Hired by Google as L4 but rejected by top colleges

Can anyone verify the accuracy of this statement? A random post on a message board doesn’t merit a response without a little more evidence…

I went to a small rural high school in the 1980s. Taught myself to code, started a business writing software, entered and won the regional science fair and placed second in the CS division of the International Science and Engineering Fair in 1987. Won a prestigious NASA internship, got glowing letters of recommendation from my NASA mentors. Took every AP class available to me (all both of them). Graduated third in my class.

Also played on the varsity basketball team, was an Eagle Scout, and served in my church.

Oh, and scored 1460 on the SAT and 34 on the ACT.

And I got turned down flat by MIT and waitlisted by Yale. Actually, MIT turned me down twice, once for undergrad and again for grad school.

I also ended up at the University of Maryland, and had the time of my life there. And I've had a wildly successful career, which occasionally means I fund MIT professors.

It's a crap shoot. I'd love to know what happened when the MIT admissions board looked at my resume, because as a rational exercise I don't get that decision.

I'm trying to find the takeaway, should kids not go to college? or that nobody reads the comments, since one of them raises the question, "is there proof?" and claims that not according to their linkedin

Its because he's not rich.

I don't understand why this is not more widely understood. These schools are not for meritocracy. Schools with sports teams fill much of the incoming class with athletes before they even consider an application, and then they start picking from places and people who'll keep their prestige reciprocally high. The son of a foreign dictator would never attend the school that produced the only human with two unshared nobel prizes, because that's not the game they're playing.

And when they pick, they're starting with schools the admissions officers have relationships with (rich people schoools) that require rich people middle schools to attend, etc...

The chain starts in childhood, you don't just take a bunch of tests available to the public.

I've had friends whose job it was to interview kindergarteners for access to their exclusive schools. Others had to deal with two sets of parents suing each other over one's access to that school.

And before you say this is conspiratorial, I've verified this with admissions people and deans from these places.