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There isn't enough room in the Ivy league schools for all the competent people in this country to have an Ivy degree, even if you kicked out all the 'legacy' admits.

If anyone's treating attending a non-Ivy school as a negative signal for competence, I can only treat that as a negative signal for their competence.

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Which is also exactly what the colleges are saying themselves (on the surface). For example, MIT's rejection letter:

> Please understand that this is in no way a judgment of you as a student or as a person, since our decision has more to do with the applicant pool than anything else—many of our applicants are not offered admission simply because we don’t have enough space in our entering class.

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