what percentage of US population has attended ivy league schools?

Answer 1

Harvard, Yale and Princeton rejected 91% of applicants, Stanford and Columbia 89%, Brown 86%, Dartmouth 85%, Penn 82%. MIT, Amherst, Williams and Swarthmore all rejected 80% or more of their applicants. Among the top state schools, Berkeley rejected 76%, and UCLA 73% of applicants.

Hope this helps! Just reverse the numbers.

Answer 2

Let's try to work this out. The largest of the Ivy League schools is The University of Pennsylvania. It has about 20,000 students. About half are graduate students and half are undergraduates. Let's assume that the average graduate student takes four years to get out (PhD students usually take longer, but MBA and Law students take less -- MDs and Dental students take four years). That means that they graduate about 5,000 per year.

There are eight Ivy league schools. That means that fewer than 40,000 people graduate from Ivy League schools per year. Since some of the schools are smaller, and many of the graduate students already have an Ivy League degree from their undergraduate studies, let's say that there are 25,000 new Ivy League graduates per year. That is about 1,000,000 in the last 40 years. But not all of those people are still alive, not all are Americans and class sizes were smaller in the past. On the other hand, there are still some people who are alive who graduated more than 40 years ago. So -- let's use 1,000,000 as an upper limit.

The Census Bureau just announced that the USA will have 300,000,000 people in the next few weeks.

That puts Ivy League graduates at about a third of one percent of the population -- at most.

I'm not one of them.

Though I was accepted at one that I turned down, and taught at another.