When The Wall Street Journal reported “the NYC Marathon is harder to get into than Ivy League Schools,” many runners felt validated and many Ivy grads felt insulted. I’m both,* and I’m here to tell you the Ivy League grads were right.
Why?
Winning the marathon lottery is random; getting into an Ivy is not. New York, unlike Boston, doesn’t require runners to meet a qualifying standard; you don’t have to prove your speed or endurance to participate. Elite schools, of course, do have admissions standards: a high school diploma, good test scores, and maybe some extracurricular activities. You may not like the Ivies’ standards, but you can’t deny they exist. So while winning the marathon lottery requires only luck, getting into an Ivy requires effort.
You can pay your way into the marathon; you can’t (legally) buy your way into an Ivy. You can’t just purchase admission to an elite school. (Don’t believe me? Ask Aunt Becky.) But you can buy a bib for NYC. In fact, only 12% of New York City Marathon entrants last year came from the lottery. The vast majority simply paid for entry as part of a travel package, by giving money to charity (or asking friends to), by spending thousands of dollars on New York Road Runners’ other races, or by cozying up to one of NYRR’s sponsors.
You are not the average. NYRR actually runs three marathon lotteries: one for New Yorkers, a second for other US residents, and a third for international runners. So while the average odds of winning were 5%, it’s not likely any one group actually had a 5% chance. Similarly, while the average Yale applicant has a 4.5% chance of acceptance, every student has different qualifications — meaning no two have identical odds of success. The result: these averages don’t represent your (or my, or any individual’s) chances of getting into either the marathon or the Ivy League.
So no, it’s not harder to get into a the New York City Marathon than into an Ivy League school.
What language should The Wall Street Journal have used instead? There are lots of correct ways to describe this data, likely none as pithy or viral as what the Journal chose. But I’d have gone with:
“The odds of getting into the Ivy League are higher than winning a spot in the NYC Marathon.”
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