One-thousand, nine-hundred, forty-eight high school students were admitted into America’s most exclusive club Monday. They were selected from a pool of 27,462 students that included more than 2,500 students with perfect SAT critical reading scores, more than 3,300 with perfect SAT math scores and more than 3,300 students who were ranked first in their class. They were among the 7.1 percent of applicants admitted this year — another record-breakingly low percentage.

These 1,948 students got into Harvard College, the apple of America’s collegiate eye and the object of academia’s most notorious fetish. In other words, these students were picked from the freakishly smart of the freakishly smart who started working as hard as a 40-year-old business executive at the ripe age of 15.

Face it; you probably know how those 25,514 Harvard rejects are feeling right now. Whether you were a Harvard reject back in high school (like I was) or you just got denied from Harvard Law (like I probably will be), you are not alone. Or maybe you aren’t a Harvard reject, but you fit into the broad category of Ivy League rejects - same difference.

The allure and mystique of Ivy League fascinates Americans, and admittedly I’m drawn in sometimes, too. It’s tough not to pay attention to these schools when it seems like they are constantly at the forefront of making higher education more affordable, defining and redefining who should receive financial aid and how much aid those people should receive. Plus, the Ivies are intricately tied to our beloved American Dream, functioning as training grounds for America’s elites.

But our infatuation with everything Ivy is giving us a misleading and dangerous snapshot of the American higher education system. While these schools still shape elite opinion of higher education, they are only a few of the 2,629 U.S. colleges and universities turning out the educated people this country needs. The more we overlook these schools, the more vulnerable we make them.

It’s tough to deny that our East Coast colleagues are important. When Harvard does something incredible like open up its $34.9 billion endowment to give financial aid to students whose parents earn up to $180,000 a year, that’s understandably a big deal. Since the school did that last December, dozens of universities have followed suit. State and federal legislators also took notice, starting to question why public universities with multibillion-dollar endowments aren’t being more generous.

But only the privileged few public universities could ever parallel what the Ivies are doing - and I’m not talking about public-Ivy powerhouses like the University of Michigan. The truly incredible examples, then, are the universities that stretch themselves thin to make an education as affordable as possible.