When Robert Rubin (who eventually became treasury secretary of the United States) as a high school senior applied to Princeton and Harvard he received a rejection letter from Princeton but he was accepted at Harvard. He had hoped to go to Princeton. Four years later Rubin sent a letter to the Director of Admissions at Princeton saying: “You ought to be interested to know what happened to one of the people you rejected … I graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.”

Later, Rubin received a reply from Princeton’s Director of Admissions: “Every year at Princeton we at Princeton feel it is our duty to reject a certain number of highly qualified people so that Harvard can have some good students too.”[1]

In Rubin’s recent memoir, In An Uncertain World, he made it clear that he…