10 things that are harder to get into than Harvard

A recent report from researchers at Harvard and Berkeley Universities shows that in many major US cities, it's very hard to achieve a rags-to-riches success story.

The report analyzes the number of people who were born into the lowest income quintile but ended up in the highest income quintile. The results don't bode well for upward socioeconomic mobility.

The chances were below 5% in Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Columbus, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; Milwaukee; and Indianapolis.

Even at the top of the list, people in San Jose, California, showed just a 12.9% chance of living the American dream.

In 2014, Goldman Sachs hired just 3% of more than 267,000 job applicants.

It's no surprise so many people want to work there, as Fortune magazine named Goldman one of the 100 best places to work in 2015. Since the ranking began in 1984, Goldman is one of just five companies that made the list every year.

In 2014, Foursquare's Michael Li began work on another startup: The Data Incubator.

It's essentially a boot camp for data scientists. While many programming Ph.D.s have solid research skills, few can meet the pace of a startup. They need training, and only a select group are chosen. "We accept fewer than 5% of our advanced-degree applicants," its website states.

Some of New York's most in-demand public high schools are actually harder to get into than Harvard, as Brooklyn Magazine has noted.

For its September 2014 admission, 16,675 students listed the Brooklyn Latin School as a choice on their application, according to the New York City Department of Education. However, fewer than 3% were accepted.

Meanwhile, the High School of American Studies in the Bronx has an acceptance rate of around 1%, as does the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College.

While Harvard lets in about 5.3% of applicants, not even 1% get accepted to India's insanely selective Institute of Management, BloombergBusinessweek reported last year.

The Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (IIM-A) received 173,866 for its 2012-2014 class. The university has the luxury of being extra choosy because of India's large population and the vast number of students with outstanding grades and test scores.

You have less than a 1% chance becoming a Delta Flight Attendant, according to Bloomberg.

In 2010, Delta, the world's second-largest air carrier, received 100,000 applications for 1,000 jobs. In 2013, it recieved 44,000 applications for 400 jobs.

Foreign language skills are highly valued by the company, with as many as 30% of hires speaking a second language.

Y Combinator is an exclusive startup program — sort of a startup school — founded by Paul Graham.

Despite being extraordinarily picky and only accepting fewer than 3% of applicants, Y Combinator considers only 10% of its "graduate" startups successful after a few years.

By putting those two statistics together, Business Insider's own Henry Blodget has estimated the success rate of startup companies could be as low as 0.4%.

It's safe to say the smartest entrepreneurs are those with a backup plan.

Google gets around 3 million applications a year but only hires about 7,000 people, meaning that you have a less than 1% chance of getting hired, as Quartz has reported.

"That means only one in 428 applicants end up with a job, making it far more selective than institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford," Quartz noted. "Those are pretty thin odds ..."

Stanford University is the most competitive college in America — even more competitive than Harvard. This month, it announced that its admission rate for the class of 2019 is just 5.05%.

With close ties to Silicon Valley, Stanford was once dubbed by The New Yorker "Get Rich U." Its famous graduates include former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, as well as several Supreme Court justices and Nobel Prize winners.

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