Advantages to attending super-difficult high school?

kmcmom13
Tue, 06 Aug 2013 07:31:05 +0000

I’d be careful about making these types of assumptions. While most top universities may only look at the top ten percent of the class seriously, they certainly seem to take “more” from the magnet programs I know. But attempting to manipulate admission odds via school rigor can be dicey at best, because you’ve got to consider peer factor and engagement. Where will they love to learn and not be bored outta their skulls? It’s more important than we think when we’re talking about gifted kids.

I’ve seen what can happen to really bright kids who leave magnet schools and attend an under-performing school, and if its a mismatch, just because they’re capable of getting a straight 4.0 doesn’t mean they will.

I listened to a young man - a lifelong friend of my son’s – just this weekend describe how leaving one such school was terrible for him, how the public underperforming school was such a joke curricularly he barely bothered to turn up, etc., and how now when all his other friends were graduating college, he wished he’d never “screwed himself” in this way and is trying to figure out how to belatedly get his butt to college and do something with his skills/passion instead of working retail.

The other two friends sitting at the table with us had gone to Northwestern (but dropped out to work) and University of Michigan (graduated, but in music technology, which will make employment an adventure – and of course, that one’s mine :). The Northwestern dropout makes decent money now (but hates his job) and the other is newly searching (but loves his field).

What was interesting to me was that the conversation wasn’t just about getting jobs, but rather the life of the mind and delving into things you love, feeling stimulated by new ideas. And they talked openly about how torturous it could be in the education system to plod through material slowly when each is the type to prefer total immersion toward mastery.

All three are bright guys and may just end up doing equally well or differently than one might guess based on their varying degrees of post-secondary education. Life is full of viscisitudes. So the pedigree itself might be overrated, but I think the culture isn’t.

Then others will go their own way. My son has another friend who dropped out of the magnet school, then after a single term, dropped out of the underperforming public, which he described as ridiculous, and decided instead to self-educate (completely independent of parental input.) He went to community college and aced it, transferred to UMich, and graduated with my son (and with considerably less debt.) Now he’s going to grad school.

So, every kid has their path :)