Advantages to attending super-difficult high school?

TranquilMind
Wed, 31 Jul 2013 12:18:32 +0000

LehighMH:My opinion is that she will get a better education at the more rigorous / gifted school. However, I think it will actually hamper her ability to get into the “most” completive colleges. Many colleges today would rather have the 1st in their class sub-par public school graduate than a comparable student who is ranked lower but at a very good “gifted” school. That being said – I think her overall education will be better at her gifted school and then only at a very good University as opposed to the most competitive University.



I fear you may be correct, though I must confess that the reasoning seems illogical to me. Wouldn’t the student who challenged herself be more desirable than the one who breezed through an easy school with straight A’s? I would think the latter would be more likely to need remediation when the workload started abruptly ramping up in the higher level colleges. My daughter could have easily been number one in her former “top” school, but it was too easy, and there was lots of remediation of other students already going on from the beginning. In her current school, you had to quickly learn to sink or swim and get your problems solved yourself, without parental help, since it was residential. If you didn’t, you ended up being asked to leave, and they lose about a third of every class. How is that not more like college - and the real world? It concerns me that colleges wouldn’t analyze it this way.