Advice Please - College Choices

JHS
Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:12:13 +0000

Excuse me, WashDad, but what is your point? There are different models of what college education ought to be. You know that as well as I do.

Apart from state universities – which have often tried harder to be all things to all people – the most “prestigious” colleges tend to have very, very limited trade-specific programs. Engineering schools, yes (but not at Harvard or MIT, and Yale shut its e-school down a couple generations ago). Wharton. Cornell is a real exception. There are Ed Schools and Nursing Schools and Public Health Schools, but most of them do not have undergraduate programs.

I know, I’m talking about a thin layer of private universities and LACs, but it’s a layer that matters to a lot of people, and it’s the layer in which Georgetown sees itself. And it’s way too simplistic to say “Georgetown doesn’t have a program in my intended major, so I should go somewhere that does.” What Georgetown and most of its peer institutions are saying is “On our educational model, you shouldn’t be specializing on that level yet.” It’s like the journalism school discussion that pops up periodically – Yale has never had a j-school, but I would be happy to match the careers of my Yale Daily News classmates against those of their contemporaries at Mizzou, Northwestern, Syracuse, or any undergraduate j-school program.

I’m not saying that the prestige model is right or wrong, by the way. People can, and do, make their own choices. There’s more than one way to get from here to there, and “prestige” may be unjustified or may mean less to one person than to another. It’s a moving target.

(And, I didn’t include that in my story, but when my niece transferred from PT to pre-med, she went from a program she hated at a relatively prestigious school to one she loved at a relatively less prestigious school. The issue wasn’t the university, it was the students that each program attracted. One had only prospective physical therapists; the other was designed for people who wanted to enter any health-related field, including medicine, administration, nursing, pharmacology, etc. My niece was much happier in the second program, even though she knows – or thinks she knows – that physical therapy is what she wants to do.

When she initially chose a PT program, it was a mistake for her. That doesn’t mean it would be a mistake for everyone. But her experience may not be completely irrelevant to the OP, because she sounds maybe similar: a very strong academic performer, very analytical, who also happens to be very gifted physically and earns her living in a field where most of her peers never finished elementary school, much less college.)