This is the reason this conversation can only go so far, especially on here. It is hard for some to understand/see, or even discuss the differences or benefits of anything (an certain car, vacation, school) if it is something they can never have or want or are willing, etc., to do. If someone only considers privates because they prefer them, and/or they believe they offer a better/different education, or prefer the social mix better or offer more of what they want in any regard - that doesn’t make one a snob, it is just their preference. There are people that wouldn’t send their kids to UCB and UCLA even if free. They may be a great school for some, but certainly not for everybody. It is fine for anyone to believe something is better than something else. It’s called having choices, which many are fortunate to have.
S18 only applied to public schools. D20 is choosing to apply to 6 public schools and 1 private.
Both of my kids attended private schools. The first one applied to two public schools in-state, and it would have been much cheaper if he’d accepted the offers (one was a full-ride major merit award). But he wanted to get out of state and preferably to a major league city. He ended up in/at Chicago. The second one adamantly refused to apply to any in-state public, and also was looking to attend college in a “real city”. She ended up at RISD in Providence. End result is that this cost a lot more money, but looking back we’re very happy with their college choices.
@katliamom Of course there is. There are no public options among the most academically challenging LACs, except military academies. If a kid has a 3.9 UW GPA and a 1510 SAT, and wasn’t interested in a military academy, they would not be a match to any public LAC.
There is no good reason to choose a private school just because it’s private, but there are many good reasons that a kid would only apply to private schools.
As a PA resident, our flagship schools cost more than many of our LACs after merit. Our directional state schools have lower 4 yr graduation rates and have not been in a good financial position for 15 yrs.
That said , 2 of mine chose OOS flagship with scholarship. And my current high school senior will be going to a private LAC.
In some states, though, there are smallish public options that, while not quite liberal arts colleges, have a more intimate feel than what you’d find at a mammoth flagship state university. One example is William and Mary in Virginia. A top student who’s turned off by the large size of UVa might find a good fit there.
One of my kids had stats like those in the post I quoted and applied to both public and private schools. She ended up at her first choice, which was private, but could just as easily have gone to her second choice, which was UVa. She wasn’t interested in LACs, though.
Please refrain from inferring people are snobs, especially if you don’t live in every state in the country! Longhaul sums up PA perfectly.
@blueskies2day I completely agree with your post. For some, choosing a school is based on fit, opportunity, major, and perceived. value for the dollar and not necessarily cost. I am on my 3rd going to college and my first 2 both chose private colleges. We found them to be a better fit (wanted smaller schools with a more personal feel), the staff and professors to be much easier to work, the merit based aid to be easier to obtain (not just grade based and much more flexible) with and the alumni networks to be noteworthy. There are prestigious public universities (Purdue, Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, etc) but we found the private schools in the small/mid sized category that my kids could get into based on GPA/SAT far exceeded the benefits of the public for my kids so we did not apply to any public colleges. . Also, there are families that can easily afford full tuition at these private schools and for the reasons mentioned above will pay it. Some still choose public but have the ability to make decisions with cost as a deciding but not overriding factor. I don’t think that’s being a snob, just being in a different situation than many and it can create a disconnect between families of different economic levels.
As noted above, private colleges are NOT just for the wealthy. The “meets full demonstrated need” colleges are extremely generous with aid— in the experience of some of my sons’ friends at college, their top private college was a more affordable option than their state university.
So, if the fit at any particular college is best for a particular student, and the cost is manageable once any aid is factored in, then that student should pursue the best fit, whether at a public or a private. Neither is inherently better or worse for all students!
Malcolm Gladwell says that is a bad strategy…you are better off being the big fish in a small pond.
https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwells-david-and-goliath-2013-10
“The worst STEM students at Harvard, he claims, may be as smart as the top third at a lower ranked college. But Harvard students compare themselves to their Harvard peers, and that’s bound to make those in the bottom third feel stupid and unsuccessful. Better to have gone to a non-elite institution, he says — to have been a big fish in a little pond — than have had your dreams and confidence crushed.”
Malcolm Gladwell exists to sell books, period full stop.
I have an entire family (children, nieces, nephews, siblings and their spouses) who attended colleges where MIGHT have felt “stupid” in Gladwell’s terms- but chose to use the knowledge that the world is filled with brilliant people to motivate themselves.
And two of these relations DID major in STEM (one at Harvard, one at a different HYP) and are now tenure track academics in their respective fields. His worldview is quite messed up when it comes to “what does it take to succeed in college”. Small fishes in a big pond do NOT go off to flip burgers for the rest of their lives- they end up doing whatever their motivation, hard work, and intelligence tells them they should be doing- just like the top student at U Maine, UVM, or University of Arizona aka the big fishes…
This rationale doesn’t jive with the title of the post though. In @jmnva06 's post above, it is mentioned that the girls WANTED the small schools. That’s a good reason for students wanting a private school. The OP infers that the parents are wanting private schools - and private schools only - for whatever reason. Maybe the title of the thread needs to be changed, but parents telling kids that only private schools are acceptable sends a bad message to a child who is interested in one or more public schools.
Well I guess the argument could be made that every writer is trying to sell books - doesn’t make his work or opinion invalid. Some small fishes in big ponds will fail and some big fishes in small ponds will thrive.
As I pointed out earlier, many students must follow the money. For many this means attending a less prestigious college where she will be a “big fish” in a smaller pond. This should not be viewed negatively. I took issue with soneone acting like such a kid isn’t surrounded by motivated and intelligent students. But then again, seems most threads somehow become about Harvard or some other prestigious school that isn’t reality for most.
Your personal experience notwithstanding, there is a fair amount of evidence that female students, in particular, are disproportionately likely to drop out of stem majors at elite schools when they feel, even if inaccurately, less capable than their male peers. So yes, some of those women engineers at an Ivy become history majors instead, when they might have remained engineers at another school. That might not be a bad thing, depending on your view of history majors, but it certainly alters their career path.
I’d love to see the evidence that female engineering students at Missouri M&T feel less “stupid” than female engineering students at Stanford. My experience interviewing engineers, STEM majors, AND liberal arts majors over the last 30+ years suggests that SOME female students do, in fact, drop “down” in their major when faced with greater competition at college vs. their HS. And some do not.
One could take a look at what happens to female medical students when they choose their specialties as a related issue. I don’t think women clustering in pediatrics and men clustering in orthopedic surgery has ANYTHING to do with how stupid these “Stem-lite” women feel relative to their classmates (all of whom are graduating from similarly rigorous medical schools where they all got the identical educations-- nobody got to pick “second tier MD curriculum”.)
And yet- voila.
Could it be that Peds has figured out more family-friendly life/work balance? Could it be that Pediatric Hospitalists are becoming the treatment norm in children’s hospitals? Could it be that if you have a “trailing spouse”, finding a job as a pediatrician (i.e. you can get hired virtually anywhere) is more flexible than a job in a specialty (more limited opportunities in mid-career)?
I don’t buy the stupid argument but I’d love to see evidence that when you go down the food chain women drop out in smaller numbers. Is the proportion of female engineering students higher at Drexel and Hofstra than at MIT? I don’t know- would love to see an analysis. I do know MANY male engineering students at Drexel, Hofstra and schools of that ilk who have dropped down to less quantitatively complex majors; they could not get admitted to more competitive engineering schools, but by junior year have opted for something which is math-related but not quite so intense. Do they feel “stupid”? Don’t know. Ask Gladwell.
The absolute number one thing I wanted for my oldest kid was for him to end up at a college where he was no longer the smartest kid in the room, or as I heard a third grade class mate say, “Mathson is the smartest student in the school” when he knew the answer to something at a science demo that no one else did. It wasn’t good for him not to have peers and to be pushed to do more. He found that in college. (And yes it was a private college.) I never wanted a private school per se, but I did want schools where smart kids were thick on the ground, where there was enough of a nerdy culture that they wouldn’t get tempted to spend their college years in one long party.
I’ve seen so many people who might have been labeled as small fish thrive at Harvard, Princeton etc. while the kids with great stats did not, that I have little patience for Gladwell’s thesis. What may be true for large populations, (and the data about women in STEM fits into this), isn’t necessarily true for individuals.
I ended up in a male oriented field. I often say it’s because I was homeschooled in New Math in 4th and 5th grade. Sometimes I say it’s because I went to a girl’s high school. But the fact is I was one to speak up and (mostly) insist on getting the education I wanted. (Still sorry I didn’t fight to take shop with the boys in junior high!) I could also credit my grandmother, who died long before I was born, but I knew she’d been an architect and among the earliest female students at MIT.
Well, given that Stanford, CMU and other elite colleges have targeted studies and programs to fix the women in stem retention problem, clearly some do think it is a big concern. I think medicine is frankly totally irrelevant, as is law or accounting. All have solid female representation in a way that some stem areas dont.
For us the privates are a draw simply because the in-state public options are so selective, and even with a 4.0, it’s “a crapshoot,” as I am constantly reminded on this forum. That’s scary, and depressing, so we are looking at schools we probably wouldn’t have considered previously. This sticker prices are outrageous, but we will focus on merit and cross our fingers. I screen the list first to see where the price can become close to manageable with merit, and then will present those options to the kids to review. They will not be allowed to ED, and they will have to apply to a ridiculous amount of schools since we can’t afford to tour these far-away schools to get that advantage either. There are a few OOS publics that give merit and suit our kids’ needs, but not many. It’s not about prestige at all. My top choice and my kids’ top choice would definitely be an in-state public flagship, but the system is so underfunded that there just aren’t enough spots for all the high-performing kids, and definitely not for kids who got a B once in awhile. Stinks, really. The fact that anyone would consider me a snob for this is laughable.
Does Hofstra have a “women in STEM retention” program? I don’t know. But if it doesn’t, is it because it is not a problem, or because they don’t have the resources (unlike Stamford and CMU), or not an institutional priority, or something else?
Smith- what’s the retention like in STEM there, where competition with men is irrelevant?
I’d like to see a bunch more evidence than Gladwell provides before making the assumptions that are being made here.
— for the few they admit. Many of these have half of the students non-FA (probably means top 3% of the family income range), so the opportunity to get that good financial aid is quite limited. I.e. most students will need to find likely and safety options elsewhere.
Also, “meet need” does depend on the college’s definition of “need”, and the half of kids who see parental divorce will find that most those colleges will require cooperation from both parents on FA forms, a probably-unlikely event in many divorces (if the divorced parents even have any money after spending it on lawyers).