The biggest lesson I learned from assisting my oldest child with the college selection process is that fit is as if more important than ranking. And for my next three children I will encourage the to focus more on fit.
Any stories to share regarding students choosing fit over a higher ranked school?
I know quite a few college professors, As a group they ignore “rankings” because they deeply know and understand the distortions and limitations of putting colleges into general ranked lists. They also understand the flawed methodologies that put those lists together.
Where do college professors send their own kids? To LACs and to special programs and schools within flagships. I have never heard a college prof hope for Yale over Kenyon.
My S is a HS senior now. We’re in Texas and he’s auto admit to all the Texas publics, and we are not financially limited. He has top stats (4.0 UW GPA, rank 5/700+, National AP Scholar after junior year, likely NMF, will graduate with 13 AP classes, 1560 SAT) and a lot of STEM and coding-related ECs. He will major in computer science. Although CS is very highly ranked at UT Austin and his GC has advised that he can consider UT Austin CS a safety (CS is not guaranteed for all auto admit students), S isn’t even going to apply to UT Austin let alone any elite private reaches such as MIT, Caltech, or CMU. Instead he is one-and-done at UT Dallas. He had a great visit there in November 2016, and then stayed on campus for several weeks this summer for coding camps. On the drive home from the coding camps he asked if we would make him apply anywhere else or if he could apply to just UTD if he wanted. Because H and I are comfortable with the school and with S’s immersive summer experience there, we told him we would leave it up to him. He has his UTD admission in hand and he is done.
Both my kids are done with college, and both picked fit over ranking. They both had excellent experiences, and are launched into a successful career and graduate school for the other.
My youngest D knew where she wanted to attend and it was a school she was likely in the top 5% of their incoming class. We asked her to apply to her state flagship and another state school which is pretty highly regarded and finally a state flagship her sister was attending. She was accepted to every school she applied to. She was accepted to her chosen school, Ohio University, in October of her senior year and asked if she had to apply to any other schools. We asked her to continue with her applications as FA was finicky and while we were sure we could afford OU, there might be offers that would make the other higher ranked schools better deals. She did in fact get better financial aid from the OOS flagship, however, it wasn’t significant enough for us to ask her to attend there.
She is now a sophomore with 80 credit hours when AP courses are considered and would like to graduate in 3 years. She is a dance major intending to be a Physical Therapist. OU offers a DPT program and has both BA and BFA in Dance. The dance major helped her get a better scholarship and she is hoping that they will consider her for their DPT program. She loves the school, their dance program and the science courses she has taken thus far. Overall a perfect fit.
There is a longstanding stereotype that many LAC students have professors as parents. There is also some evidence to back this up:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.535.1119&rep=rep1&type=pdf