College Counselor Sick of Reading about Golden Kids Getting into Harvard

Parents Forum
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I know I’m late to the party, but this statement is utter NONSENSE. The only student for whom attendance at any elite private is guaranteed to be affordable is that student whose parents can afford to pay the FULL COST of his attendance. If the family finances are anything less than that, there is absolutely no guarantee that the school’s “meet full need” policy will meet the family’s full need, unless the family’s EFC is zero or very, very close to zero.

Further, in response to @MiddleburyDad2’s comment that a Dartmouth education is necessarily superior to a Bama education, or that attending Brown is necessarily better than attending “a typical state flagship U,” I strongly disagree. Education depends on the student, not the school. One can get an excellent education at No-Name State just as easily as one can get a crappy education at Brown (or any other Ivy). All that’s required for the former result is a highly motivated student and at least one equally motivated faculty mentor. And all that’s required for the latter is a highly unmotivated student who’s smart enough to get passing grades despite never displaying the slightest interest in his or her studies. (Please, pm me and I’ll be happy to tell you the name of the nationally recognized and very highly ranked institution that was foolish enough to give me a degree once upon a time! Actually, I won’t tell you, but you get my point.)

I’ll take the high-achieving individual over the high-achieving university any day of the week, because, in the end, it’s the individual that I’ll be working with, and not the university. That fancy diploma may get you through an employer’s door, but it won’t keep you there if you’ve got nothing to back it up with.

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Yup, there was a parent out here a few week’s ago whose student turned down an Ivy to attend his flagship and participate in ROTC. For this kid it pretty clearly seemed like the best choice. One size does not fit all… and Ivies do not fit all. There ARE students who get in (or could get in) and for various reason choose not to apply or attend. And those reasons can be perfectly valid.

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Oh my. That is a mouthful. Meeting need and a family’s real life financial ability to pay their familial contribution are not the same thing. We have a couple of very gifted students who would excel on campuses with top programs in their areas of interests.

One is currently attending Bama on full scholarship.

Our 11th grade dd who has already won numerous honors in her future major will be applying to full-ride and full-tuition NMF schools with depts that are no where near as challenging or levels as top schools. We are doing our best to find depts that will be able to adequately challenge her.

Why not top programs? Bc our real ability to pay vs. our calculated net price differ by about 2/3. Our 1/3 budget can’t begin to afford them.

So, yes, students do have to worry about the $$ part if their parents can’t afford to pay. (Ironically, Middlebury would be a great school for our dd.)

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“Further, in response to @MiddleburyDad2’s comment that a Dartmouth education is necessarily superior to a Bama education, or that attending Brown is necessarily better than attending “a typical state flagship U,” I strongly disagree. Education depends on the student, not the school. One can get an excellent education at No-Name State just as easily as one can get a crappy education at Brown (or any other Ivy).”

Disagree all you want. A lot of people see it my way. Your example almost makes my point. To get to the conclusion you want, you assume an all star effort and interested faculty for flagship U, and a lazy detached Dartmouth student. So a perfect scenario for state, and a perfectly imperfect scenario for the Ivy school. Because we all know that the Ivies are full of unmotivated kids. Why is that a fair comparison?

Honestly, I’ve lost interest in the debate. The folks on your side of it twist and turn to get to assumptions needed to prove what I believe to be the exception rather than the rule. They demonstrate how great it can be to save $$ and go to Bama, and rattle off the names of very prestigious, much more highly competitive and, in that case at least, expensive schools. They don’t tell us about the kids going to grad school at Kentucky. No, went right for the big leagues: Vandy, Stanford and MIT. I think we all know why.

Nobody is talking about guarantees either. Fine. You win. The LEGIONS of kids educated in the Ivy League, at Stanford and at high end LACs who graduated with negligible debt because their full need was met just don’t count in this discussion because it wasn’t a 100% certain guarantee.

Look, it’s so simple, I cannot fathom why so many on this thread struggle with it. I am not saying a kid should borrow a quarter million dollars to go to school anywhere, and I’m also not saying that going to a mid-tier state flagship is any kind of recipe for failure. Those are hyperbolic reactions that are mostly meant to be used for rhetorical purposes. Once again: I neither stated, nor implied, either opinion.

If you ask me where I think a kid will receive a better education, with all that goes into it, yes, on balance, doing an apples v. apples comparison, a kid will get a better education at Williams or Harvard or Dartmouth than she would at Alabama, LSU, or Kentucky.

Cornell vs. Michigan? Berkeley? Well, now you’re starting to muddy the waters. Perfect outcome at State U and a apathetic Dartmouth kid? Yeah, ok, you get that one.

This isn’t a precise science at any rate, but to me, the biggest differences that make a difference in the quality and depth of your undergraduate experience are (1) faculty devotion to undergraduate instruction and (2) the quality of your peers. Both, IMO, drive a huge difference in the relative quality of education.

If you and others here want to say everything is the same and equally good, that’s fine. I just don’t agree with you.

“I’ll take the high-achieving individual over the high-achieving university any day of the week, because, in the end, it’s the individual that I’ll be working with, and not the university. That fancy diploma may get you through an employer’s door, but it won’t keep you there if you’ve got nothing to back it up with.”

Do you actually think there is anybody who would disagree with this? Again, your example is loaded. What about the kid who has both?

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I think the only apples to apples comparison is “if they cost the same”. Some folks would probably still choose non-elites for various reasons (big fish small pond, geography, size, whatever) but I suspect most would not.

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@OHMomof2 Exactly.

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We have to move away from the slinging. It’s hard enough on CC to convey what matters. Many have a flat view of various colleges. A match is more complex, from both sides, college and student.

Most kids can’t even answer a Why Us. The best aren’t just “apparently” strong, by the usual observer at-hand measures (stats and rigor.)They are already personally empowered, going for more, balanced, resilient. If you’ve got one, super. But don’t tell me the “only” place for them is a TT. It doesn’t make sense.

And don’t forget, the elites are Not just looking for stats/rigor superiority. Or some unilateral interests (ECs.) They make that clear. Nor are the rest of the top ten or twenty or so. The wise kids, the activated, savvy, etc, and their families ARE looking hard at their other options.

Why not?

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@MiddleburyDad2, for what it is worth, I agree with you, particularly on the importance of focus on undergraduate teaching and quality of the student body.

My personal opinion is that too many kids (or families) pick schools based on specific programs, or perceived strength in a particular department. I have always felt this was ill advised, since it is the rare 17 or 18 year old who knows how they will spend their professional life. Seems far wiser to me to choose a school with a broad and deep curriculum. For the most part, that means schools that have built a reputation over time.

I also think that trying to judge the quality of an undergrad education by reference to cost makes no sense. Sure, the vast majority of families need to address finances. But the financial cost of an education is wholly unrelated to its quality.

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If you really care about focus on undergrad teaching, then LACs actually make a lot more sense than research universities, including Ivies.

And there are certainly “legions” of highly successful people who did not attend Ivies.

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yes, thank you @intparent, I’m pleased to have learned today. although I’m reminded that I’ve covered that point two or three times in this thread.

But I did learn, much to my fascination, about all those kids who apply to Ivy League schools, get in, and decide at the 11th hour, “nah, I want to go to Texas A&M for the ROTC experience. It just occurred to me. Sorry Harvard. I’m not coming.”

if you really care about helping me out, though, and it appears that you do, you’d follow my posts more closely and thus would know that I’ve already said, in numerous threads, that the LAC model is, to me (and I doubt I’m unique in this view) the gold standard in undergraduate education. Why else would I find myself with two kids in LACs and, hopefully, another one on the way?

Setting that aside, there are those in the Ivy League who would challenge your categorical exclusion of their colleges from the LAC category. After all, it’s one thing to share a campus with 35,000 people; it’s quite another thing to share it with 6,000+ (Dartmouth).

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Thank you @Ohiodad51 . I agree with your post.

However, you should prepare for some resistance. Your view will not be popular with many in this crowd.

Btw, did you know that each family has to make its own financial choices at the end of the day. Surprisingly, we can’t decide that here for them on CC.

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@OHMomof2 , I usually agree with your views; here we part company. I think you missed the context of my use of “apples v. apples.” Holding constant for cost, for just a moment, I noted that if I’m asked where the better education is, it makes ZERO sense to proffer the scenario that @dodgersmom set forth: the assumed super star state school kid with the particularly motivated faculty mentor vs. the assumed “all of a sudden” slacker at Dartmouth. Is that, in your view, a rational way to compare the quality of education offered at the respective schools? Hardly. And, let’s be real: you will have to look hard to find a kid who doesn’t give a damn at Dartmouth. They just don’t attract those people in large numbers.

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It does happen but not to the extent people might expect it to be these days. There was a time when the yields were not all that high at many of these schools (until about 2005) when many were expected to borrow lots of money in order to attend. The change in financial aid policy at Princeton triggered a change for a lot of upper middle class families where students started receiving aid at much higher incomes which triggered changes at many of the other schools. This has essentially driven up the yield. There are probably 1- 2% who give up Harvard to attend a non-peer school and attend other schools for money or special programs. Most others who don’t choose Harvard attend their peers in top 20.

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@texaspg I’m sure it does, and didn’t mean to suggest it doesn’t.

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Btw I do know a parent whose kid took the ROTC scholarship at ------ MIT.

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I don’t think it happens as the ‘a ha’ moment as much as that the student who wants A&M never applies to Harvard in the first place. I know a lot of kids who always wanted to go to their state flagship so never considered Yale or Williams or Duke. It was UF or die, or On Wisconsin for them. My kids graduated from a heavily military area, so many kids were applying for ROTC scholarships or using their parents’ GI benefits and were looking to make those benefits go farther with Yellow Ribbon schools. It doesn’t mean that those students weren’t top of the class, didn’t have perfect scores and other stats couldn’t have been accepted into a high ranked school. They looked at more than just a ranking, just like the elite schools look at more than just stats when admitting students.

I agreed with you that an elite school name, on an objective scale, is going to be a easier launch into the working world, but subjectively student have to pick the school that is right for the individual student. My kids didn’t want to be the poorest kid in the dorm or the one with the lowest gpa, even if that gpa was a 3.0 at Harvard. They just want to be in the crowd. Others would do anything to be at Harvard and don’t mind having the lowest gpa.

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@twoinanddone I don’t disagree with much of your post, and don’t find much of it to be inconsistent with my views in general.

As to not wanting to be a 3.0 at Harvard, fair enough. I think Malcolm Gladwell would agree with you entirely on that point, and has some research to back up his views. I don’t know.

As to not wanting to be the poorest kid in his dorm, that probably would not have been a problem at Harvard. There are lots of kids there getting help. That’s what having an endowment the size of theirs can do. They don’t really need the tuition money.

My sarcasm was directed at few posters whose entire argument in response to another point altogether can be summed up as: “yeah, but some people …” That is all.

Hey, why don’t we start the “there’s nothing wrong with having the lowest GPA. some people …” thread.

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The fixation on GPA as the be-all and end-all of the college experience is a fascinating one. Yeah, you’ll all push back and say that it’s a product of med school admissions policies. I find it hard to believe that one single path has had such an extraordinary impact on an entire generation’s educational philosophy.

I didn’t have a perfect GPA in college but I was stretched in so many ways intellectually. I wanted that for my kids- none of whom had a perfect GPA in college, and they got stretched (in some ways more than I did- they took much bigger risks academically). They have all launched; gotten into the “prestigious” grad programs in their particular fields, doing well professionally, etc.

As someone who has worked hiring new grads for companies that care about GPA and check undergrad transcripts before deciding who to interview- I think the emphasis on a high GPA is overrated by today’s college students. I would MUCH rather see a kid who challenged herself than a string of A’s. I would much rather see an engineer who took a hard writing class and got a C than the engineer that took the watered down “principles of technical writing”. And my colleagues and I really care about rigor. Really care. The kid who takes “Buyer Behavior” which in most undergrad programs is a concept driven/analytically weak intro to the principals of behavioral economics and statistics? We’d MUCH rather see a real statistics course- with programming requirements manipulating large datasets, AND/or a real course in behavioral economics- again, quantitatively based.

3.0 at Harvard? That means nothing to me. That could be a kid majoring in medieval poetry who also took some of the hardest math classes that Harvard offers plus a rigorous chem sequence. That could be a math whiz at Harvard who took some of the really tough government/poli sci classes which have huge thesis-like papers with primary sources required. Do you really think an employer prefers the kid with the 4.0 from Stonehill who majored in Marketing vs. the math whiz from Harvard who took the tough poli sci sequence but ended up with a 3.0?

I’m not banging the drum for Harvard. But pointing out that hanging your college decision on “Where can i get a high GPA” seems like weak reasoning. Unless the kid is 200% sure of med school. And even then… the only undergrad program I’ve seen numbers on are MIT’s. And folks have told me that med school Adcom’s admit MIT kids with GPA’s that reflect the rigor of MIT’s coursework and lack of grade inflation. Which suggests to me that the “GPA is the most important thing” drum beat is likely not accurate- at least 100% of the time.

College isn’t summer camp with booze. If your kids are spending their HS years worrying about their COLLEGE GPA you might try to end the madness. Employers and grad schools are looking for kids who have challenged themselves and learned something- in depth- and learned HOW to learn. Not kids who have coasted for four years.

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I never understood this whole “better to be a big fish in a small pond” thinking. At some point, you have to swim with all the fish in the sea, especially in today’s world. Might as well get used to it. Not to sound like an old curmudgeon, and recognizing I am assembling a house of straw, but this is akin to the everybody gets a trophy mentality that pervades our culture. Not everybody wins all the time. I think if we let kids experience failure every once in awhile, they would learn that it is not necessarily the most important thing to be the smartest person in the room. Sometimes it is as important to know your weaknesses as it is to know your strengths.

Maybe I am nuts, but if all I had to go on was a GPA and college diploma, I would rather hire an engineer with a middling GPA from MIT than one who graduated magna cum laude from Univ. of Toledo. As @blossom highlights above, unless you are headed to med or law school, your actual GPA in undergrad is relatively unimportant. What is important is learning to work, and fail, and try again. I will take the kid who had to bust his butt every day and twice on Sunday.

One other point that I think is important. Someone up the thread mentioned the willingness to relocate as an indicator of potential success in the current economy. This is to me the only real benefit to “prestigiosity”. Certain schools have a cache that extends outside of their region, or at the least have a well connected alumni base in many parts of the US and the wider world. Like it or not, Yale or Amherst is likely to open more doors in Nebraska than the University of Kentucky (which has a great NMSF scholarship, btw).

And of course this is all not to say that the one true path to enlightenment runs through the USNWR top 20 Unis and LACs. But it is to me an unassailable point that in the main, and across the great wad of humanity that encompasses all college students, schools like the Ivys, Berkeley, Davidson, Rice, Kenyon, Pomona, Middlebury, Michigan, etc do a better job of educating their students and preparing them for the course of their life than the average.

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With regard to transcripts, few screeners have the time to examine rigor. They screen by target colleges and GPA cut offs. A high GPA shows employers that you adapt to new situations well, mature, you researched your courses/professors, you’re reliable, you manage time well, and so on.