@carolinamom2boys, nope, this is definitely not a one size fits all process. And as I said on my first post on this thread, virtually everybody except the uber rich needs to consider finances. But whether going to a particular school is the best decision, all factors considered, for a particular kid is a different question than whether certain schools do a better job of educating their students. I have kinda been focusing on the later, since the particular situation for each student is unknowable.
As far as law schools, and understanding this is heretical, in my experience neither HLS nor YLS churn out the best practicing lawyers. Professors? Maybe. Appellate judges? Maybe again. But over time I personally was far more impressed with the kids we hired from places like Vandy, Duke, Boalt and Georgetown coming into the actual practice of law. But who knows now? The last time I sat on a hiring committee was fifteen years ago and more.
“@MiddleburyDad2, if you would pick UChicago, why can’t you believe a student might choose to apply to Chicago instead of Ivies? One of mine did, and got into Chicago with merit aid (unhooked). And then turned them down for her one true love (Mudd). And she was a physics major, so it wasn’t the presence or lack of engineering that mattered. Not everyone is, or should be, smitten with the Ivies.”
@intparent, Where on God’s green earth did you get the idea that I would struggle to believe that a kid might pick Chicago vs. an Ivy? “Ivy” is used in this thread, at least for me, as a generic term for very highly selective schools. Yes, even I know that it’s just a sports league. You gave me A&M a few posts back. That is very different. Chicago? Stanford? Williams? Duke? Georgetown? Vand? Cal Tech? Mudd? Pomona? MIT? etc. etc.? Yes, of course those are schools that could plausibly beat out any Ivy League school for a talented kid.
No place did I write anything to state or even loosely imply that Ivy League schools are or should be first choice among all highly selective schools, or that we should all be smitten with them. You must really think I just fell off the wagon or something.
"But over time I personally was far more impressed with the kids we hired from places like Vandy, Duke, Boalt and Georgetown coming into the actual practice of law. "
An interesting factor that may come into play in the law firm context is that the employer may be going deeper into the class at YLS and HLS than at other strong law schools. You can count on one hand the law firms that effectively require YLS/HLS 2Ls to be on law review or in the top 10%; a much longer list of employers would only hire LR members from someplace like Vandy. So unless you’re at a hypercompetitive employer like Cravath or whatever, you’re likely comparing the middle of the class at HLS/YLS to the top of the class at Georgetown/Northwestern/Vandy (and perhaps to superstars from Fordham, Loyola, etc.) That is what my class at my firm looked like: the president of the law review from Kent, the top quarter from Northwestern, and anybody from Harvard who wanted to work there.
Given the thin LSAT margins that determine whether a law student ends up at HLS or Duke, going substantially deeper into the HLS class probably only makes sense from an employer branding point of view. It doesn’t make sense in terms of predicting who will be sharper or work harder at the law firm.
Not in the original article it isn’t. And you will find on CC that people DO mean Ivy League when they say “Ivies”. They aren’t mixing the rest in. And I know the thread is long, but for the record, I did not mention A&M.
@Ohiodad51 said, “But whether going to a particular school is the best decision, all factors considered, for a particular kid is a different question than whether certain schools do a better job of educating their students.”
I will await with bated breath the responses to this assertion. Lord knows I failed multiple times in this thread to get this point through to some folks.
“Not in the original article it isn’t. And you will find on CC that people DO mean Ivy League when they say “Ivies”. They aren’t mixing the rest in. And I know the thread is long, but for the record, I did not mention A&M.”
@intparent Someone somewhere mentioned a kid preferring to attend a large state school for the ROTC experience over an Ivy League school, which I’m sure happens, but which I’m also sure is the exception not the rule. Maybe I brought up A&M, because it’s so well known for ROTC. In any event, my mistake.
I don’t know what article to which you are referring; I’m only discussing my participation in the thread. Not an article.
Your point about CC is noted, but I think it not terribly hard to infer from my posts, including my comments about LACs, that I was not just limiting my argument to just those 8 schools and their historical athletic association.
If there is someone here who doesn’t get that kids turn down Columbia to attend Stanford all the time, then I’m probably not going to waste my time trying to convince that person of anything on this topic.
I am the one who posted this, but it was not A&M. I believe it was UVA. And… this thread started with an article being posted. I would assume anyone posting read it as a starting point, although I admit it was many posts ago.
Harvard now has ROTC. I would think that a student accepted at both a state school and Harvard with ROTC options would choose the Ivy. Just an assumption. I could be wrong.
The Corps at A&M is not your typical ROTC experience though, @TessaR
In @MiddleburyDad2’s defense, it shouldn’t take anyone very long to understand that he is not an Ivy or bust guy.
@Hanna, maybe. Certainly when I came out the rule of go to the top ten or be in the top ten applied to pretty much everywhere except places like Cravath, Debevoise and maybe one or two others where the rule was go to the top ten, be in the top ten and it helps if your dad is a partner here or better yet at Morgan Stanley. But by the mid to late nineties things changed, and my firm wasn’t really distinguishing between the top fifteen/twenty schools. On the other hand we were taking far fewer “superstars” from lower tier schools. It is like the curve flattened out. But I left the partnership a decade ago, and you certainly have better Intel on how things are going now.
The quote above is probably a large reason that these conversations take the directions they do. The first part of the quote is not simply a digression bc a heck of a lot of families do live in that reality, and the italicized portion is inaccurate bc of the caliber of students being discussed. Why do people bring up schools like Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Etc? Bc they offer large scholarships to high performing kids. The kids who are qualified for admission to top schools and cannot afford to pay to attend them are often attending college on large merit scholarships with no need component.
Are most of them attending the top UG programs in their fields? No. Some are awarded extremely competitive scholarships at higher ranked schools. More attend schools with automatic scholarships. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make these schools work for them, either. Our ds, for example, will be earning his masters with his bachelors simultaneously. While his UG experience may not be ideal, it has still been great. His university has provided him numerous opportunities and his professors actively mentor him. He also spends about 18 hrs a week working on research. He is making the most of his UG experience.
I think that is the reality that a few posters on this forum face…a huge gap between cost and affordability and having students who have no choice but to attend their affordable option. When you have witnessed your children not only succeed, but thrive, at these schools, you know positive outcomes from the lower ranked schools are a possible reality.
It also doesn’t mean you don’t have doubts as parents. I am very concerned about finding a school where our 11th grader will be challenged and will be able achieve her personal goals. She has spent numerous hours researching depts, sending emails, arranging dept visits, asking questions about taking grad level classes as an UG, etc. But all the doubts and concerns don’t increase her college budget. We cannot afford to pay our expected parental contribution. It is what it is. We just keep searching and hope that at least 1 merit scholarship school will be able to offer her what she needs academically.
Fwiw, that isn’t saying that top schools are the same as lower ranked schools. It is saying that out of necessity highly motivated, high achieving kids can find ways to make their lower ranked schools work for their needs and succeed long term.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, no offense, but I do not see how my post that you quoted from is in anyway inaccurate. Financial aid and merit aid are two different things, at least to me. In any event it is or should be crystal clear from the two or three posts preceding the one you truncated that we were discussing need based aid. Really I was addressing a particular pet peeve of mine, which is when people on this board self identify as “middle class”, but then say they are full pay at an Ivy or the like, which is a virtual impossibility.
That said I do not disagree, and have said repeatedly, that almost every family must take finances into account when picking colleges. My overall point though is that this financial component is a different thing than a determination of the general educational strength of a particular school.
Following 314: and what happens when a large number of bright, high achieving, worthy kids don’t get into a TT or can’t afford it? Well, when the large numbers choose Alabama or others, you can no longer claim inadequate peers lolling around, dragging down snowflakes.
“On the other hand we were taking far fewer “superstars” from lower tier schools.”
This is exactly what I saw when the summer classes shrank, and it’s a terrible shame. Here in Chicago, the Loyola/DePaul/Kent tier often advertised data showing that their graduates, when hired at big firms, made partner at much higher rates than average. I don’t doubt that at all.
D2 is not a special academic snowflake–either in terms of intellectual ability or my delusion about her ability. However, what IS true is that she has challenged herself with her course load and cares about academics and doing well. So by way of illustration of the issue, what typically happens–as it did for her siblings before her–is she will be the only one who has to do homework at high school track meets. She’s had several recently that are 2-day meets, for which she leaves school early and doesn’t get home until 9:30 PM on two consecutive school nights. For these, getting some work done at the meet is a necessity. I would think it would be necessary for even a student in non-advanced classes. But there she is, the only one ever cracking a book while the others are off wandering the school campus together, having fun. That’s isolating. (I recall that junior year at Penn Relays her older sister planned to look around for some of the teams of the schools she was considering attending. Coincidentally, her high school team sat right near Yale’s team, and do you know, all the Yale girls had their textbooks open while waiting to compete. D1 was ecstatic to see that!) D2 is also not a special snowflake athlete talent-wise. But what distinguishes her is work ethic. She’s the only one on her high school distance squad who doesn’t goof off at playgrounds and at Starbucks during long runs because she cares about doing the best she can.
Not doubt at some universities the honors programs are truly great, but at others I hear they’re a lot of window dressing without much substance. Regardless, your student won’t just be going to class while away at college. S/he will be participating in clubs and teams and dorm committees and going to parties with non-honors program kids. Do you want them to be the very same ones who in high school didn’t show up to volunteer at the big club event, despite signing up? The same ones who didn’t do their share of the English class group project? The same ones who skimped on their long training runs? The same ones who constantly bragged about how drunk they got on Saturday night while you were home doing your AP homework? How eager do you think even my average good kid is to attend the same local state schools as her teammates that she never sees studying and who are lazy in their training? Not very.
To me that’s the issue and to improve the odds of avoiding a repeat of high school, I want my D to attend the best and highest-ranked school she can. Now apparently all CCer’s kids who attend state schools are not only very smart but highly-motivated and simply eschewed those Ivies and other top-tier schools. Well frankly, that’s just not the pattern we’ve seen here in real life, with the exception of pre-med and engineering students. And that’s why we celebrate those special kids from disadvantaged backgrounds who get into all the Ivies: it’s their chance to again rise above the mediocrity around them and excel.
“Working hard may be necessary for top grades, but it is certainly not sufficient, at least in the Humanities and Social Sciences” - Many mix the idea of “working hard” with “working for long hours”. These two are not the same, not even close! I do not know anything about MIT and I did not realize that this whole thread is devoted to MIT situation, so I apologize for that. However, outside of MIT, working hard while taking the most rigorous classes will result not only in 4.0 but also in achieving the goals beyond college as college is simply one step, there are more to be taken after graduating from college. Also, as I pointed before, while high GPA is needed to retains the Merit scholarships and to obtain the additional ones that are based on the college GPA, some career paths also require very high GPA. Do not be mistaken by reading here, some doors will be shut down for you FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, if you do not achieve high college GPA, even if you graduate from MIT. This simple fact cannot simply be brushed under the rug.