Just wow, GfG. Lotta riff raff out there, eh?.
And DAP, did you know this thread isn’t really about MIT? Do you know other colleges than your kids attended? Do you know hiring practices outside your field?
No one disputes that a certain GPA is necessary for med or law school. What we have been discussing is whether GPA is a relative measure or an absolute one, relative to other endeavors in addition to law and med school. It may in fact be that if you or progeny are that one in a hundred kid who knows with absolute certainty that med or law school is the path, maybe the right answer is to go to a less rigorous school, but then again maybe not. Certainly someone is winning the “ties” at HLS between LSAT 173/GPA 3.8 kids. Some other kids are getting in with GPAs around 3.5. Wanna bet more of those kids are coming from Princeton and MIT than Bama and Baylor?
Certainly the margin for error is going to be narrower at a non elite, which is something that it is wrong to ignore in debates like this. The academic support/advising at the elite is likely to be superior as well. To me, it is not terribly persuasive to assume that everything goes exactly to plan for the kid at Univ of Kentucky, but that the wheels fall of the bus for the kid at U Chicago. Not every NMF who goes to Kentucky graduates in four years with a 4.0 and not every HS valedictorian who attends UChicago craters. In fact, if you look at graduation rates/admit percentages to law and med school etc. the data will tell a different story.
It also is very true that declining to attend an elite school in favor of a more normal school will close doors to an individual’s future. Maybe they are important doors, maybe they are not. But you can’t sweep that under the rug either.
No, lookingforward, there’s just a lot of mediocrity and people doing the bare minimum to get by. Our country used to be so new and prosperous that being average was plenty good enough to get a decent job and feed your family. Maybe in some parts of the nation it still is–just not where I live. Here my kid has to compete with 1000 other students for a summer internship, and even so some people have told me they think those odds aren’t too bad. I guess they’ve seen worse? Being mediocre, or being actual riff raff, won’t cut it anymore.
"And DAP, did you know this thread isn’t really about MIT? Do you know other colleges than your kids attended? Do you know hiring practices outside your field? " - I do not know any of it and my field does NOT require high college GPA at all, neither it requires to attend an MIT and such. The most departments in our city where I have been working at 9 different places in completely unrelated industries, hire from the local college and / or local people with certain experiences and 4 year degree obtained at ANY college. I do not know any colleges, there is no need to know colleges, the kid has to step up efforts at absolutely ANY college, because there is a huge gap between HS academics and college academics even if one graduated at the top of the class from the most rigorous HS. Those who fail to adjust in academic efforts at ANY college, including the lowest ranked, MAY face being derailed from their initial academic track. I said “MAY”, because it is not true for all academic tracks, only for some. But if you choose to be on the track that requires high college GPA, do not be misled, the name of your college will not save you, got to get the high college GPA and it is only ONE of many other requirements. So, I am trying to warn those who may be on such tracks. You can ignore my warnings as much as you wish, your choice. And, again, not all fields require very high college GPA.
No @lookingforward it is not about riffraff. But some schools are going to have a higher percentage of students where their academics are not the primary focus, or where the academic focus may be very narrow. Other places, like the schools we are discussing here, maybe not so much. Some schools just have a higher percentage of kids with “hungry minds”, and a track record of feeding that hunger. That I think is the ultimate point.
@ohiodad51 I read your pet peeve post. I just don’t happen to share your POV. I can empathize with families who cannot afford to pay their expected family contributions bc we know exactly what it is like to not be able to. Schools look at a single slice view of your financial situtation and their formulas are far from perfect. (Incomes fluctuate. Older children are no longer dependents and their educational costs are not a factor. Kids spread out in age aren’t in college at the same time. Caring for older relatives is not considered. All those combined with any number of different financial scenarios.) If a family states that they can’t afford to pay what they are expected to pay, they can’t, MC or otherwise. It can irritate you, but it doesn’t change those students’ reality.
@thegfg My kids have managed to find great peers who have been both highly motivated and academically strong on their state university campuses, and no, they have not all been engineering or pre-med majors. Ds fits that profile and is a physics and math major. His friends are across multiple majors. He met many of them through his honors program, but many are friends he met through the campus Catholic parish. My 11th grader is planning on foreign languages as her focus, and there is zero doubt in my mind that that will continue to be her profile. She has personal goals that will require dedication to achieve. She eschews slackers now and gravitates toward high achievers. I’ve no doubt she will find friends with similar personalities at whatever school she attends.
Fwiw, I don’t think it takes comparing a highly successful state university kid to a “wheels fallen off” top university kid. I think top kids from both backgrounds are equally likely to succeed bc they are demonstrating more than class attendance. The kids at the state university probably have to prove themselves more, but it is still possible. My lowly state university kid was able to choose from 3 amg great REU opportunities this summer (2 in different areas of the country and 1 international). My state university engineering grad was able to choose amg multiple great job offers. Both fit the profile of highly motivated and academically successful and both sought/seek opportunities to build their understanding of their field outside of the classroom. That drive and motivation for success is not restricted to certain campuses.
Exactly, ohiodad51. Our high school certainly has a lot of fantastic students who are a whole lot smarter than D. They are in her AP classes. They just don’t happen to be on the team with her. It would be great to attend a school where the student body was more homogeneous in terms of academic and athletic work ethic. D1’s top tier college team was full of great, hard-working students who were also great, hard-working athletes. It was wonderful for her.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, I have consistently said that virtually every family needs to take finances into account. My points are these. One, the decision of what resources can or should be dedicated to paying for college is a different question than the quality of any particular school. Two, a family that is full pay at an Ivy is not a member of the middle class as that term is commonly defined. I am not making any assertions about the particular financial burdens faced by anybody. Please do not continue to imply that I am.
I think it’s possible to agree in principle with Ohiodad51 and MiddleburyDad2 without extrapolating it to mean a slight on your own kids or their friends who attend state schools. If and when my own D attends a state uni I expect to still be of the opinion that the top tiers are generally superior. Certainly my friend whose two older kids attended Cornell–one in engineering and one in the humanities-- would agree their education was superior to the one her honors program youngest D got at Rutgers. That doesn’t mean the D3 herself is inferior as a person or a student.
Hanna is spot on in her analysis of law school admissions and firm recruiting. I’ve followed law school admissions over the last few years (my older son graduated from law school last year), and two things stand out to me in terms of how admissions today is much different than when I went to law school decades ago: (1) merit money is plentiful, and the law schools use it liberally to get the stats, primarily LSAT scores, they want; and (2) an applicant with a low GPA (say, 2.9) but high LSAT (174+) will get into a number of Top 14 law schools, with merit money. Your LSAT score is extremely important in admissions. It seems law schools can find lots of kids with high GPAs, from Stonehill or wherever, but they really chase the high scores.
I’ve wondered how the kid with a 2.9 and a high LSAT does in law school. Does he/she suddenly become a nose to the grindstone student in law school? It seems unlikely.
@TheGFG I agree with your last post. The main area of disagreement I have had is the assertion that top schools are affordable bc they have great FA (not implied by @Ohiodad51, but another poster) and that income alone is a good indicator of economic situation. Using $150,000 as the indicator of UMC, would they be considered UMC if they lived in $175,000 house with a mortgage and only $500 in the bank? In my pragmatic thinking, economic stability needs to play a role. When kids post that is their family income but their parents have no savings and lots of debt, I don’t think, wow, an UMC family. I think, “How on earth do those parents assure their kids that they can make this work when they haven’t managed to yet?” or “Good job, parents, for not destroying your and your kids’ futures by digging a deeper financial hole.” (Obviously depending on the direction of the college choices.)
There was a student who described her parents searching through furniture for change but couldn’t understand how come her college choices did not offer FA bc her parents made $350,000. Obviously, schools were going to consider her full pay, but her parents were new to their jobs and had no financial buffer.
As to one of the other points, I also believe that students who utilize their lower ranked schools to the fullest (grad level courses, UG research with mentorship, etc) also don’t reflect the avg grad from that school.
To label anything “superior” or “inferior”, one must present the examples of how the superiority manifests itself. Certainly, if superiority manifests itself in some career pursuits, it does not do it in others. I know several Ivy’s graduates who did not feel at all that they achieve any superior status, they feel that they had no advantages whatsoever over others who graduated from in-state publics. I am talking about graduates from various colleges who ended up in the same Graduate school class. In addition, to end up in this Graduate school class, one had to possess very high college GPA among other factors on application, no matter if applicant had a Harvard / Princeton / Berkeley /MIT …name on the application or simple in-state public.
Again, to claim superiority one better show the superior results. In the example above, they were lacking which was apparent to both Ivy’s graduates as well as in-state school graduates who ended up in exactly the same environment after graduating from college with no advantages / privileges to any of the group. And while academic preparation was important in this environment, the non-academic personal growth factor was also crucial. Again, no superiority was manifested by any of the group.
@TheGFG, thank you and exactly right. I won’t speak for @MiddleburyDad2, but I have not seen any post of his assert that a particular student was either more or less based on the school they attended. For my part, I have been intentionally talking in broad strokes. Nobody can determine that a particular school is the right choice for a particular student, and I certainly have not done so. I have said that in the main, elite schools are thought to be elite for a reason, and that is that they have a track record over time of attracting and nurturing students of serious mind and wide interests.
On the specifics, one of those elite schools was the exact right choice for our son, largely because he was a bit of an odd duck in high school. Now instead of being an outlier he is much more one of the guys, which he really enjoys. Sounds a bit like your D1 actually. Our younger daughter is different, and we are looking at different schools. Some schools we are looking at are elite level, because she does well at school and enjoys her studies, but some are not because she also enjoys other things. In addition, her academic interests run more to the practical rather than the theoretical like her brother. For her, different factors go into the hopper, and maybe a different result will come out. But if she decides to apply to Otterbein instead of Swarthmore for example it won’t be because we have convinced ourselves that Otterbein is an overall better school, because it is not. It will be because based on all the knowable factors at the time, she will have made an educated guess that Otterbein was the best school for her. Not sure why people find such a calculation to be controversial.
@MiamiDAP, if you want to talk about superior results, I would suggest expanding your focus beyond one med school class. There are tons of statistics which show that kids from Middlebury, Penn and Stanford graduate, are employed and go to med school, law school or grad school in greater percentages than kids from Toledo, Bowling Green and Akron. That is inarguable.
GPA is not only affected by the strength of the students. I’m at a Midwestern state school, very solid, but nothing elite about it. I know many bright students (some of whom were accepted to elite schools such as MIT, but couldn’t afford to attend there) whose GPAs are not as high as they could be because they WORK.
“I’ve wondered how the kid with a 2.9 and a high LSAT does in law school. Does he/she suddenly become a nose to the grindstone student in law school? It seems unlikely.”
In my experience, they often do very well. Like the LSAT, law school grades depend on one big high-stakes three-hour test. You don’t necessarily need a consistent work ethic the way you do in college; you need to be talented at writing those exams.
Years ago my S was trying to decide between an Ivy and an almost full scholarship at a top 15 LAC. We are of modest means and also at that time he was planning on law school, so saving money on undergrad seemed prudent. It should have been a no-brainer by current CC standards! Yet, we consulted a number of lawyers–several we knew personally, several we didn’t–to ask their opinion of S’ college options. All but one advised he attend the highest-ranked college he was admitted to. One lawyer in particular elaborated that he had chosen the cheaper undergrad option and even after years of experience still finds himself needing to justify his undergrad choice, since it’s inconsistent with the caliber of his law school. Also, once he arrived at law school, he felt that the Ivy-educated classmates there had a huge leg up on him–not just educationally but also socially.
And here’s the other thing: not everyone who intends to go to grad school actually does. In fact, S decided law school wasn’t for him, so now he’s especially glad his only degree is from an Ivy. All the emphasis on going to a top grad school instead seems logical except you still do need to acquire the goods to be admitted to that top grad school, and only a small percentage of the population actually get their doctorates–some 172,000 were graduated in 2015 and many of those are not even American citizens.
“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.”
I’m going to be blunt here: I really don’t think you know at all what you’re talking about.
For the love of God, not hitting a certain GPA during undergrad can be overcome through a few avenues, especially if that low GPA was earned at MIT.
This thread has officially jumped the shark.
Spot on, @MiddleburyDad2. Yes, there are "some’ situations (med school applications, some top tech internships/jobs) where GPA is a consideration. But for the vast percentaged of college grads, whether you graduate with, say, a 3.1 or a 3.62 makes no difference at all. You are correct.
"Middlebury, Penn and Stanford graduate, are employed and go to med school, law school or grad school in greater percentages than kids from Toledo, Bowling Green and Akron. That is inarguable. "
- This is definitely inarguable that all these “superior” Elite school pre-select their future students. So, again, it is up to a student to achieve whatever result they want to achieve, it has nothing to do with the name of their college and that is one big reason why medical schools adcoms do not pay much attention to the name of the college and medical school students do not feel any superiority or inferiority that anyhow connected to the name of their college. I am not closely familiar with the Law Schools, but somebody here mentioned that it applies there also. Of course, if one college accepts only valedictorians, while other accepts much wider range of students, and in addition, have much stricter pre-med committee that simply do not support any applicant with lower stats than certain threshold to further insure the high percentage of acceptances among their graduates, certainly, this college will claim a higher percentage of acceptance. Specifically, to impress people like the crowd on this thread. However, those Honors colleges at in-state publics with similar policies of accepting only highly pre-selected applicants (like top 2% of HS class with very high SAT/ACT scores), these Honors colleges also happen to claim a 100% acceptance to the medical schools and other very selective places. The reason for the high acceptances to the selective places after college graduation is the same across various colleges - high degree of pre-selection into the freshman class as well as support provided only to those who will actually make it.