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Since I had a lot of âdependsâ up above, itâs quite likely that this could be a situation that is student-dependent. I suppose that âfit,â from my perspective, is something that is more about what would regularly affect a studentâs life in college (on-campus or not) and has a bigger impact than a preference in terms of whether a student would be happy at a college.
In terms of cultural amentities like live music, theater, and art, I guess itâs because pretty much all colleges with which Iâm familiar have live music, theater, and art. In fact, thatâs one of the reasons why my family is likely to retire to a town with a college, because they tend to be such great producers of the arts. The theater department or student organizations put on at least 3-4 plays a semester, plus whatever community theater there is in the town. The music department and student organizations put on a number of concerts and there are also all the student recitals as well, in addition to other bands that might play at nearby clubs/bars. Ditto with the art. There are also touring productions (especially music & theater) that will go around the country, even if theyâre not based in the college town. And if the collegeâs town really has little in the way of community arts, then students can go 2-hours to the Big City closest to their college to see Big Name music or theater or art and do it as a long day trip or make a weekend out of it.
So although the college productions might not measure up with the professional ones in NYC or Chicago or wherever, I still think theyâre enough for a student to get by (in addition to if they decided to use a big auditorium with a good sound system to livestream an opera from The Met or something else to give them a taste of big city amenities).
I donât have the file available at the moment but, at least five years ago, I was looking at some colleges that had very high percentages. Millsaps, Furman, Wofford, U. of the South, and Samford (and maybe Birmingham-Southern?) all had pretty high percentages if I recall. The âlowerâ percentages may have been 40-50%, and some were more in the 60-70% category. For many of the smaller colleges in the south, there tends to be a very high percentage of students participating in Greek life.
But to answer the original question, I think that the emphasis on college brand/prestige/selectivity is not super common amongst the general population in the U.S.. I think itâs more common in certain geographic areas and generally only among the more affluent in those areas. And Iâve already said plenty about my thoughts on whether prestige is a âfitâ issue, so I wonât belabor them.
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I disagree. I think there is a big difference between how admissions departments spin rejections, and what these schools say at all other times. I listen to fall convocations and I almost vomit. Itâs all about how they have assembled The Best and The Brightest, and how so many are valedictorians and how so many have âdone researchâ and how so many have won exclusive awards (that are markers of privilege) and how so many blah blah blah exceptionalism!! blah blah blah. And trumpeting how low their admit rates are.
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Gotta keep your reputation.
A Ferrari is a Ferrari for a reason. It doesnât share attributes with a Dodge.
Luis Vuitton doesnât target Wal-Mart shoppers.
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It is very hard for many on this site. These are the angry people whose motivations are all about themselves and their own agendas (usually driven by their disappointment in their own children being rejected by highly selective universities).
The overwhelming majority of students would be just fine at the overwhelming majority of universities.
It is sad that high school students who come here and post that they are interested in both Dartmouth & Columbia get attacked. They get told that no one could possibly be interested in 2 institutions with such different attributes, and that they are ill-informed or reckless in their decision-making.
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The question which comes to my mind is whether that âfitâ pertains to the kid or to the parents.
Parents who either push for their kid to attend a more âprestigiousâ colleges, regardless of how good the colleges is, or who have convinced their kid that âmore prestigiousâ = âobjectively betterâ are looking for a college which fits THEIR (the parentsâ) requirements.
Fact is that many parents are incapable of separating between what they want for their kids and what their kids actually need. I read what some parents write here (and other places), and their arguments as to why, for example, a place like Brown is the best fit for their kid who is passionate about aerospace engineering, and it is obvious that they are the ones who need their kid to attend an Ivy, not the kid.
Societal expectations and mores play a much larger part among parents than among kids. Even for kids who seem to be obsessed with prestige despite their parents, it is usually a case in which there is peer pressure. That peer pressure is, invariably, because the parents of that kidâs friends have hammered an âIvy or Bustâ mentality into their own kids, and that is the atmosphere in which the kid has grown up.
Sometimes, it is not the parents or the peers, but the school itself. Many private high schools (and public high school which serve affluent communities) want that list of ânumber of students accepted to prestigious collegesâ to be large. Private schools want prestige-chasing parents (who are often full-pay), and the public schools are competing with private schools for these very same wealthy parents (donations and influence).
Bottom line, parents who are elitists (and classists) will always find some reason or excuse as to why more âprestigiousâ colleges are better for their kids, whether this is true or not. High schools who want to attract wealth elitist parents will do the same.
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I agree itâs not ideal. But as a mandated reporter who has had to call Child Protection many times, I can tell you they do not care, and they do not provide resources.
Parent driving kid while drunk? Did you happen to get a BAL on the parent? Because if you didnât it wonât hold up.
Parents hitting kid? How old is the kid? Because if itâs a teen it doesnât matter. Did it leave bruises? Because if not it doesnât matter.
Verbal abuse? Umm, thatâs not what this reporting line is for.
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Whatâs interesting to me is that when people express interest in dissimilar but not-very-selective colleges it often gets met with the online equivalent of a shrug. Maybe an âare you sureâ, but certainly not the type of response we often see in one of those âchance me for T10/T20â threads. So it definitely seems itâs something about the top tier that gets this response.
My older kid very definitely had a âtypeâ of college she was interested in, although there was one pretty high up on her list that was dissimilar that she also liked (sheâd visited all of these). C26 on the other hand just wants a college that âfeels niceâ, and as a topical example (not that they will apply to all) liked Cooper Union as well as BoulderâŠitâs hard to imagine two colleges more different from each other, but itâs subjective.
While on the one hand recognizing the amount of effort that goes into each top-tier application and needing it be worthwhile, Iâm also not really a fan of cutting out too much too soon. Iâd lean towards culling once you know what your options are rather than limiting them unnecessarily beforehand, especially as senior year is a year when kids often change their minds about things.
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How about GW and WVU.
I think people are saying the schools donât share many commonalities.
Forget the names. Or rank.
People are talking about fit.
Theyâre surmising, probably correctly in many cases, that the schools were selected based on Ivy and nothing else.
I donât think that you are correct. We almost never get somebody looking at multiple âless prestigiousâ colleges which have no similarities other than their admission rates. We donât get âchance meâ posts that read âHigh school junior, 3.8 GPA, 1420 SAT, wants to be chanced for all public and private research universities in the NE/East Coast with admission rates between 70% and 50%â.
In the rare cases that we do get posts like that, people ask the exact same questions as they ask a person posting âchance me for all research universities with admission rates that are lower than 10%â, sorry, I meant âChance me for all the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and U Chicagoâ
Moreover, many of the chance me posts for colleges with higher admission rates are generally for flagships and other very large universities. Colleges which have 25,000, 35,000, 50,000 students are so very diverse, by way of students, culture, and faculty, that quite often majors are more similar to the same major in another flagship than to different majors in the same college. I can tell you that the CS major at UIUC, Michigan, Wisconsin, and UNC are more similar than is CS to English at any of these universities.
Furthermore, most of the ânot-so-selectiveâ colleges have admissions directly to major, and the students who are applying are looking for a high quality education in that major. Nobody will criticize a kid who is looking to major in creative writing, and is looking at Emory, Yale, and University of Iowa. These may be very different places, but all have top notch creative writing programs.
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I think in some states the family tradition has more to do with it than what we think of as prestige or ranks here on CC. My kids went to hs in Florida. There were 3 camps and if you were in one, youâd never send your kid to another: UF, FSU, Miami. This was found in the office I worked in too. An FSUer would never go to UF (or even apply). We were in the north so not as many Miami applicants from our HS, but if you didnât get into UF, you DID NOT go to FSU, more likely to one of the other state schools.
On a tour of Florida Southern, I asked the tour guide how/why he decided on the school and he honestly said his familyâs school was UF and he didnât get in so went to Florida Southern. Totally different type of school and a world of difference from UF, but he never considered FSU.
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It might be an important desire for internationals as many are seeking prestige and aid, but we all know that there are internationals attending many, many, many other schools throughout the country.
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Thatâs right. But the reason we typically donât see questions about all those other schools is that admissions to them are far more predictable.
Even among domestic applicants, itâs rare to see a high-stat student asking about their chances at a moderately selective state flagship or similar schools. Itâs not because theyâre uninterested in applying, but because thereâs little uncertainty - after all, admissions at these schools tend to be fairly straightforward.
In contrast, thatâs not the case with T20s or even most T50s these days. That unpredictability is why so many students come here looking for help with their chances at those schools. Itâs easy to focus only on the âChance me at the T20sâ part and miss that, very often, they also say things like, âI already have a safety I like, so Iâm not asking about those,â or âI have great backup options in my home country, so just chance me for these schools.â
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Um, obviously this is the answer. The real question is why do we care where the top 2% of income-earners go to college?
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No, we donât get it phrased like that , but we do get lists of colleges from students with maybe lower GPAs than youâve cited there with a range of colleges which have a number that are quite dissimilar from each other other than admit rate. Such as a number of smaller private colleges (some Iâve never heard of before or seldom heard of) in amongst the large publics.
When students/families have lists like that, I almost always see responses that say some variation of âThe smaller the school, often the more of a âfit schoolâ it is, be sure to visit if this school stays on your listâ.
Maybe the big difference is the lack of pushback on those threads regarding that type of advice.
Waitâ didnât @Austennut start a couple of great threads for these kinds of questions (about schools with higher admit rates, like this one) Colleges with Admit Rates of 20-59%: Schools Youâve Liked and Why (NO REPLIES)
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A thread titled: âChance me for T20s for a major in Folkloreâ. Iâm waiting for such a thingâŠ
(sorry @circuitrider, not sure why this is in reply to you not @blossom, and canât fix it)
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Actually, these kids get criticized all the time.
Poster number 1 pushes back with "writing is a very low paying field, and you should aim for the lowest possible cost. So your flagship state U is fine, or get merit aid at XYZ U which will âpay youâ to attend.
Then Poster number 2 says âDenison is MUCH better than the three famous places youâve listed. You need to do your homework and not chase prestigeâ.
Poster number 3 piles on âIowa is famous for its GRADUATE program in creative writing, it doesnât matter where you go for undergrad as long as you end up in one of the top MFA programs. Look at the list from the last 80 years of where the Iowa MFA students attended for undergrad!â
And poster number four contributes- happily- âwe told our kids that college is for getting a job when you graduate. What kind of marketable skills can you possibly get in a creative writing program? You should major in CS and you can write for the school paper in your free timeâ.
Methinks the CC crowd is having selective memory loss is you think Emory, Yale and Iowa isnât triggering for a bunch of people here!
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