I am so tired of these myths about early admission

Parents Forum
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<p>JHS, This analogy may be helpful, may not be. See for yourself. I’m just tossing it out there. </p>

<p>I really like that dude’s Bentley convertible in my office’s parking lot. I like his brother’s Ferrari, too. But I’ve never walked over to look inside either of them . I’ve certainly never called to see what special financing they may have that might just make it barely affordable. But I am well aware of the cars from car magazines and TV. I can cite chapter and verse about their performance (well, actually I can’t anymore but I could at one point, and it sounds better this way. Indulge me. ;)). </p>

<p>They just aren’t on my screen.</p>

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<p>At least in this neck of the woods, it isn’t the kids who are ignorant of the options, it is the guidance counselors. Seriously. It would help middle class kids a lot, and poorer kids immensely, if reps from selective schools came to town and got people talking about alternatives to the same old, same old.</p>

<p>oops: cross posted with momfromme on the guidance counselor jab. Must be a common problem.</p>

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<p>I’m not sure of any such thing. But I guess I’m sure you weren’t betting in earnest, because I can’t write you my check for $1 million if it could be shown that you won the bet if you won’t even let me know to make the check out to.</p>

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<p>Yes. Harvard’s research shows this. I have just checked some books out of alma mater’s library on the economics and sociology of college admissions, and I will be reading over the next few weeks to have more to contribute to these interesting discussions here. </p>

<p>Changing topics slightly to turn two posts into one, I’ll also mention that I track the issue of where colleges do recruiting travel very closely </p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/389153-where-students-can-meet-college-admission-officers.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/389153-where-students-can-meet-college-admission-officers.html&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>and it is quite apparent that college admission officers favor travel to airport hotels over travel to outlying cities not near major airports. Sometimes students meet them more than halfway–I have seen students from Duluth and even from South Dakota and Iowa at college information sessions in Minneapolis. I note each year where colleges put their college information sessions in my town–Harvard, especially, and also MIT are both good about putting their big public information sessions in inner-city Minneapolis, at places on lots of bus lines.</p>

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<p>from marite…

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<p>i agree with marite. there is sometimes a mindset that elite colleges are unaffordable. sometimes little is known about the financial aid process and the availability of need based aid.</p>

<p>just in looking at where our local kids choose go to college, it appears that a HUGE percentage choose the in-state publics…(ours is a mid-western state)…and the chosen schools are usually those within the closest proximity to home. in other words, they tend to choose the closest public and less consideration is given to those publics in other parts of the state that are a greater distance from home. with gas prices soaring, perhaps that will become even more the case.</p>

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<p>I agree with Marite; in fact, in cases I’m aware of, it’s even more basic: families don’t know that their kid is a viable candidate for HYPSM; they don’t know what the SAT and gpa ranges are for admission; they don’t know that selective colleges have earlier deadlines than other schools; the don’t know what an SAT II is; they aren’t aware of which schools meet full calculated need and what that could mean for them; the aren’t aware of the difference between need-meeting schools and merit-scholarship granting ones; they sure don’t know about preferential packaging . . . and the list could go on. Even at schools with good guidance counselors, by the time they have the “college meeting,” early in the senior year at many typical public schools, it’s almost too late.</p>

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<p>“of color” is not the same as URM. It includes Asians and Asian-Americans.</p>

<p>I suspect that the proportion of Asians and Asian-Americans might be quite high. Add in African-Americans and Hispanics, it is not impossible to arrive at over 40% students “of color.”</p>

<p>I am fully aware of the fact that he is including Asians in that figure. Which is rather ironic, if you consider that Asians don’t count as URMS, but they DO count when it comes time to cite one’s percentage of students “of color.” Since the term URM was virtually created to avoid counting Asians as minorities, it is doubly ironic.</p>

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<p>Re#67. That happens all the time in our district. Asians are counted when the district wants to highlight diversity; but they are lumped together with Caucasians in many other contexts.</p>

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<p>I’m sorry that I missed the many interesting responses to my post yesterday afternoon. (I have to work and attend to real life sometimes.)</p>

<p>I agree with marite (and others) that people (including GCs) could understand the financial part of elite education better. I also agree that my views may be colored by my relatively sophisticated, urban/suburban context in which ambitious kids of all socioeconomic classes eat, sleep, and breathe college admissions issues in 12th grade, if not before. And, finally, I also agree with Marathon Man that merely reaching kids when they begin to think about college may not be soon enough, since (if they don’t live someplace where these strategies are in the air) by that time they may be way behind in meeting the de jure and de facto requirements for serious consideration.</p>

<p>But. I am still skeptical that the game is really worth the candle. For most of the kids we’re talking about now, the competition for Harvard et al. is State U. And for most of the kids we’re talking about now, even if they had all the information in the world State U. would still be competitive with Harvard – financially, educationally, socially, and in terms of meeting life goals. I am a big fan of elitist education, but I wouldn’t even begin to pretend that the realistic alternatives aren’t . . . realistic alternatives.</p>

<p>I’m imagining the poor Harvard rep out there somewhere in northwestern Nebraska, in a room with 10 kids and some parents (many of whom still had to invest half a tank of gas in getting there): “You see, uh, there’s this thing called the Eastern Establishment. And, uh, the people in it aren’t any better than you, uh, but sometimes they think they are, or other people may think they are. And, like, they get to run things and stuff. Like the government and big corporations. Not the elected parts, the secret parts – well, they’re not really secret, but some people think they are. Have you ever heard of the Trilateral Commission? The Elders of Zion? They don’t really exist, but it’s a little bit like that. Anyway, if you want to join, coming to Harvard is a really good idea. And it may not cost a lot more than Nebraska unless your family owns any land. And the colors are almost the same. And you won’t have to see your family too often, but you probably won’t want to anyway after you decide that they are unsophisticated hicks.”</p>

<p>Who could turn it down?</p>

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<p>JHS:</p>

<p>LOL. This is why I think phoning may be more effective than flying around and then driving long distances to maybe talk to 10 kids at most.</p>

<p>But who knows how students learn that they might want to apply to HYP?<br>
I recently talked to a young woman whose parents immigrated to the US a few years before she was born. They’d had very modest, low-skills jobs in their home country but thought to give their children a better chance.
For the first few years, they were on welfare, but by dint of hard work, and despite their total lack of English, they got off welfare and began to do well financially. Her three older siblings attended UCs. As for her, why is she in my neck of the woods? She told me she watched “Legally Blonde” and decided to head East. She was admitted to two Ivies and is about to graduate from one.</p>

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<p>LOL at the comparison of Harvard and Nebraska colors. </p>

<p>Yes, JHS makes the interesting point that in some places the academically qualified students simply aren’t going to come forward to apply to the most elite universities. (Not to mention, as he did, that many times a naturally smart student may not do the things in high school, in a noncompetitive environment, to become academically qualified for such a college.) Here in Minnesota, I know quite a few young people smart enough to get a brace or even a trifecta of 700+ SAT section scores at middle school age, but I have yet to know someone in that circle apply to an eastern elite university. (I know other kids in my town who do apply and get admitted.) Much of the time the difference, even in college-educated families, here between students who apply to eastern elite colleges at all and students who don’t is better knowledge about how lavish financial aid is for plainly “middle class” families at the eastern elites. Harvard, Yale, Princeton (and now Stanford, Chicago, etc.) have to repeat that point OVER AND OVER AND OVER to even get that idea on the radar screen here. The state university is still the main competition for top students here, just as it is in Nebraska.</p>

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<p>from JHS

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<p>JHS - that’s an excellent post. </p>

<p>in our rural h.s. there is no student/parent meeting on the admissions/application process and financial aid, i don’t think, until senior year. it also appears that the college reps that do visit are meeting with seniors, not the soph. or juniors. i don’t recall there being any information about taking SAT subject tests along the way. ACT is the test that is taken by many, not the SAT I.</p>

<p>from tokenadult…

tokenadult …i agree…same thing here in our mid-western state. state u’s are a very popular choice.</p>

<p>prior to finding cc, i really had no idea that parents and students took extensive college visit trips for that exclusive purpose. i had never met anyone in our area who had mentioned that they had done something like that. i did finally meet some nmf families who mentioned going to visit univ. of denver, northwestern, and uw-madison. we squeezed in one brief college visit just prior to d starting her senior year. knowing now what we didn’t know then, we’ll start making college visits, hopefully, sooner with our younger two.</p>

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<p>Quickly responding to one point…

Schools team up to travel to avoid scenarios like this. UVa, Harvard, and Princeton teamed up plan programs for students and GCs around the country. Two colleagues who have completed a week each on that “tour” reported that the numbers of GCs at their counselor breakfasts were much higher than those we usually see on other group travel tours. </p>

<p>The student sessions were well attended…perhaps because the invitations were very clear that financial aid was a major topic of the program.</p>

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<p>I’ve said it before; my two DDs go to schools that NEVER visited anywhere near where we live, much less at our local public HS two-hours from any major US city. Their HS counselors had little to no knowledge of even where the schools were much less anything about them. No one ever suggested private LACs as a possibility, or even any out of state schools, period, even though my Ds were NMSQT winners or commended scholars. And this is a good HS, in an area of vast high-income pockets where a large portion of the highest income families still use the public schools. If it hadn’t been for my family background, both kids would be at our state U. NTTAWWT, since it is near the top public U in the country. The point being if kids from this area aren’t aware of their options, then how the heck does a smart kid from a poor urban or rural outlying school with little family knowledge of colleges or the process have any ability to think outside the state U, or community college options? It’s not so much the colleges that fail in this but the HS GCs who don’t have the time, knowledge, or manpower to spend even on the best and brightest kids.</p>

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<p>prouddad,
this is where the h.s. teachers can make a difference. i remember that there were some teachers at my d’s h.s. who were more informed about elite colleges. they were encouraging and definitely a big help to d in the process.</p>

<p>perhaps there could more of an effort by admissions to reach out to the h.s. teachers and that could be helpful.</p>

<p>agree prouddad…not every student is exposed to thinking about attending out of state schools.</p>

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<p>I worked for many years with colleagues who had intelligent kids with good grades and very strong success in sports. None of these people seemed at all interested in private elite educations for their children. Their primary concerns were (1) go to school completely free of costs, and (2) continue to play their sport in college. This boiled down to them sending their children to school in-state at either the flagship public or small very low-profile privates. I was an oddity in their midst (we all loved to talk about our kids) in that I was very interested in my kids attending schools with strong reputations and superb teaching, strong alumni networks, research opportunities, and name value. They just couldn’t fathom what motivated me. We all had very similar educations, similar incomes, similar backgrounds. We were just really different on this issue. As I get older, I think their attitude has more merit than I once did. Their kids want to stay near parents, pursue similar career tracks as parents. They have a good life and simply want their kids to replicate it. That doesn’t call for an ivy education. In fact, an ivy education could very well derail that plan. Perhaps HYP should ponder the possibility that for many, their style of education is really not desired.</p>

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<p>Mammall, to each his own. Why should HYP care that many kids aren’t interested in what they offer???</p>

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I’d also add that most CC posters should understand that the HYP style of education is not really desired, valued, or envied by the vast majority of the country.</p>

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<p>sticker, we get it. My question is, why should Harvard care?</p>

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<p>At my kids’ urban public magnet – which DOES get visits from lots of college reps, and which DOES send kids to HYPS – the GCs do very little for the “best and brightest” kids, either. And, to some extent, that’s how it should be. There are five of them, for 2,400 students, about 550 of whom are 12th graders. The goal is to have 100% of the kids go to college (or maybe the military), and it is always missed, but never by much. It is way more important in the grand scheme of things for the counselors to make certain troubled kids stay on track, find a place to further their education, and figure out the financing, than to help kids who are proven winners figure out whether they should go to Harvard or Penn for less than sticker price or Penn State for free. The kids who can apply to Harvard with a straight face have faculty mentors coming out of their ears, and even if they (and their families) know nothing about educational options among the elite crust, they are eating lunch and sharing lab benches with other kids who do, and they know ten kids from last year who chose A or B. These kids do a fairly good job of self-counseling; the GC’s just resign themselves good-naturedly to the fact that this group is going to generate 5-10 times the per-kid paperwork as the rest of the class.</p>