Fabulous article! I had to send the engineering rankings to family who were shocked/surprised we weren’t pushing a more prestigious school and I still have this urge to clarify. Great reminder!
@brooklynrye Wow. I could have written that article myself. Word for word. I have recently stopped qualifying my answer when people ask where my daughter is going to school. But there is still part of me that wants to shout, “You don’t understand! She’s not one of ‘those’ kids, the ones who had to go there!” Its wrong to feel this way. Its wrong and disrespectful to my daughter, to her school and to all of ‘those’ kids. The truth is a lot of them are my daughters friends and peers in her classes and you know what? They’re great. They’re smart and successful and talented. For so many reasons their high school records are not indicative of who they are and what they are capable of. Imagine that, your entire worth as a person is not determined by what you accomplished between the ages of 14-18! So I try very hard to put the thoughts away and I’m getting much better at it.
In two years, she and her cohorts graduate and then the questions will all change anyway. We’ll all be judging each other on what our kids are doing with their lives. What fun!
@lmao2018 I already said the kid matters more than the school. But in our case (we are a full pay), I have to be honest and say we found it extremely difficult to walk away from Stanford education once our kid was accepted, although I would have been just as happy if our kid went to an OOS Honors College and saved a lot of money. Note the biggest reason I am agreeing to send my kid to Stanford is NOT because I think he will get a higher paying job graduating from there.
I think it would be interesting to hear from parents who have one kid attending a very high ranked private college and another attending a state school or OOS Honors College.
Also, let me say there are very smart and talented kids in HS without near perfect GPAs and test scores who end up doing very well. In fact I myself got low GPA throughout my academic career but never felt less smart than other kids with high GPAs. In fact, if you asked some of them, they would have told you They thought I was a straight A student. Some kids do well in HS and then go down from there: some keep on going up from HS; some like me keep on doing bad from HS to graduate school and then decide to turn it on after school.
Also a kid may be very, very good in one area but not be good in other areas; these kids are not going to have high gpa.
We are a family with four kids. One graduated from our state school. Next two chose NESCAC schools
Fourth is in the process of looking at colleges now. For our kids, the choice of career was what directed them to their college choices. Our oldest is a school teacher, she went to a state school, which originally started as a teachers college. Was employed upon graduation. Next one wanted to work in finance in NYC, he also was employed prior to graduation. Hopefully, the others will be just as fortunate. I do feel that the choice of a college can be beneficial in getting you that first job.
There is a huge problem with education system, especially at high school level. The budget for schools are getting so tight there are no longer non academic track for our kids. 40 years ago in high school we had auto shop, working with metal, cooking, art classes where we learn needlework, etc. what is also lacking is funds for vocational schools.
I read today that many companies are starting to approach high schools to recruit kids for construction, plumbing and electric work. I hope so because not all kids are academic talent but talented with their hands.