Just Say NO!

SlitheyTove
Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:38:20 +0000

I’m railing against the concept that turning your most precious cargo, your child, over to any school other than the Ivies, Cal Tech, MIT or Stanford, the latter two of which DS is a legacy, is dooming them to a life of mediocrity. This perception was created by USNWR and fueled right here at CC.



You’re the one with the engineering prospie and you’re not mentioning Olin or Mudd or Berkeley etc etc etc among the “elite”? (shakes head sorrowfully) OP, you’re either buying into the hype yourself or you’ve not done your homework. And you’re showing an engineering bias, because you’re not mentioning any of the super-selective LACs (which understandably wouldn’t be on your kid’s radar) as among the annointed list.



Do you really believe that in the span of one year schools can move like they do in USNWR?



I don’t know, because I’ve never looked at the USNWR ratings, let alone how their relative rankings change from year to year*. And if you’re noticing that, then that’s saying that you’re paying a great deal of attention to them. Why not just say no to those ratings? You’ve been a member of CC for a year, and you’ve not harnessed one of its strongest features: posting about your kid and his stats/background/interests and your budget, and asking members of the community for suggestions for his college list. Speaking of which, is Purdue or Ohio State a possibility? I know engineering kids at both schools who are happy as pigs in, uhm, that stuff that pigs are happy in and both got really nice merit money. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

*I do, however, watch avidly to see how schools move up/down/on/off the biennial Reform Judaism College list, which tracks percentage and raw number of enrolled Jewish students. Not that their methodology is foolproof, but it’s much more useful for my purposes than that news magazine list.