Most of our tour guides have been really, really good.
Our funniest experience was at Dartmouth.
Our parent group (admittedly) kept asking really bad questions and our tour guide would just go nuts. She was incredulous at their “stupidity.” Our tour guide mentioned that she was an Astronomy major and had done research looking at Lithium levels in stars. One of the parents said, “That is good that you are doing that, we learned that our town has Lithium in its water.” The tour guide responded by saying “OH MY GOD. I am talking about Lithium levels in stars, NOT Lithium levels in your water.” Later in the tour, she talked about housing and then moved on to dining. But then a parent asked a question about housing which had already been directly addressed. “OH MY GOD. I already covered that!” This went on and on.
I thought it was absolutely hilarious. But my daughter developed a dislike of Dartmouth that I tried to talk her out of. “You can’t disregard a school on the actions of one person,” I said.
Terrible! Funny - when I was in HS (new england), we never made fun of the name. It was always considered an amazing school. My son wouldn’t even consider it!
Oh how I wish we would have had a terrible tour at Amherst! I fell in love with it on my tour in 1994 and my son fell in love last year on a cold february day. They rejected us both. Devastating for us both even though I thought I prepped my son for the likely rejection given the ridiculously low admit rate. We are super excited for the college my son will be starting at next year and I ended up where I was meant to be, but this thread helps with the residual sting of rejection.
We were underwhelmed by Amherst when we toured about 2.5 years ago. The presentation was so blah. We have twins so we then had two different tour guides. Both kids reported the same thing: each tour guide said they chose Amherst because they were “scared” of math and never wanted to take another math class. Must be part of tour guide training.
Not my kids’ people.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because through the process of touring a bunch of schools they wound up discovering that they wanted BIG schools.
My cousin’s kid went there, enjoyed it, and now works as…an architectural engineer If you want to sidebar let me know. May even be able to put you in touch with assuming your D30 is interested.
It’s so interesting because it’s exactly the opposite of the way I would expect people to sell it. It “feels” like schools with no core curriculum or with no broader liberal arts requirements end up attracting what I might call “one dimensional” students. I know that’s not their intention, but it’s so interesting that it’s how some of us end up perceiving it. Is it better to say that I never want to take math again, so I’m only engaging with subjects that I love or is it better to say “I want a well-rounded education”? Different strokes for different folks, but I don’t think I could tell you where I’d fall.
Yep. Same. I twisted my kid’s arm a bit to apply because, on paper, it is a near-perfect match for them. They were waitlisted, but in a way I was relieved because it would have broken my heart a little for them to turn it down just because of the name. (Seriously, this might have happened.)
If I were admissions, I would flat out forbid students from saying that sentence. Perpetuates so many bad stereotypes.
Both of my kids went to open curriculum liberal arts schools, against my personal preference (I am a big fan of what now appears to be old-fashioned detailed and prescriptive general education requirements that make every student take courses in common, as well as serious history, literature, math, science, social science, arts).
When I talked with my kids about this, their argument made me stop short … they pointed out that when I was growing up in the dark ages, I had graduated from high school having taken BOTH of my high school’s AP courses (not to brag, but I was an academic overachiever that way). And I took THREE years of French. And I took every math my high school offered, all the way up to precalculus.
When they went to college, they had both taken, respectively, 9 and 11 AP courses, as well as 6 and 5 courses at the local college. Their point: they took my general education curriculum in high school. And in their minds, it was time to really dive into the things that they had discovered to be theirintellectual passions. And both of them used the open curriculum to explore broadly … in the areas that they chose. (having taken calculus in high school, neither took math, though one did take a major specific statistics course, and the other took a quantitative GIS course).
Can’t say that they’re wrong, but I still love the idea of the Chicago curriculum, or Columbia, or the Rhodes College two year interdisciplinary “Search for meaning” sequence, or St. Olaf’s Great Conversations, or Lawrence U’s freshman year sequence …
This is where my college professor self gets grumpy about the College Board scamming so many people into believing them when they say that their curricula are the equivalent of college course curricula.
I’m with you 100% on this. A US history course taught to 9th graders for the AP exam (the grade level for my kids), with so many class sessions on how to “answer the essay question correctly,” is a very different experience from a US history course taught to 18-20 year olds by a scholar who has written essays or a book on some sub-field of US history. Both might emphasize the mastery of a corpus of factual data, but the college course, hopefully, will do more to teach students how to think critically about the past.
But I also must acknowledge that the AP courses fall somewhere in between a college course and the courses I took in high school - they are more rigorous than my high school experience.
And I think the AP courses are often better than the dual-enrollment courses where colleges hire high school teachers to teach a college course in the high school (which is a rapidly growing phenomenon where I live). Colleges prefer this to AP, b/c they get tuition revenue. Teachers prefer this, b/c they become adjunct professors. Students prefer this b/c they get the credit without taking a large national exam at the end. But I think the educational experience can be far inferior with little in the way of true quality control.
I have always heard, for admission purposes, college prefer to see AP exams (as there is a clear curricula and outcomes) then DE on transcript.
I think colleges, as DE providers, like revenue from DE courses.
It is all so hard to compare. My 27 goes to a very rigorous private HS and their standard courses (all considered honors level) are harder than most school’s APs…by a fair bit.
And APs to APs can be wildly different, it is quite rare for someone from our LPS to not get a 3+ on their APs (mostly 4s and 5s)..but seems like in many places getting a 3-4 isn’t that common.
My kids, their DE courses have been taken at the local university, and taught by regular university faculty.
That’s different from DE courses taught in high schools by high school teachers who happen to have the (absolute minimum, usually) qualifications to do so.
It’s like much in education—the same label is being used for very, very different things. This is a problem.
agree, that is different! we should have a different term, for that. My 27 will do this (most of their senior year will be at a major research university with no other HS kids in their classes - it is just taking undergrad courses) This is wildly different than my 25 who had a random history teach them a DE class in the HS building with only other HS kids in their classroom.
I think most people mean the latter when they say DE though so was using it in that way… I could be wrong!
I was always under the impression dual enrollment meant enrollment at a local college or CC. That’s what it means at our school. There are no DE classes taught on site.
in a lot of places kids get whole associate’s degrees, in HS, taught by HS teachers.
DE isn’t super common near me, but the ones that exist are HS teachers, trained, and teach college-level courses in the HS, it is basically just an AP class but you can pay $$ to get credits from a university. No test. But it isn’t very common- I think my 25s school has 2-3 of these.
At our (and many other) LPS you can’t take classes at a CC or other school and have it on one’s transcript so DE, that way, isn’t a thing!
It is one of those norms that is VERY regional and make admissions tricky.
If you want to sidebar let me know. May even be able to put you in touch with assuming your D30 is interested.