Are there any published outcomes for students who attend colleges:
Trying to help my D weigh her options. Any decision making advice is appreciated.
I have only seen anecdotal evidence on this - and decision making has to include lots of personal factors that we cannot know.
If you are trying to help your D weigh her options, what factors has she considered to be important to her, and you (If you are paying).
I don’t know about published outcomes. Our D16 wanted to go to an elite private in the worst way, where she would have been in the middle of a pack of very smart, accomplished students.
We could not afford it, and instead she is attending an OOS public flagship for next to free, on a merit scholarship.
As it has turned out, she is managing her coursework well, without overwhelming stress (HS was VERY stressful). She has time to fit in some volunteer work, and time to take a weekend off here and there to travel to visit her BF. If she was at that elite private, I’m not convinced she’d have the time to visit, nor could afford it.
A professor noticed her research paper first semester and recommended she apply for an undergrad fellowship program. She was pumped up that her work was noted. She feels competent. Smart.
Then, she discovered a pre-professional undergrad major her school offers and has submitted an application for admittance. This program does not exist at her “dream school” and it wasn’t even on her radar when looking at colleges. With AP and CLEP and having taken an online class over winter intersession, she is on track to graduate in three years. Again, not possible if she were at that private school.
None of this was planned out ahead of time. Different schools will present different opportunities, different friends, different experiences, etc.
Good luck!
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Are there any published outcomes for students who attend colleges:
Trying to help my D weigh her options. Any decision making advice is appreciated.
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You have a hole in your scenario…a bunch of kids attend where they are in the top 10-25%.
BTW…your suggestion that kids who attend a school where they are in the top 5-10 are attending a school that is “beneath their academic abilities” is often not true. Top kids tend to choose more challenging majors, so their classmates are often top kids as well…and the subject matter is appropriate.
This thread is more of the anecdotal information.
I haven’t seen data on this but I think it depends on SO much, not the least of which is the kid. Some kids do better when they’re trying to keep up with their peers whereas others do better when they’re leading them. And of course, a “lesser” student might still do better in a “reach” small school where there’s a lot of participation in the classroom than at a “safety” state school where he/she has to learn by attending lectures, taking notes, etc. because his/her learning style might be better suited to the former.
With that said, I think you’d also want to think through in what way you D fits into these categories. If a school was a reach because she was a weak English student but she’s planning on majoring in physics, will it matter that her test scores were low in verbal and that her English and history grades were low? Likewise, even if she’s at the “top” for a school, if she can go straight to higher level work, as @mom2collegekids suggests, she’ll be with her peers.
I think you’ll probably have to look the course of study at each school and the overall “fit”. Unhappy kids thrive nowhere…
This is an entertaining discussion of graduate school outcomes from a few years ago: Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on why you shouldn’t study at an elite school, but one where you can be among the top students in your program. If my link doesn’t work, you can search Gladwell, Ted talk, and elite college and find it. I’m sure this has been posted elsewhere on cc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&feature=youtu.be
I’ve never seen published outcomes like that.
My daughter went to a safety school. (She applied to 2 matches and 3 safeties, was accepted to all, could afford them all, and chose one of the safeties). She had a good outcome. She enjoyed her time there, she did well, and she found a job in her field. However, I don’t think she ever felt like the school was beneath her academic abilities. It was a large state flagship, so even though she was near the top based on GPA and test scores, there were plenty of smart kids around and I don’t think she ever felt like the smartest kid in the room. She felt challenged but not overwhelmed. She had time to pick up extra majors/minors and pursue extra-curriculars. She had opportunities that might not have been available to her at a reach school. I think it was a perfect choice for her.
OTOH, she has friends who attended matches and reaches who also enjoyed their schools, did well, felt challenged but not overwhelmed and found jobs in their fields or were accepted to graduate schools they wanted to attend. We also know kids who’ve flamed out at schools that fit each of your categories.
Research seems to support a wide variety of positions on the earnings payoff from attending a more selective/prestigious college.
Earnings payoff may not necessarily be the only outcome that a student considers when looking at whether his/her position in the college’s student range matters in his/her choice of college.
One possibility is that, if one attends a school where one is in the tail part of the student range (at either end), a larger college may be more suitable. All schools need to have offerings suitable for the thick middle of their range, but smaller colleges may not have enough students (in absolute numbers) in the tails to have offerings for them. Examples would be honors courses or honors programs offered to the top-end tail students at larger colleges.
Anecdote: D2 attended a school that I would call a “solid match” for her. She got into some, and was rejected by other, “reach” schools, but they are the types of schools that are reaches for everyone. If she had attended one of those schools, it would also have been an academic match. She graduated from college two years ago, with flying colors: 4.0, high honors, Phi Beta Kappa. She has been working for an employer that is considered a, if not the, top employer for students in her desired Ph.D. area of study. She has been accepted to top graduate programs. I think it worked very well for her to be a big fish in a medium-sized pond. She did not think her undergrad college and program were perfect and still sometimes says she wishes she had gone to another school for undergrad. But I think that overall, she thinks her decision was a good one.
This book “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania” claims that outcomes don’t depend upon the school but only depend upon the person.
from the book description - Bruni, a bestselling author and a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors’ mansions, or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys, and the stories of hugely successful people who didn’t attend the most exclusive schools, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges-large public universities, tiny hideaways in the hinterlands-serve as ideal springboards. And he illuminates how to make the most of them. What matters in the end are a student’s efforts in and out of the classroom, not the gleam of his or her diploma.
That question is based on a fallacy - the idea that a student comes into college with some sort of rank in relation to the college.
My DD attended a reach college where her test scores put her in the bottom quartile. She also reported to me that she felt that her level of preparation from her public high school put her academically behind her peers – most had attended private high schools or far more academically rigorous public schools.
So was my daughter in that group (3)? “reaches (where they fall in the lower 35% or so of admitted students)” ?
No. By the time the first set of midterms rolled around, she perceived herself as being in the upper third of all the students around her. This was her perception based on being in class with these students, participating in study groups, etc. And her GPA supported that perception - she ended up with a higher college GPA than her high school GPA, and graduated statistically within the top 5% of her class.
But please don’t take this as an indication that reach schools are overrated. It isn’t - just that you can’t predict where your daughter will stand based on the numbers. My son was a national merit finalist who started at match level school where he floundered, but later transferred to a clear safety where he stumbled into an amazing opportunity – obviously helped by the big fish/small pond scenario – but it had never been about ability. It had been about discipline, maturity, and motivation. I don’t think my son got he opportunities at college #2 because he was smarter than the others as much as it was because he was older and wiser. (But for obvious reasons I don’t recommend that course of action for others.)
Your daughter’s personality and level of motivation are what will determine relative degree of success in college, not the numbers she comes in with nor the degree of selectivity of her college. Usually when a student is faced with the decision of selecting between a more or less selective college, the less selective one is attractive for cost reasons and often is also a large state public university. A large university where the average SAT is 1200 may very well have MORE students enrolled who had scores above 1500 than a small LAC where the median score is 1450 – not that SAT really matters (see above) – but there is big difference between statistics (means, median) and raw numbers. Additionally, the presence of graduate students and graduate courses on campus may boost the potential level of instruction (and challenge) up considerably from a more rigorous, small, undergraduate-focused LAC. And that graduate-education influence just isn’t reflected at all in undergraduate admission stats.
In other words, sure the introductory courses at Big State U might be less challenging than the equivalent intro courses at Super Elite College… but the high school valedictorian coming to Big State U with a full complement of APs isn’t enrolling in those intro courses --they are skipping right to the upper level courses.
If they want to.
Because if the kid wants to relax and party, or is more focused on other activities like volunteer work, athletics, music, theater, political activism – or whatever – then maybe they aren’t going to maximize their academic opportunities at Big State U. So maybe they won’t have a particularly remarkable academic experience.
So again – it comes down to individual interests, goals, and personality. Does your daughter thrive in an intense, competitive environment? Or does she prefer a more relaxed, cooperative environment? Does she do best when there is external challenge? Or is she more intrinsically motivated, more likely to do her best work when she has more freedom and flexibility? What does she like to do in her spare time, and who are her friends? Is she a nerdy type who likes to hang out with other intellectuals? Or is she a fun loving type who enjoys spending time with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, or people who share her love of a particular sport or art form?
And then of course there is the financial question – because if there is significant added dollar cost for attending the college that is perceived to be more academically challenging and/or prestigious – there is also usually a significant opportunity cost that goes along with it.
I have two kids who had the same undergraduate majors and same graduate degrees, both equally smart & capable, but very different in terms of personality and very different educational paths. Their outcomes are different, but both are gainfully employed; both earn more than I do, which is my personal measure of success (or at least the point at which I felt that I was let “off the hook” in terms of being a source of financial assistance for my now adult kids).
Bottom line: you can’t predict “outcome”. Your daughter needs to choose the best fit school among whichever options are affordable. And look at each school as offering its own unique set of opportunities.