Prestige/Expensive vs. Good/Cheap

JHS
Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:24:56 +0000

Well, discussing this with my mother last night, I learned two things I had never known:

(1) She chose Mills College over Radcliffe because they gave her a full ride scholarship (and against the wishes of her mother and grandfather, the latter of whom would have been all too happy to pay for Radcliffe). I knew she had chosen Mills rather than Radcliffe; I never knew that she did it because of a scholarship.

(2) She has never expressed any regret about that decision (in part because she went to graduate school at Harvard, which she loved). But last night, she told me for the first time that she started, but didn’t finish, a transfer application to Cornell in her sophmore year. Her friends at Cornell had seemed much more sophisticated than her Mills classmates when she saw them over Christmas break – much more au courant about current trends in politics and philosophy, and half of them Communists, which she thought was the height of chic.

Anyway, no lesson here, just amusement.