<p>Fair points, Wildwood. (Sorry, I never overlapped with you - I am '86.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Oh, PG, steal some of the H thunder. Some of the smart Boston kids “had” to trek to Wellesley for obvious reasons. :)</p>
<p>I wonder–is there any school that had top achievers 30 years ago that has weaker students now? I’ll bet there isn’t. I think the overall pool of strong students has grown substantially in that period. Not only are there just more people in general, I think that preparation has improved in a lot of smaller cities and towns with the spread of AP.</p>
<p>I doubt that the middle fifty percent student at Harvard or Yale has greater intellectual horsepower than the middle fifty percent student at Northwestern or Duke, or the top LACs. There may be more “geniuses” at the top end of the Ivy league - assuming that scoring 800 means that you are a genius. I think it tends to mean either that you are a genius, or that you are very bright and work extraordinarily hard. </p>
<p>That said, is Goucher the Vassar of Baltimore? I am jesting; however, my daughter is interested in Goucher for riding too, but I don’t know much about it other than it is in Colleges that Change Lives. She is bright, but wants serious collegiate riding as well as a good education.</p>
<p>Hunt, I agree with you. Great professors were not getting tenure at my alma mater and going elsewhere. One of them ended up at Texas and I found a course of his on The Teaching Company. There are only so many slots in the Ivy league, and top professors and students cannot all go there. Penn of yesteryear was not the Penn of today. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. have extraordinary students, but so do Stanford, Duke, Pomona, Williams, etc.</p>
<p>I attended an LAC. Typical of LAC’s not in the top 25 or so, it continues to attract solid students, and overall 25/75 SAT ranges might be higher and probably comparable to our state flagship, but I am pretty sure it is no longer a first choice destination for the tippy-top students (SAT’s above 1450 before recentering, top 5% of high school class in rigorous program) in suburban districts. Although they do offer merit aid, they are competing with elite schools (both LAC’s and research universities, many offering merit aid as well) and state school honors programs, which were non-existant thirty years ago.</p>
<p>I think this is fairly typical of that type of school.</p>
<p>Interesting.
D1 has attended two LAC’s, in top 25. Started at a less well-known LAC and no one except in the region of the state it is in really know of it or recognize the quality.
To get her major, she moved to another LAC only a few notches higher on the rankings, but it was a Seven Sisters school (and probably the most well covered one in the media), so the name is recognized EVERYWHERE!!! And “everyone” says “that is a really good school, she/you must be really smart.” Too funny.
The stats and the students and the other rankings of the two LAC’s are really similar, i.e. both were called a match for her on Naviance, so it is just a branding thing.
TBF, while she was not seeking it at all in her transfer, she does not mind the recognition!!! And doesn’t think it will hurt a bit on the career and/or grad school front (smile). Image vs perception…</p>
<p>Compare places like Wesleyan and Kenyon–the middle 50% of CR is exactly the same at both schools, and the Writing is just 20 points lower (at both ends) at Kenyon. Math is lower at Kenyon (but you’re not going to Kenyon to study math, are you?). Wes accepts 21% of applicants, Kenyon 39%.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This could very well be true when focusing narrowly on a very small band of students and the pool of students who target the tippy-top schools. It is a given that with the explosion in applications, the schools at the top of the food chain have become more selective. </p>
<p>However, although a discussion about weaker versus stronger applicants at elite schools could take various twists and turns, I think that comparing the “average” students of yesterday to the current crops might not be so positive. We know that the performance of students on the SAT test (probably the only measurement that tracks performance to 1946) has deteriorated, and this despite a recentering in 93-94. </p>
<p>We like to say that our parents and grandparents would have great difficulties in being accepted to any of today’s elite schools. However, I also tend to think that there are plenty of things that the older generations could do much better, and this despite what was probably a much shorter basic education. Of course, this could not have anything to do with computer science or advanced mathemtics, but everything to do with regular mathematics and with “basic” English, and especially with vocabulary and reading comprehension. Spend a bit of time on the SAT Prep forum and evaluate how students who “target” 2200 or even 2300 struggle with 9th grade vocabulary and arithmetic. </p>
<p>Our world has changed. We have replaced a deeper education with the AP-influenced mile wide and one inch deep system. Students deal with a megaload of information that is as quickly forgotten as it was acquired. </p>
<p>I am afraid that the extraordinary focus on the HYPS of this world is masking our slow descent in overall mediocrity. We lull ourselves in believing that the new generations are smarter and better educated. This might be true for an extremely small population, but doubtful for the overwhelming majority.</p>
<p>^I agree with this. Although this generation is better at taking standardized tests (who studied for the SAT 30 years ago?) I feel like general reading and writing skills are sorely lacking in a larger majority of students due to how other time-consuming things have surpassed reading as a passtime.</p>
<p>I imagine it was much easier to claim “merit” was the basis of most admissions decisions back when applicants consisted mostly of a homogenous group of upper-middle class White (and in the case of HYP et al, male) students.</p>
<p>
Well, we didn’t get a very deep education in my small-town high school. AP would definitely have been an improvement. I think our view of how things have changed may be colored by where we grew up.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Was high school education in the US ever particularly deep? In the absence of AP, it is conceivable that many or most high schools in the US would offer less rigorous curricula than they do now. When I went to high school, there were only about 6 AP courses; the courses in the non-AP subjects were not particularly deep.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is perhaps a sad commentary that many high schools need the incentive created by AP to offer useful high school level courses like AP Statistics and AP Human Geography.</p>
<p>I don’t think my high school started offering calculus until they got AP. “Math Analysis” was the most advanced math course in my day. We did go pretty deep into Virginia history, though.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It is not always easy to recognize sarcasm or irony on a public forum.</p>
<p>
I guess it depends on the school.</p>
<p>In 1973 my school offered one AP course in US History. I took that junior year. But senior year I took a total of four more AP exams, all based on regular or honors classes. I didn’t get 5s on everything but I did do reasonably well. So the classes weren’t all that bad.</p>
<p>It was a pretty upscale school though, I guess.</p>
<p>The year after I graduated they added AP English. They had calculus when I went there but didn’t change the name to AP Calculus until two years after I left.</p>
<p>Of course, not sure how deep it was though. At least we had labs. We took a Physics called PSSC Physics which I recall being pretty cool - it was supposed to make you think like a scientist.</p>
<p>^^^
Sorry for the trip down memory lane. Don’t know why I do that. I’m sure it wasn’t as thrilling to me at the time I was living it as it is now in retrospect.</p>
<p>My high school graduated several 15 and 16 year old national merit finalists each year. But, few students took more than one or two AP’s at a time, and they mostly took those during senior year.</p>
<p>I think many of the students who would nowadays be taking a full load of AP’s and be vastly accelerated in math by high school graduation were likely to have been college freshmen or sophomores at the same age, back in the seventies. I took honors calculus (using Apostol) at a younger age than my children, but I took it in college rather than high school.</p>
<p>^I agree to some extent with frazzled2thecore. I used to think my oldest had accomplished so much and then I remembered he was 19 when he graduated from high school while I was only 16. My SAT scores were almost the same centered, and I had more APs at 16 than he had at 16. I took Calc at 16 while he was (horrors!) 17.</p>
<p>I took 4 APs as a senior - Art, English (though the course wasn’t called AP), Euro and Calc BC. I was in an AP French class, but didn’t take the exam as I was a dunce in French. (I took a gap year in France and did learn to speak it fluently before I started college though.)</p>
<p>My daughter had mediocre math and writing scores, but a near perfect verbal score (missed three questions). Her perspective was that she may not be great at calculating, or writing, but she can read the cr@@ out of anything! What I appreciated was her sense of humor, which is more telling than her scores in my extremely biased opinion. Since she did this coming from a very average rural high school, I was very happy for her. She is sharper than I am, and I did reasonably well back in the day. She learned what she knows more from her own reading, and my reading of her papers, than from high school classes. She never took the PSAT because the school forgot about her despite the fact that her brother was one of their top students two years ago. The top kids in her class are the math whizzes who get calculus as sophomores and juniors - a class I never took and my daughter bombed as junior, but kept with because she founded it interesting despite being a GPA crusher. The numbers of kids who seems to do well with higher math, even at a below average rural school, seems at odds with the lack of engineers, scientists, that everyone descries - unless the math gods go for bigger bucks and major in economics.</p>
<p>^^Bogney, haven’t seen your posts for a long while. Missed your wit.</p>