<p>We can’t link to the NIU forum here at CC - it doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>What those 6 people achieved in academia, without connections, is simply amazing.</p>
<p>Would it be elitism or snobbery to say that the Sereno children benefitted from having such great parents? What about all the average parents out there? Average parents can have children who accomplish great things, can’t they? You don’t hesitate to credit the Sereno parents. </p>
<p>Elite colleges are like great parents. They provide just the right kind of richness in the college experience to make students grow and develop. If you believe the six children benefitted from having “elite” parents, then you should also allow that students would benefit from attending elite colleges.</p>
<p>On the issue of more selective schools providing a better environment, I have very personal experiences with that. My dad attended UC Berkeley for two and a half years, majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. As I’m sure many of you know, Berkeley Engineering is consistently ranked in the top tier, just behind MIT. Unfortunately he did not graduate; he was working too many hours, didn’t know he could get student loans, didn’t realize soon enough that he was better at the computer science than the electrical engineering, etc.</p>
<p>He ended up graduating from San Jose State University as a math major with an emphasis in computer science. It wasn’t through their college of engineering, which is ranked among schools not offering PhD’s, but he took several classes through the engineering school. But despite this being a ranked engineering school, he still tells me all the time that the upper division classes at San Jose State were teaching a lot of the same things he already learned in lower-division at Berkeley.</p>
<p>It is true that not everyone would benefit from a more selective university. But it is true that these schools definitely challenge you more, and professors will expect more of these students. Also, stop citing the Harvard drop-out cases. For every student dropping out of an Ivy League, there are hundreds dropping out of state universities like San Jose State and Northern Illinois. Graduation rates are very well posted on sites like princetonreview.com. Go compare Berkeley and Harvard with say some of these lower-prestige schools like San Jose State. It might shock you.</p>
<p>So lets stop beating up on collegehelp. You may disagree with him, but fundamentally he’s got a point; these six children clearly enjoy learning, and a more selective university may have been a better environment, especially given how many of them are involved in scientific research. My dad can testify on that: there really can be a big difference for science and engineering majors.</p>
<p>Perhaps 18 year olds already have parents and don’t need another set at college? Perhaps “great parents” at this point need to let go? A highly selective college tends to be a microcosm of the selective and elitist world the student is accustomed to , or desires. My son, who went to a selective and expensive private school found the same situation all over at his most selective liberal arts college. After 2 years of the same old, ( while gettting a 4.0) he made the decision transferred to U of Michigan and couldn’t have been happier with the wide and diverse world it offers.( and graduated with highest honors, also) Maturity came for him through living off campus, having to assert himself to figure out where in this big university world he wanted to be,not from living with a bunch of the same uniformly bright and cookie cutter upper middle class kids he went to high school with.</p>
<p>“these six children clearly enjoy learning, and a more selective university may have been a better environment, especially given how many of them are involved in scientific research. My dad can testify on that: there really can be a big difference for science and engineering majors.”</p>
<p>I’m wondering if you read the linked article. Given they state very clearly they were pleased with their professors and the quality of the education they received, why you disagree with that assessment. They went on to top PhD programs and several were NSF funded. Wouldn’t they know if they weren’t adequately prepared or they struggled later?</p>
<p>collegehelp, I am not a PhD, but an MD. I had the great fortune of being able to attend Bryn Mawr for my undergraduate degree. I understand to some extent what you mean with respect to the intellectual curiosity one finds, yet there also tends to exist a sort of ivory tower isolation and one misses out to some degree on perhaps a more experiential type of education which is inherently valuable in it’s own right.</p>
<p>Further, and more importantly, one might try as has been done to list the myriad of individuals who did not attend the more highly selective institutions and yet managed to excel in their fields. I would like to strongly remind everyone that there are in fact many who are “LEGACY-ED” into these institutions who DO NOT possess great intellectual capacity…“THINK YALE…THINK GEORGE BUSH!!!” There does exist a sort of classism in our society and one can see it all too well in such an instance as his.</p>
<p>As mentioned earlier, NIU isn’t even on the radar of CC applicants. However, not only did these six PhD sibs attend the school, but so did the fellow who wrote “The Santa Clause” movie and many others, the guy who does the voice of Homer Simpson, and well…me. In addition to being an avid cc mom, I have written for television, created shows, and written 8 novels published by William Morrow, HarperCollins, and Pocket Books. There are great professors everywhere. There are motivated students everywhere. And not one person, not my literary agent, or my editor, or the dozens of television producers I’ve worked for over the years has asked me where I went to college. They just look at the work.</p>
<p>Go Huskies! heh.</p>
<p>I did actually read the article. Being perfectly content with what you have does not mean you won’t like something else better. I don’t think it’s a matter of preparation, it is a matter of whether they would have enjoyed attending a more prestigious school like the University of Illinois at Urbane-Champagne. Hardly a highly selective school, but it is at least on the radar of most people, unlike NIU. The environment would have been much different, and that may have benefited them, because they are clearly highly intellectual.</p>
<p>I wanted to get into a top school (and I succeeded: I will be a freshman at UC Berkeley next fall) precisely for this reason. I see the people in my school, and where they go to college. The crowd going to San Jose State and UC Riverside is a very different group from the group going to UC Berkeley and UCLA. I have absolute confidence that my friends going to SJSU and UCR will do just fine in their careers, but for an academic learning environment I enjoy the company of people that are as smart or smarter than me, that are as motivated to learn as I am. I worked on plenty of group assignments in high school where I was the only person motivated to do the work and/or learn the material. It was quite frustrating. I don’t mean to be elitist, but it is true that the environment is very different, in terms of work ethic and intellectual motivation, at UC Berkeley and San Jose State. I can’t speak for collegehelp, but all I’m saying is that they may have enjoyed a more academically-oriented environment than NIU offers.</p>
<p>^^^ Financial aid may also a play large role in decision making between universities. Maybe UCR offered more money to your fellow classmates than UCLA did. For example, I got into UCSD and CAL but also got offered a full ride at some private university. I am deeply considering the full ride over these “prestigious” schools…People choose different schools for different reasons.</p>
<p>Agree completely with other posters who note that it is not essential for someone to attend “the most selective school” in order to be “successful” in academia or in other fields of endeavor. Agree that the definition of success in this life encompasses much more that economic or competitive attainments. Agree that this family of exceptional scholars probably did, as they stated in the article, obtain a fine education at NIU. But, it is important to not generalize this family’s success coming from a state college to mean that it doesn’t matter at all where a given individual goes to college. On some level, as much as I agree that Collegehelp’s post smacks A LOT of elitism, it is silly to deny that there are differences in educational quality at different colleges and universities. In California, for instance, at least a third of all students admitted to California State University (CSU) campuses are in need of remedial courses in English and math - that is, 1/3 of students at CSUs do not possess basic college level skills upon admission. Like it or not, students who get admitted to the elites all have more than adequate college level skills - many if not most elite-level students have been academically achieving at the level of the average state college student since the beginning of high school. Having gone to an IVY undergrad college, and a CSU for graduate school, there was a HUGE difference in the quality of my educational experience between the two schools. Also note that the family in the article are all baby boomers - they went to the state college of a generation ago. They did not go to today’s state universities; the quality of education at state colleges today is not necessarily the same as it was for these people, who came of age in the Sputnik generation, and went to college with the large wave of boomers.</p>
<p>Its nice to hear this kind of tale, especially for us mortals attending “just another college”…</p>
<p>Part of the problem with collegehelp’s logic is that she assumes:<br>
a. the best professors end up teaching at the best colleges
b. Professors teach differently depending on the quality of their students.</p>
<p>I don’t actually believe either of those things. Professors are human beings too – and in highly specialized fields, there may be only a few openings every year. Topnotch people take jobs at all sorts of universities – because that’s who’s hiring in a given year. They also have lives – and families – and a great prof may end up choosing the position in the town where her husband is most employable, which is nearer to family so they can help with childcare, which provides the best medical care for a critically ill child, etc. etc. etc. You can indeed have a great professor at a number of different universities (and then there’s the whole ball of wax about how great researchers aren’t always great teachers and vice-versa.)</p>
<p>And collegehelp is wrong if she thinks that every classroom at a lesser known university is full of people who are not well read, not serious, unprepared and that the level of the conversation will be significantly different than that at an elite school. My impression is that frequently, the lesser-known schools have more nontraditional students and that conversations about literature, linguistics, politics and economics are often enhanced by the participation of people who have: given birth to children; fought in a war; started a business; watched their farm fail; run for office and so forth. You just don’t get diversity like that in a traditional university setting.</p>
<p>I think that there are two intersecting but separate issues under debate here. The first, which I noted in my original post, is:</p>
<p>There are many roads to happiness and success. One certainly need not attend a celebrated school to attain personal satisfaction or professional recognition.</p>
<p>The second issue is:</p>
<p>** Are our most able students well served and sufficiently challenged when attending colleges and universities that don’t have exacting admission standards and which don’t draw the proverbial best and brightest from around the world?**</p>
<p>I do agree with Momzie when she says that top students can be found anywhere, but it’s also true that there are some colleges where the academic bar is definitely set higher across the board than it is at others. </p>
<p>When I advise high school students about their college choices, one of the first questions I ask is, “Do you think you do your best work in your AP and honors classes where you are surrounded by smart, often ambitious peers, or do you feel you thrive the most in the ‘regular’ classes where you may stand out as the leader?” Some students who know themselves well prefer the latter choice. It’s not because they’re lazy and want to cruise through college, but it’s because they realize that they may not be ready for the uber-competition at the Ivies and their ilk. I remember one young woman I once counseled whose top choice was a Catholic university with a regional reputation, despite the fact that I urged to consider other more prominent, potentially demanding schools. But she enrolled there nonetheless and stood out as a star from the start, garnering faculty favor–and, with it, special research opportunities–even as a freshman. She then went on to earn a fellowship to attend a Ph.D. program at Stanford.</p>
<p>So I think we’re debating two different things here: 1) Can any college be a springboard to success, however you may define “success”? [My answer = a resounding YES] and 2) Should students attend the most challenging school they can get into? [My answer = a far flakier but equally heartfelt IT DEPENDS]</p>
<p>“In California, for instance, at least a third of all students admitted to California State University (CSU) campuses are in need of remedial courses in English and math - that is, 1/3 of students at CSUs do not possess basic college level skills upon admission. Like it or not, students who get admitted to the elites all have more than adequate college level skills - many if not most elite-level students have been academically achieving at the level of the average state college student since the beginning of high school.”</p>
<p>I agree that’s a crying shame and we should all be up in arms about the quality of K-12 education that let’s that happen. However, I’m not sure what at all that it has to do with the actual educational experience of a top student who goes to a lesser ranked state university. </p>
<p>Let’s say 1/3 of the students at the school need to take remedial college algebra. Other than improving the possibility for employment as a tutor, what does that have to do with the experience of a top student going to that state u? The top math student is going to be in those classes. At a state university they’ve got access to a huge range of math offerings and they can go straight to seminar format classes with juniors and seniors majors and then on to graduate courses if they need them.</p>
<p>“My impression is that frequently, the lesser-known schools have more nontraditional students and that conversations about literature, linguistics, politics and economics are often enhanced by the participation of people who have: given birth to children; fought in a war; started a business; watched their farm fail; run for office and so forth. You just don’t get diversity like that in a traditional university setting.”</p>
<p>Excellent point. We’ve really enjoyed the mix of highly motivated nontraditional students at the state university. I especially enjoy the program that allows senior citizens to enroll. It is great to have someone in class who has spent 30 years for fun reading about the subject they are now studying in class.</p>
<p>So, what if a few of the professors at an “elite” university actually went to / got the phd from NIU? Or any other school off the CC radar. Does that diminish the caliber of the “elite” university?</p>
<p>Of those prospective students who think they know themselves and choose to be the big fish in the small pond I would ask “Are you really sure you don’t want to attend a more selective school?”. Somebody has to be in the top 25% at every school but I think it is better to be in the middle 50% or even the bottom 25%. The bottom 25% may be the best place to be (most growth potential). Fear of failure is a debilitating affliction. If you can get in, and you are disciplined, you can probably succeed. Take the risk. But I can understand how some students might be very uncomfortable in the bottom 25%. On the other hand, being uncomfortable might be a good thing.</p>
<p>Wow, interesting thread…</p>
<p>Without a doubt, a bright, motivated student can accomplish great things at any university. But some schools do offer greater opportunities and the research going on at some schools is just huge compared to others.</p>
<p>From my experience, for example, the UC system experience for my daughter has been much more opportunity-laden than was my experience at a CSU ( undergrad). </p>
<p>However, it does depend upon the program, too. I really don’t know anything about the field, but I have heard that Cal Poly ( a CSU) is top-notch for architecture.</p>
<p>I am always amazed, though, that some folks are so certain that private schools provide such a better experience than publics. I just attended the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities Conference at a gigantic public. It was a huge event and one thing about a gigantic school: there are a gigantic amount of interesting people from all walks of life doing a gigantic amount of interesting work there :)</p>
<p>“I am always amazed, though, that some folks are so certain that private schools provide such a better experience than publics.”</p>
<p>The wording is important. All private schools do not provide a better experience than all publics. Some private schools provide a better experience than some publics. It’s the blanket statements and beliefs that cause problems.</p>
<p>I know US senators who went to state schools and Harvard and Yale grads who have mundane jobs. I know nationally successful doctors and lawyers who went here, there, and everywhere. Having worked and socialized with many people over a lifetime, I can honestly say happiness has absolutely nothing to do with where one goes to college. Not one darn thing. Nor does it have a whole lot to do with how much one contributes to society. Each and every college offers endless possibilities.</p>