@goldbug Nothing to add on Princeton. Just here to say I love your screen name. No matter where he goes to college (looking now at high schools), my guy lost hours and hours, even days, in books searching for goldbug. You triggered the happiest of memories, Thank you!
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Agreed. If you turn away 10 qualified students for every one accepted you don’t need to concentrate on sales.
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Did they attend Lawrenceville? I am not sure about today, but it used to be a feeder school into Princeton.
The dining clubs are not like fraternities with initiations and rivalries. Think of them as social clubs where students meet people from many different backgrounds. They are really quite civilized. My sister was in a dining club at Princeton back in the dark ages and loved it.
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No, pingry and peddie.
Yes, and doing the hard sell just to increase selectivity even further - as many colleges do - is pretty unethical as well. Save that for admitted students day.
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Unfortunately, one by-product of the whole
“overlap between the knowledgeable, scholarly, highly skilled elites and the wealthy elites” is that you often have to deal with some version of:
I’ve been on many college tours- and usually the tour guide has the answers to the very basic questions high schoolers are asking. They are paid by the admissions office to know about the school, and in some sense, to sell it to prospective students. We unfortunately just had a not-so-great tour guide that day. The info session was better, but it’s still the tour that really makes the biggest impression. We were the last tour of the day, with only 3 families, so it wasn’t a case of being rushed or in a big group. Just a bummer, as I hoped my kiddo would really love [X University.]
Not saying that was the OP’s attitude. It didn’t sound as if the tour guide was at fault in any way. On the contrary, they were “charismatic and positive”. It was just the let down upon seeing the man behind the curtain, as it were.
They had a guided tour 30 years ago… I had guided tours at a number of Ivys (including Princeton) All had info sessions…and I even gave tours briefly at one.
Some of my friends at my fancy college were tour guides. They made a game out of who could come up with the most outlandish fake trivia and get away with it (people would apparently nod along to almost anything, the bigger problem was keeping a straight face and not changing tone).
I gather cellphones with Internet access have since limited that game, although on a few of my tours with S24 I did wonder . . . .
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hahaha
I only did it only a brief time, so I was trying hard to remember how to walk backwards and all the content I was supposed to cover. I was handed a VERY long paper packet of script and expected to learn it real fast (which, to be fair, I did!, but not well:)
I thought being on tours as fun - even then people asked weird questions and I was turned off be random things. I remember Princeton info session they answered very dissmissvely about study abroad - basically “why would anyone ever want to be off our campus” - turned me right off…and, of course, another day I might have heard a different answer!
Same, in the early 90s I toured a number of Ivies and SLACs and they all had guided tours.
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Haha. I still have trouble thinking of the 90s as The Stone Age. But you’re right. It was before the internetz.
Totally get it - 30 years ago is 70s to me, always:)
And I don’t know when the in personal tour thing started, but am confident it shouldn’t be considered new!
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Fun Fact: Princeton received 14,362 applications for the class of 2000 which had an acceptance rate of 14% and a yield of 57%. Source: “Insiders Guide to the Colleges”; 1998 edition.
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I apologize for repeating.
OP- it is time to move on from Princeton. It is fine not to “feel it.” We visited 2 Ivies that were crossed off the list. We visited Duke and my kid didn’t like it (great school, not for her). My kid decided that Vanderbilt was not for her after the interviewer would not stop talking about her amazing sorority experience (another great school).
Just because a school is highly ranked does not mean it’s a good fit.
OP- Brown seems like the better fit for your daughter. Has she considered it as a reach school?
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I believe the OP has moved on from Princeton and her D plans to consider other options for the “longshot” application.
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Thanks!
Or no long shot at all. There’s no rule that says you have to.
And W&M fits what they want and that’s not ‘assured’.
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I just repeated what the OP posted. Nowhere in my post did I opine that the OP needs to or even should apply to a reach school. The OP did not say definitively if D was going to put in a long-shot application or not. The OP appears focused on her D’s happiness/fit rather than prestige.
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