I wasn’t patronizing you, but I can if you would like. It doesn’t matter what school you chose. I would say that you were young and inexperienced if you made a comment that warranted it. As someone who supposedly applied to Alabama and considered it you should know that Honors students can be around just honor students if they want. They have their own dorms and, more importantly, classes if they wish to do that. And while clubs, games, and Greek life are all a part of the overall college experience they have nothing to do with the academic caliber of an institution.
One of my best friends at Harvard was dumb as a ****ing brick. Recruited athlete but dropped out of his sport. Graduated in five years with a lot of help. God bless him. Helped make the whole experience tolerable. I think he makes about quadruple my salary now.
In general though I think @CaliCash is right. Those honors programs may have students with Ivy-level stats, but the institutional framework around those students is not comparable. The honors program is a loose assemblage, an Ivy is a hothouse/pressure cooker.
I also speak from experience. Applied to both Ivies and Catholic honors programs. Not the same, and I don’t see why public programs would be any different.
Wow. Really? This is what you picked up from the thread?
No, there its no guarantee in life but I’d like to think the best of people. This is a very smart, talented likeable student. Maybe he won’t cure cancer; maybe he won’t make millions of dollars; he probably won’t be famous but I’m going to assume that he will graduate from college on, enter a profession and hopefully live a happy fulfilling life. That is what I see as a successful future. What were you thinking?
Yes, I know the story of Freddy Adu. I don’t see any connection. Would you point it out to me? I didn’t even read that Mr.Nelson played soccer.
Well, duh! Aren’t most similar stories about people making the financial decisions based on their situation? He obviously would have chosen a more prestigious school if it were cheaper.
Did people really say that Bama was Harvard? Only Harvard is Harvard. A handful of schools are better for certain students but most do not carry the same prestige. The finances make the difference.
@CaliCash Are you familiar with UFE? UFE accepted only 39 students out of an application pool of 600. He is part of an elite group of outstanding students who receive very specialized attention. I suspect that the decision was not strictly financial but instead tied to the unique opportunities connected to UFE.
When you are selected for this level of mentoring and support which is designed with the purpose of encouraging.superior levels of personal and academic achievement and combine it with having your entire undergrad experience completely funded, it is an exciting proposition.
FWIW, we have Bama love b/c my ds’s experience has been stellar. You hear excitement from people who are actively involved in the actual UG experience. People aren’t fictionalizing their experiences. They are just that satisfied with what UA has offered their children.
Favorite College Football Moment: Chris Davis returning the field goal 109 yards to beat 'Bama #WarEagle :-@
It’s been claimed on this thread that public honors colleges are the same or pretty close, so basically yes.
The fact that Honors college make it “pretty close” does not elevate the school in its entirety to Harvard’s level. The best in the Honors College might have turned down the HYPS of this world, but it remains that almost everyone else had no whisper of a chance to be admitted.
We are going from one extreme to another. This student made a wise choice because of the support and program he will attend AND the financial reason. None of that makes Alabama in general a school close to HYPS level because of the variance in students’ body. This applies to all public universities.
I would have to say that the vast majority of students in the Honors programs at schools like Bama and other big state school are absolutely qualified to go the the HYPS type schools. The difference is basically one of non-academically based selection criteria. All of the kids involved are capable and smart. I would bet nearly all have the scores to be admitted to HYPS. The difference is one of often arbitrary selection or a nebulous attempt by the schools to build a mythical level of artificial diversity. However, they can never be as diverse as a public university because they do not admit ‘normal’ kids. Other than perhaps Cornell, most of the Ivies student bodies are not much bigger than the Honors college at some big schools. If you compare the scores of the honors colleges to the Ivies, you have the same kids albeit with less money than some and more money than others.
The state schools honors programs offer rigorous academics and excellent professors. They offer high-caliber peers with whom to share academic pursuits. They also offer a chance to mix with ‘gasp’ normal people, too. The stats are skewed because they reflect the entire university, rather than just the honors students. In my kid’s case, he never has classes with the other students because his courses are filled with other highly academic kids. He does get to spend social time with kids of all academic levels. You see, in many ways the honors programs give them the best of both worlds. We don’t live in enclaves of academic elites. They must learn to interact with the average citizen as well. The Ivies are not bad schools. They are just not worth the exorbitant price to many of us.
There are three ways to use tuition discounts. One works when you’re a university with a fundamentally sound infrastructure (any flagship research university- i.e. Alabama) and you “buy” high stats kids. They’ve already got the labs and the libraries and the named professors and the archives and research grants. For a relatively modest amount of dough (certainly less than the hundreds of millions it costs to build a new nanotechnoloy lab) the U gets some high profile students, who in turn attract other high profile students. Faculty like to teach highly engaged kids, so the whole discounting effort is good for faculty retention, student recruitment and retention, etc. and it doesn’t cost a bundle.
The second way is the Harvard’s of the world- need based aid when you know you could fill every seat four and five times over with rich kids. This allows you to handpick the class you want- the poet, the cellist, the ballet dancer, a few champion debaters, a bunch of Intel winners. Some of these kids will have the stats of everyone else (the Intels) and some might be a skootch lower but when you are Yo-Yo Ma nobody cares about an extra 10 points on your SAT’s or that you got a B in Spanish junior year. And you can craft the class regardless of the families ability to pay. You’ve got deep pockets, and it’s an institutional priority to capture a wide range of talents- not just good test takers and the high GPA/high scoring kids who end up getting merit money aka tuition discounts. You get to define what you are looking for (holistic, an eye out for first gen, outstanding kid who grew up homeless, outstanding young playwright, etc.) and you use the discounts to make that possible.
The third way-- in my mind the most controversial- is the Sweet Briar (we saw how that ended) model for lack of a better term. This is when tuition discounting is used to fill empty beds/empty seats in the classrooms, or when it’s used as a somewhat cynical way to reward “low need” kids with a modest amount of cash that gives the parents bragging rights. If you’re a college without a Harvard level endowment, or without an Alabama level of educational infrastructure, it’s just cheaper to throw out 5K and 10K merit awards then to fully fund a bunch of impoverished kids who really need a full package to attend (you gap those kids and most of the time they won’t show up). It’s cheaper to tout your new “merit aid policy” which basically subsidizes upper middle class kids at the expense of low income families than it is to be need blind/meets full need, and it’s certainly cheaper to announce your “university scholars 2015” who are getting 10k in merit than it is to build a new neuroscience lab or to do something which will radically up your game educationally.
So for all the blather on CC about discounts one and two… there is (in my mind) a surprising lack of scrutiny and cynicism for the colleges which are rising in the rankings due to number three. With zero investment in improved pedagogy, research, faculty investment, cutting edge thinking- and with a modest amount of discounting for kids in the top quartile of the admissions pool, you can jump a bunch of rankings. Good deal!
Except that it’s a zero sum game for the most part-- and it’s lift has got to be short term. Unless every college decides to become High Point (great food, beautiful campus, mediocre education) at some point, a college needs to invest in actual education.
So this kid going to Bama- great choice for him and his family. Great deal for Bama. And nobody at Harvard is losing any sleep whatsoever about their yield- since they practice discounting method number 2, not number 1, and don’t care about the kids they lose on the margin who prefer number 1.
Does Harvard lose kids due to method number 3? Call me when you find a kid going to Drexel honors instead of Harvard.
I hate to bring up the Putnam because it’s something only math people care about, but if you look at the 2014 results (http://www.math.cmu.edu/~ploh/2014-putnam-top500.pdf), you’ll find that elite schools dominate, to the point where MIT, Harvard, and CMU combined made up a third of the top performers. On the other hand, Alabama had at most one. One could make the argument that maybe students at Alabama don’t care, but the Putnam is a big enough deal in the math community that people who would do well will at least take the exam.
There seems to be a self selection process with a lot of this math stuff . In terms of whether high math aptitude kids even participate at all in these types of things and what types of schools they are drawn to.
http://oira.ua.edu/d/content/reports/2014-2015-common-data-set
I don’t understand why UA is considered a school for Alabamans (?) 
You do know that MIT practically seeks out competition kids, right? It would be interesting to find out where the IMO and IOI kids attend college. It would even be interesting to find out where the kids who made MOP and IOI-equivalent camps have gone to school. I bet MIT and Harvard top the list. If you go to AoPS forums, you will see people commenting on which USACO/USAMO kids are Putnam fellows or N1 (or in a bad year, N2).
That said, the third school is not always the same. It can be CMU, Stanford, Berkeley, RPI, Princeton in any given year. Actually, Harvard can drop out of the top three as well.
I think this young man made a fine choice, given that his parents seemingly could not afford the Ivy schools he was accepted at. Yes, he could have chased merit money at other schools, and maybe he did…but his stats don’t really look high enough to guarantee a full-ride at any of the schools that offer big merit money. And even a full-tuition scholarship at those schools leaves at least $10k-$15k in expenses, which is still a lot for some folks. My son was in a similar situation (except for the Ivy admittance part, lol) and Bama was very high on his list for the same reasons…great school at a great price…However, he was surprised (and very lucky) to get a full-ride merit scholarship at another school and he took that offer.
But let’s face it, Bama is doing a fantastic job of recruiting these smart kids! It’s a lovely school full of really nice faculty and staff, and they are providing an amazing honors experience for a price that is hard to turn down! I think this student will do fine at Bama, and he will be happy to go on to medical school with all that saved tuition in his pocket. 
Alabama students being edged-out…Read the 198 comments, too.
http://www.al.com/news/tuscaloosa/index.ssf/2014/07/is_the_university_of_alabama_s.html
I have never heard of the Putnam competition so I just looked it up. With a median score of zero it is obviously very hard. I saw a list of people who were Putnam Fellows (top 5) either 3 or 4 times and I did not recognize any of the names, although that is not surprising since they probably aren’t the Bill Gates of the world, but the math theoreticians etc. How many of this list went on to math fame and fortune?
@texaspg Has UA admitted more out of state students this year, or is the difference in percentages of out of state freshmen and undergraduates overall due to more out of state students transferring out? That seems like a big difference to me.
Just looked at the common data set for 2013 and it was 59% OOS for first year freshmen and 44.9% for undergraduates overall. It looks to me like they lose a higher percentage of OOS students than in-state students.
Qualified is just a wide-ranging term, and often used to bring up similar agreements. The reality remains that there is quite a difference between being in the potential pool and being admitted. And that ratio is anywhere between 1 out of 20 or 1 in 10.
While there are great students in Honors program, I doubt that the majority of them would also be admitted. Actually I think that they represent exceptions, as most people who are able to earn a spot at HYPS end up … attending. One simply needs to weigh the yield at such schools, account for students like the one in the OP (with complete admissions) to understand that in the end … very few do turn down the Ivy League plus Stanford and MIT.
In so many words, the Honors programs’ vast majority of students were in the range of admissions but were NOT admitted or did not think it was worth to apply.
In the end, the biggest diiference is the student body … and there is a huge difference between the applicants’ pool and the enrolled student body. If the above example of analyzing the yield at the top schools, one can dig into the information shared by Stanford regarding its yield losses to its public rival across the Bay. Almost everyone who was accepted by both schools ended up enrolling at Stanford as only a handful of cross-admits chose Cal.
Most yield losses at HYPS are with their peers – and the public universities, even at the Honor level, are NOT peers in that sense.
@texaspg, the big scholarships at JHU/WashU/Vandy almost certainly aren’t rewarded solely by stats (though super-high stats no doubt help). They’re trying to lure kids who will be leaders and movers and shakers in society (in all fields) and bring glory to their school in the future with those scholarships.