@soccerguy315 ^^^ That’s sort of my point. If we didn’t have kids at the well regarded IB HS or the magnet HS I bet we would have a few more. But for an ‘average’ school, it seems to be hit or miss.
@TV4caster, but not every big affluent (or faculty-progeny-laden) district has a magnet that siphons off almost all of the top students. I don’t know of one in MI, and many parts of NJ don’t have them either. And many of the top big suburban high schools in Chicagoland aren’t too affected by the one non-Chicago IL magnet that I know of, so it’s just not surprising to hear of high schools in those areas sending at least 1-2 dozen kids to Ivies/Ivy-equivalents every year.
Heck, Naperville North is right by IMSA (so loses a decent number of kids to them every year) but still managed to matriculate grads to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Northwestern, UChicago, Duke, Rice, ND, Tufts, WashU, and Vandy (as well as Cal and UMich, neither of which are in-state): http://www.naperville203.org/cms/lib07/il01904881/centricity/domain/47/nnhsprofileweb.pdf
Naperville Central’s list was similar.
Even with TJ, I’d guess not all the “top” students in the area attend there. Many kids just don’t want to leave their home school to go to a magnet. There may be other Northern Virginia schools that are having better success than your school, OP in having their kids go to “top schools” for whatever reason. Also, some of the other Northern Virginia schools may be more inclined to have kids that are just as happy to attend UVa, Wm & M, or Virginia Tech and less kids even aiming for or applying to “top schools.” TJ may be attracting the most competitive kids and families that aim for Ivy League, MIT, etc. to begin with. But that is just a guess on what else may be at play.
Wasn’t taking offense at all. I’m amused you have the t-shirt too.
Ah, good.
I went to graduate school at Chicago.
After reading this thread and thinking about our midwestern public high school (no magnets in our neighborhood) located in a college town, I think the fact that we have a very prestigious large public university (UMich) in the state satisfies the academic ambitions of most of the most talented students in core subjects.
The ones who wander out of state tend to be either artsy (heading to an art school, or perhaps to NYU for theater), are looking for a small college (better ones out of state than in-state), or a big city environment (which Detroit does not satisfy) – or are looking for an academic environment that’s more focused in some way. If those kids don’t go out of state for college, they are likely nonetheless to go there after graduation. Case in point: of the ~200 graduates in my daughter’s high school class, five years later ~20 of them were living in NYC (specifically Brooklyn). Quite a good-sized ex-Michigander community in NYC. Chicago is another frequent big-city destination for our local graduates. (BTW, there really is something to the Detroit renaissance: more graduates are heading there now than just a few years ago.)
While certainly some of graduates from our HS apply to and attend Ivies, as well as UChicago, CMU, and other high-rep universities outside the state, I think in our town many of the parents (high percentage college grads themselves) have figured that if their kids are going on to careers that require graduate diplomas (law, medicine, business, etc.), they don’t have to attend the most prestigious undergrad institutions, just very good ones. And so the likes of UMich, Denison, Kalamazoo, Macalester, and others are perfectly fine places to get an undergrad degree. And it’s hardly a dead-end to earn a degree from Michigan State, Western Michigan, Mich Tech, or other state or private institutions. In short, we see very little of the “Ivy or Bust” mentality among our high-schoolers.
“And it’s hardly a dead-end to earn a degree from Michigan State, Western Michigan, Mich Tech, or other state or private institutions. In short, we see very little of the “Ivy or Bust” mentality among our high-schoolers.”
-For sure kids in Midwest (not only in Mich) are not infected with the Ivy hype, exceptions are always there, but overall, very many top kids with stragiht As, high scores and multitude of interests are primariy seeking full tuition, full ride Merit awards to lift a burden of UG payment and free family resources for Grad. schools. While there are free options to get a Grad degree, these are mostly in sciences. Most important, these kids find great opportunities for all their pursuits at their public in-states as well as some privates, and at the end achieve everything that they planned and plus. The important factor is to be at the place that fits you and since there are plenty of these kids who never even apply to Ivy / Elite, they can find their crowds at any place as well as widen their social horizon including kids who are outside of intense academically focused students.
The Ivy / Elite hype is more NE / CA thing, we can do just fine without…and have done very fine without…
You’ve done fine without Ivy fever, we know that.
But it isn’t just a NE/CA thing. People need to unlatch themselves from that notion, no matter how often they hear it from others.
When our girls were starting hs, we used to say, sure, if we lived in Michigan… Or if we were still in CA. But we weren’t. And we knew that if we lived in NVa, there’d be no “predicting.” At the time, I was reading of in-state 4.0 legacies who were denied.
Oh puleeze. I lived in the Midwest (not Chicago or Minneapolis) and interviewed for Brown for most of that time, and the Ivy fever (back in the 1980’s I might add, not the current feeding frenzy) was intense.
It’s great to pretend that everyone in the Midwest is too sophisticated to get caught up in what you guys believe is a NY/Menlo Park phenomenon… until you actually look at the admissions stacks and realize how many kids from the midwest are in the application piles.
The files don’t lie. If every kid in Ohio was trying to maximize merit aid, how are all these Ohio applicants finding their way to Cambridge and New Haven??? Schools that offer zero in merit aid?
Calling the BS police on this one. I interviewed for what was probably the LEAST popular Ivy for a decade and was kept busy from January - March. Public school, private school, parochial school- in a city with few alums and before the Internet, scores of kids were lining up outside my office in the early evenings for their interviews (before Starbucks, alas, and it wasn’t considered seemly to interview in a diner. My how times have changed!)
Here in California, there’s not that much of a culture thinking about the ivies or really any schools in the east. in good part that’s because of our extraordinary public college and university system, though those will go down the tubes if the governor doesn’t start funding them better. My two older kids went to cal (UC Berkeley) and the youngest just was admitted. she’s also applying to some ivies etc., and we’ll see what happens but…Cal is a great, rigorous school full of very bright people, in a lively, charming if slightly nutsoid town with views across the bay, great public transit and a quick BART ride from San Francisco, all for $13,000 in tuition and fees. Plenty of other terrific UC schools. So why would most students pay $30K more per year in tuition to go Ivy?
CA high achievers are submitting apps to Ivies in freaking droves. Cal is a great school, so is UCLA. But you don’t realize how many CA kids are also applying to Ivies. There is nothing wrong with, in the end, choosing to stay in-state, whether CA,MI, TX, IL or others. But no one should assume where kids eventually matriculate means they didn’t apply to NE schools, too.
Blossom, you are offering a very myopic view. YES of course many kids from the midwest apply to Ivies and also attend there. You are certain to be kept busy as an alumni interviewer because there are a few hundred thousand high school graduates every year from the region. But it remains the case, I believe, that the mentality – the fixation – on Ivy or Bust is far less common here than in the east and northeast.
In some other regions or states with slimmer pickings for great colleges, kids with ambitions may well look elsewhere. My brother’s kids, growing up in NM, for example, attended Stanford, Princeton, Brown, and Bryn Mawr.
“It’s great to pretend that everyone in the Midwest is too sophisticated to get caught up in what you guys believe is a NY/Menlo Park phenomenon…”
Haha. Not too sophisticated, mainly just unaware. For most people in Michigan, they have no real thought that this is even possible. Their aspirational schools are Michigan and Michigan State. Most of them with get into neither. Most will attend Grand Valley, Western Michigan, Oakland U, Central Michigan, Wayne State, or a local community college.
They weren’t above the fray, they just never really knew it was possible. Ivy League schools are far away and few people know anything about them.
I’m not offering a comprehensive statistical analysis of where kids from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois et al end up going to college. I am pointing out that almost 30 years ago, there was a “buzz” among HS seniors about which colleges were cool and which ones weren’t- and the list wasn’t all that different from kids living in Belmont MA or Atherton CA.
The town I live in now (Northeast) has no Ivy or bust mentality. It is a very localized phenomenon, even here. If you live in a community with a lot of kids who are first gen college (American parents) you may find MUCH less Ivy fever than the town two exits off the highway with a lot of immigrant families where it’s Harvard or bust.
But I am calling the BS police that every kid in the Midwest is looking for merit aid and is much too sophisticated to fall prey to the stupidity which is the Ivy League. A- because it is demonstrably false. B- because for many families, getting a kid into Princeton means a much better deal than the Merit offer from the instate option (and these families are shrewd enough to figure that out.) C- some posters here like the chest thumping that comes with “we were too smart to pay tuition”-- which is great if that’s what’s worked out for your family- but is hardly representative of your entire geographic region- where many kids are pining away for the same set of 8 or 10 schools that their counterparts in other parts of the country are.
But mostly A- demonstrably false. Living in Ohio doesn’t make you immune.
There are “most kids,” sure. But that still leaves droves outside NE applying to Ivies. Their choice to apply, facilitated by the Common App. Why assume the vast bulk of kids with 4.0 or better, rigor, great scores, great activities, etc, just want to stay local? Why do you think they apply to the Ivies? Just to see?
If we can distinguish between those who will end up at less familiar names (Grand Valley) versus those qualified for a highly selective school…then folks really should do the same for NE kids. Plenty of them aren’t qualified for an Ivy and don’t apply.
Lookingforward- good post. My neighbors who have kids at Stonehill, LIU, Hofstra, University of New Haven, Baruch, Rutgers, U Conn. Temple, Quinnipiac, etc. had no illusions that their kids were heading to Yale (well, one of them did but that’s another story).
Do you think it’s because it’s so much easier to apply to a lot of colleges now with everything being on the internet? Back in the day it was all done by hand, you couldn’t surf the web and look at the far away colleges on youtube etc., and for most kids those schools were just names.
Now the world feels a lot smaller and a lot of kids are like, why not apply to Stanford, looks good on the internet! Which, in turn, drives Stanford’s acceptance rate below 5% because there’s really no downside to applying to something that looks so good (other than the probable no and the $100 for the application).
Having a top public (or several) as an in-state option certainly does lower the number of kids who matriculate at OOS elite privates (as I showed in my comparison of MI and OH), but the number doesn’t drop to anything close to zero either.
The Internet might play a role but there are many components to this…big rise in overseas students who can pay ful price and perhaps even more, a drive among schools to drive up the number of applicants so that they can look more competitive in the stupid rankings. We were inundated with milers from colleges. I counted them back when there were 350; we’ve received at least a couple dozen more since then. At least five mailers from Stanford, as though we weren’t going to know they existed beforehand.
also applying to most top-tier schools requires essays. so most kids don’t just randomly add as many schools as possible. they have to write i think three essays for stanford. Then for most of these schools, there’s an interview, though Stanford only interviews in certain geographical areas–and does not interview California students. And a lot of schools want you to show the love, though I doubt that’s a big issue with Stanford.