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<p>Driving distances? Square mile is a measure of area, not distance.</p>
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<p>^^Whoever said anything like that? Certainly not me. I have said nothing about the job prospects of graduates of community colleges or 3rd tier directionals. My point was that plenty of people on CC have said that Ivy League education wasn’t all that great and may not even be mediocre. To which someone replied that they had never read any threads saying that, so I provided a bunch of quick examples to demonstrate the point. </p>
<p>Most of these members that you are dismissing as ■■■■■■ have hundreds of posts on multiple topics and don’t fit a ■■■■■ posting pattern (including the Harvard vs. Rice guy). But they do fit an Ivy-bashing pattern. And even some of the threads that might be started by ■■■■■■ have long term members responding by jumping into the thread to agree with their Ivy bashing and join in on it.</p>
<p>courer, you are beginning to sound like the “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” ads.</p>
<p>Belyavsky,
I hope you don’t want to say that there is no point to teach our kids from early age to read and write, teach second language, give music lessons, buy them puzzles and educational toys, take to sports, museums, and libraries. Why are we doing all this, if IQ determines everything? We need a study of twins adopted by uneducated families and educated families, to see if they differ on IQ when they grow up 
I’m also wondering if people with the same IQ can reach different levels of success.
I think there is plenty of research showing that environment influences future success. Actually, they are even finding that environmental factors can switch on and off certain genes, affecting your health.</p>
<p>yolochka: You make a good point about student progress, but for some measure assessing what a student learned in college to be accurate, it can’t be almost the same caliber of test the Ivy-bound kids already showed they could ace while in high school. My comment was made thinking about using a measure like the GMAT as beliavsky suggested. It’s been decades since I took it, but to me it seemed like a glorified SAT that tested the same things: vocabulary and reading comprehension, and lower level math. You won’t see as much improvement in the Ivy crowd as you do in the kids who entered college less academically qualified.</p>
<p>Not everything to be gained is quantifiable. Seems absurd to have to say it.</p>
<p>I agree and don’t think you could ever come up with an accurate way of assessing intellectual growth in college. That said, ranking systems currently use data that have far less relevance to students than an “average academic progress” sort of measure. If I’m a Latin major, I don’t care how many Noble Prize winning physicists are on the faculty, for example.</p>
<p>Right. But you may care very much about the intellectual environment and how ready peers are for higher level inquiry and discussion, in general, in and beyond their specialty. In this respect, my two girls are different. One has had more expansive growth, in addition to subject knowledge.</p>
<p>coureur, disagreeing that eight schools are the be-all, end-all is not the same as “bashing” them. In any case, they certainly seem to be doing fine in keeping their legends alive and attracting record numbers of applicants each year. Of course the Ivies are great schools. They have been for centuries.</p>
<p>What I think would be more helpful to kids starting the college search is to dispassionately acknowledge that there are many paths to success, including but not limited to elite schools, and to avoid rhetoric that is not based in fact (i.e., Ivy grads get hired more often than other CS graduates by the top tech companies, or it’s easier to get into a leading med school if you got your undergrad at an Ivy). It would also help if people could avoid words like “mediocre” or “second-rate” when describing other reputable institutions. Impressionable teens like Suzy Weiss (and thousands of others who read this site) take that to mean THEY are mediocre or second-rate, which just starts the cycle all over again for the next group of kids going through this.</p>
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<p>Fifty years ago I think upper-middle class parents did not make the same effort to intellectually stimulate their children as their counterparts do today, and I doubt it harmed them much. There is no harm if children are exposed to speech and the written word but not formally taught to read before school. Introducing children to sports, music, and other forms of culture should be done for enjoyment and because those activities are important in their own right, not because they raise academic performance.</p>
<p>Twin studies have found that by age 18, the IQ of adoptees has a substantial positive correlation with that of the biological mother but almost none with that of the adoptive parents, but the IQ of adoptive parents has a larger effect on IQ at early ages. Many studies on efforts to increase IQ find such fade-out. Of course IQ alone does not determine how successful people are. Studies have found that the correlation between IQ and income (one measure of success, and I agree not the only one) is about 0.4.</p>
<p>A book discussing the effects of nature and nurture on IQ and other traits is “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids” (2011) by Bryan Caplan. He argues that since parents’ efforts (beyond basic care) have few long-lasting effects on their children, they should consider channeling their efforts into having more children. I agree with him and have three. They generally entertain each other better than I can.</p>
<p>Bel, I’d think there’s more to be learned from the MN twin family studies. Just how often is IQ detail avail for bio mothers, in adoption?</p>
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Am wondering if that is a regional thing. My peers/playmates 50 years ago were from families who were concerned about “intellectual stimulation” as much as playing stickball in the street. No they didnt go to Kumon and I dont recall as many chess opportunities in elementary school, but intellectual stimulation was not ignored.</p>
<p>Well, Bel, once again, I have to say I agree with you on this one. Every once in a while we do converge.</p>
<p>The one thing I have noticed that is really different from when I was in school is that the parents all advocate for their kids to be in APs and then everyone complains there is too much homework. What I remember is that the only ones of us who were in APs were those of us who tested in and then, to be honest, we didn’t really advertise it. None of us were overwhelmed by the work or were working harder than our peers in normal classes.</p>
<p>We did all the ECs, in leadership roles and we went to all the parties on the weekends.</p>
<p>I could say I believe it’s “harder” today, or I could be honest and just say I think that some kids just have to work harder today. But not all.</p>
<p>I’m not sure this is a “wasted effort.” Certainly the parents working so hard to make sure Suzie and Jack are in APs would say it’s the right way to go. But, I wonder how much difference all that effort is making in the end.</p>
<p>"Square mile is a measure of area, not distance. "</p>
<p>If it is 50 square miles, will we have enough space to drive around a Humvee? Poetgirl said we can only golf in the Vatican.</p>
<p>“There do seem to be Harvard students who want to coast through classes, sometimes because they are spending more time on extracurriculars, including sports.”</p>
<p>I think the prof made up the rules and it is to make him feel good perhaps. This is the most idiotic thing any prof should have ever done. By all accounts, no one seemed to be clear on the exact rules he wanted them to follow and as a result, he might have destroyed a bunch of kids’ lives.</p>
<p>Yeah, 50 years ago we had music lessons, riding lessons (me), and ballet lessons (sib), learned to play tennis and swim, and went to art museums and concerts and the like. We were taken to the library every week. I used to play chess with my mother before we went to afternoon kindergarten. When we encountered a new word or one we weren’t sure how to pronounce, we would look it up in several dictionaries and compare the entries. (My mother loves dictionaries.) My father would give us math problems to solve, and we’d play “guess the composer” at the dinner table. </p>
<p>None of this was to build IQ or a resume for college. It was just part of living a fulfilling life and doing things people in our family liked to do. I also spent lots of time running around in the woods, playing softball in the back yard, playing horses with friends, and so forth.</p>
<p>It’s true. you can only golf in the vatican, and the clothing is not very good for the swing.</p>
<p>But the hats? They are fantastic. ;)</p>
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I don’t think there was less intellectual stimulation going on 50 years ago, but I suspect it wasn’t being done for the same reasons as it is today. A large part of it shouldn’t be teaching a child to read early, but to stimulate their desire to read and their curiosity - by reading to them, and by modeling behavior where they see the adults in their life reading. The same applies to music - they don’t necessarily have to have formal music lessons at 4, but they should be taken to appropriate performances. Part of that stimulation came from our play - if we played stick ball, as jym626 suggests, we were encouraged to find ways of improving the way we played, and how to pick teams. Our activities were less organized, and we were left to do the organizing. Now kids lives are too structured, and they don’t play a part in organizing.</p>
<p>Then we have the push, as poetgrl mentions, to take all AP classes. Our HS had many AP classes, but most were reserved for Seniors, and a few for Juniors (AP Sciences all required the full sequence of Biology, Chemisty, and Physics I, so could only be taken by those who started in Biology as Freshmen, AP Languages were 5th year classes, so you had to have taken the “first year” before you got to the HS). There’s a reason the workload for 6 AP classes is that high - you’re asking a student to complete their first year of college while still in high school! I know a few students who have taken enough AP classes to start with Junior standing - maybe colleges should treat these students as transfers instead of “first time college students.”</p>
<p>I remember in the fourth grade we were all offered in-school lessons on musical instruments. The achool even had some “loaners” for people who couldn’t afford the instrument, and I remember you could also rent instruments from the local music store. Do they still have things like that in public school? </p>
<p>We always had a piano and piano lessons at home because mom played, but I also took violiin lessons in school (surprise, I’m a WASP male - well Catholic actually).</p>
<p>I proudly held last chair for many years until giving it up in high school in order to suck at something else.</p>
<p>My kids’ public grade school had a strings program for all fourth and fifth graders. There are many low-income kids in the district and few kids had started playing a stringed instrument by then anyway so all but a few were given loaner instruments from the school. The teacher who ran the program at our school is the first chair bassist in our local symphony, so the quality of instruction was very good.</p>
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<p>I agree. Which is one of the big things I, personally, want my kids to take away from their experience - living, working and playing with a cohort of other bright, driven kids. Of course bright, driven kids can be found anywhere, but there’s a difference when it’s “thick on the ground” and that’s what I think you get at elite schools. (I’m defining elite fairly broadly, here.) It’s harder to soak in that atmosphere at “lesser” schools and may be near impossible for an introvert. </p>
<p>As for the Harvard “gut” course. Not commenting on the cheating scandal, but I don’t see anything really wrong with having my kids have, say, 3 “serious” courses (perhaps in their majors or something very intense) and then one “fun” course. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing that there are Rocks for jocks types of courses. Sometimes they can introduce a subject “lightly” and foster an interest that a course-for-majors wouldn’t.</p>