When Thing #1 was drafting his college list and visiting campuses he focused on 1. quality of the program to which he planned to apply (engineering), 2. student support, 3. campus, and 4. surrounding area and access to restaurants, shopping, entertainment, etc. He ultimately chose Case Western over CMU, Purdue and Rose Hulman (much to my wife’s horror) because CMU had a reputation for not being student friendly, Purdue wasn’t guaranteeing engineering majors even if students made the GPA cutoff immediately after COVID, and Rose was in the middle of nowhere.
From a parent’s perspective, I think it is also important to factor in what industries or employers recruit from given schools. If you want to work for Ford or GM, you would do well as a graduate of UofM, MSU or Kettering, and to a lesser degree other Big10 programs like Purdue. If you want to work on Wall Street go to Wharton. When Thing #1 was looking at schools, we reviewed data on what grad schools and employers accepted Case engineering grads.
Size of the school may be a factor here. For a club that can only be so large, like the main student newspaper, getting into it may be more competitive at a large school than at a small school.
Yes, but large schools will have multiple student publications. A daily news oriented paper or site, a weekly “feature” paper, a “muckraking” type publication focused on local politics, development, Town/Gown relationships, a humor/satirical publication and even a publication devoted to arts and theater reviews.
Hmmm - you missed the continued discussion that this has no value ( I say tongue in cheek) because I post this type of stuff all the time b4 I’m refuted.
As the other poster says, large schools have many pubs, OR the main newspaper is published far more frequently or has more sections, and/or is longer. There are often MANY ways to include more kids. I am not saying all can be unlimited, but many can be very inclusive - not saying everyone can have the exact role they want w/i the paper.
And competition for a specific role (editor in chief or whatnot) is not what I meant, though clearly that wasn’t obvious. I meant I see no reason why the i-banking club needs to be limited to 45 people or whatever.
Major/Minor [only public universities for S25 (Metallurgical Engineering) and D27 (Chemical Engineering with Food Science minor)]
Cultural / Religious fit; primarily red state / blue state (obviously different people have different opinions). D27 not considering Cornell.
Travel: prefer less than 10 hours by car, so can do it in a day twice per year; access to hub airports to minimize connections for breaks
Weather: not worried about summer time heat as student would come home or go to a city for summers
AP acceptance: at least Calc I and II, Chem I, and some core; prefer Chem II and Phys I; 30 hours desireable towards degree to fit in minor and finish in 4 and maybe 3.5 years
Size of city/town; urban/rural
4+1 engineering and mba
Costs: kids aren’t going to U of Arkansas (30 minutes from home), so we are paying OOS no matter what
This is a good point. Looking at which companies hire from which schools (and from which majors) is a strategy many consider wise. People (well most people) don’t dispute that. If you aspire to be on wall street, without potentially taking a very unlikely and circuitous route, it’s best not to go to (for eg) a regional college just because its inexpensive. Many of those corporate hiring folks are familiar with the schools and the education/training the graduates bring with them to their job. What many people DO advise, when looking at colleges, is to take the “outcome reports” with a large grain of salt. This is vastly different than choosing a school that is well known to the company your Thing 1 aspires to work for.
I know people will say that’s ridiculous - but here in the south, there are people who pick Ole Miss for that reason. Supposedly, allegedly, it’s tops. I’m sure others around the country do the same.
Silly, but no doubt someone uses whichever ranking they find….after all, these are 17 year old kids. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and beautiful people are everywhere.
For us, the main criteria was ability to enroll in a specific program my kid was interested in. Other factors included cost, distance from home and overall fit. I strongly believe that perfect college does not exist. There is always some compromise, you cannot have it all.
Colorado School of Mines for sure. Probably Rose Hulman, Embry Riddle and Florida Tech but they are geographically uncool. Here’s a list. Many are top schools of course or not in your desired locations.
But you can find these kids anywhere but better chances at large schools.
The answer to “how can you tell” will vary depending on the student. For MY kid, the most important factors were cost, distance from home, weather, and major. If the school had an honors college, a Women in Cybersecurity club, and a DND and/or gaming/board gaming club (even though she doesn’t do either DND or board gaming currently, those are basically ‘her people’ and she said she’d be interested in exploring that in college in order to meet people), then that was a big plus.
Some schools got eliminated because the ‘vibe’ wasn’t quite right. Or the campus had plenty of ‘nerds like her,’ but it felt slightly too conservative, the weather was too cold, and you’d need a car, like Embry Riddle-Prescott. Or the college felt too left wing. Or she didn’t like the area immediately around campus. Or she didn’t like the food. or…or…or.
Socioeconomic diversity was one way that my family distinguished between colleges. I was personally interested in what type of support the college offered its FGLI students (or not) though I don’t think that my kids have paid as much attention to that topic as I have. However, while my kids have mostly looked at predominantly white schools, racial diversity was still important to them. They’ve wanted places where black and brown students were active and visible in classroom discussions, labs, student leadership, and campus social events. They have been clear that they don’t want to be the only black person in their courses.
On the issue of competitive clubs, both D22 and D24 have encountered needlessly competitive club culture that is not around pre-professionalism, industry, or size or even audition based activities. Instead, they’ve also seen gatekeeping around activities that one would think would be open to everyone such as community service. As this Atlantic article about Yale put it:
Most clubs have the capacity to accept far larger cohorts or do away with entrance requirements altogether, but choose to maintain rigid admissions frameworks. The Asian American Students Alliance, for instance—the primary Asian American affiliation group, for which one would think the main requirement would be affiliation—required an application until this year.
“It’s strange to me how many student organizations decide to be selective when it’s students who completely control the system,” Mira Debs, the executive director of Yale’s education-studies program, told me. “I have often found it to be a puzzle. What force drives Yale students to be so competitive, and to construct all of these different categories that they’re applying for?”
While my kids have found open organizations to join as well, they were quite taken aback their freshman year since they came from high schools where with the exception of varsity (and sometimes jv) teams and performing arts activities such as ensembles, dance, and theater, pretty much all club activities welcomed everyone. They were surprised to discover that part of their transition to college was such a culture shock, given they attended prep schools that send lots of kids to selective universities. Academics were not more challenging than high school, but the social scene felt less inclusive.
My kids had wish lists, and they could put anything they wanted on it (location, type of school, LAC, University, size, sports teams…but in the end it was cost that ruled the day.
One wanted ‘diversity’ which to her meant racial. She ended up at a mostly white school, but did end up (just by chance) on an international wing of her dorm and had no interaction with them at all. She tried, but they weren’t interested. She also ended up on the club hockey team which was a BIG bonus for her as she’s really really bad at hockey so was happy they took everyone; men’s team does NOT take everyone so only 25 or so in a school of 10k get to join that club.
Other was at an engineering school and there were lots of limits to clubs, like the Jet Car team (I think was 12 or 15), club that made moon vehicles, robotics teams, etc. Not sure how competitive they were or if it was self-selection that sort of shuffled everyone to some club (my daughter was an athlete so didn’t belong to many other activities (SWE, civil eng club, a sorority) and her team participated in some charitable activities (as did her sorority). She had plenty to do and there were no restrictions on joining A sorority, but maybe not the one you’d prefer (IMO, they were all about equal)
On CC, many hs kids (and parents) have a long list of wants but in the end I think there are a few controlling requirements (cost, size, major, and for some rank). Some may rule out a religious school or one in an undesirable state, or substitute MIT for Cal Tech for size reasons (and give up those palm trees) but not many are going to give up Harvard because UMass has better food. Choose UMass over URI or Delaware? Sure, but not JUST because of food.
