<p>Steve, you and warbrain are not saying different things. Both of you, in slightly different ways, are disagreeing with Hunt (who, I suspect, did not really mean what he said as absolutely as he said it).</p>
<p>This thread is hillarious.</p>
<p>I think we can all agree that we can’t all agree on anything, which is why this is such a great site. but, I bet we could all agree that a college education is important. I think that’s the base line on CC. We all believe in the value of education, even if we can’t agree on how highly we might (monetarily) place said value.</p>
<p>^ I like (button) post #22.</p>
<p>I think we can all agree that a DadII thread is gonna get a lot of traction ;)</p>
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I think I did mean it, if I understand what I said. What I mean is that it’s my opinion that, all other things being equal, a kid with a 2400 SAT will have noticeably better results in getting in to the most selective schools than a kid with a 2250. There may be some level where it stops mattering, I guess, but I think it’s more like 2350. Note that I’m not saying that I think this is sensible–I just think it’s the case. Top schools get thousands of applications, and they don’t have that many objective criteria to use to rank applicants. SAT at least appears to be objective.</p>
<p>You know, one day I am really busy trying to make a living, and I totally missed this thread until now.</p>
<p>What we can agree on is that we can’t agree.</p>
<p>Frankly, I am not even sure what is being discussed on this thread, but anyone with less than 5000 posts shouldn’t be allowed on this. Too much history.</p>
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<p>Right! And bulge-bracket IBs recruit only at schools A, B, C, D, E, and F not because they fully believe in USNWR’s methodology and assiduously chose the top 6 schools (meaning that if E dropped out and G took its place, they’d drop E like a hot potato and rush to start recruiting at G) but because any company doing recruiting needs some way of cutting down myriad schools to a handful they can handle, and what-they’ve-done-in-the-past-and-has-gotten-good-results is as good of a rubric as any to use. The high school seniors and college freshmen on CC, bless their little innocent hearts, really seem not to understand how much of recruiting is done out of convenience and fishing where the fish are, not because McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or whoever really has some strong institutional belief that Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth are the only worthwhile colleges in the country and everything else is just a tremendous step down.</p>
<p>Wait who agreed Stanford is in the same league as Harvard? :D</p>
<p>Can we agree that Cornell is not a lower tier Ivy?</p>
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<p>Actually, most of the posts on CC revolve around expressions of anxiety.</p>
<p>Sure, oldfort – “lower tier Ivy” is just such a … well, lower-tier person kind of comment. I mean, please. Are bronze medals in the Olympics “lower-tier medals”?</p>
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<p>There are a fair number of people in College Life that would disagree with you. </p>
<p>I can agree that Middle Class varies significantly depending on where you live. $105k in my hometown would be very well off- well out of middle class. $35k-60k would be about middle class. Where I’ve lived for the last few years, $50k-75k would be about middle with $105k still being upper middle class. I disagree that the cost of living for your area should be factored in as the majority of the time, it is a choice where you live.</p>
<p>Actually, bronze medals ARE the lowest tier of Olympics medals. And Cornell is easily recognized as the least prestigious and least selective member of the Ivy League. </p>
<p>If that matters at all is really a different question.</p>
<p>“Easily recognized” by whom? I am quite sure that 98% of the population doesn’t “easily recognize Cornell as the least prestigious and least selective member of the Ivy League” because 98% of the population couldn’t give a darn who is in the Ivy League, what it does, or why they should care. So, no, I don’t really think it matters in any kind of final analysis. There’s a small segment of the population for whom these distinctions are mind-blowingly important. I’m not so convinced that that small segment of the population is really as important as they think they are, though. Or they are important only to themselves, which is kind of the same thing.</p>
<p>@Pizza</p>
<p>“The high school seniors and college freshmen on CC, bless their little innocent hearts, really seem not to understand how much of recruiting is done out of convenience and fishing where the fish are, not because McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or whoever really has some strong institutional belief that Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth are the only worthwhile colleges in the country and everything else is just a tremendous step down.”</p>
<p>What matters it the end result. If a company recruits from school A for sure, and the student would really like to work for that company, it is naturarl for the student to consider that school A is better for their professional goals than some other (potentially equally good academically) school.</p>
<p>To me there is no point in being anti-Ivy for the sake of being anti-Ivy. The same way that there is no point in being pro-Ivy just because it is an Ivy. One have to recognize, though, that most of the Ivy schools open a lot of great oportunities to their students. Why try to deny this?</p>
<p>Pizza, isn’t context relevant. 98 percent of the population could not care less about the Ivy League? So what? The context of this thread is the CC “universe” and that is it.</p>
<p>Again musing about how much the subjects debated on CC matter is an entirely different issue. Fwiw, I think that many CCer assemble here just because they cannot share their opinions about colleges with … 98 percent of their real life peers.</p>
<p>My kids didn’t attend Ivy or equivalent schools. I have never bought or read a USNews ranking. Remarkably, our kids attended two decent schools. We are not dirt poor, and never assumed that others would pay for our kids to go to college. We feel fortunate.</p>
<p>Re: the Ivies…they are all good schools, I would not argue that. BUT they are not the perfect place for everyone. Ditto Stanford…MIT, CalTech…Podunk U. Different strokes for different folks.</p>
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<p>No. It’s my alma mater and my daughter’s, and we are both pleased to have gone to college there, but it’s not Harvard, and neither of us ever had the illusion that it was.</p>
<p>I’ll bite. :D</p>
<p>Middle Class
I’ll agree that people who clearly are in the top 10% income wise (like us!) feel like they are in the middle class. That’s partly because we are in a high cost of living area, but I think it’s also partly a culture where we all expect to have granite tops in our kitchens etc.</p>
<p>Saving
Honestly we didn’t save much for college because my parents said they’d pay for it and the 529 plan for NY always underperformed the market. We also expected (and to some extent it’s been true) that we could live off one income while the other paid for college particularly as I increased my hours as the kids got older.</p>
<p>Ranking
I could use the quote about SAT scores that the Yale Rep used to us. “Less important than you think, more important than we like to admit.” A Harvard grad myself, I don’t think Harvard is clearly the best university in the country, but as the most famous one (probably), it has some measure of prestige (especially overseas) that may be useful for some students. </p>
<p>I definitely think that a student who is sure about their major should be looking at the quality of the department as well. (That’s why my oldest turned down Harvard for Carnegie Mellon - for a more well rounded kid however this would have been a silly choice.)</p>
<p>There are some excellent schools that aren’t in the CC top college list - Tufts for example. But certainly, any school on that list should provide an excellent education. There are however significant differences between schools on that list - especially between Tech schools and the rest.</p>
<p>Stats
I’m positive that a score over 750 in any section is good enough for any school, and that a score between 700-750 in any section is unlikely to hurt you. (Assume equivalent is true of the ACT.) </p>
<p>I do agree you can’t compare GPA or even rank between different high schools. It does behoove you to try to figure out the minimum GPA/rank that will make you a viable candidate at your school however. I don’t think anyone gets into Ivy caliber schools from our high school outside of the top 5% and all the HYP acceptances I know of were in the top 2%. I suspect this is pretty normal for a pretty good large public high school.</p>
<p>I am not a fan of ED, but I think if you love a school and your finances aren’t muddy (no ranches or family owned businesses), you can safely apply ED to schools whose financial policies are clear and promise to meet your need. </p>
<p>I do agree, that you should have a safety college - or better two that you can afford and will get into. It’s a plus if you get into one early. (Hey my younger son had U of Chicago for a safety after he was accepted - it was the highest ranked school he applied to!) </p>
<p>The student makes a huge difference, but you can’t make lemonade from a potato.</p>
<p>Sometimes everything doesn’t work out come May 1st. Sometimes the dream college doesn’t work out, but there are second chances in life, mostly.</p>
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<p>All of the Ivy schools open a lot of great opps to students, as do all of the other top schools (however one defines top). What is there to deny? I am not anti-Ivy. I don’t know why people keep thinking that; it reflects a fundamental misreading of my posts. I just don’t get the provincial attitude that they are somehow even more exalted or offer even better opportunities than their peer elite schools. Well, yeah, if you define “opportunity” solely as i-banking, perhaps. On any other measure? There are SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES AROUND that this whole thing seems like arguing that places that offer 30,000 opportunities are that much better than places that offer 29,000 opportunities. Well, any one person can only pursue a handful of opportunities anyway, so we’re talking plethora of riches vs embarrassment of riches, which is a distinction without a difference.</p>