My list to answer the original question:
University of Alabama
Applying to lots (but not too many) colleges.
1- Getting into top schools
2- Turning down top schools to go to the affordable flagship
- Engineering majors (that's the best selling bodice ripper!)
- STEM majors, except for biology, chemistry, and pure math (because there are too many of the first two who didn't get into med school and the third isn't practical?).
- The authority of many senior members.
@albert69, your post is great. both hilarious and ‘spot on’!
The NE schools and a few west coast ones are the only ones worth attending.
We romanticize our own infinite wisdom about colleges.
The whole idea that the norm in the US is that everyone wants their child to go to college. That is not the case.
Also the idea that kids who don’t go to college never move out.
The “freshman experience”
The idea that you are better if you go to X University
Holistic admissions, brilliant students with bad SAT scores.
It’s rational for parents to make their kids take big loans for college because the parents are saving their funds to be able to “help” an unborn grandchild with his or her tuition (25 years hence?).
The interesting fact is that if you read on pre-med forums, you will find that most (all?) of these are dismissed there. Pretty grounded group that deals with real brutalities of the very selective process instead of imaginary ones.
Miami of Ohio
U of Alabama
Arizona State
Magical fit
Merit money
Miami- but what of everyone else in America who is NOT going to med school? You seem to ignore the reality of hundreds of other professions.
For students,
The money for college will naturally appear once accepted.
There is a perfect number of ECs for acceptance to an Ivy league, and no one will share this important information.
The perfect school is OOS. (Doesn’t matter that thousands of students are trying to enroll in your state universities.)
For parents,
No matter the amount of income over 100K, they are middle class.
There is FA for the middle class family.
Both
The EFC is all that a family is expected to pay.
That we are “helping” our children pick the perfect college rather than simply tring to adjust to this whole idea of them going away.
“Miami- but what of everyone else in America who is NOT going to med school? You seem to ignore the reality of hundreds of other professions.”
-I do not understand your question. Why “everyone else in America who is NOT going to med school” take a look and stop being bogus about the whole process, just like most pre-meds do. What is whorng with this approach.
And this one is NOT bogus at all: Miami of Ohio is a magical place that offers huge amount of Merit awards, much more than most other in-state publics in OH. And this fact is very well known in my hometown (in OH). In fact, D. applied there mostly because we heard about this reputation. And it was a magical fit for her and many around her.
Some things are so predictable.
Personally, I romanticize that there might ever be a thread where the same posters do not have the same argument again. Sadly, this is rarely the case.
Also the parents who romanticize their really smart kid with wonderful test scores and middling grades throughout high school. They absolutely believe his grades will magically improve when he is “challenged” in college.
Words like “elite” or “prestige” … perhaps any CC meme
often are romanticized in an unromantic way