<p>DH is an MD who runs his own medical related business. He started it when he realized he didn’t want to continue to take home equity loans on a house he didn’t like to pay his student loans and his kid’s school tuition. Many MDs are doing this. Many do very well. </p>
<p>Son was well aware a typical doctor in our area is woefully underpaid and will have trouble paying his EFC! Kind of the decision I made in my legal career for now. We have 8 kids between us, yes folks 8, to put through school!</p>
<p>sjmom, at large corporate law firms like the one I work for only hire from a handful of law schools. Most hires also went to top undergrad schools. As a senior partner said to me in my youth when I questioned it, the reason is simple. The more hoops a candidate has already jumped through to be stellar at everything, the lower the firm’s risk.</p>
<p>Calmom, I can only speak in detail for the school my daughter attends. The schools follow their alum and they do extremely well at top colleges. I never stop being amazed at the matriculation list, the bottom of the class goes to schools people here are calling elite. These are hardly rich slackers although there are a few of those. I have seen no Barnard matrics at my daughter’s school in the years I’ve been looking, so I’m wondering where the kids you describe went.</p>
<p>Cur- I, for one, appreciate that you started the thread and appreciate the posts that were responsive. I think it is an interesting and important issue to many families, and I know how your family agonized over the many wonderful choices your daughter had. You are in a really good position to give your thoughts on the questions DStark raised, and try to ignore the arrows flying over your head (and the stray one that might pierce your skull). My son, who was all about prestige, has found that his particular college just may not be worth the high cost of tuition. This is a kid who has never had any qualms about spending the family’s money, so this is really something to note. It sure has made ME take a closer look at what we are all paying for out there and what our kids are actually receiving.</p>
When I was practicing law, I always preferred to hire students from the low prestige law school than from the local high prestige schools. The students from the low end law school were all being taught in the evenings by practicing lawyers and they knew the way to the court house – they could be entrusted with a variety of tasks from the get go. Plus they tended to be kids who needed the money, had plenty of work experience, and had a great work ethic. The students from the elite law schools were clueless; worse than that, they thought they were smarter than everyone else and already knew everything, so they didn’t have the sense to ask when they were unsure of something. They potentially could make huge mistakes, and needed close supervision. </p>
<p>I think big corporate law firms are more eager to hire students from top law schools because they have the staff and the budget to properly train their hires. I didn’t – I needed to hire students that were being taught the practical end of things in law school and came to me already trained.</p>
<p>It may be different for other professions. The problem with law is that there is a wide gulf between what is taught in schools and what takes place in practice.</p>
<p>A problem with the jumping through hoops analogy is that there are many, many excellent students who could jump through the hoops but because of the quirks and luck that is involved with college admissions (and in part because they not have gotten the best guidance from parents and guidance counselor) simply didn’t get a chance to jump.</p>
<p>Today’s LA Times has an article from a Swarthmore professor who suggests that there be a lottery for students once they fit some shared criteria. </p>
<p>Schwartz goes on to say that we like to think the process is based on merit alone but it isn’t. Surely we all know this, even as some argue that it’s better to use a doctor who went to certain undergrad colleges or universities.</p>
<p>That’s a great article. I totally agree the process is just silly the way presently handled. Let’s face it though, it’s not going to change.</p>
<p>Colleges are meeting their own needs. More than half the space in any class is knowingly going to legacies and other hooked candidates before they even start reading. IMO, it’s maybe 25% who get in by the infamous practices often described here.</p>
<p>The law firm also is meeting their own needs. The kid from Exeter, Yale, Harvard Law is someone the partners feel comfortable with. They talk about their common schools all the time. Bump into each other at the Yale club. Their biases are as ingrained as all of ours.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to add that many of the Andover/Yale/Harvard kids come from poor and middle class backgrounds. Even 25 years ago they hired me, someone who had lived on welfare 7 years before.</p>
<p>Kirmum, you are the one who claimed that kids from TJ & Andover are finding their first year at college to be mostly “review” with plenty of time to play. My question remains: if their classes are too easy, why don’t they just sign up for harder classes?</p>
<p>momfromme, great link. I like the full paragraph you quoted from.</p>
<p>“The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. Social scientists Detlof von Winterfeldt and Ward Edwards made this case 30 years ago when they articulated what they called the “principle of the flat maximum.” What the principle argues is that when comparing the qualifications of people who are bunched up at the very top of the curve, the amount of inherent uncertainty in evaluating their credentials is larger than the measurable differences among candidates. Applied to college admissions, this principle implies that it is impossible to know which excellent student (or school) will be better than which other excellent student (or school). Uncertainty of evaluation makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent students a waste of time; the degree of precision required exceeds the inherent reliability of the data. It also makes the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings of colleges silly for assuming a precision of measurement that is unattainable.”</p>
<p>WOW! The mods work fast! The link to Kirmum’s article that was actually a program trying to execute, has disappeared already. Kirmum - how did that link get messed up like that? A rogue program??? Scary. :(</p>
<p>“What the principle argues is that when comparing the qualifications of people who are bunched up at the very top of the curve, (Edit: Kinda like the top %tiles of the standardized test world?) the amount of inherent uncertainty in evaluating their credentials is larger than the measurable differences among candidates. Applied to college admissions, this principle implies that it is impossible to know which excellent student (or school) will be better than which other excellent student (or school). Uncertainty of evaluation makes the hair-splitting to distinguish among excellent students a waste of time; the degree of precision required exceeds the inherent reliability of the data.” </p>
<p>Does it seem to argue in favor of a bigger net? Or a smaller net? LOL.</p>
<p>Don’t let kirmum’s comments get up your nose. She’s right.</p>
<p>Students from elite secondary schools are often bored in their first two years of university. They’ve been there and done that. I saw that in 1975.</p>
<p>I’ve seen it since–in the high rate of transfer of my son’s peers from second and third tier schools.</p>
<p>From what I saw among my peers at university, many elite school students connect with a tertiary challenge in junior and senior year–but some drift into dilettantism–or transfer to try to find the challenge. I didn’t have that sort of elite secondary education. In retrospect, it served my ambition well. I was on fire with the challenges of my first two years at university and my ambition grew exponentially in succeeding years.</p>
<p>calmom’s post 326 raises the question I’ve been wondering about, too. Why don’t kids who are well prepared one way or another take harder classes? My S took 9 college classes but did not find his freshman courses easy by any means. And for good reason. He did not choose easy courses. He did not get top grades either. So, are prep school grads taking easy classes for easy grades?</p>
<p>Cheers, I look at Kirmum’s comments differently. If students can catch up in high school if they don’t have the top private school experience, they can catch up after college if they don’t have the best college experience. Life is a marathon, not a sprint.</p>
<p>The point is you can catch up.</p>
<p>Then you put the Swarthmore professor’s thoughts in the mix and this supports the argument of strong students at many schools. </p>
<p>When Kirmum argues that law firms only hire at certain schools, we aren’t talking about education. We are talking about connections.</p>
<p>So if you don’t need those connections, and pre-med students at Rhodes and many other schools don’t, you are not losing anything of importance. You may even come out way ahead if you get special considerations at your college.</p>
<p>You see, Curmudgeon’s daughter is pretty smart. She figured this out. :)</p>
<p>She doesn’t have to take a back seat to anybody.</p>
She figured this out. :)</p>