Your kid takes the top scholarship instead of the top school. What's next?

binx · March 20, 2007, 8:29am

Epiphany - great post. I was following this thread closely until I got hit by a stray arrow and and had to deal with my wounds. That was when the thread veered to “my kid doesn’t want to be around your kid 'cause she’s too stupid and has nothing to offer.” (Perhaps those weren’t the exact words, but the kid she described as unwelcome fit my D pretty well, statistically…) My initial thoughts were #1 - their loss. And #2 - please tell me where he’s going, so we can avoid it. Then I became concerned that the only people who can validly contribute to this thread are the superstars of the world, deciding between full rides and elite schools. Some kids actually have to make decisions about full rides, or significant merit, because of another talent or ability that has nothing to do with curing cancer.

I do actually have a bit of an idea about what reflectivemom’s S means, I just think he’s chosen faulty guides. My eldest chose a school where it was okay to be smart, because that was sorely lacking in his high school, and we were tired of him having to defend himself. So we paid attention to the atmosphere when we visited, looking for fit. Never occurred to us to ask kids for their SAT scores. The SAT score division line really confused me - 1500 is smart, 1350 isn’t? Funny, when my 1550 kid and my 1360 kid get together, their conversations are pretty amazing. My S can be “Spockish” in his thinking; my D can add the emotional or social elements while retaining a high level of logic and reasoning. They need each other.

I don’t want to keep this thread on SAT debate. I really liked the insightful, respectful discussion about people determining “cost vs. value” on an individual level. Like sjmom’s post #538 above, we sent our first two to school without too much concern for cost, and are not comfortable treating D differently, just because her test score came in lower. But because her schools are a lot more similar to one another, and our financial situation has changed, we can and will make cost a factor.

calmom · March 20, 2007, 8:35am

I have no idea what type of school Reflectivemom’s son attends or who is friends are, but my son attended a very diverse public high school, with whites in the minority; most of the students were hispanic or filipino, and about a third from lower SES families. The smartest kids all ended up in the same college prep honors and AP courses, of course, and were together for most of their classes junior & senior year. My son was the only kid in the school to score high enough to qualify for NM semifinalist (and was the only one that the school principal could remember having ever scored that high, in the years she had been there). My son had taken the PSAT unprepped in fall of his junior year, and he took the SATs - also unprepped - in March – when he got his scores back he did talk with his other college bound friends about their scores, and his were by far the highest of anyone he talked to.

However, he noticed a definite correlation between test scores, skin tone and financial status that made him feel quite uncomfortable. There were kids he knew from his classes who he considered to be extremely smart, certainly as smart or smarter than he was, but whose scores were significantly lower. So one reason that he announced to me that he did NOT want to go to any college that only took students with high SAT scores was a concern about diversity: he told me that some of the smartest and most interesting people he knew seemed to have a hard time with the SAT, and he would not want to attend a college which had admission practices that would exclude those types of students. He ended up at an LAC with holistic admission practices; even so, he was dissatisfied with the lack of diversity (racial/ethnic and economic) at his LAC and that contributed to his decision to leave after 2 years.

SAT scores have a linear correlation to income level, with a steep jump at around the $80,000-$100,000 mark – so the basic information you can get from looking at SAT scores is economic. See:
<a href=“Examiner is back - Examiner.com”>Examiner is back - Examiner.com;

Most of the highly selective LAC’s which have gone test optional have cited the built-in economic and racial bias of the test as one reason for abandoning it as a requirement.

So when I see a college with mostly high end test scores, I think: “rich”. I am sending my daughter to a college that fits that definition, but not without some qualms. Fortunately her world and her friendships extend far beyond the boundaries of her campus.

When someone makes a statement about preferring to be among high scorers, I draw a conclusion that is probably very different than the one the person making the comment wants to project. I simply get a sense of a person who only wants to associate with individuals who are very much like himself in terms of economic background and life experiences. To me that simply reinforces a very narrow world view – and I see college as a time when I would want my kids to broaden their experiences.

sjmom2329 · March 20, 2007, 8:42am

Reflectivemom, you seem to be relatively new here, and maybe you don’t realize that quite a few of the parents who post on CC have high-scoring, high-achieving kids. Many of the students and/or their parents attend(ed) very selective colleges, or are currently employed at such. There is a wealth of experience and knowledge from which any parent or student embarking on the college admissions odyssey would benefit. Over the last 4 or 5 years there has been a welcome change from the early days of this forum, when the mantra seemed to be “SAT, SAT, SAT.” Most of us now realize that there is more to the college admissions process than standardized testing, and more to happiness in life than just getting into the most selective college possible.

My older son, as I’m sure many are tired of hearing, attends a college with an SAT verbal range of 670-770 and math range of 680-780. Many of these kids would have been NMF, and would meet your son’s criteria for who he wants to go to school with. In some ways, your son sounds like mine, as far as being a pretty serious student. He was accepted at some pretty intense colleges – Harvey Mudd, Columbia, U of Chicago, Duke etc. He was sure he really wanted the “life of the mind.”

But kids do change when they go away to college. S is still enjoying the academic side of college, but I honestly doubt that he and his buds sit around debating philosophy in the wee hours. They’re all too busy with problem sets, labs, reading and papers. I’m pretty sure they just goof off in their free time. He’s also really discovered his social side. I used to joke that this was a kid who NEEDED to go to a “party school.” His challenge has been learning to balance study, sleep and play. It seems like these kids only have time for two out of three.

Finally, as a parent, it’s important to help our kids understand that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Getting IN to college is great, but graduating is better. Then there’s probably grad school or professional school, fellowships, post-docs or whatever. My husband works in an R and D organization where the majority of people have graduate degrees from some pretty impressive universities. 20 years after grad school, it’s not where you got your degree, or what your GPA, SAT or GRE scores were that counts. It’s getting the job done. There are some really smart people out there, and there will always be someone smarter, prettier, richer or who works hard. There is a skill involved in finding personal happiness that doesn’t involve competition or beating the other guy in some measure. These are just my thoughts, and anyone can disregard them if they don’t make sense. I just think it’s a parent’s job to help kids find balance.

MotherOfTwo · March 20, 2007, 8:43am

Calmom - I am sure what you say about socio-economics is true, but both my kids have the same ethnic background and parental income We are like binx’s family - I have a “1590” and a “1380”, and each one has areas in which he/she is “smarter” and more talented than the other. It is not likely that my daughter would do well as a physics or engineering major at any college, but perhaps many of the students with very high SATs would not be able to learn Chinese, as she is doing, as it requires skills not measured by the SATs.
There is a very big difference between wanting to be surrounded by people who have interesting things to talk about and who are interested in learning for learnings’ sake and wanting to be surrounded by people with high SAT scores.
Sorry for the hijack of the thread back to SAT scores!

P.S. SJMom2329 cross posted with her very insightful thoughts. Her son sounds like my son - earned excellent grades in college and also became much more social than he was in high school. I am very happy about this. My daughter excelled in her GPA at her first school, but was not happy and did not enjoy the social scene. She is doing great academically AND socially after transferring. Finding the balance between work, friends, and sleep was the challenge for both of them, as SJMom said about her son.

Allmusic · March 20, 2007, 8:47am

I don’t want this to further devolve into more SAT talk, but I have not witnessed quite what Calmom has, in that the “smartest and most interesting people seemed to have a hard time with the SAT”. There are some very interesting kids who do not necessarily do well on the SAT, but they are also not the “smartest”, at least in my very humble opinion. I have seen exceptionally smart and interesting people who do exceptionally well on the SAT.

For me, the whole conversation seems to equivocate colleges and ability, and I have never quite understood the need to do that. There simply are colleges that are a better fit, academically, intellectually, socially, etc. for different kids, even when big merit money is involved. There are kids who would be bored by certain colleges, because the intellectual culture is in some way lacking. This certainly does not mean that that college wouldn’t be a great fit for someone else, whose academic standards are not as high. There is no harm in saying this.

I don’t know why we have to pretend that college A is equivalent to college B, or that student A is comparable to student B. Perhaps a certain college IS better and a certain student IS smarter. Is there a shame in that truth?

epiphany · March 20, 2007, 8:48am

“He has limitless opportunities and an unlimited # of all sorts of people to learn with and get to know.”

sounds like an ideal environment to me, sax.

I wanted to add to my own post – which is not O/T from what you just posted, that the SAT does not select for adventurers & explorers, including those in academia, not to mention those with life-education. It doesn’t de-select for them, either. But I continue to be disappointed both that colleges “filter” (as calmom said previously) through the SAT as a metric, and that some students focus too much on whether a campus without 90% of students in a narrow range of high scores will provide a satisfying 4 years.

If one is worried about the caliber of student in the student body --which is an important concern – than visit the campus, and maybe more than once. Attend entire class sessions, in several dept’s. Read the student newspaper. Notice the kind of extracurricular activities that are available, and the interest level, attendance level in those. Talk to people on campus. Talk to profs. If the prof behaves as if your arrival is a miraculous exception to the typical student he encounters, (and your class visits confirm that), then maybe you should think twice about the challenge aspect.

Checking out test scores for verification of whether there will be intellectual stimulation is a very unreliable way to predict academic engagement among students, or between profs and students.

I also think that the experience of sax’s son illustrates & verifies why private colleges & U’s seek a broad diversity of life experiences in selecting the freshman class, and why they seem even to artificially construct this: it’s because without doing so, they won’t get the variety, necessarily, that will happen in a Public. A fairly homogenous group of prep school grads with a narrow range of test scores does not necessarily produce the optimum level of curiosity and intellectual energy that sustains the vitality of a campus, in and out of the classroom.

jyber209 · March 20, 2007, 8:55am

I enter this thread with trepidation but can’t resist sharing some thoughts, perhaps because my family may be facing a similar choice in a year, and also because we have family friends who went through two years of this.

It seems to me that some schools are using merit money to “buy” academic diversity for the college. I am not really talking about schools such as Rhodes that have a substantial core of very solid students. Rather, I am referring to schools that are lower ranked and often very regional (not known much at all outside the area) and accept a very high percentage of applicants.

I have known of numerous kids who were given mucho merit, very often free rides, as inducements to commit to such schools.

IMO it can work fine, even great, depending on the kid and the kid’s program. I am a real believer that it is the KID, not the school, that is the biggest factor in what happens.

But just as when a kid from a minority background may wonder whether her or she wants to spend four years being in an extreme minority on campus, kids who are “outliers” in terms of admissions stats may want to consider this aspect.

I would heavily recommend an extended visit if at all possible. Sit in on classes, experience the dorm life, etc. Do you find the discussions in class of interest or a bore? What are the kids talking about at lunch?

Do not be too swayed by flattery and how warm and welcoming the admissions process is. The school is using the merit money for its own purposes and that may or may not jive with the student’s own. Aside from the money, four years is a big chunk of a young, developing person’s life.

On the other hand, what’s to lose if you go for the scholarship, spend a semester or year at the school, only to become dissatisfied? That’s what TRANSFERS are for and you then know better what you most want.

Our family friend did take a merit scholarship (no family opressure to do so - family would have been full-pay but left decision totally up to kid) and spent his first year restless, wondering if he had made the right choice based perhaps on a comfort level.
He then applied to transfer to a quite selective school which had accepted him previously.
Got in.
Spent the summer wondering which he should do.
Decided to stay at merit school, which did give him lots of honors and perks and some fine classes in his field.
Spent the next year debating his decision again.
At the end of that second year, applied to transfer to same highly selective school (not IVY but very highly ranked/regarded).
Was accepted for the THIRD time - and finally went!

He is happy as a clam now. He had been forcing himself for two years to make the most of the previous place – and now the fit is a natural.

But that is just ONE individual kid’s experience.

For another kid (perhaps like mine), who is more easygoing/less intense, the story could be very different.

I also concur with the theory of “multiple intelligences” and hope that any kid could learn from being among those who have strengths other than those measured by SATs.

toneranger · March 20, 2007, 8:59am

Great post SJMom. After scanning through this thread, I was beginning to feel that - somehow - my son is lacking since he doesn’t usually spend his weekends discussing Plato with his friends. He’s a good kid, smart and hardworking and very social. He likes to “goof off” when he’s not working - playing guitar, going to silly movies, playing sports, or just hanging out. He loves his school - loves his friends, enjoy his classes and is doing well academically. Although we wonder about the college paths he did not choose, we believe he has made the right choice. He’s happy. What else do we have to go on?

marite · March 20, 2007, 9:05am

I’m with parabella’s post 533. We went to the reception for NMSFs (or was it NMFs?) and though we saw some of his friends there, not all of them were. Yet, among those who weren’t are some who got admitted to top ten schools. S did not know the SAT or AP scores of his friends in high school and no one ever mentions such scores in college.
S also has friends who were clearly not NMF material but are extremely talented in areas that the SAT or even GPAs do not measure.

curmudgeon · March 20, 2007, 9:05am

I think this is the same thing BookAddict was talking about when they said that kids shouldn’t go to the merit school with an attitude of “settling” for it. I also believe it is akin to my D’s warning not to go to a school where the kids aren’t happy to be there and proud of their school. I think we are getting close to something here. Maybe it’s a required part of a successful process for the kid to be enthused, happy, proud to be at the merit school. Not forced to make do or settling for second best. Maybe that’s where my D’s take on the special opportunities that are available , that she considered as world-class as attendance at Yale, comes in. She’s dang proud of where she is and what she’s doing.

Don’t go to a school that doesn’t fit you (has a good chance to allow you to be happy and fulfilled) just because you can get it for free/reduced price, if there are other options that you can pay for without going broke. Is that anything?

Are we getting somewhere? What do y’all think?

calmom · March 20, 2007, 9:07am

Allmusic, the reason my son had that observation about the “smartest and most interesting” kids is because he attended a school with a lot of kids from poor and working class families, and a lot of hispanic, filipino, & black kids. As far as I know he was the only Jew. I only remember him having one or two white friends.

The school also had educational practices that were designed to create more opportunities for kids that might not perform well in one context but could do better in another, with emphasis on things like group projects and integrated teaching of subjects. The AP track was open to anyone who wanted to do the extra work – the way to get into AP English was to sign up for an “Honors” component to English in the 10th grade that meant coming to after-school sessions and writing about half a dozen essays --anyone who showed up for those classes was guaranteed a spot in the AP class. My son’s sophomore year, so many kids showed up that they had to add an extra AP English class the following year to accommodate them.

So my son was surrounded by the very group that statistics show do poorly on the SAT test. A kid in a school that was more affluent, or had mostly white, Jewish or Asian kids wouldn’t see it – the dichotomy was stark precisely because of the environment my son was in.

At HIS school, all the most interesting and smartest students scored much lower on the standardized tests than he did. If I had sent him to the richer, whiter school down the road maybe he would never have noticed. But he did – and when he looked at his score and looked at his friends, he didn’t want to go to a college that had a requirement that would automatically exclude all of those friends. Keep in mind that my son was not even ranked in the top 10% of his school, and by “smartest” he was including the kids who were val & sal as well as other top performers in his class.

Allmusic · March 20, 2007, 9:07am

Well, if we were just going to talk about where kids were happy, we could have avoided the last 36 pages! ;)

garland · March 20, 2007, 9:09am

Ya know, JHS, I spend a lot of time deploring lazy swipes at Harvard on these boards, but you’re making it difficult!

simba · March 20, 2007, 9:16am

"SAT scores have a linear correlation to income level, with a steep jump at around the $80,000-$100,000 mark – so the basic information you can get from looking at SAT scores is economic. "

I frankly am very sick and tired of people confusing cause and effect. I feel like puking every time some one mentions it. Yes it may have a linear correlation with SAT score, it could also have linear correlation with height or weight or the wind velocity on test day or the planetary position.

The main reason is that people with higher income bracket generally are more educated with one or two parents having a college degree, have stable family, value education and and motivation and effort on kids part. The last one is the most important one.

I am also sick of hearing people with money can have tutors or prep classes. All it takes to score well on SAT is some work, a $20 book and determination, and elementary knowledge in math and your information processing ability in verbal section.

curmudgeon · March 20, 2007, 9:19am

Maybe, but I don’t think so allmusic. I think some kids do make bad choices, and I think some parents force the issue, too. If all one seeks from their school is what the name brings them , nothing but name will do. I can live with that. (Edit: Or if they are a kid who can’t run from the front and needs to be middle of the pack to succeed or reach their potential , then that should be addressed in the choice, too.) But something about BookAddict’s post rang true with me about this feeling of “settling” . That a year later after the kid has tried to fit their foot into a 6 suffering all the way gives up and announces that he now recognizes he was a size 10 all along. (Please no one equate size 6 as better or worse than a 10. I’m begging you. It is not meant to talk about scores or quality of the student however you define it.)

It’s not just happy, unless we broaden the usual definition of happy out a good bit.

And anyway, sometimes the answers really are simple. ;)

calmom · March 20, 2007, 9:20am

I can assure you Simba, the average family income at the elite colleges correlates very well with the SAT scores. Well over half of the kids come from families earning $100K or more.

You can see data in chart form here, correlating income to SAT score along with enrollment at a selected group of elite colleges, particularly slides 9-14:
<a href=“http://www.tiaa-crefinstitute.org/research/programs/docs/Slides110106_hill.pdf[/url]”>http://www.tiaa-crefinstitute.org/research/programs/docs/Slides110106_hill.pdf</a>

What the charts show pretty clearly is that you would start seeing a more reasonable income distribution among students at 1300 and below. There’s a big jump favoring the upper quintile of income at 1420.

So I think it’s pretty reasonable that if I see a school’s median score puts most student at 1400 and above, my kids can expect a very affluent student body.

epiphany · March 20, 2007, 9:22am

“All it takes to score well on SAT is some work, a $20 book and determination, and elementary knowledge in math and your information processing ability in verbal section.”

Wrong. The SAT does not measure “elementary knowledge in math.” It measures mathematical reasoning – not just because that’s the title of the test, but because I’ve seen the contents, as I’m sure you have. This kind of reasoning can be taught, directly & indirectly, but is often not taught. And the point is, that when it is specifically taught – via excellent math programs, or via a teacher who focuses more on math reasoning than math facts & exercises, or via a private test prep company that trains its preparers, consultants to do this – then scores on that section increase.

Same for the verbal section.

sjmom2329 · March 20, 2007, 9:22am

I think this is worth repeating. Having know a few math types in my life, I can attest that really smart people can be really silly at times. If someone thinks that all the kids at Chicago or MIT or Dartmouth, for example, are sitting around smoking pipes (tobacco!), wearing sport coats with patches on the elbow, while talking about serious matters, they probably haven’t spent much time on campus.

My experience is that very intense, smart people need to cut loose now and then. I can’t imagine a more serious, intense experience than Caltech. If those kids can have fun with a food fight, good for them. I’m sure they all had very high SATs, by the way.

weenie · March 20, 2007, 9:24am

Great post sjmom. Your feelings about a kid that “needed to go to a party school” sort of matchs the feelings I had about my eldest son, who was a bit of a homebody. Sending him to a challenging, but not overwhelming, LAC with plenty of opportunities to meet kids from around the country and a close residential feel met that criterion, without going overboard. You’ve made a good point about “well-rounded” living.

Allmusic · March 20, 2007, 9:24am

I think this is absolutely true, Cur. But this is also why I bristle when people try to equivocate different colleges, as if to purport that kids are flexible enough to be happy or productive anywhere.

No amount of merit money in the world would make my kid happy at 99% of the colleges, although for a different reason…he is a gifted musican, and while many colleges and universities have music programs, in no way would most be appropriate. They could chase after him with money; and he would be miserable in a setting with other kids who were not playing at his level. The money is honestly moot, in this respect.

I think this is true for may kids. They will be happy where they are challenged and comfortable. There is no one size fits all in this.

Your kid takes the top scholarship instead of the top school. What's next?

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