<p>My first 3 kids went to selective schools that fit them. Child #4 is at a very good engineering program at a state school and he seems to be doing ok. Honors program, honors dorm, good kids to hang with. He is not a major over-achiever, even though he is very smart, and it was a tossup which would be worse–to be trampled at a very selective school, or join the slackers at a less selective school.</p>
<p>However, (and this is strictly anecdotal) a friend’s brilliant son started off at the same state school and after the first quarter said “Get me out of here.” He was a humanities major so that supports what the poster said above.</p>
<p>I’d chime in on the humanities/science issue: It is a lot easier for a STEM-type kid to have high stats in HS, because they ace the math/science classes and can usually hunker down and get the As on English and History tests, and do well enough on those sections of ACT/SAT not to bring their composite down.</p>
<p>Many humanities/SS students are not good at math and science and tend to be lopsided. I have one of each in my Ds, and while D1 (the science one) did get a 4.0 and high test scores, D2, whose GPA is much lower due to math and science grades (although has the same ACT) can talk and write circles around her sister, reads more, and probably is more interesting to be in class with (sorry D1!).</p>
<p>So before you put down kids whose stats don’t “prove” that they are worth being in class with - please think about them a little more holistically.</p>
<p>D2 also is looking for specialized arts programs, and we’ve found that at the “lower” schools D’s looking at, the arts students are immensely capable and looking for rigor in their own way, even if they weren’t stellar students in HS. I feel bad for the young woman described above, where the academics at her “lower-stat” school have been so disappointing. We’ve looked carefully at that everywhere D is applying; ideally you hope for the best quality in both, but sometimes the artistic program is best - or the one you get into - at the “lower” school. I do believe that the honors program at the school she is strongly considering will work for her - we got tangible information on how the two programs mesh, and talked to several students who say it is working well for them. I don’t think it’s a downside that for her the honors classes will be all humanities and social science (this is the school with the Great Books program); I think she’ll be happy to “take a break” with basic classes in math and science and save her stress for what’s important to her.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for my D, the BFAs at the most rigorous schools are also the hardest to get into artistically (and the high selectivity may in fact be due to the attraction for so many kids of a BFA at a high-level university, as well as the quality of the program). For us, we’re trying to find a good common point for two criteria, similar to anyone looking for a specialized program. </p>
<p>I also want to put in a plug for late bloomers. I refuse to believe that anyone’s grades and scores from HS define them for the rest of their life.</p>
<p>State universities (including flagships) tend to provide plenty of examples in students who went to community college for their freshman and sophomore work and then transferred as juniors. Some of them are older students who decided to go back to school to get a bachelor’s degree after realizing that their messing around in high school and lower end jobs afterward were not going to get them very far in the rest of their life. Others went to community college first for financial reasons, or (in the case of recent immigrants) because they needed a few more years to learn English better.</p>
<p>Note, however, that size of school makes a difference. In some cases, larger may be better. For example, consider a public school with 1000 students per grade and a selective prep school with 100 students per grade. Is it necessarily true that, for a high performing highly motivated student, that the prep school is “better”?</p>
<p>Not necessarily. If the large public school has 200 out of 1000 students per grade whose performance matches or exceeds the prep school students, then the public school will likely offer the same type of honors / AP courses as the prep school, and a high performing highly motivated student will find an academic peer group in his/her grade at the public school that is larger than the entire grade at the prep school, even though the overall average student performance at the public school may be much lower.</p>
<p>The same can apply to comparisons between Giant State University and Small Elite Private University. Of course, in each case, the specific schools need to be considered, as blanket statements either way will not be true for all comparisons.</p>
<p>My observation, after reading this thread, is that if you are contemplating sending your kid to a school where he is significantly above average in stats, you need to look very carefully at how the school treats kids like that. Do they make it easy to place into higher level courses? Are there a lot of general core classes that everybody has to take?Do they have an honors program that includes a substantial number of honors-only classes? Do they have special housing for honors students? Does the school have plenty of organizations that are likely to appeal to these students? Are there departments that are known to be particularly strong or weak?</p>
<p>“why doesn’t he continue at USC and get a Phd in 2 years or less.”
Good grief POIH, next time why don’t you try reading ALL of my post and you will see that I already provided the answer to your question before you even asked it! </p>
<p>“He didn’t apply to those graduate programs because of the “prestige” factor of those universities, but because they have the best PHD programs and professors in his particular field of study.”</p>
<p>“What difference a Phd from Stanford or Caltech will make?”
"why is rigor any less important for the undergraduate program? "
In the scientific world, [at least in his highly specialized field,] for those wishing to be scientists- WHO you studied under/ worked with in Grad school makes all the difference. And the best profs /scientists in his field are at CT and Stanford.</p>
<p>Also agree with Hunt! And as a community member that is asked to present at my area HS junior parent’s night- I get asked the question that started this thread, frequently. You all have made great contributions and I will recommend parents and students sign up for this site/read the forum while going through the college search process.</p>
Oh absolutely. But you can do that at any school. Right now I have a huge folder of interesting scholarly articles and a pile of library books on my dorm desk, none of which are related to my actual research papers. I think it goes back to the distinction that I made earlier: enriching and challenging vs. the most enriching and challenging for a given student. If the student is motivated, s/he will do independent scholarly reading at any school, and at some schools will get the additional benefit of high-level in-class discussion.</p>
<p>I admit that all of my comments are biased toward the ivory-scholar type student, as I am myself. I enjoy the real world well enough, but I would love to work in higher ed for the rest of my life. ;)</p>
<p>
But the “better” prep school experience isn’t just about size of peer group. It’s also about tiny LAC-style roundtable classes, for instance, and the Socratic method. I don’t know of any public school that can afford to put 8-12 students in a typical classroom.</p>
<p>
One might also easily argue that the name of your undergraduate institution–and perhaps more importantly, the preparation received there, regardless of grades–is extremely important for graduate school. Not everyone wants to attend grad school, of course, but many do. For those students, I believe there is a difference between being well-prepared at the top of your major at a mid-tier state university not particularly known for that major, and feeling confident that grad school will be easier than undergrad because all of the alumni say so.</p>
<p>This is an excellent, thought-provoking discussion thread, and I agree that it depends very much on the individual student and school. A college or university should be able to handle a range of abilities among its students; unfortunately, some do and some do not. We have opted to apply only to the schools that should be challengeing based on scores and stats, given our experiences for years at a school where there were rarely academic challenges, and the contrast between that school and academic summer camps. In addition, we made this decision based on our own experiences as undegrads. I would not trade my undergraduate experience for anything. I knew that any class I chose to take, no matter how far afield from my ultimate major, would be enlightening, taught by a professor who was highly-regarded in the field, and that the class discussion would add greatly to the experience. In addition, I cannot count the very late nights and early mornings I spend in someone’s room, discussing everything under the sun from the grammatical and spelling oddities of Sanskrit to the unique interrelationship of art, politics and literature in 19th century France.</p>
<p>"I don’t think USC is what most posters on this thread would consider a problematic academic fit. "
Nor now perhaps as much, but 5 years ago, when he was accepted, USC had an acceptance rate of 40%, and was not nearly as well thought of as it is now…</p>
<p>"feeling confident that grad school will be easier than undergrad because all of the alumni say so. "
??? PHD programs in grad school are NEVER easier than UG! Where did you get THAT idea?
And a very small % of UGs at USC go on to PHD programs. So his getting into S or CT was never a sure thing .</p>
<p>POIH – actually, these students attended the same program my S1 did, which I have written you about privately. Avg. SAT for kids in the program is ~2230, 50% make NMSF with the highest cutoff in the country. Our local flagship snags Intel STS and Siemens finalists, International Olympiad medalists, 2400 SATs, etc. from this public HS program. I could bombard you with other awards and accomplishments, but I’m not going to violate their privacy. The flagship is well known for outstanding STEM programs and knows how to nurture the these kids.</p>
<p>The local prep schools cannot begin to meet the needs of these kids, and with two outstanding STEM public high schools in the area, they don’t even try to compete. </p>
<p>If we lived in a different part of the country, we probably would have been compelled to go the private route. But in this area, the tippy-top kids are at the public IB and STEM programs. Private does not automatically mean better. Glad it worked out for your kid, but don’t disparage mine.</p>
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<p>Our experience has been that undergraduate merit scholarship awards cannot be applied to obtaining graduate degrees. The school may let the student begin taking graduate courses freshman year, but those count towards meeting the undergrad degree requirements. That’s the case at our flagship as well as S1’s school. </p>
<p>Agree with meloparkmom. At the PhD level, it’s who you’re working with that counts. Certainly is the case for what S1 wants to pursue in grad school.</p>
<p>“Our experience has been that undergraduate merit scholarship awards cannot be applied to obtaining graduate degrees.”
True. Son took 30% more classes than were required for an UG degree, including Grad courses, but they all counted toward his Bachelor’s.</p>
<p>"If we lived in a different part of the country, we probably would have been compelled to go the private route. But in this area, the tippy-top kids are at the public IB and STEM programs. "
Wish we had lived in your area when son was in HS! That would have saved us some big $$</p>
Shrug. I wouldn’t know, obviously. That is, though, exactly what MANY alumni of my school say. Admittedly my interest is not in the sciences, so I haven’t bothered to pay attention to what the “science” alumni say.</p>
<p>CountingDown - Your kids’ public magnet is not what POIH means by “low performing public,” I’m sure. It’s a fact that many kids from “average” high schools do get into the top colleges.</p>
<p>OK question to ask, but be aware of the impact of self-segregation – the artists, late bloomers, and non-traditional students have a lot to offer, and someone who enters college with the idea that they can only rub elbows with fellow high school super-stars my be diminishing their overall experience from the outset, especially at a larger university. </p>
<p>I’d look more at overall structure and policies – whether the student has flexibility about which courses to enroll in (upper level, graduate courses). But be aware that just because it isn’t official or written down doesn’t mean it can’t be done – my son came in as a transfer to a CSU, signed up for the upper level courses in his major, and then as a senior successfully petitioned for waiver of some of the lower level courses he had missed.</p>
<p>
You’re making the same bad assumption that POIH made – that students who didn’t excel in high school and have super SAT scores have nothing to contribute. </p>
<p>
My experience – and that of my kids - has been that the LAC-style seminars can be very limiting. It takes a very gifted professor to keep those going. Otherwise it often happens that the first class meetings are very stimulating, but as the semester wears on the classes are dominated by the same students who are simply spouting different iterations of the same ideas or perspective over and over. You know who is going to speak up before you get to class, and you know what that person is going to say before he or she opens her mouth. There is less peer-level dialog going on in a large class, but one advantage of a lecture is that the person doing most of the talking actually knows more about what he or she is talking about than the others in the room. </p>
<p>Also, sometimes in a large university setting, students seek out the peers on their own, and can come up with better than they would get in the classroom setting. That is, the student in a lecture class may form a study group, and deliberately seek out the students who seem to be the smartest in the class for feedback.</p>
As applied to a specific student, this is absolutely false–there will always be exceptional students with less-than-exceptional stats. But as applied to broad swaths of colleges and universities, the holistic admissions process must have SOME effect; otherwise, there would be no difference between Harvard and University of Minnesota-Morris. (Not to disparate UMM, which is a wonderfully nurturing public LAC, but the academics and peer group alike are not elite-level.)</p>
<p>I’m not saying that humanities classes at a lower-tier state university are all boring and dead of discussion. I am saying that if one is a high-achieving, highly motivated humanities/social science student who nevertheless is not committed to one exact major, then the academic experience at an “academic par” institution is more likely to be the most challenging. That doesn’t mean that schools where the majority of students “didn’t excel in high school and [didn’t] have super SAT scores” will be unchallenging, but it means that you’ll have to work harder to get to point B, and maybe never get to point B.5.</p>
<p>
Sure, valid points. Some people are better-suited for LACs, others for larger universities. My own experience in 1.5 semesters of an elite LAC–8 students is the sweet spot for size, 4 and 12 can both work very well depending on the particular students, and trying to hold a discussion-based seminar with 21 students is noticeably less productive. I have taken 5 seminar-size courses, 2 courses in the ~20-student range (one was an overenrolled seminar, the other a part-lecture science course), and audited the stereotypical 120-person lecture course. I am unofficially auditing the large lecture, in fact, because it was such a stark contrast in quality of learning–though the professor is engaging and well-informed–to the rest of my classes, that I didn’t see the point in wasting a credit. My friend who stayed enrolled in the class and enjoys it, freely admits that he enjoys the rote-memorization style of learning as a break from the intensity of other classes.</p>
<p>In summary, my experience as a current student is that LAC-style seminars depend equally on the students as on the professor. If the students are engaged enough, even a mediocre professor is good enough to sit back and let the conversation develop organically. Alternately, a gifted professor can gently nurture discussion in an average group of students. I’ve never actually experienced the stereotype of a discussion-based class being dominated by a few broken-record students, which leads me to believe that they are relatively rare, just as the absolutely terrible and unredeemable lecture class is also relatively rare.</p>
<p>Does my anecdote mean anything? Nope; it’s just another blip in the eternal argument about LAC vs. university teaching styles.</p>
<p>On an different note: I am struck by how wonderful it is to be in class with intellectual peers of my own age. Starting in middle school, I discovered online communities and intellectual peers full of fruitful discussion–but they were all 10 years older than me. It was liberating to write comments and engage in debate while being treated as an adult; but it was lonely, too. I went to a competitive high school whose academic focus was antithetical to my own (math/science vs. humanities), so that was a pretty lonely experience, too, even though I kept the literary magazine going by force of will with a few friends and was in the habit of hanging around the English hallway just to chat with teachers.</p>