<p>Look, I thought it was provincial when I went to hs in suburban St. Louis and the GC couldn’t see beyond WashU for a smart kid. I thought it was provincial that my kids’ GC couldn’t see beyond Northwestern for a smart kid - even though that’s where S wound up. I think it’s provincial that a lot of people in my neck of the woods are completely unfamiliar with many of the great northeast schools; a great little LAC like Haverford might as well be on Mars. And it was provincial on my part when I didn’t realize that all of those UC’s which were unknown to me were actually pretty good schools and had a lot of “brand power” in CA. So why would I think it any less provincial when it works the other way? </p>
<p>“Do you think east coast parents should be encouraging their kids to apply out of region?”</p>
<p>I look at this question a different way. It’s not that I think one should or shouldn’t encourage their kids to apply out of region. It just makes intuitive sense to me that if you’re going to value a certain kind of elite education, you’d look at all the schools in that range as one package regardless of location and then go from there. It’s a big world out there; this is the time to encourage your kids to spread their wings, IMO.</p>
<p>TheGFG, Pittsburgh is not the midwest.</p>
<p>What airport does your husband generally fly out of/through?</p>
<p>It isn’t accurate to lump everyone in the Northeast together. Their are religious differences, ethnic differences etc. which create big differences in how families (and communities) view college.</p>
<p>A Catholic family in Boston whose kids are in parochial schools are not going to view Seton Hall, Notre Dame, etc. as “equivalents” to Boston College and Holy Cross, rankings be damned. An Italian family in Brooklyn (with many generations and cousins living close by) may not be encouraging a daughter to attend BU or Wash U or any other U’s-- the girls who go to college in that family go to Brooklyn or Queens or Hunter. LDS families encourage BYU (obviously) but also the second tier LDS U’s (some of the public U campuses in states with large Mormon populations). Sometimes this is just pragmatism - not every college will be as supportive of “two years in- then mission- then back for two more years” as is the norm in that community.</p>
<p>It’s fun and convenient to tag everyone in the Northeast as “prestige %^&*'s” but you’d be surprised by how concentrated the college “wish lists” are, based NOT on elitism, rankings, or anything else in some communities.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I think you have identified an important element of “regionality” in your last post. </p>
<p>There’s a standard analysis going around that basically says “red state / blue state” is misleading; it’s really “urban/rural,” with some modest differences between urban areas that wind up determining the national political map. I suspect the same is true for elite-type colleges: Their attraction is really to affluent families in major SMSAs. So, the “Midwest” is underrepresented at Harvard, but I bet “Chicagoland” is represented just fine, and also Cleveland and Minneapolis/St. Paul. And Atlanta, Miami, Dallas/Ft. Worth, and Houston. (texaspg: 35 slots is more than 2% of the Harvard class, and only 90% of the slots go to domestic students. Do you think Houston or its metropolitan area has more than 2.3% of the US population?)</p>
<p>I am not arguing that regionality doesn’t exist, but I am guessing that it’s far more significant outside major MSAs.</p>
<p>Also, the “home” MSA probably ought to be excluded from the analysis. I posit that everyone’s home MSA will be significantly overrepresented, but that means different things at Duke, Dartmouth, and Columbia.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Isn’t that too big of a generalization? </p>
<p>Does that mean that a student who might have traveled the world but happens to live in New York should travel to Michigan or Missouri to open his mind to the world? Or a student from Los Angeles to Louisiana or Alabama? </p>
<p>Do you think that TPG’s kids will be (or are) more provincial by attending a school that is in driving distance of Houston? </p>
<p>Inasmuch as I understand the theory behind the attempt to evaluate the regional or national catchment zone, it all reverts to the simple interpretation of data and the desire to read something (anything) in revised numbers. </p>
<p>In the end, it remains that it is incredibly difficult to identify CORRECTLY the zones and even more difficult to define the local, regional, national, and international appeal and attribute based on overly sketchy original data. </p>
<p>For instance, do we really think that a student from Texas should be looked at in the same way as one from Miami, if both were considered from the South? </p>
<p>And, as an another instance, what do we do we popularity of certain schools? In Texas, next to the HYPS of this world, schools such as Vanderbilt, WashU/WUSTL, and Tulane are very popular for students who think that HYPS will not happen. Do you REALLY think the students and their parents look at the distribution of the student body or … simply at the prestige vs chances of acceptance? Local or national? Pftt, that makes no difference!</p>
<p>But again, the real question to answer should be … even if this analysis WERE correct, what is the thesis and what it is the conclusion of the exercise? Is it that a school that attracts and enrolls students from ALL fifty states (not yet 58) and many countries is really nothing else than a regional powerhouse – as in the case of Stanford? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Having lived in St. Louis for a number of years I’d say St. Louis is firmly Midwestern. Historically, despite the Missouri Compromise of 1850 which made Missouri a slave state, during the Civil War Missouri leaned more to the Union side although supplied troops to both sides. Now, if you get several hours south of St. Louis, parts of Southern Missouri (e.g.Cape Girardeau) do seem more typically Southern.</p>
<p>WashU is relatively unknown in the Southeastern state where I live now. My D is a high school senior applying to WashU, and many of her friends are unaware that it exists.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I am not sure one can dismiss the travel part to other parts of the country. In theory, it should be not be harder to travel from Texas to the Northeast or Midwest than it is to California. In practice, there are simply many more options, with many that happen to NOT require stopovers in areas that suffer from inclement weather. </p>
<p>Perhaps, we should revisit this issue after Thanksgiving and Xmas, and see how the travel season went for the non-provincial students who need to navigate the skies! ;)</p>
<p>So, basically, encouraging our kids to go to colleges outside our regions is the 21st century version of the Grand Tour? </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No one is doing this. We had a NE-oriented poster on this thread who admitted to a bias against the midwest and expressed surprise that cities in other regions were actually, like, cities! No one called him a prestige #*$&% but a certain snobbishness does come through in his posts. </p>
<p>When people display this lack of awareness of other parts of the country, they come across as closed-minded–and yes, I firmly believe people like that need to get out more.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think we are talking about Texans going to California.</p>
<p>I also think the “midwest has the worst winter weather and the most flight cancellations” generalization is untrue. Among the 10 worst airports for delays and cancellations are JFK, LGA, EWR and IAD. That’s all three airports in metropolitan NYC, plus one of the DC airports. Yes, ORD and MDW are also on the list I pulled up, but other midwestern hubs are not (MSP, DTW, CVG). The others in the top 10 list were ATL (no surprise), DFW, MIA and SFO.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.weather.com/activities/travel/businesstraveler/slideshow/flight_delays.html?page=6&scheme=image-horiz-plain.css”>http://www.weather.com/activities/travel/businesstraveler/slideshow/flight_delays.html?page=6&scheme=image-horiz-plain.css</a></p>
<p>If you live in the NE, and your kids attend a college in region, there’s a good chance they can just take the train. Or drive themselves home if they have a car on campus. It does make xiggi’s holiday scenarios easier. That’s just a fact.</p>
<p>No one disagrees with this. I would kill for better train service in the midwest.</p>
<p>But to hear people say their kid can’t consider a midwestern college because it’s hard to get to but they can somehow manage to fly them back and forth to Palo Alto seems a little disingenuous at best.</p>
<p>
Don’t be silly. It was just a fictional way of describing a journey of a shift from “region vs region” view to “city vs rurual area” view, which could happen to a lot of people and isn’t the most naïve thing as you made it sound like. And I’ve travelled more than you’d ever know. Thank you very much.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>How provincial! </p>
<p>Forgive me for missing what the essence of “what we are talking about” really is. Really! </p>
<p>Fwiw, one of my cousins just started his freshman year in St Louis. I’ll be following the weather patterns and his travel to Texas. Unfortunately, I cannot draw conclusions as I do not have as many cousins as Cobrat. </p>
<p>Assuming some hypothetical north eastern board reader looking at colleges for her children: There are many excellent colleges nearby. The holiday, beginning & end of term logistics will be easier. She can afford to send her kids to summer programs in other areas of the US and in other countries, maybe they have already been to such programs. What is the argument the kids need to go out of region if they can get into their choices in region? Provincialism, still?</p>
<p>All other things being equal, if a choice exists, you still think they should go to a comparable mid-west or west coast college?</p>
<p>My sister went from the middle of Wis to Middlebury. It was hell as it involved going to Chicago and that might have be 2-3 stops as the regional planes would stop all over, and then a flight to Boston, and then somehow getting to VT. Even in the 1970’s, it would have been easier to go west to San Fran or LA, because really the hard part was Boston to Middlebury. Probably still is.</p>
<p>Good luck getting a family in New Jersey to consider Santa Clara when Seton Hall is an NJ Transit $3 bus ride from their home.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t presume to tell a family living in the Bay area that they should be looking at NYU or Columbia when they’ve got Berkeley (or any other number of UC’s sitting in the backyard), nor do I think it’s provincial of them to want their kids to go to one of them.</p>
<p>But it makes that family in NJ hicks for wanting the kid to stay close to home- both for costs and for logistics?</p>
<p>Just looking for some consistency here. It’s provincial to prefer a second tier school close to home vs. a second tier school far away, or it’s only provincial when an Northeast family prefers Dartmouth to Stanford?</p>
<p>And just for the record- I’m not one to claim that it’s so hard to travel outside the region and I travel for work regularly. And it’s not so hard- to some places. But I’d need a good reason to consider Beloit over Conn College (not saying I wouldn’t consider it- just would need a reason) given that Conn College is on Amtrak and Beloit requires a day of travel. And since the “geographic diversity” or relative prestige factors of those schools is likely similar, not sure what is gained by the exercise.</p>
<p>Go to Cal Tech out of region? I get that.</p>
<p>I don’t want to think of myself as provincial, but the only OOS on DS’s Naviance list is MIT. I had him add CMU just because, but I don’t see how that might be so much better than, say, UCB to be worth the extra cost. What with the UCs being $30Kish in state with 5 of them ranked in the top 10 publics (more than our 12% fair share) and potential options like Caltech and Stanford and other very STEMy private schools in state, I don’t see the advantage of going out of region except for a place like MIT.</p>
<p>We do have kids from his HS who apply to and attend Ivys, but the perception, at least here, is that the Ivys mostly aren’t as STEMy as he’ll be looking for. Maybe that is provincial of us.</p>
<p>I attended college out of my region (Western->Southern), because it was free with National Merit.</p>
<p>xiggi, no need to be snarky. And you are missing the point. I was responding to posters who say it is difficult or impossible to travel from the northeast to the midwest because of weather delays and awful airports.</p>
<p>alh, I agree with you. No one “needs” to go outside their region unless they want to and there is something worth going for. I have one kid who has gone far and another who won’t be. No one here has ever said it is essential to leave one’s home area for college. What some of us are saying is that if college is supposed to be a time to open one’s mind, and one has some very established prejudices against other parts of the country (or other types of people, or…) that this might be a good time to do that.</p>
<p>Overall the point some of us are trying to make is that people can’t have it both ways–be able to call midwestern or southern kids unsophisticated or provincial because they want to go to Michigan or Georgia Tech or wherever (not to mention “settling” because they are not aiming for an elite northeastern school) while at the same time vehemently defend the northeastern kids who want to be within a few hours from home.</p>
<p>Going out of region for college is not a guarantee that one’s biases regarding that region will be lessened. (Texas A&M grad here–just saying…)</p>