<p>Oh my. I need to get my last one into college so I can be done with this stuff and just hang out on the Dressing Young thread.</p>
<p>TAMS is mostly rigorous in sciences. I looked at it for my kid two years ago and decided even for one going to be in a STEM field, it was not something I wanted to push. </p>
<p>[The</a> Academic Program | TAMS](<a href=“http://tams.unt.edu/academics/academic-program#diploma]The”>http://tams.unt.edu/academics/academic-program#diploma)</p>
<p>You know I wonder if parents encouraging these sorts of super-technical pathways for kids have really paid attention to the fact that people like Jobs, Gates and Zuckerman (sp? the facebook guy) were fairly broadly educated types, not on the engineering track from the cradle. In the final analysis, the big impacts on our society from technology have needed geniuses who can straddle and understand how markets work.</p>
<p>Also, getting really, really, really good at math and chem and physics is wonderful and useful and marketable. But vulnerable to outsourcing. Would that it could be so easy to be truly secure in the emerging crazy economy.</p>
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<p>If you believe Wikipedia:</p>
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<p>Fwiw, I am not sure how much more should be said (and learned) about the Newsweek/Jay the Moron high school hitparade and the AP/IB factories versus the ROW.</p>
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<p>I went to one of the alphabet soup consortium (e.g., school like annasdad’s imsa).
In english and history, 3 out of 5 of my teachers had been professors at state flagships or better (one top 10 school). The elective offerings were pretty exotic to my recollection. One of my foreign language instructors won a Fullbright scholarship; foreign language was complete immersion from day 1. </p>
<p>I don’t see why it is so outlandish, other than the name of the school, that a math/science school could be better at humanities. </p>
<p>Is it better than Exeter? I really don’t know. But I certainly think these schools are being unfairly pigeonholed. In some ways, I think TJ & co. is a lot more like Swarthmore than Caltech…One thing I do know…the humanities at TJ is a lot better than a regular public high school, even a good one…</p>
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<p>Well, allow me to rephrase your earlier statement as follows:</p>
<p>“Although I really don’t know, I think it is possible that the humanities classes at TJ, TAMS, IMSA, etc. could be better than Exeter, Andover, and co…”</p>
<p>The alphabet soup schools form a remarkable group, but that was not the point of the comparison to the tony academies. In Dallas, Texas, there are two similar schools that routinely top the WaPo list of Jay Mathews: </p>
<p>Source: <a href=“http://apps.washingtonpost.com/highschoolchallenge/[/url]”>http://apps.washingtonpost.com/highschoolchallenge/</a> </p>
<p>RANK SCHOOL CITY STATE E&E% SUBS. LUNCH INDEX
1 Science/Engineering Magnet Dallas TX 100.00 63.00 17.186
2 Talented and Gifted Dallas TX 100.00 33.00 16.667</p>
<p>Making a statement that such schools could be better for humanities than a number of local and public high schools in Dallas would raise more than a few eyebrows. Better than Exeter or Andover? OK, let me blunt … people would laugh at you and say “Bless you heart!”</p>
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<p>Jobs and Gates went to high school before most of these magnet schools existed. (Plus, Jobs needed Wozniak to do the technical stuff.) And as I said, youtube, yelp, and paypal were founded by math/science magnet school alumni. I hope you’re not setting the bar at facebook.</p>
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<p>Well, I think my statement “I would bet that…” is more reasonable than the statement, “I would rather send my kid to a regular public school than TJ/TAMS because the humanities are stronger at a regular school.”</p>
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<p>PhDs by department:</p>
<p>Math: 9/12
Science: 12/16
History & Social Science: 7/8
English: 3/8
Languages, Fine Arts, PE: 0/15
Overall: 31/59</p>
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<p>I don’t think you need to wait. I can’t imagine this thread is of much help vis-a-vis senior year college applications. If it is, you could probably just look up one of the other 100 or so threads on basically the same topic matter.</p>
<p>For anyone interested, they can find my “Oxford Secret” post here:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/williams-college/50094-anyone-choosing-williams-over-princeton.html?highlight=oxford+secret[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/williams-college/50094-anyone-choosing-williams-over-princeton.html?highlight=oxford+secret</a></p>
<p>^^^
That’s an excellent article, quite a pleasure to read. THanks.</p>
<p>At the risk of truly offending some sensibilities, Collegealum, I think counting numbers of humanities PhDs on faculty at a high school is sort of a quant and clueless approach to characterizing the humanities education at a high school. There are a great many unemployed and underemployed humanities PhDs around. The fact that lots of them are teaching at a high school can mean a lot or nothing. The fact that a technical high school would point to this as some sort of proof that they do humanities as well as Andover is just silly. My kids have had PhD teachers in high school for science, math, English and history. Some have been good, some not so good. In fact, a few of the worst had PhDs.</p>
<p>Oh, and Paypal vs Facebook. Right. No comparison of the societal impact between the two.</p>
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<p>Why does everyone need to aspire to be a Jobs, Gates, or Zuckerman? I’d be happy argue Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had a much bigger impact on the world than Zuckerman did. And, heck, if you want to compare more recent people, how about Larry Page and Sergey Brin?</p>
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<p>Well, there is no other way to prove quality; I was impressed with it, but there’s no point in me saying that. And I said that they had been professors at major universities, not that they just had PhDs. I’m assuming there is some quality control there in the hiring of faculty. </p>
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<p>I think Youtube had a fairly large societal impact…But there’s only one facebook. I guess if the Youtube/paypal/ had gone to Exeter, they would’ve been affected society even more?</p>
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<p>That’s interesting because Jobs died the same week as Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C language and unix. A lot of people think Ritchie had a greater impact on society than Jobs, though there are no public memorials for him.</p>
<p>Why does it have to be a contest? Can’t it be “yes, and” instead of “no, but”?</p>
<p>Go back to the genesis of this thread - Caltech was named #1 in some ranking and someone (I think it was tk) said that it struck him that Caltech was too niche in nature to be fairly called the world’s top university, and off we all went to the races. Such a statement didn’t mean that Caltech - or STEM-focused schools in general - aren’t valuable though. What ever happened to the concept of “it’s all good”? You’ve got the dorks here on CC who think that anything not HYPSM dooms you to flipping burgers the rest of their lives – and they can’t possibly conceive that there are many fine schools in this country. And now there’s some kind of competition above to try to prove that STEM-magnet schools are “better” than either generalist public hs or generalist private hs. What is the freaking purpose of this competition?</p>
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<p>“A lot of people” – where? In techie circles?</p>
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<p>I think it’s fair to say that people were disparaging the humanities program at so-called STEM-magnet schools, and by extension, trying to reason that their graduates are somehow limited in their abilities.</p>
<p>If it’s in techie circles why does it even matter?! Joe Schmoe is probably not going to even know who Dennis Ritchie is, but why do we care about his opinion? It’s very similar to how schools like Williams and Chicago can still offer very quality educations, maybe even better than Harvard, but Joe Schmoe can only recognize Harvard…</p>