<p>After reading this thread I have a few thoughts:
First: The decision on where to attend college is unique to each individual. If 8 kids decided to attend BC there were 8 different reasons why. We can speculate all we want, but keep in mind that those numbers represent actual people. College is a time to specialize. Many kids enter schools that aren’t widely viewed as great schools, but have an exceptional reputation in their intended field. It’s impossible to know that from the numbers alone.</p>
<p>Second: As far as college decisions go financial aid can play a huge part. One of the first things the college counselors at my school said when we were getting ready to start the admissions process was that prep school was much more generous with aid than most colleges. From talking with people at my school that was very true. There are lots of discussions on CC about whether to go to a “lesser” school with lots of merit aid or going to a “better” school and having to take out hundreds of thousands in loans. Those discussions happen at prep school too and should not be minimized.</p>
<p>Kraordrawoh - As a recent grad of prep school I thought the college counseling was very good. My counselor really took the time to get to know my priorities and listened to what I wanted in a school. I had a few colleges in mind and he gave me a list of 10 or so that he thought I might like. After doing some research on my own I was able to narrow down the list. The college counseling department was there to answer any and all questions from admissions tests to financial aid to athletics. I felt that college counseling was a team. If my individual counselor didn’t know the answer, he would look to the others and find what I wanted to know.</p>
<p>To those of you who argue that it is <em>common</em> that BS graduates turn down a high ranked college such as an Ivy: do you think potentially there could be - say 40% - instead of the current 30%+ of Andover graduates each year who could attend Ivies+SM, as some of them may be able to but choose not to apply or not to attend ivies and the like? I don’t believe it. I think it could happen but it’s far from being common (and therefore it doesn’t have statistical significance). Prove me wrong if you could. I’d love to be proved wrong on this.</p>
<p>The college counselors office will have the exact percentage of number of kids who turn down Ivies for a ‘lesser’ college, but I’ve haven’t seen it published. We personally know two seniors this year, and we really don’t know that many seniors, who turned down their Harvard acceptances to attend a non Ivy. In fact not even close to an Ivy. Why would they do that? These other colleges (places we wouldn’t even consider ourselves at this point for our child at Deerfield) gave them full academic scholarships whereas Harvard would have been full pay.</p>
<p>@two: Thanks for your description. Did you experience or hear of friends who felt they were discouraged from applying to a school in order to manage the number of applicants from your school? Just wondering.</p>
<p>Since we basically just got done with the BS app process, I don’t have much to contribute to college discussions for now…</p>
<p>However, here are a two anecdotal examples I’ve observed over the past year:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>HS seniors I know going to southern schools instead of the usual NY/NJ/PA + NE schools. A few of them because of merit scholarships offered…kids are from what seem like full pay families to me.</p></li>
<li><p>A Senior at one of the BS on our short list NOT getting into an IVY s/he applied to early…matriculated at Georgetown and definitely seemed sheepish about admitting this when I inquired at the revisit. Kid seemed like a lock for IVY, IMO…goes to show you how much has changed since my alma mater let me in years ago!</p></li>
</ul>
<p>FWIW, while I think SevenDaughter will have the scores/academics/temperament to go Ivy+M/S/Williams, I’ll definitely suggest some outr</p>
<p>Wow, is this bash a Catholic university thread? I attended Georgetown. I am the only member of my family who did not attend HYP and two other Ivy’s so I have seen up close how the education compares. There are other reasons one chooses a school besides reputation. I have yet to see any school (save for George Washington University) that can begin to offer the opportunities for real world work and academic exposure to government that Georgetown does. If you are a driven student that wants this exposure you will be hard pressed to choose HYP over Georgetown. BTW, I applied to Georgetown early because it was my first choice. Also, knowing the results of my education, I wouldn’t trade what I learned at GU for an education at Harvard or Yale. Now that I am long graduated and have seen much more of the world, I might trade it for a Princeton education but that is still only a might. I think it is truly impossible to look at statistics on a page and know what drives people to decide on certain colleges vs. others. As someone said earlier, there are as many reasons to choose a school as there are people who choose them.</p>
<p>Talk about going off track… why are you bringing religion and Georgetown into picture? We are discussing why smart people from Andover would want to go to BC after spending 200K for high school?</p>
<p>Because BC and Georgetown are both Catholic universities and the implication on and off in this thread has been that both would not be someone’s first choice of school after having attended Andover and both are completely within the realm of being first choice schools for the right person.</p>
<p>I said “might” and I rejected that I would trade it for the other two equally “prestigious” Ivy League schools of Harvard and Yale. The reason I said I might has nothing to do with the reputation of these schools and all that I know about the education one actually receives while there. With the hindsight of many years I believe that there are some things that I might have learned at Princeton that could have helped me in where my life has taken me. However, I am not sure I would trade that for what I know I got at Georgetown and would not have gotten at Princeton. So, my point remains the same, for some people, regardless of where they attend high school, the education offered at a school like Georgetown or BC might actually be a better fit for what they want to learn in their college years.</p>
<p>@sonoratoo: In the case of the senior I referred to in my post, Georgetown, while a fine school, was not the student’s first choice, having applied early to a non-HYP Ivy.</p>
<p>Thanks SevenDad, I understood that. I do think the implication can be taken by the post that there was something off about the child having not been accepted to the Ivy League schools and therefore embarrassed by going to Georgetown and you surprised because you thought she should have gotten into an Ivy. If you look at many top BS matriculation lists Georgetown is often the most attended school (5th on the matriculation list for Andover between Columbia and Stanford according to BSReview stats) so I have a hard time processing the distinction between getting accepted to an Ivy league school and GU. I haven’t looked at admittance rates recently but in my day it was just as hard to get into either. My only intended point was that for many this distinction is not made at all. Many people believe a good education can be had at any of these schools and that the applicant needs to find the school that offers the education he/she wants.</p>
<p>@sonoratoo: College matriculation out of boarding school has been an occasionally hotly debated topic here on CC over the year or so that I’ve been active on the BS forum. </p>
<p>While I agree that GU is a great school, it was not this particular student’s first choice. And yes, I did get the sense on that BS campus that “it had not been a banner year for college matriculations”…</p>
<p>Your closing sentence “Many people believe a good education can be had at any of these schools and that the applicant needs to find the school that offers the education he/she wants.” is one that I agree with not just for college, but for BS as well.</p>
<p>I can definitely understand why there are over 3mm posts in the Colleges and Universities forum. Honestly, there’s really a wide range of school types among the Ivy League. For a career minded student (business or government) who may want a major urban location, I can’t see why Dartmouth or Cornell (or for that matter Duke, Williams, Amherst, etc.) would make the list, whereas, Penn, Columbia, and Georgetown might easily. The variation in university/college settings is actually far greater than BS where Andover, MA qualifies as an urban location. :)</p>
<p>I like what I’ve heard so far. It sounds like many kids from top prep schools are competitive even for the most selective colleges and the matriculation stats do not accurately reflect - or we should say the popular perceptions about college admission success distorts - the competitiveness of the the top prep school graudates in the “college admission market”. They are actually more competitive than it seems for the most selective colleges although some of them choose not to take the most popular for various valid reasons. I am happy about this realization.</p>
<p>The problem with narrower indices is the lack of subtlety your example demonstrates, plus the weightings sometimes seem absurd when you look closely. For instance, if you look at the Matric Top Index, liberal arts schools like Middlebury or Wellesley receive a 4, whereas Brown gets a 2, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UVA, Georgetown and UCLA get a token 1. Models are only as good as their inputs, alas.</p>
Honestly, there’s really a wide range of school types among the Ivy League. For a career minded student (business or government) who may want a major urban location, I can’t see why Dartmouth or Cornell (or for that matter Duke, Williams, Amherst, etc.) would make the list, whereas, Penn, Columbia, and Georgetown might easily. The variation in university/college settings is actually far greater than BS where Andover, MA qualifies as an urban location. :)</p>