I think it’s individual student-dependent whether a person will prosper better in an environment where the typical student is on par, below or above their own academic level. My oldest has tended to benefit from schools and classes where the other students set the bar pretty high and he disciplines himself to reach it. If the bar was low he would inevitably, subconsciously adapt to that too. He knows this about himself and tended to look for schools with high academic reputations, though still avoiding those with the most “sweaty” / “hardcore” reputations where he worried he would just be miserable. Some other students subconsciously like being the ones to set the bar and feel good about themselves. Some like the role of mentor and feel comfortable when they are helping other less advanced students. There isn’t one answer. Sure there always has to be someone near the top of the curve at any school. But some of those people thrive being there and others waste potential.
Obviously we need to have some set of criteria to cross schools off the “list”, I don’t disagree. But I believe, all be it naively perhaps, that when you are looking at the top 150-ish USNWR ranked national universities (or top 10 ranked regional/lac schools), where most of your “wunderkind” are likely to end up, you are truly splitting hairs when you decide to axe schools because the 25%-75% ACT range is 25-30, 28-32 vs 30-36. There are so many factors that play into standardized test scores, economics being the biggest factor, you may as well make the weather your deciding factor. Really what kid wants to schlep to class is 4 feet of snow for 3 or 4 months of class? If they are not going to be motivated by their “stupid” peers then they are just as likely to be the kind of kid who would be stymied something as superficial as the weather, IMO.
The fact is, opportunity and intellectual stimulation exists, in abundance, at all of these schools. Subtly blaming “less academically talented” classmate for your/your child’s inability to seek out these opportunities, to thrive and succeed, is disingenuous. Unless your wunderkind is likely to have a career in some think tank (and really there are not many kids that are at that level), then the reality is that they are going to have to learn to deal with and rise to the top AND be an effective leaders of those poor unfortunate souls who just don’t meet their intellectual acuity.
I recently had to correct a family member who made the statement that she was worried that her B student wouldn’t get into a “good” school. I pointed out that an IVY league or similar was not likely but there are LOTS of good schools where her child can get accepted and thrive. I gave some examples, my one alma mater being one.
@labegg “the reality is that they are going to have to learn to deal with and rise to the top AND be an effective leaders of those poor unfortunate souls who just don’t meet their intellectual acuity.” lol So true! DS has had a lot of experience with a wide range of intellectual abilities as a mentor for the Debate class (he’s taken it for 4 years) & team. I feel it’s been a really valuable lesson for him in learning how to interact with people of all different opinions and levels of intellect.
We encouraged DS to look at schools where he was above the top 25% to increase his merit chances. He really wants to go to school in DC, so we researched GTown, GW & AU. We did not visit GTown because he was solid middle for GTown and we would be full pay. We visited GW & AU. AU became his top choice.
GW - The Information session was such a train wreck that I didn’t even want to go on the tour. A student was leading the info session and she kept saying how she was graduating and didn’t have a job! Her major was IR - the one my son was considering. It hard to describe how disjointed the information session was. We did tour and the young man giving the tour redeemed the school. However, DS didn’t like the split campus. So it is his second choice school. He did however love that Chick-Fil-A was a campus dining choice.
AU - We are a pretty sarcastic bunch, so we all agreed the video was complete cheese. However, the Admissions Officer was really informative and I felt like I walked away with invaluable information on the admissions process for AU (and other schools). My son loved the campus - it’s a 15 minute walk from one end to the other. He has attended camps at Kansas U (so many hills and very spread out! But it’s beautiful!) and one thing he was looking for was a smaller easy to navigate campus. When he heard about their CLEG major - he was all in! He said t was like someone took all the things he loves an created a degree for him. Our tour guide was really good and my son felt like he was a guy he could relate to. My son didn’t want a school where Greek Life was a major part of campus life. When a third perspective student asked about Greek Life - seriously it’s like they weren’t listening at all - the tour guide got this look on his face like he really wanted to say something snarky, but he answered nicely. My son was like well he doesn’t like Greek life either. He’s planning on applying ED1 to AU. We went back for a preview day and that further confirmed that this was the right fit for him.
Those were the only schools we toured for him. We went to a college fair early on and two of the Admission Reps had a real impact on him:
TCU - Went of the list! He thought the guy was arrogant and presented the school as elitist. My take was slightly different, I felt he was proud of how nice TCU’s facilities were and of the caliber of students that TCU attracts.
Drake - Went on the list. The rep talked about how there was a place for everyone a Drake. He liked the inclusiveness. It’s at the bottom because he does not want to go to school in Des Moines. We haven’t visited, but we may for DD.
@twinsmama "I spent all the years of my education - including med school, surprisingly - amidst classmates who were less academically talented than I was (although many of them were more intelligent and/or talented in other ways). It wasn’t good for me. I didn’t learn to study, I didn’t learn to use my brain to its capacity (I’m not smart enough or motivated enough to have done that without a push), and I spent so many years hiding my intelligence that I can no longer find it. So, although that rant was entirely off topic , I know that I do not want the same thing to happen to my own children. I want them to experience college at the highest intellectual level in which they can thrive. "
Great post. I agree. Also, I really don’t disagree with @carolinamom2boys and @oneundecided that some kids can thrive in a more mixed academic environment. My wife and I felt that DD would be best served by spending 4 years in Uni surrounded by the smartest kids possible (she attended a top 10 UK secondary after going to a mixed primary and we saw how much better she did in the former atmosphere). Of the two honours programmes that she rejected, one school was overall too pre-professional (and was probably not a good choice as a safety in the first place). The second school had an A&S Honours programme that was going to cover only 6 credits per semester. DD was worried that the rank and file kids were not going to be at the same level as the kids in her high school and we were particularly unimpressed with some of the kids that attended the session for her prospective major. Lastly, she had already read some of the “Great Books” that would covered in the freshman seminars which concerned her.
Again, this was very much an individualised decision based on my kid but I am comfortable that we made the best choice.
I can only imagine…re-reading a Great Book is indeed a chore. Most people garner everything that is necessary after the first read. And that rank and file lot… you certainly wouldn’t want to get your feet dirty with the unwashed heathens! It must have been such a relief the be able to cross those schools of “the list”.
Someone’s having a laugh right?
@labegg, There is a difference between the kids who read classics for fun in middle school and those who consider reading them somewhat of a chore. I have one of each, and they are of equivalent intelligence and verbal ability. I think all anyone is saying is that they are mindful of their own children’s needs. We all know that any school that has been crossed off someone’s list is perfect for thousands of others, but it’s always interesting to read why it has been crossed off and make our own assessments.
Sad to see this thread degenerate. People have different opinions, including about the level of academic challenge they want. How this is worse than not liking hills or pre-professional campuses I am unable to fathom. This was one of the few places on CC I used to enjoy NOT seeing so much defensiveness. Guess I’ll un bookmark.
I guess the difference @Booajo is there is no talk of intelligence or arrogant judgement regarding the size of hills. I agree it is a very personal decision what school meets a student’s needs best. My frustration is the need to imply another student’s intelligence is beneath another’s or that students who are perfectly capable of being admitted to more highly selective schools that select a less selective school are doomed to be under stimulated . It’s not what’s said , it’s the way that it’s being said.
Hear, hear @Booajo ! Let’s get back to the kids who crossed off a school because of bad colors or a lame mascot. I still crack up when I think about the kid who crossed a school off her list because the doors were too heavy. This thread was great anthropological entertainment at one point. It was my favorite thread because, as much as I enjoyed touring with my child, it was stressful. There is a lot of irrationality and chance in this process – and it made me feel better knowing I wasn’t alone. Don’t let it go sour!
Agree with @booajo and @binky17. If anyone wants to have detailed conversations that are spurred on by comments here but that fall outside of the scope of this thread consider starting a new thread and tagging the people you wish to continue the discussion with or using private messages.
I second that happy1.
My daughter crossed off Oxford and Cambridge because she thought the English students would be to snobby and arrogant. ( That is a supposed to be a joke )
My son crossed off any selective schools north of the Mason Dixon line because he didn’t want to attend a school where the majority of students and their parents were under the false notion that they were better educated or smarter than he is because he attended school in the South.
Our S19 has only crossed off schools for geographic reasons if they are hard to get to from Chicago. A plane ride is fine but a plane ride plus a long drive is not. That actually does eliminate a ton of schools. It’s very possible that he will limit himself even more after we do some trips to see schools that require a plane ride. He may decide that school within a six hour drive is more for him. If that ends up being the case, that will really help us narrow down the list!
@homerdog Both kids only had real interest in schools that were within that six hour drive limit. One went almost 3 hours away, the other five. It was nice in terms of logistics that did not involve plane travel. But, one has moved a long plane ride away after college. So, you never know. But it did make it easier during their college years to have them within driving distance. Most kids actually go within a couple of hundred miles or so from home for college.
I thought I’d do a new campus impressions to try and resume the original topic.
We recently toured Pomona (formally, including info session) and walked though other Claremont’s informally with our daughter (second child) who’s a rising Junior. My wife had toured and been accepted many moons ago but I had never been. My older child/son had focused on East Coast schools.
Pomona is very high on her wish list, recognizing it’s a reach for almost anyone, with a single-digit acceptance rate. Campus was nice and the benefits of the 5C consortium are interesting and a useful hybrid versus most small LAC’s. Architecturally, and I say this having grown up in California and having gone to UCLA, I have become a fan of the historic character of many of the East Coast LAC’s versus what we saw there. (Though walking around Scripps in particular made me feel like I was at a luxury resort retreat!). I personally am not a desert person. My D didn’t mind it.
The tour itself was underwhelming and bizarre. First, it was a huge group of over 40 people with just one guide. They ask you to schedule the tour and we did months in advance so not sure why they would over-book with just one guide but who knows. But the guide walked us into the dorm common area and suggested everyone just walk around and see if anyone left their door open to peek in and see a room. So they didn’t have any room set aside to show on a tour and didn’t mind 40 people roaming the halls at 10am making a ton of noise looking for an open door (which no one ever found). We also didn’t tour any of the logical places schools often show — no library, no performing arts space, no athletic facilities, etc. We visited one classroom and the dorm common area and the hallway of a science building. The rest was outside — even when we were at the student center we didn’t go inside. Overall my group which is a veteran of many tours liked the school despite the tour but rated the tour low. We have relatives with us who were on their first ever college tour who were underwhelmed as well.
The one thing my D didn’t like was how the guide repeatedly talked about all-nighters and starting homework at midnight, etc. She said she wanted to research to find out if that was a lifestyle choice of the student or essential because of the Pomona workload even for self-discipled students. She’s a fan of a regular sleep schedule, at least at the moment — we all know how college changes many people in that regard.
Scripps, which we didn’t formally tour, was very attractive. We didn’t see much inside.
The best surprise for me was the adjacent community of Claremont Village. It was only recently that I read a few comments in this topic about it with someone calling it tiny or underwhelming and someone else defending it. I have no dog in this fight — no kids there, not an alum, not a resident — but it was one of the nicest college villages I have seen. I live near Princeton and my relatives near Stanford and I would put it up against either of those. There was an attractive 4 x 4 block radius full of restaurants and shops with a library and town hall interspersed. That’s about 16 blocks of stuff. There were at least a couple dozen restaurants of every variety including many competing Italian places, and we didn’t see nearly all of it in our walking. It’s a substantial, seemingly prosperous village. Hard to imagine what someone who thinks its underwhelming is comparing it to — NYC?
D21 just started her freshman year on the West Coast. So many people commented on how I would feel having her so far away. Funny thing is, it’s not really much farther than had she gone to the East Coast schools she applied to. We just flew out there to move her in. We left the house at 4:30am for a 6:30am direct flight, arrived about 8:45amPST. Her school is a 10 minute Uber ride from the airport. All in all, door to door, it was 8 hours.
Had she gone to the Boston school or the SC school she was also considering, we would have driven her to/from those schools. Boston is just over a 7 hour drive from us and the SC school just over 8 hours. However, I would much rather be on the direct flight to CA than have to deal with driving 95 either north to Boston or south to SC. So I’m really not that much further time wise than my friends whose kids are in school in New England or some of the southern schools that are suddenly popular with DC area kids. Sure, I can’t drive to CA in those same 8 hours, but I’d rather sit back and read a book for the 5 hr flight than be behind the wheel of the car dealing with traffic much of the 95 corridor. Of course, it’s more expensive to fly, but dh travels quite a bit so we have his frequent flier miles to use, plus SWA and Alaska Airlines both have reasonably priced direct flights so it’s not too bad. In fact, I already bought D’s Thanksgiving ticket home and was talking with some parents from Seattle WA who were shocked to discover that they paid more for their dd’s ticket on Alaska to/from Seattle than I did for our dd to fly Alaska to/from BWI. I’m sure I just lucked out-I purchased her ticket as soon as I knew her fall semester schedule so was able to get the cheapest fare.
Frequent flier miles and/or not having financial constraints definitely can open up options. I definitely would not have wanted to drive numerous times a year to get kids to and from college. After freshman year, our kids had an old car that helped in getting them back and forth. We were lucky we could provide that. Many kids stay local, attend CC or s local college, because of finances.
@sevmom I absolutely agree that there can be a financial burden associated with flying that can limit choices. I was just pointing out that many of our friends questioned how we felt about the distance from a standpoint of a perceived notion that it takes so much time to get there. Yet these same people were driving their kids 8-10 hours away to get them to their schools. We live in DC area and their kids are going to places like Clemson, Ole Miss, College of Charleston, Univ of SC, UGA so while the distance in miles is closer, the time it takes to get there is not really much different compared to our D flying. When she started looking at schools on the West Coast (dh is from CA and all his family lives there), one of the things we made sure to consider was that there was a direct flight and the school was not too far from the airport.
I agree that when you start getting into the 8-10 hour range in driving, that a plane ride instead starts looking more attractive.