They sound like great kids! Good luck to your older son on his AP English exam!
@sally305, I donât recall characterizing an entire school as partiers, though there are some dorms at somes schools that are.
To me, thereâs a difference between a school where a big chunk of the student body parties but everybody still graduates on time (our alma mater does have a reputation for being work hard/play hard, but Iâve heard that Dartmouth and MIT are even more. . . extreme) and one where a big chunk of the student body parties and a not insignificant portion donât graduate. Different atmosphere.
@mstomper, seems like the oldest just needs some place where he can concentrate on what heâs interested in.
PT, no, you didnât characterize the entire student body of state schools as âpartiers,â but you seem to believe the temptations are greater there than at elite privates. I disagree. Every large public I know of has honors colleges, living/learning communities, etc. where it is possible to avoid the party culture entirely. International students donât tend to party, and state schools have tons of them. Kids are predisposed to partying, or theyâre not. Some will experiment with how it feels to be stupid drunk a few times and decide itâs not for them. Some will develop dependencies on alcohol or other substances. But this can happen in any environmentâitâs part of growing up to navigate these temptations.
'It is true that some kids donât graduate from state schools on time because they are partying. More often in large public universities the extended time is due to not being able to get into classes, switching majors and needing more required courses, etc. Also, for in-state kids where tuition is affordable, an extra semester or year is not as crippling financially as it would be at an expensive private.
Even at a LAC or a small Uni, there is (and should be) limited hand holding. If a kid wants to slide by, he or she will. The professors give up after a while. Or donât realize until it is too late that the kid is not doing well.
I am clearly not as good a parent as some of you guys. I assumed that my 17 year olds- as âbook smartâ as they were, would make decisions based (in part) on their teenage wiring and brains, and assumed that part of my job as a parent was to get them to think like their 25 year old self, not their teenage self.
None of you know kids who graduated from college X and wish theyâd had a parent encouraging them to reach higher? None of you know kids who are working at a job they hate, but they missed the chance to get the kind of education that would give them transferable and fungible skills? And none of you know kids who have flunked out/are on the 6 year plan due to too much hijinks/shenanigans?
Jeez. I must be a bigger loser than I thought.
Nevertheless- only on CC is it a virtue to brag about how your kid is a star at a college where his/her stats put them at the tippy top of the student body. Of COURSE your kid is a star. Duh. What a moron I was for encouraging my kids to attend the college which accepted them where theyâd be at the mean. And what a moron I was for attending such a college myself.
Oh good freaking grief. That is not at ALL what I meant when I posted that link. I posted it for two reasons. One- to remind people that there are bigger things in life than where your child goes to college. Two- to show people that there might be legitimate reasons for why you might want to choose a school where your child would be happier.
By the way, when most students want to kill themselves it has absolutely NOTHING to do with the rigor of the college. For some, yes, but not most. I know. Iâve been there.
That was just an incredibly ignorant post.
Of course there are bigger things than where your kid goes to college.
But the OP posted about parental disappointment. Not shock or horror or grief. And we are discussing whether or not disappointment is legitimate (and my guess is that most of you believe that itâs not- parents should suck it up and allow the kid to make whatever decision his 17 year old brain deems to be a good one).
In a world where kids die of curable diseases every day, clearly where someone goes to college is a first world problem of the highest order. I donât think we all need to be reminded that our disappointments with our kids are small fry in the real world.
Itâs a college board.
I think the disappointment is legitimate, AND that the kid should be able to make the decision on their own from any school on their list.
blossom, would you let your kid apply to a college that you wouldnât want them to attend? I feel like Iâm missing something here.
Some of the scenarios you discussedâe.g. a kid choosing among different college options for a very specific program where one school offers far, far better placementâare different in my mind than a kid not quite sure of their major going off to college. Or a kid going into engineering going to a perfectly respectable school for engineering.
No, I donâtâprobably because kids like that âreach higherâ on their own at whatever college they are able to attend.
Sure, I know lots of people working at jobs they hate. Most of them (for whatever reason) are lawyers. And they attended top-tier colleges and law schools.
If you are truly advocating for transferable and fungible skills, you should have no issue with an engineering degree from MSU (or comparable institutions). Presumably it would be harder to defend an English or philosophy degree from an elite LAC or prestigious private over a degree from any âdecentâ school in a STEM field or other in-demand major.
Nope. I know a kid who was suspended from a top east coast LAC for criminal behavior sparked by taking illegal drugs. Mommy and Daddy hired an expensive NYC lawyer to make the problem go away and sent the kid abroad for the semester he was missingâit was as if nothing ever happened. The kids I know who might have turned into the stereotype you are describing actually never made it through a semester of collegeâthey have highly educated parents but are working in coffee shops and figuring out a different path for their lives. Because their parents have means, these kids are being spared the consequences of their reckless decisions. Most kids whose families have made sacrifices to give them the chance to go to college generally pull it together unless the extenuating circumstances are too overwhelming.
@blossom, if Iâm going to worry about teenage wiring and brains, Iâm going to worry a lot more about the tendency of teens blindly to pick the highest ranked school on their accepted list without looking more carefully about whether that highest ranked school is a good fit or not. Yet I have not seen a single post here that expresses that concern.
A few more thoughtsâŠ
1.) The most recent newsletter from the Michigan State Honors College highlights recent alumni who are in graduate school at Penn, Cornell and Yale. Others are in med school at Michigan and Chicago. Just as there are bandwidths of quality in colleges, there are also bandwidths of quality in students within a college. There are students at MSU right now who are smarter, better students than your child or mine. The CoE is in the beginning stages of adding a Computational Science program and is hiring faculty away from some of the very best colleges in the country. Please stop with the argument that MSU is somehow not a viable option for a high achieving student. That argument is ignorant and elitist. My son didnât choose Saginaw Valley State University: he chose an AAU member and Top 100 research university in the world. Good grief.
2.) My son and I visited Michigan several times. On one occasion, we had lunch downtown and walked to the Maryland-Michigan football game. I passed yards full of drunken students. I saw some throwing up, others who looked on the verge of passing out. Not all of them could be from Eastern or Washtenaw CC. Read the mlive stories about the alleged sexual assault that resulted in Garrett Rivas being expelled from UofM before their last bowl game. It will give you and idea of what a typical Friday night in Ann Arbor is like on the eve of a home football game. Drunken students who matriculated to school with 35 ACTs and top 5% standing in their HS class are undoubtedly more likely to graduate than students who scored in the mid 20s and are enrolled because they are willing to pay full tuition. I donât think it matters who youâre vomiting next toâŠI really donât.
3.) The pressure on your kids comes from them internalizing their perception of your expectations. Be they explicit or implicit, they exist - and your kids are aware of them. Will you encourage them to âleverage your expertiseâ in selecting a spouse or raising their children?
No, a post about teen suicide did not belong on this thread romani, especially since you yourself say in #465 that being depressed and wanting to kill oneself generally has nothing to do with the rigor of the college. In the same post #465, which addressed my response to your depression article, you say your purpose in posting was to show that :âthere might be legitimate reasons for why you might want to choose a school where your child would be happier.â That sounds like you again are conflating unhappiness with clinical depression, which I know you donât want to do, and are suggesting we parents need to be careful about pushing a child to attend a college other than his preferred one.
IMHO, a person does not go to the U of C or MIT for the âbrand name.â They go there for the remarkable intellectual and academic experience that both of those unusual institutions offer, something substantially unlike that offered by the vast majority of other schools, including most highly selective schools.
This experience is life-enriching and worthwhile for the right people, even if it never results in a single DIME of additional income.
If, indeed, the âbrand nameâ is ALL the student stands to gain from the experience, then it would make perfect sense to go to the âgood enoughâ school with a full ride. For the student who is ready, willing, and able to benefit from what those two schools have to offer, for the student who NEEDS that intellectual stimulation like they need food, it is a different thing.
I donât know if that was directed at me, but I only mentioned my sonâs GPA to make the point that choosing the less prestigious/âless rigorousâ school did NOT cause him to slack off in any way. And nobody is suggesting that choosing the school where the student would be at the mean or below (I WAS that kid) is a mistake either. Different kids excel in different situations, and some can excel in any. My kid was already 18 when he made his decision, and it struck me as a very reasoned, realistic one. Very much like the OPâs son. I donât see anybody here advocating for letting an immature kid of any age make any decision he wants and that the parents should just suck it up and pay the bill regardless of the price tag.
How on earth did this thread go so off the rails? There are carcasses of straw men littered all over it.
This started off as a thread about a parentâs disappointment about the more prestigious road that was not to be traveled, which, as I understood it, he was keeping to himself. Then it segued into how in no uncertain terms would some parents let their kids choose an âinferiorâ school, including a large public university that âwasnât even the state flagshipâ (the horrors!!!) or schools in lesser âbands,â irrespective of the fact that the school this kid choseâMSUâhas a very good/perfectly respectable (define it as you will!) engineering program.
greeninohio, it sounds like you are now convinced your son made the right choice and have joined those arguing it was a great choice. The thread did its job, then, and hopefully you should no longer feel any disappointment.
@TheGFG, I think he made the right choice for him - and I am still a little disappointed. I donât think those two things have to be mutually exclusive. I am now focusing my attention on getting my two youngest sons into MIT and Yale, respectively - and getting my ârisingâ sophomore to at least take the Honors section of Algebra II.
"IMHO, a person does not go to the U of C or MIT for the âbrand name.â They go there for the remarkable intellectual and academic experience that both of those unusual institutions offer, something substantially unlike that offered by the vast majority of other schools, including most highly selective schools.
This experience is life-enriching and worthwhile for the right people, even if it never results in a single DIME of additional income."
Hear, hear!
WowâŠ
@sally305, I think it is safe to assume that that was tongue-in-cheek. 
Should students go to the most competitive college that they can get into (and potentially be middle/low ranked in the pack) or should they go to a less competitive college (where they will presumably be top of the pack)?
Well, should students get a B in a Honors course or an A in a regular course? The time-honored answer from teachers has been to aim to get A in the honors course, challenge oneself, work hard, and let the chips fall where they may. If you quit without trying then you have lost already. At least give it a good fight.