<p>And on the Ivy topic - my d is graduating from Penn on Monday - full freight that we saved up since her birth (along with the grandparents) - not realizing that we could be eligible for aid. She had an amazing experience there and it was money very well spent. And she has a job!<br>
My son is at a state school (not our state) with a well ranked program in his major. His experience is a bit different - larger classes, more school spirit. Ask me how the two compare when he graduates and gets a job…</p>
<p>But take Math 55 for example. Where else in the world would one be able to take such an astonishingly difficult course with the brightest math and physics students in the country?</p>
<p>^^ Is Math 55 open to the public online, like some of the MIT courses?</p>
<p>That’s not the point, the point is you are collaborating and learning with a group of people which simply wouldn’t exist at universities which don’t attract as committed and intelligent students.</p>
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Sure there is … if a college is trying avoid too much grade inflation and wants some distribution of grades then the lower means help the students to distinguish themselves and helps avoid the issue of false precision trying to differentiate grades all clustered together around 90.</p>
<p>Written as a grad of Cornell who historically has had grade deflation and curved grades … interestinly having lower means on exams helped my both when I was a deadbeat student for two years (I was closer to the mean) and when I was a good student (and could show that I a much better grasp of the material).</p>
<p>I get the pros and cons of grade inflation/deflation at highly selective schools … personally I’m in favor of schools diffentiating their students … and shame on emplpoyeers and grad schools who are not smart enough to take this into account. That said I certainly understand those who do not believe in grade deflation at highly selective schools as there are lots of grad schools, employeers, and scholarships who take straight GPAs without consideration.</p>
<p>It will never hurt you to go HYPSM as far as education, contacts, etc. The question is, how much will it help you, and if you’re full pay, and have other good options, that is where it gets difficult. No question if you’re getting aid, you should go to Harvard. However, even if you don’t have to take out loans, the money you’re paying to go to HYPSM, at the end of 4 years would be worth close to $300K if it was invested properly, and 7 years down the road, $600 K, and 7 more years $1.2 M, and WOW, lets use some of that money for graduate school at an elite school. If you think dollars and cents, it can be hard to justify HYPSM, but not everyone thinks like that. </p>
<p>Now I know full freight costs just as much at other colleges, but IMO it is never justified to pay that kind of money for an average to decent college. Of course, I analyze everything I buy, including cereal. Possibly why I have a lot of money saved up.</p>
<p>Along with 3togo, I agree that there’s not necessarily anything wrong with a having a mean of 59 on a math exam, especially in an advanced course. The point of teaching these courses is to help the students acquire a level of understanding that is deep enough to solve problems of types they have never seen before. The problems just need to be solvable with the ideas/theorems/methods they have been taught. </p>
<p>This means that the it’s not a question of showing students how to solve specific categories of problems and then testing whether they can do those (although high school math courses often tend to run along those lines). Take unfamiliar types of problems, throw in a time limit, and the stress of an exam, and it’s unremarkable that an average could be in the 50’s. An old student of mine, now in the National Academy of Sciences, mentioned undergraduate physics exams at Berkeley with means in the 30’s. It’s essentially the same phenomenon. A beneficial side effect of a low mean is that one avoids transforming meaningless differences of performance (among students bunched in the 90’s on an easier exam) into curve-based differences in grades.</p>
<p>As a more extreme example, at the University of Cambridge historically the Senior Wrangler (the top scorer on the final undergraduate math exams) had ten times the number of points of other students who qualified for first-class honors. Below that, there were two further classes of honors, a pass degree, and the possibility of failure.</p>
<p>On the main topic, whether Harvard or HYPSM is worth it, in general, I don’t think there is any blanket answer. It depends first on what the student and the parent are looking for in the college. There are some students who want to go into i-banking, and for them the financial reward may be the principal issue. In that case, I think Harvard would pay off handsomely, as long as the student does well.</p>
<p>For a pre-med, the question is much trickier, I think. Most students who are admitted to Harvard are likely to score very well on the MCAT’s, wherever they go to college. The research/volunteer opportunities are excellent. </p>
<p>But grades are the other factor in med school admissions. The statistics on med school acceptances that are available from most colleges refer only to those students who persisted in the pre-med curriculum and reached the point of application. It is hard to tell how many were dissuaded along the way. Some will have found other goals that they prefer–if so, this is a good outcome. But of those who remain interested in medicine, I’d guess that grades would be the principal stumbling block. </p>
<p>Grade inflation at the Ivies is commonly mentioned on college confidential; but personally, I don’t think I’ve seen this. (It might be a matter of course selection–not just meaning science vs. humanities, but individual courses.) Are other parents seeing grade inflation in their children’s outcomes?</p>
<p>Regarding grade inflation – endless attempts to prove it out there. Mine was very challenged to get good grades. He was a “John Harvard Scholar” (top 5 percent of his class) two years there and did not carry a 4.0 either of those years. That basically tells you that perfect grades are extremely rare at Harvard. The students there are not getting A’s without working.</p>
<p>Regarding med school admissions, the same gpa and MCAT coming from Harvard seems to produce better and more plentiful interviews. Very few students from Harvard who apply to med school don’t get into med school. Take a look at the MDapplicant website if you doubt this.</p>
<p>I think this is a common sense issue. Admissions people for med schools have a strong sense of what it takes to make it into Harvard. That get’s there attention. I know so many want this not to be true because they’ve made different choices for their kids. I think both directions (cheaper, less prestigious) vs. Harvard have advantages and strong arguments in their favor. But I don’t think these sort of statements should be bandied about as if they are incontrovertible truths, i.e., the grade inflation and no advantage for med school arguments.</p>
<p>If you’re paying full freight it is enormously expensive. As my second one applies to college next year, I will be just fine if she does not get into schools like Harvard and hope that she will be able to have merit offers at other great schools. I don’t loose sleep over this. I don’t think going to Harvard confers guaranteed success or a fairy tale ever after life. But I do think it carries value, real value and that there is a lot of effort to try to prove differently. People need to be very sensitive to their biases.</p>
<p>Final comment (just divided a long “essay” by topic):</p>
<p>Other areas should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis against the alternatives. In math, there is a strong argument to be made that a student who has been on the USA IMO Team, or barely missed it, would be very well served by Harvard’s curriculum, including Math 55 (or HYPSM generally). </p>
<p>On the other hand, for a student who is just “very, very good” in math, or who can develop into a real mathematician, but hasn’t yet had the experiences to reach the level of Math 55 in the first year of college, is Harvard actually better? </p>
<p>In my freshman year, one of my math profs remarked that for our level of mathematics at the time, it didn’t matter whether we were being taught by John von Neumann or John von Brand X. John von Brand X was, incidentally, a really, really good mathematician–they can be found in many places.</p>
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It seems to me that this may be somewhat more likely to happen at a place like Harvard, Yale, or Brown, where there are lots of students taking all sorts of exotic majors, including self-created ones. I agree that this can be a good outcome, but it might be unnerving to parents who were expecting to have a doctor in the family to find out that they’re actually going to have an expert on cuneiform punctuation.</p>
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<p>The S of a friend has been a professor at Harvard and at USC. He said that there were committed, engaged, intelligent students in his classes at both schools. At his USC classes, he might have 5 such students. At his Harvard classes, everyone EXCEPT FOR 5 of his students could be described that way. </p>
<p>Whether that difference “pays off” is another story.</p>
<p>Found your comments interesting, sewhappy. I am not surprised that the great majority of the Harvard students who apply to med school get in. The question for me is: How many have dropped off the pre-med track along the way, while still being interested in medicine?</p>
<p>At the large public university where I am a professor, we lose quite a few students from the pre-med track over time, and we don’t have as high acceptance rates among the applicants as Harvard does. But take a Harvard student who entered as a pre-med and has decided not to apply to medical school. I’m assuming that there are some. I think that some of the better students in this category might have made it into medical school, coming from my university.</p>
<p>(No personal issue, here. QMP was never interested in medicine. I’d like to claim that the students who didn’t make it to the point of med-school application at Harvard wouldn’t have made it at my university, either, but I suspect otherwise.)</p>
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This is a good question, and is really one that should be studied, because many of us will have pre-conceived notions of the probable answer.</p>
<p>I will still say that there are probably more kids at Harvard who stop being pre-meds because they got interested in something else than there would be at a state university.</p>
<p>I think that having an expert in cuneiform punctuation in the family would be a great outcome! 
I’d guess that more incoming Harvard pre-meds shift to a highly intellectual area, compared to incoming pre-med students who shift areas at a state university (on a percentage basis).</p>
<p>Hunt – true. But I am a parent who fits the above profile (albeit not in the exaggerated way you use to make your point so cutely), and for me if my student weren’t going to be an expert in cuneiform punctuation he’d work at Starbucks for the rest of his life. He immediately decided he wasn’t going to pursue medicine (which he had chosen at 4 before he knew it was a desirable profession) and didn’t find anything else he was remotely interested in doing until the end of his time in college. He found MANY classes that fascinated him, so that wasn’t a problem.</p>
<p>If he hadn’t been at the school he was at, I think he’d have no direction at all. I saw that in my H and my brother. Both of them did finally find rewarding things to do but it was decade after they left college.</p>
<p>So cuneiform punctuation sounds good to me.</p>
<p>My daughter is finding her Barnard/Columbia pedigree to be very useful along with her CUNY law credential (she is still a student) in getting interviews for internships, and she landed the most prestigious one among her friends, even friends from better law schools. Since she wants public interest law CUNY is a good credential (City University of New York – a very low ticket public law school specializing in public interest law), and the interviewers like seeing the Barnard/Columbia pedigree as well. This may be unique to NY. I have no way of parsing that. But it certainly indicates that her undergraduate experience is opening doors for her.</p>
<p>Look at the Supreme Court. You will need an Ivie law degree to sit up there.</p>
<p>Hey, my son is a music major. Cuneiform punctuation may be a more secure field.</p>
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<p>[National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com) has (at the bottom) information on average grades at various schools.</p>