<p>ProudMom. A kid shouldn’t resent a parent for not sending them to their unaffordable “dream” school if the parents had the money discussion with the child BEFORE the college search. The kid has to know what the parents can do, and what they can’t. From that point, the student can research schools with the possibilities of scholarships that may fit the budget. The reason a student could resent a parent is if the parent leads the kid to believe they can pay for an unaffordable school in the first place.</p>
<p><i think="" the="" article="" has="" some="" value="" but="" also="" smacks="" of="" a="" severe="" case="" sour="" grapes.=""> -</i></p><i think="" the="" article="" has="" some="" value="" but="" also="" smacks="" of="" a="" severe="" case="" sour="" grapes.="">
<p>I couldn’t disagree more! Making the best out of your situation, changing one’s perspective, to me that is resilience, which I feel is the opposite of sour grapes. More like making lemonade of lemons.</p>
<p><most of="" us="" are="" guilty="" succumbing="" to="" the="" pressure="" consumerism="" when="" it="" comes="" our="" children…designer="" clothes,="" sunglasses,="" phones,="" electronics,="" even="" cars="" but="" a="" name="" brand="" education="" suddenly="" some="" parents="" draw="" line?=""></most></p>
<p>We have tried to set limits all along with regards to spending, and college spending is no exception. My S applied to MIT (did not get in) but we had discussed that even if he did, finances would have to be considered and that he might not be able to go if the financial package wasn’t doable. He did not go to the school that gave him the “cheapest” offer but the bottom line that we paid was a consideration as he was considering all factors. It frankly amazes me that people talk about “dream schools” as if there is no associated price tag. - But I digress. With regards to this article, I am sort of relieved that MIT’s rejection meant that I as a parent wasn’t the one who had to ultimately tell S he couldn’t go to MIT due to finances. Each family is different but I feel like part of my job as a parent is to teach my kids to live within financial limits.</p>
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<p>Good stuff. I cringe when I hear a student say, “My safety is _____, but it sucks and I hope I don’t end up going there.” In addition to affordability and admit-ability, desirability has to be a key aspect of any safety choice.</p>
<p>And, if you can’t find a school you like that you can get into and afford (as least as much as any school is affordable), you need to look hard at your priorities.</p>
<p>That depends on how much money and how high the stats are for the student in question. I don’t particularly like the local community colleges in my area of Oklahoma, but if they were my only way of affording college I’d go to them. A safety doesn’t have to be desirable. It has to be affordable and easy to get into.</p>
<p>My daughter certainly doesn’t “come from wealth”. She’s attending her dream school, which meets 100 percent of need (sort of). It would have been more expensive for her to attend one of the two “safety” schools she applied to, even though she was admitted into the Honors College - a very nice out of state public school that simply doesn’t have the endowment to offer much. The other “safety” she applied to was our in-state “flagship” university. None of us, my wife and myself included, (and we’re alumni), wanted her to attend there, even though it would have been virtually free. So-called safety schools can be the “perfect” place. It helps if you don’t live in Tennessee, though…</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing!</p>
<p>@ banterboy: I ended up going to UCLA, my dream school. I kept saying that I would kick myself in the ass if I gave up the opportunity and I’m so glad that I did decide to go to LA over UC Davis. Realistically, opportunity wise, UCLA and the LA metropolitan area just offers so much more than the middle-of-no-where. I started an internship at a tech company in Beverly Hills this summer and it’s awesome! No regrets!</p>
<p>sally305-
“I know very few people who have succumbed to the consumerism you describe.”
Really? Where do you live? No iphones or beats or in your neighborhood?</p>
<p>There are few things in day-to-day life that compare to the cost of four years, full-pay at the most expensive schools in the country. Four years of private high school, a new BMW, a new iPhone every year? That is a fraction of the $240k Georgetown or Chicago would cost.</p>
<p>ProudMom, I live in a Midwestern college town. My kids have attended a public high school that is very diverse socioeconomically and demographically. There are very affluent kids and very poor kids, plus many in the middle. I have not seen designer clothes, handbags, or sunglasses–it’s just not a showy kind of place. Of course a lot of kids have iPhones but I don’t think a $200 cost is comparable to over $250,000. And again, if one is talking value–many would argue that the value of an iPhone over other phones (which cost what? I don’t know) is worth the incremental cost. But with colleges, the difference many families face to get the “name brand” is orders of magnitude over other options, not incremental.</p>
<p>How about you? Where do you live? I cannot imagine an environment in which kids routinely blackmail their parents for everything they dream of having. Nor would I want to live in one.</p>
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<p>ROFL! Succumbing to the pressure of consumerism spending an extra $50 here or $100 there on sunglasses or jeans, and equating that to an extra $150k for the name-brand college experience aren’t exactly comparable. Any kid who can’t discern the difference has no business going to college at all and would benefit greatly from a few years working a minimum wage, food service job.</p>
<p>In my case, going to my safety school resulted in a series of events where I ended up in CS instead of Bioengineering. As a result, I’ve made a ton of awesome friends, discovered that I love CS (Bioe definitely would have been worse for me), and I’m about to join [insert well-known tech company you’ve heard of] in the fall, making more than I have any right to. Maybe I would have come to a similar juncture if I had gone to another school, but I’m quite happy with how things turned out.</p>
<p>sumzup, congratulations! Just promise you won’t ever say again that you don’t have a right to what you are getting paid–you do. :)</p>
<p>Your story is proof positive that smart, resourceful and mature students who make the best of their circumstances will find opportunities from among the options they have. They don’t wallow in self-pity that Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t pay for the “school of their dreams.” I would hire someone like you any day over an entitled, spoiled kid whose only point of distinction was having gotten into an “elite” college.</p>
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<p>This is silly. My safety schools are all huge public universities. I don’t like the teaching style. I don’t like the campus locations (universally urban). Honours colleges only do so much. They are acceptable because they are extremely inexpensive and because they do have one thing I care for - research. I don’t have much flexibility with my major requirements.</p>
<p>Why should I “love my safety” if it doesn’t suit me at all? I’m sure most of the kids on this website can * make it work * , just like we’ve made things work at our high schools but it doesn’t mean I’m going to love it and say these were the best years ever!!11 I don’t condone whining at all, and obviously I would try and make friends and do well, but there’s no harm in not really ‘loving it’ and acknowledging that other places are better fits for you.</p>
<p>(And before someone says I should apply to LACs, LACs are mostly expensive, even with FA which I am unlikely to get and do not fulfill one major aspect of my requirements).</p>
<p>Oh, PLEASE…</p>
<p>The girl who wrote the article went to Stuy. She was obviously only an average student at Stuy. She passed up Vassar, ranked #10 among LACs by US News, for the honors program at Fordham. Fordham overall is ranked #58 by US News. I assume the quality of the honors students is higher than that of the overall student body. So, the bottom line is that her “safety school”'s honors program’s students are probably very close in quality to the average student at Vassar.So, personally, I don’t think she sacrificed much at all.</p>
<p>Now, if she HAD gotten into HYPS and pass them up for Fordham, that would be different.</p>
<p>thanks for sharing this article it was great</p>
<p>jonri . . no, of course it doesn’t sound that bad, and in reality it is not, of course it isn’t. Of course. The thing is, if you are in the pressure cooker of Stuy and NY private schools (from which she comes) there is rampant elitism. You will be looked down on or felt sorry for if you say you are going to Fordham rather than Yale. You will be seen briefly as something of a failure. </p>
<p>And that is ridiculous. I know it is. You know it is. And in the long run, it is a good lesson to learn. But that doesn’t mean that in certain societies (which you may argue is foolish, as I do) such a (non)failure still stings. And then you get over it, as the writer did. She learned and she wrote about it. </p>
<p>And, jonri, The name Vassar has much more status than Fordham, for whatever that’s worth, where I am, in NYC. Personally, I don’t care about status, the schools aren’t better or worse in my book, but the perception of Vassar is elite. Not Fordham.</p>
<p>Anyway, this an essay of one girl’s PERSONAL experience. This is not supposed to be all things to all people, a great parable about safety schools. This is just her reality.</p>
<p>and i felt one of the points she made very well was the crazy pressure to go to an elite school and at the end of the day, one of the schools she viewed as a safety turned out to be a phenomenal choice for her. I really saw it as an encouragement to younger kids that it’s not necc worth it to get all caught up in the college admissions rat race. I thought she showed a lot of wisdom for a young woman of around 20.</p>
<p>My daughter was pulled aside at her tony private school and told that her classmates would be shocked that she would attend Pitt when she was admitted to higher ranking schools, but that Pitt was a fine school. Believe me, it is out there.</p>
<p>Although I was rejected from my reach school (Berkeley EECS), I’ve been introduced and bound to the idea (by my parents) of attending a safety alternative since my sophomore year of high school. That being said, if I did get into Berkeley, I still would have chosen the safety school for financial and a ton of other good reasons.</p>
<p>Yes, I’m seen as a failure by quite a few people and I can’t really explain myself out of it, but the truth is, going to the safety school guarantees (with a bidding war between companies going on over limited graduates in a rather rare subfield of a major) a high paying job (if that qualifies to not be a failure) and means graduating debt free. </p>
<p>I’ve found many more ways to love my safety school than the initial reasons that my parents provided me that I do not need to attend an expensive university to land a top paying position (examples with people they know) and that there’d be debt if I went away.</p>