<p>Turtletime - I think we are from that school that you allude to. Be rest assured kids from the school apply to public universities. My kid is applying to 6 UCs but would probably only consider going to UCB or UCLA. Not because she thinks that they are bad but because other schools (private or oos public) would be a better fit. I will add a couple of things - I have lived and worked in Silicon Valley for over 2 decades. Companies are extremely brand conscious - going to an elite private definitely gets you a leg up over going to a great state univ like Michigan or UVA. Also, the networking opportunities that you get by going to a private university is usually wider (geographically) than with public univs. All this obviously only makes sense if finances are not a concern. For the record, I went a very small midwest public school. could not afford to go anywhere else - would have loved to go to one of the many other private schools that I was admitted to.</p>
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<p>Are they? From what I see, there are lots of state university graduates around Silicon Valley (not just Berkeley and UCLA, but including various other state universities in California and other states). In computer software jobs, there are also some whose knowledge of CS is predominantly self-educated. Elite private university graduates are not very common in comparison.</p>
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<p>You think there are enough full rides for all the top students? Really? </p>
<p>One of the WORST things we do to kids in this country is raise them to think that the educational system is a conveyor belt. Get on when you’re 4 and for God’s sake don’t get off until you’re 22, or someone who is interviewing you for a job might think you are a screw-off.</p>
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<p>Of course, in many cases, when someone points out the <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1348012-automatic-full-tuition-full-ride-scholarships-19.html#post16145676[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1348012-automatic-full-tuition-full-ride-scholarships-19.html#post16145676</a> to a high achiever with tight money constraints, the reply is often “I don’t want to go to the south/HBU/whatever.” Sometimes, they have the same (expensive) tastes for pricey private LACs or universities that seems to be common around these forums.</p>
<p>& like I mentioned, my daughter was a strong enough student to be admitted to a need aware school with significant need, but where they met 100% of need.
But things happen.
A student might be doing very well with a heavy load including work study & OChem and then get mono that wasn’t properly diagnosed for weeks.
Being academically brilliant doesn’t mean they will question a diagnosis or even tell their parents because they don’t want them to worry.
A policy that restricts you to four years only no matter what because it looks better in the rankings doesn’t allow for real life.</p>
<p>I’d rather my kids not feel so much pressure and be able to explore classes rather than be locked in to a major from freshman year.
Taking an extra semester can be like oxygen.</p>
<p>UCB…2 kids in school and out of a 14 apps between the 2 of them, only one was to an expensive LAC and that was only because at the time our income was such that we would have only paid for housing. Haven’t suggested a single expensive LAC to the kid in the thread you are referring to. In fact, I’ve told him that realistically they are probably out. </p>
<p>Off topic now: UCB has jumped to a conclusion about me based on another thread without having all the information. </p>
<p>I’ve sent you a private message with the rest of the story.</p>
<p>It was not specifically about you (and the student you are trying to help wouldn’t be an academic fit for many of those private LACs that are popular around here); it was a general observation based on the number of times that the scholarship list was rejected by various students and parents.</p>
<p>Mainstream media reinforces the elite college bias, which is mostly hype. Here’s a neat deconstruction of one such example, Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30. Article shows how Forbes tends to emphasize Ivy League backgrounds of 30 under 30ers and stays silent on educational background when the details are a bit more, for lack of a better word, “pedestrian.” The cumulative effect is to convey the impression that these stellar “under 30s” are, overwhelmingly, products of the Ivy League and its ilk. In fact, all kinds of colleges are represented.</p>
<p>[Forbes</a> 30 under 30: Colleges they don’t talk about. | 60second Recap®](<a href=“http://www.60secondrecap.com/forbes-30-under-30-colleges/]Forbes”>http://www.60secondrecap.com/forbes-30-under-30-colleges/)</p>
<p>My senior drank from the I-have-to-start-college-when-I-am-17-and-graduate-in-4-years Kool-Aid. (worse than that, he’s going straight into grad school) </p>
<p>He is an engineering major with no minor. High GPA. Significant humanitarian service project experience using skills related to his future profession (bragging is going somewhere here, really) Ridiculously mature–the born-an-old-man type kid, who can also communicate with anyone. </p>
<p>But, to graduate in 4 years, the non-engineering/math/science classes he’s taken are: </p>
<p>Modern World History
English 101
Health
Public Speaking </p>
<p>That’s it. Eleven quarters of engineering/math/computer science/physics. One quarter of required liberal arts classes. An extra couple of quarters to explore some interests and passions, or to expand his view of the world, would have been good for both him AND his future employer. </p>
<p>But, oh, wait. Now I know-two extra quarters to take some interesting classes=slacker. No interview (job) for him!</p>
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How do you think most first generation immigrants managed to go to schools? Especially when a lot of parents didn’t have the luxury of start saving for school when they were babies. </p>
<p>As far as those poor students also have expensive taste when it comes to schools…Well, honey, going to college is not a right, but a privilege. If you have such an expensive taste then maybe you should study very hard in high school (or be a ranked athlete) to make sure you could get aid to your dream school.</p>
<p>The unfortunate thing when it comes to access to top tier schools is it leaves the middle class students in the hole - the donut hole. They are too wealthy to qualify for FA and not wealthy enough to pay full fare. On the other hand, there are good affordable schools out there if one’s stats are excellent. </p>
<p>There are a lot of different employers out there. I am sure scubasue’s kid will get interviews.</p>
<p>My kids have to graduate in 4 years, because we can barely afford to pay for just the 4 and their FA does not extend to extra years. That said, it seems that quite a few of D’s wealthy peers at HYPS attend classes in the summer. This allows them to finish in 4 years more easily. They can better maintain a high GPA while taking hard classes and pursuing EC’s, since they can lighten their course loads each year. IMO, this is another way in which the rich are advantaged in the job search. Kids like D have to just squeeze it in, while also working part-time and perhaps being an athlete to boot. So if they can’t hack it and take an extra semester or two to graduate (and she knows some who have taken leaves of absence due to stress), now it seems that some employers will discriminate against them. And if their GPA is a little lower, that can be enough to shut them out too.</p>
<p>Cobrat, possessing creativity, confidence and assertiveness is different from being an entitled, annoying know-it-all. One negative stereotype of elite school grads is that they think they know everything and are unwilling to pay their dues in a company. Allegedly, they abhor the idea of starting at the bottom and learning the ropes, because they went to Harvard or whatever. This stereotype may have some basis, but I wonder if there aren’t actually more kids with that attitude who have lower grades. They’re the ones who think they’re too smart to have to do that silly homework exercise or that stupid project or listen to that idiot teacher and so don’t. Thus their grades suffer and they don’t make the elite school cut.</p>
<p>GFG, I would take these faux employment “concerns” with a grain of salt. It is ludicrous to think that a hiring manager in this day and age would categorically reject an applicant who was otherwise qualified because he/she took an extra semester to graduate OR had to work during college and got a few Bs OR went to a college that didn’t require recommendations (really?? someone would actually know this and use it against job candidates?). I wouldn’t want my child working for such a person anyway. Think about where you or people you know work. Does every single one of them have the same perfect pedigree? Of course not. The most successful people I have known, in many cases, went to colleges I had never heard of or that had a so-so reputation. The Forbes link above is testament to that as well.</p>
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<p>ucb, thanks for pointing this out. I had been thinking the same thing.</p>
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<p>So, if you can’t graduate in four years, you must be lazy, right? Because if you can’t afford college, it means you didn’t work hard enough to get money for college? And if you can, it means that you couldn’t “manage” things well enough?</p>
<p>Wow. That’s an amazingly crass assertion. Here are several points of response.</p>
<p>1) Many students who qualify for need-based aid realize that taking out a large amount of loans to get through school is not financially advisable. They may choose to work a full time job to avoid going into debt. As an employer, I’d be impressed by someone who made that intelligent decision.</p>
<p>2) Not all hard-working, diligent students are “top student[s]” who are going to get a full ride.</p>
<p>3) Many students with disabilities are simply not going to get through college in four years. They may be just as intelligent as their fellow students, with just as great, if not greater, work ethic. However, they might not be able to carry a full load each semester.</p>
<p>4) Many students change majors. When that involves changing colleges within a large university (i.e. going from engineering to design or vice versa), that might mean going back and picking up completely different prerequisites and electives, which can add a semester or year to a course of study.</p>
<p>5) You did it, yes, but that was a generation or more ago. The cost of college has risen much more rapidly than salaries have risen. Most colleges and universities in my area are TEN times more expensive than they were when I was in college. Salaries have not gone up ten times.</p>
<p>Yes, in an ideal world, students would all be able to graduate in four years. However, not being able to do so does not necessarily mean that a student has been or is a “sloth”.</p>
<p>I have been hiring for large, global corporations for almost 30 years and I can only recall one instance (1 candidate out of how many tens of thousands? I can’t even count) where the fact that a kid had taken longer than four years to graduate became an issue. Just one. And the issue was a phony date on a resume, not the actual fact of how many semesters were involved.</p>
<p>Lesson- if you’re going to put a beginning date on a resume, either start of employment, enrollment in a college, date you qualified for some sort of licensing or finished the CFA, Series 7, etc. it had better be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Someone will check, and there will be consequences.</p>
<p>Otherwise- unless the resume (or the candidate, during interviews) gives off the unmistakable aura of “train wreck” (and there are always situations like that), an extra year to graduate, assuming everything else is intact, would hardly be an issue for discussion.</p>
<p>What does make an impression- someone who is perpetually a day late and a dollar short. Large gaps in employment, coupled with a very lengthy time to complete a BA, coupled with a part time Master’s degree that takes an inordinate amount of time (i.e. don’t enroll in a 3 year part time MBA and then take 6 years to complete it; don’t list 8 years enrolled in a PhD program and then list ABD next to your completion year; don’t list a JD with no bar admission). These are the actual knock-out factors; not 5 years to finish a BA with everything otherwise in order.</p>
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Why would you consider loans to be aid? Merit aid is grant given, not a loan.
True. Hard work doesn’t always equate to productive work, and that’s fine for some employers.
There are always exceptions and no one is disputing disabled students are just as intelligent. But in my line of work, people are often required to put in very long hours, so if a student is not able to carry a full load while in school probably wouldn’t be able to work very long hour or be under a lot of stress.
Not that much has changed when it comes to merit aid. My kids could have gone few tiers down and we wouldn’t had to pay much for their education. </p>
<p>As far salaries, my starting salary was 15K, but today salary can be 80-100K as base, and this is not investment banking.</p>
<p>How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is a young adult novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, an Indian-American woman who wrote it just after she graduated from high school. Its 2006 debut was highly publicized while she was enrolled at Harvard University, but the book was withdrawn after it was discovered that portions had been plagiarized from several sources, including the works of Salman Rushdie and Meg Cabot.[1][2] Viswanathan apologized and said any similarities were “completely unintentional and unconscious.”[3] All shelf copies of Opal Mehta were ultimately recalled and destroyed by the publisher, and Viswanathan’s contract for a second book was canceled.[4]</p>
<p>I would say she was of dubious moral character. And Harvard admitted her.</p>
<p>The 2012 Harvard cheating scandal involved approximately 125 Harvard College students who were investigated for cheating on the take-home final examination of the Spring 2012 edition of Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress”. Harvard announced the investigation publicly on August 30, 2012.[1] Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris described the case as “unprecedented in its scope and magnitude”.[2][3][4] The Harvard Crimson ranked the scandal as the news story most important to Harvard in 2012.[5]</p>
<p>I would say these students were of dubious moral character. And Harvard admitted them.</p>
<p>“The Duke University fraternity that threw a “racist rager” party last week featuring racial stereotypes of Asians has been suspended by its national headquarters.”</p>
<p>Duke admitted them. They probably had glowing recs.</p>
<p>In what universe does a teacher recommendation override the fact that any student may be of “dubious moral character”? What the heck does that mean anyway? If you imagine your kid will avoid contact with kids of “dubious moral character” at an expensive private school, I am afraid maybe you live in Bizarro World. As Coco Chanel said, “There are people that have money, and people who are rich.”</p>
<p>I am amazed and a little disgusted at some of what oldfort is saying. Today’s salary can be $80-100K base? Sure, but for how many graduates? Not many, and mostly only in a few fields. The median salary for Penn CAS 2012 graduates – and that’s pretty elite – was $50,000, $46,000 if you only look at women. Half the Penn BAs and BSs made less than that. And that was a significant increase from a couple years earlier, when the median was below $46,000 for everyone. The $80K starting salary exists, but it’s not something that high school seniors should be counting on in planning their educations. They won’t all get it; hardly any of them will.</p>
<p>It’s a little disheartening to know that someone with oldfort’s attitudes may be the one handing them out.</p>
<p>My kids, who may well be almost as smart as oldfort’s kids, and who are very hardworking, but neither of whom sought a career in engineering, financial services, or business consulting, earned $43,000 and $33,000 (in two jobs, working a minimum of 70 hours a week) in their first post-college jobs. I was really proud of them. Their mother, working a public interest job as a new college graduate, earned more than half that, with a degree that cost less than one-tenth of what her children’s degrees cost.</p>
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<p>If we could invert this, we could do away with these inane discussions.</p>