For those looking at elite schools: why do public universities have such a bad rep?

<p>“Allegations of cheating at Stanford University have more than doubled in the past decade, with the largest number of violations involving computer science students.
In 10 years, the number of cases investigated by the university’s Judicial Panel has climbed from 52 to 123.”</p>

<p>"Back at the end of September an anonymous Gmail account identified only as “Expecto Patronus” sent out a blast message to the entire Dartmouth student body.
(Apparently this happens regularly.)
Among the contents of said email was a three-stanza riff on … well, uncertain. On its own, the thing is actually fairly oblique: “Welcome to Dartmouth; we are glad you are here; Prepare to surrender; what you hold most dear.”</p>

<p>Just a couple of examples that teacher recommendations do not screen out dishonesty and ***<strong><em>baggery. In fact, bullies, cheats and *</em></strong>**bags are often very good at concealing their true “moral character”, especially with harried teachers and blind parents. At my daughter’s high school, the girl who won all the academic awards was the most manipulative, conniving little bulls#%$ artist. The teachers all loved her. Just ask any of my friends whose sons she dated about what she was really like.</p>

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<p>In my circle of HS friends, we’d joke that someone like that is a natural-born salesperson/politician. :)</p>

<p>OP,
I do not understand the question in the title of this thread. I have never heard of it. D. was in private k - 12, then she went to public state UG, and now she is at the selective private Med. School. We have never questioned public vs private vs elite vs high ranked vs low ranked or whatever. D. went to the schools that she felt that she fit, she gave her decision making very very careful considerations with lots of research, both on internet and in person. She never cared about status, prestige or how others feel about certain place. She only cared about her own opinion based on her own research. The result is so far great. D. has never had a single B, straight As from kindergarten thru graduation from college, great selection of Med. Schools that she was accepted, going very well there so far (3rd year Med. Student).
All those talks about mediocre kids and so for is …I do not what to say it here, but you know what I meam. The cut at D’s Honors college at her UG was top 2% and ACT=31+. This cut resulted in majority of the 200 who were accepted to Honors being HS valedictorians, many from private schools. How do we know/ We have attended special Honors events, talked to whole bunch of applicants and current students. D. end up living in Honors dorms for the first 2 years. Yep, many were indeed valedictorians who would be accepted at Ivy’s. D’s roomate was one of them.<br>
In addition, there are many (probably majority) in D’s Med. school class who came from very top Elite UGs and Ivy’s and a very good number of people with Grad. degrees. Kids from state publics (including my D.) do just fine in this environment, they are by no means inferior to these classmates and in mahy cases ahead in social development coming from more diverse environment at state publics. This is just my D’s observation. I value her opinion much higher than I value others. She has first hand experience.</p>

<p>Sheesh, tpshorty, who said that teacher/counselor recs screen out all students of bad moral character? No one.</p>

<p>sally,
If you don’t want to take if from me, then take it from the source: </p>

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[Recommendations:</a> Counselor Tips](<a href=“http://professionals.collegeboard.com/guidance/applications/counselor-tips]Recommendations:”>Writing Recommendations – Counselors | College Board)</p>

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How many schools offer FA for families with income over $200k? I bet you could count that on one hand. Therefore unless a students is super, super, super smart, he or she is not going to be able any FA. I think most cut off is around 100k.</p>

<p>OP - Here’s my thought based on my oldest son’s experience last year. He decided to go to Georgia Tech which also is a great public school like U of M. The problem is that a lot of kids from Georgia go there… A number of the top kids at his high school thought that going to a private school was better than going to their in state U. I think they end up believing that the instate school will take just about anyone while the privates are pickier. However they are wrong,getting into U of M or GT is not a given for anyone. Ignore the other students and figure out which school is the best fit for you.</p>

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<p>Yep…acutely aware of what they require…technical writing for engineers satisfies some of that credit(hardly a liberal arts class)+ AP credits (none in SS though) +English 101+Public Speaking + his World History class somehow satisfied all of those requirements. It’s ridiculous.</p>

<p>Hmmm…I think his Environmental Management course might have satisfied some particular liberal art requirement too, but I guess I lumped that in with his science classes.</p>

<p>I am a community college teacher. Occasionally I am asked to write letters of recommendation. How much do I know about a student’s moral character? Only what I see in the classroom, and I get fooled. All the time. I think I can identify the cheaters and plagiarizers, but some manage to bamboozle me. In one case, my sweetest student was outed to me as having taken pictures of the test with his camera phone while my back was turned. I work for a company that is creating an elaborate screening process for Chinese students because so many of them cheat on tests and lie on their college applications, including fake letters of recommendation. My point is, whether a university requires letters of recommendation or not says very little about the quality of the education or the student body. There must be a reason besides sheer numbers that the University of California, one of the biggest university systems in the world, doesn’t use them.</p>

<p>tpsthorty,</p>

<p>Top private colleges ask for counselor recommendations, as well as teacher recommendations. In many instances, counselors do, in fact, have extensive knowledge of a student’s character and personal qualities. As do many high school teachers, believe it or not. And students are asked to waive their right to see the recs, so these recommenders can write freely in most instances.</p>

<p>There is probably more value to top colleges in the fact that some students are either unwilling or not able to obtain the two or three positive counselor or teacher recs, that culls them out of the process altogether. Some colleges are apparently not interested in admitting those students, for whatever reason. If they didn’t think it made a difference in the composition of their student bodies, I cannot imagine why they’d put themselves through the effort of reading tens of thousands of them every year. If they thought the requirement was causing them to lose out on the best candidates, then I’m almost certain they wouldn’t require them.</p>

<p>Many schools just go by numbers for admittance, it certainly would be faster and easier, but even public schools are now using more holistic admissions, requiring ( or suggesting) essays & recommendations even though it takes much more man hours (& $$$) to do so.</p>

<p>Here we go again. In the game of life, the person you marry, the people you associate with, the friends you have, the health you maintain, are far more important than the school you attend or even the income you achieve when it comes to satisfaction and happiness. Academic or brilliant classmates do not necessarily make great friends or associates.</p>

<p>Need I remind people here that there is far more to life than academic or even professional achievement. Went to my Thirty Year HS reunion some time ago. Plenty of Lawyers and Doctors and business men. Many of these people were fat and coronaries waiting to happen. You could tell that many of them were neither healthy nor happy. I wonder if their bank accounts or the academic pedigree are going to mean a damn to them while they are recovering from by-pass surgery? </p>

<p>My daughter is attending a non-elite public college. It is reasonably priced so I do not feel like I am being scammed by the educational industrial complex. She joined a Sorority, has a zillion new friends, enjoys her classes and is having the time of her life. To me that’s whats life is all about. Nobody cares about any other person’s educational or professional accomplishments. People only care about their own because it is how they justify their own existence.</p>

<p>The kids referred to by the OP? What sad specimens of humanity.</p>

<p>“a great public school like U of M”
-Again, great for some and not so for others. Do not go with what others are telling you. Research what fits specific student the best. I have heard different opinions from different people. Cannot go with that. And they are very stringy wiht Merit awards at U of M. One reason D. has not applied. She actually got huge award at the only private UG that she has applied, but has chosen another school, state public that gave her full tuition Merit and later some more. But it was not the reason. She simply decided to go where she felt she belonged and opportunities started falling on her lap like we had not predicted at all. Her experience there was way beyond any expectations.</p>

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<p>CSU has about twice as many undergraduates as UC.</p>

<p>UC and CSU not using recommendations is likely both due to sheer size and not wanting to increase workload on the high schools. A student applying to UC and CSU creates no workload on the high school – no recommendations*, no transcripts. Only in the case of matriculation does the high school need to send a transcript (one only after graduation from high school, as verification of previously self-reported courses and grades and that senior year was completed sufficiently well).</p>

<p>Indeed, the added workload on counselors and teachers may be a significant impediment for students at underfunded public high schools to getting meaningful** recommendations for private universities in a timely fashion.</p>

<p><em>Except in rare borderline cases where the school asks for supplemental information which may include recommendations.
*</em>If a counselor has to handle hundreds of students, and not just on college preparation and application issues, can a recommendation really be meaningful?</p>

<p>“Yep, many were indeed valedictorians who would be accepted at Ivy’s. D’s roomate was one of them.”</p>

<p>There are 38,000 valedictorians and about 23000 Ivy League accepted students a year.
So even if all those students instead of “many” were valedictorians and the Ivy league only accepted valedictorians (which they don’t), it is not clear that those students would have been accepted.</p>

<p>The top schools often repeat that they could easily fill their classes with valedictorians/2400 SAT/36 ACT kids if they wanted to.</p>

<p>^I had a different reason to say what I have said. D’s HS always send fe top kids to Ivy’s and #1 going to Harvard is almost a tradition there. Well, D. did not apply to any Ivy /Elite at all. I cannot say that she was accepted after graduating #1 simply because one cannot be accepted if she did not apply. But based on her school history, there is a very high chance that she in fact would be accepted if she has applied. She was the only student in her HS senior class with GPA=4.0 uw.</p>

<p>Bay, suggesting that recommendations aren’t likely to weed out students of questionable morals does not mean that they are useless. While, as I said earlier, I think it is very rare that a student’s character is so questionable that inability to obtain recommendations would keep her out of schools that required them, I believe it is far more common for teachers to have some positive information about a student’s character. For a student not to be able to obtain recs, it means that her behavior is widely known to be so far beyond the pale that he can’t get references from anyone. For a student to be able to produce recommendations that speak to positive aspects of her character, it only requires that she have gotten to know one or two teachers well enough that they can speak to something beyond her math or writing ability. </p>

<p>But the other things that recommendations can do is distinguish between good and great students. The fact that a student in a suburban high school got an “A” in AP History and an 800 on her SAT II might mean that she is a bright kid who works hard, or it might mean she is a leading historian in the making. A teacher’s letter can really help here.</p>

<p>Being #1 is a small private school with a graduating class of 30 may be seen differently than being #1 in a large, competitive school with a graduating class of 600.</p>

<p>Re jym626 #175: I have not personally heard the top schools saying that

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<p>With regard to valedictorians, this is certainly true, since there are about 37,000 high schools in the US, and quite a few of them have multiple valedictorians.</p>

<p>With regard to the SAT composite scores, among 2013 college-bound seniors, 494 had scores of 2400 (single sitting). I doubt that the number is more than three or four times that, after accounting for superscoring–which makes the number roughly equal to the number of students admitted to Harvard each year. In 2011, 705 students had a 36 on the ACT. This number has been growing swiftly, with about a 10-fold increase from 1997 to 2011. However, I doubt that it has more than tripled since 2011.</p>

<p>The top scorers on the SAT and ACT are quite a bit rarer than valedictorians.</p>

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I have, quantmech. Many times. Its almost a canned response as admissions events. That they could fill their classes with vals or students with perfect scores on standardized testing if they chose to. They talk about building a class and look beyond just grades and scores.</p>

<p>I didnt say anything about single setting scores. You added that.</p>

<p>To clarify- they said that the could fill classes with students who either were vals or had perfect scores. Not meaning both together in one candidate. ie-- the class could be filled with students who had any of the 3 (Val, perfect SAT or perfect ACT)</p>