<p>The title says it all: HADES or Harvard = Most prestigious/selective BS or Most prestigious/selective colleges.</p>
<p>Fair point, Periwinkle, one I ignored simply because I perceived the original question to be solely about chances. I fully agree that if tuition would place too heavy a burden on the shoulders of your parents, you should absolutely turn the offer down. However, boarding schools, especially those perceived as the elite, have massive chunks of their endowments set aside for financial aid. When I applied, my family expected to get very little, being from the middle class. The school I ended up attending went WAY beyond our expectations. In fact, when I received offers from colleges a few years later, the only school that made a better offer was my state university and that included merit scholarships, which few boarding schools have. We still had to pay something and that is obviously more than we would have been paying for public school, but it in no way broke the bank. Bottom line: I would apply and see what happens. If you get in and the FA is sufficient, awesome, take it. If not, at least you tried, and it sounds like you have a pretty decent option at home.</p>
<p>But NoDrama, it isn’t an either/or question. It’s a very complex question. Attending an elite boarding school will harm the chances of some candidates to attend a “big name” school, but it will help other candidates. I’m not certain that eighth graders know enough of the larger world to judge whether their school is a “good suburban public high school.”</p>
<p>Tapper7, yes, the schools do have funds which they may only use for financial aid, and many schools do commit additional funds to FA. However, if you’re already in college, you aren’t facing the effect of the current downturn in endowments on financial aid. Certainly, any applicant can submit an application, and a few will be accepted. Some will be full pay, some have all need met–and some will be in the painful position of being unable to attend because their parents can’t afford it.</p>
<p>
I agree with this statement, folly as it may be to choose a big name school for the sake of choosing a big name school. Most 8th graders also can’t give good reasons about why Harvard would or would not be the school for them. If you’re trying to maximize your chances to get into Harvard before having a good understanding of what that truly means, your education (and childhood) may be weakened. What may be worth doing is, assuming money is no issue, deciding what is more important - possibly lowering your chances to get into a top school by attending boarding school (don’t assume it’ll help, even though it may) or attending what is likely a more challenging school right away and ending up where you do (which will likely be a good school, even if it’s not a top one). There’s no good answer for everyone - it depends on each individual child.</p>
<p>
This confuses me somewhat; I’m not sure I see the difference between a college and a boarding school where it comes to FA (although Andover was much more generous than the colleges to which I applied by providing more than my family’s demonstrated need.). Once one is in college, one doesn’t receive the same FA for each year, either. One has to apply again for the next year and all of the calculations are done over, bringing about the same potential problems as for one trying to enter the school.</p>
<p>
This point really shows the difference between FAFSA’s definition of “can” and the parents’. FAFSA assumes one will make many sacrifices to send one’s child to school. It’s is theoretically possible to do so, but generally not practical at all. However, the same Financial Aid process applies to boarding schools and to the top colleges.</p>
<p>I’m sure there’s something I’m misreading, because I’m not quite sure I follow the argument you’re making. I do agree that a financial standpoint does radically alter the paths open to a student, though.</p>
<p>I had the fun of applying this past admissions season, so I’m not already in college. But as Uroogla pointed out, I’m not sure how this makes a difference. I also went to Andover, a school with an unusual focus on FA. Andover is one of the few schools that remained need-blind as the economy went downhill. Since students have to renew their awards every year, they could have decreased current students’ FA with the economic downturn, but everyone’s that I know of remained constant. To be fair, I’ll admit I don’t know what the FA packages look like for new students. But judging from all their recent fundraising initiatives and the way they’re reallotting funds all over the place, I’d assume they’re fairly similar.</p>
<p>Periwinkle, what I’m curious about is how much better the same courses might be in a HADES-type boarding school versus a “very good suburban” high school? Some have said it is the difference between really “learning” a subject versus simply “memorizing facts” about a subject. If generally true, that would be quite significant. And that would matter much more to us than how Ivy League admission chances might be affected.</p>
<p>@Tapper7:
My understanding, based on how both my FA package was done and how my brother’s seems to be, is that Andover promises at least that amount of FA that the students receive as freshman for the full four years, if the need continues to exist. I have not ever seen such a promise at colleges.</p>
<p>@Mainer95:
I never attended a “very good suburban” high school, but I can say that at a HADES-type boarding school, memorization is less important than understanding the subject. For example, in AP Physics, memorizing the formulas is often not enough, since one would be expected to go through the process to show one understands from where the formulas come. In history, while tests are primarily factually based, class discussion focuses more on the “why?” than the “what?” One of my essays for US history was to suggest and defend an alternative to the concept of judicial review, that the judicial branch could and should determine the constitutionality of federal laws. In Latin class, only a small portion of every test was dedicated to the translation of passages that had been covered in class (i.e. the memorization of a translation made in class). Instead, we were expected to apply our understanding of the vocabulary and grammar learned to translate passages we had never seen before and to answer grammar questions about them. After such a class, the AP exam was, to put it bluntly, trivial.</p>
<p>Again, I don’t know much about “very good suburban” high schools, though I can safely say, based on conversations with people at my town’s public high school, that I learned to learn, while they did not.</p>
<p>Uroogla
The confusion comes from an imprecision in phrasing on my part. Tapper7 would be the class of 2009. Thus, he or she would have received a generous offer before the crash of last fall. First, Tapper7 isfour years further into the educational journey. Second, four years ago, the well-endowed boarding schools had larger endowments. This year, schools and colleges were scrambling to adjust to the effects of the crash. Looking forward, there is a question as to whether schools and colleges can continue generous financial aid packages. It depends on their assessment of the length of the crisis. The schools may be able to afford packages as generous as in past years, or they may not. Only a trustee, head, or business manager of such a school could say for certain. See <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/573003-financial-market-impact-endowments-financial-aid-applications-etc.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/573003-financial-market-impact-endowments-financial-aid-applications-etc.html</a>.</p>
<p>FAFSA makes an estimate of parents’ capacity to pay. As a parent, I would not say that the estimate is always possible to meet. I know people who’ve lost their jobs, or had to take a reduction in pay, and these are people who’ve never expected such a blow.</p>
<p>Thank you for clarifying - I understand your point now and mostly agree (although the financial budgets tend to be set out for at least 4 years at a time, which lessens slightly the impact of the crash). Similarly, Harvard specifically seems likely to continue its extremely generous policy (and even a reduction would give it a more generous policy than most other top schools). On the other hand, Brown tends to determine that FAFSA says a family can afford less than it truly can. Theoretically, if one’s situation changes, one could discuss the situation with the Financial Aid department, but I’m not sure that would work out exactly as the family would like.</p>
<p>Simply put, if there is money for boarding school or college, but not both, college is the obvious choice, unless you’re sure you’d find a college where one would get a full merit scholarship, which is not generally something one could know right now. If there’s money for both (OP’s situation was not quite clear, as it may be that there is money for both but they’re prefer not to spend $160,000+ for BS), then it depends on the quality of the high school in question (requesting any college placement info and SAT/ACT score info from the HS that they’d be willing to give may help to determine the quality of the school, somewhat), just how important getting into HYP is (not that this is anywhere near guaranteed from either location), and the other relative values of the family. It may be worth applying just to see what sort of aid package one may receive, if the financial situation could be close.</p>
<p>Again, it depends on the family, and there’s no “right” answer.</p>
<p>Uroogla: When I said I didn’t know what packages looked like for new students, I was referring to the amount schools were issuing for new students with similar circumstances as compared to before the downturn. </p>
<p>Periwinkle: In the interest of full disclosure, I was a two year senior, the entering class of 2007. But it matters not, it was still before the crash. My point was simply that some schools seem to be trying valiently to keep up the generous financial aid offers that they have had in the past, so a HADES education might still be within reach. </p>
<p>Mainer95: I did two years in a well regarded public school and two years at Andover. I found math and science largely the same, though there was a more pronounced focus on problem solving. However, I’m a math/science person so I might be biased. I was bored in math at both and rarely did any work that wasn’t explicity required. I don’t think I’ve done more than 10 math assignments this past year and I definitely haven’t done anything I didn’t think would be checked for years. But that’s what’s nice about upper division technical classes. In most of the ones I took senior year (Organic Chem, Multivariable Calc, and Linear Algebra, but not Physics C) your grade was your test average, so if you didn’t need to do the homework, you didn’t do it. Whereas most of my friends at my home school were handing in nightly homework assignments for grading through senior year. The humanities were the big difference, and in my opinion they were much better taught at private school. Part of this is class size, you can’t really have a meaningful discussion with everyone in classes approaching thirty students. Smaller classes allow students to really learn how to develop and argue their ideas. This is also stressed in paper writing. There were far, far more papers at private school. At public school, I took history for two years and wrote one paper, about ten pages, with a partner. At private school, I took history for one year and wrote ten papers, four of which were ten pages or longer. I usually had a weekly or biweekly English paper, and foreign language had frequent papers as well. In my experience, private school foreign language was the biggest change. Coming in, I’d taken four years of Spanish, but got dropped back to Spanish level 2 because they flew through the grammar and I wasn’t nearly as fluent as many of my new classmates.</p>
<p>Thank you very much, Uroogla and Tapper7. Your comments have shed a lot of light on some of the differences that are most important to us.</p>