<p>I went to an Ivy years ago and I know it was a financial strain on my parents even with the financial aid package I received. Still, they wanted me to go as I had earned it, I guess. I think they were also impressed with the name, and this school was quite hot at the time. I could have gone to my state school with no debt and gotten a used car and not had to work part-time, but I chose the Ivy even with the debt and the job and the not having much spending money for 2am pizza.</p>
<p>I ended up getting a real liberal arts education, mostly because I didnât know what I wanted to do with my life (other than something creative). A mishmash of classes in English, History, Latin, Psych, Sociology, BiologyâŠyou wouldnât believe some of the classes I took and some of the papers I wrote. Itâs pretty embarrassing to tell people, âYup, wrote a paper on Charlieâs Angels and 70s feminism. Did a presentation on The Boss. Got a diploma.â </p>
<p>My DH went to the same school and studied a hard scienceâthat was a very rigorous program and it served him well getting into a top-ranked med school and residencies.</p>
<p>We married as soon as I graduated and I got a job while he was in med school. I will say the boss hired me mostly because of my Ivy pedigree (this was a time when the job market was quite bad and he admitted he thought I would be a feather in his cap). The work was fun and creative but the salary was awful. I was thankful to be able to pay off my school loans in a reasonable time frame. I stayed a few years at that job and I havenât worked outside the home since.</p>
<p>I have felt guilty off and on about going to the Ivy and not making a six-figure salary or changing the world or writing the Great American Novel. I asked my parents once if they were disappointed in me, that I didnât live up to my potential in some way. They said they werenât upset, that going to the Ivy affected my life in a positive way (learning, growing, meeting my DH and subsequently having children with him) and that as long as I was happy it was worth it.</p>
<p>I think maybe what I am trying to say is that when one attends a university known for having the âbest and brightestâ, and perhaps one comes out of that experience at a lower wattage than is expected, there may be associated feelings of pressure and guilt on the part of the student. I feel sometimes that I wasted my parentsâ money. I am lucky they do not feel that way.</p>
<p>I really dislike the fact that people lump all the Ivies together or all research universities together. Except for the fact they donât give athletic scholarships, the Ivies arenât all that much alike. </p>
<p>Life at Penn is much different than life at Brown. Life at Dartmouth is different than life at Yale. Princeton and Harvard are very different places. Ditto Cornell and Columbia. </p>
<p>Personally, I think some of the top LACs are ever bit as stressful as any Ivy. Swarthmore, to me, seems a heck of a lot more stressed than Brown does, for example.</p>
<p>My offspring attended a NYC public magnet-type high school and thus knew a fair number of kids at virtually every top school you can name. In some ways, it was more competitive than college. (One of my Dâs high school classmates was valedictorian of his Harvard class; he wasnât valedictorian in high school. )</p>
<p>Iâve never liked âbig fish in small pond syndrome.â Iâve read a few studiesânot that I can give you a citation now. I recall that most men were happier being big fish in college than women were.</p>
<p>ucbalum, I donât remember what the son did after high school graduation, though I have a vague impression he went to work at something prosaic. No idea what happened to him in later years, so I canât report on if his high school experience made a difference in the rest of his life. However, his mother was happy with the outcome. Not that this was necessarily the story for this particular student, but if you can take a kid who was entirely unengaged in school and put them in a school where they can muster some enthusiasm for learningâthatâs a good outcome. Or if the student had a peer group heading towards alcohol or drug abuse, and ended up in an environment with fewer such peers. Or if a student could go from a school which didnât have the resources to see when a kid was beginning to slip academically or socially to a school that could be more aware of a kid needing some help.</p>
The datapoints compared the rate of med school acceptance vs distance from mean GPA of full class (applicant GPA - mean GPA of class). The distance from GPA of class relates to the suggestion to avoid highly selective colleges because itâs expected to be harder to maintain a high GPA for med school. With a 32-35 MCAT, the Harvard/Stanford apps had a high acceptance at all GPAs of 3+ (not enough data points for less than 3), including GPAs well below the mean GPA of the full class (mean GPA high due to grade inflation); while Texas/Arizona apps only had a similar high acceptance rate for apps with a GPA of ~3.75+, which is far above the mean GPA of the class.</p>
<p>
A single datapoint is not very meaningful, particularly if we donât know his MCAT or GPA. Highly selective colleges tend to have high med school acceptance rates, with some exceeding 90%. However, acceptance rate without stats info is not a good measure due to a biased sample (class is full of good test takers who have high MCAT) and some schools blocking/discouraging low stat students from applying.</p>
<p>I donât follow medical school admissions, but if theyâre anything like the law schools, they donât give a fig about the mean GPA of the undergraduate institution. They just care about the GPA and the test scores. So your data set up a false comparison. The student who is at the mean GPA for Stanford or Harvard has, what, about a 3.5 or 3.6? I assume some medical schools will go below that to get the MCAT scores they want, just as law schools will go below their target median GPAs to get the LSAT scores they want. But very few medical schools will go below a 3.0 GPA, which is roughly the mean GPA for Texas or Arizona. So if youâre saying a Harvard or Stanford student with a strong MCAT score can have a GPA up to 0.5 below the schoolâs mean and still get into medical school, then all youâre saying is that some medical schools will go down to a 3.0 to get those strong MCAT scores. But they probably wonât go below a 3.0, so any Texas or Arizona student who is even just a little below that schoolâs 3.0 mean GPA probably wonât get into medical school, even with a strong MCAT. Whoop-de-doo.</p>
No, Iâm not saying that at all. It doesnât matter if you compare class rank (distance from mean) or absolute GPA, the conclusion is the same. The post immediately previous to yours mentioned specific GPAs instead of just references to class rank. A quote is below:
Note that itâs not clear that the minimum Harvard/Stanford admit GPA is 3.0. Stanford and Harvard apps who had a GPA below 3.0 had a 100% acceptance rate (with the specified MCAT range). I did not mention them in my earlier post due to the small sample size.</p>
<p>âI donât get it? Whatâs the problem with every body earning Aâs? If a student does the required and masters the concepts and proves it via test paper project, then why not. I can see low grades, if the student slacks or doesnât learn the materialâŠâ</p>
<p>I pulled my kids out of public school over this âmasteryâ stuff. They go to a prep school committed to challenging them. Mastery is fine if youâre getting a nursing license or passing the bar, but education should be about excellence, new horizons, discovery, and not some check off box of mastery. Iâm happy handing out Bâs for mastery, but I want Aâs kept special so that I can acknowledge, even award, stellar performers.</p>
<p>My DS is a freshman and loves it. BUT he only applied one Ivy and That is because he loved it. In fact the name was a negative for him. To thine own self be true and regrets are unlikely to follow.</p>
<p>Mathmom, do you really say âan el-ay-ceeâ? I always assumed it was âa lackâ, but I now I think of it, I donât hear it said out loud very much.</p>
<p>Swat and Reed have had reputations for being just as/more stressful than the IviesâŠeven for those at my HS. And older alums/HS classmates who ended up attending those LACs have concurred. </p>
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</p>
<p>This is a YMMV deal depending on the individual student. Some love being the big fish in the small pond for various reasons ranging from enjoying being top dog to enjoying the diversity of being surrounded by students whose academic-level is much wider ranging than what one may find at more selective institutionsâŠwhether public or private. </p>
<p>Others would feel that doesnât provide enough academic/intellectual challenges and/or provide one with a desired critical mass of kindred spirits in that regard. They may also want to reduce the chances of encountering students who may slow the class down for various reasonsâŠespecially due to not having as much academic interest/not caring*. </p>
<ul>
<li>E.g. A woman in a college English lit class whose stock answer to every single question posed by the Professor in class was âWater, a symbol of life!â By the middle of the term, most of us classmates were either really annoyed with her or were maintaining wits by viewing her as our classâ pitiful version of comedy relief. And while the Professor tried putting on a diplomatic face most of the time, even she grew so annoyed at times to the point it was apparent on her face.</li>
</ul>
<p>Dd is a Yale grad and says the problem with going to a school like Yale is that everything after college compares unfavorably.
Iâm sure some students from every college feel that way, but I can imagine for kids who basically love school and the kind of learning that college affords, which is the type of students admitted to schools like the Ivies, graduating is bittersweet.</p>
<p>MoonchildâŠmy kids both loved college and the learning it afforded them. Neither attended an IvyâŠor anything close to an Ivy. Yes kids who attend other schools also love their schools, and have a zeal for learning they gained there. And it is often bittersweet to graduate. My kids felt that way about their little high school. This is not unique to the Ivies.</p>
<p>Moonchild- what you been drinking? I hate to break it to you, but there are plenty of kids at Ivy schools who are eager to get on with life, who skip class, like the social aspects of college the best, or who spend their time founding a start-up. Time to stop worshiping at the Altar of Yale.</p>
<p>After reading the postings, I couldnât help but to consider that the Ivy schools conduct interviews of their applicants while almost all of the state schools do not conduct interviews. Could the low rate of regret be a result of a better selection process?</p>
<p>First off, are we talking specifically Ivies as in those-specific-8-schools, or are we talking about highly selective colleges as a whole?</p>
<p>Because if the question is âhas anyone regretted sending their kid to an Ivy specifically,â thatâs a really weird and odd question. Like any place else, there is always going to be x% of people who donât like it there, and thereâs no reason to think that the Ivies are any different. I recognize that CC is populated with unsophisticates who think that every day at those-specific-8-schools is going to be Untold Happiness With Chocolate Flowing From the Fountains, but come on now â these are places, just like any other. Why wouldnât some people regret sending their kids to Ivies ⊠just like some people regret sending their kids to service academies or state flagships or schools in big cities or schools in rural areas or schools close to home or schools far from home? I donât get the question at all. What kind of person thinks that Ivies are so very golden that no one could ever POSSIBLY utter a single word of regret or disappointment with them?</p>
<p>While Ivy or other comparable private colleges do employ more interviews to screen applicants, they donât necessarily use them to screen all applicants or even a majority of themâŠincluding ones who were admitted. </p>
<p>They donât usually have the human resources, whether in the adcom office or alums in all places needed to interview every applicant or even those who are interested in interviewing with them.</p>
<p>The state universities are typically less selective*, so more weakly prepared students enter, struggle, and flunk/drop out for academic reasons. In addition, they tend to have many more students from low income families, and cannot afford to shower them with the financial aid that HYPS give, so such students may be closer to the edge of being unable to afford to continue to attend, so they are more vulnerable to dropping out for cost reasons.</p>
<p>Interviews for admission make no difference in the above differences.</p>
<p>*In terms of material differences in academic preparation as measured by high school grades and test scores, not, as with the super-selective schools, deciding whether to admit one set of 4.0/2300 applicants versus a different set of 4.0/2300 applicants.</p>
Although I too have noticed that some posters write âan LAC.â</p>