<p>Well, I have attended three different schools: top tier, middle tier and community college. I have to say that ALL the students at the top tier school were bright. Some of them blew me away. At the middle tier school and community college it was a mixed bag. One project I worked on at the middle tier school I got stuck with a real dummy. He kept telling me how smart I was, and I knew I wasn't that smart (having seen REALLY smart kids). When I tried to explain concepts to him it became apparent that he was just really stupid, I hate to say. Plus, I aced all my classes, getting my masters with a 4.0 whereas at Rice, I had a 3.0. At community college there were some really smart, motivated adults in certain classes and some really smart, motivated high school students. The average college student, though, seemed not too smart. So, in summary, can you find smart students at non top tier schools - yes, but you could end up in a group project with some not-so-smart kids. Also, you may never find out what it's like to be challenged by a curriculum and a top-notch student body. As one of my friends said to me recently: Carnegie Mellon taught her how to handle not knowing all the answers on a test which turned out to be a good thing for life.</p>
<p>If your mom is stat driven, you might also look at 4 year graduation rates and the percentage of students employed at or soon after graduation. Guilford has an astonishing number of students who actually have a job the week after they graduate. </p>
<p>The "Ivies" are really a diverse group. Dartmouth is smallish and rurally located. I think comparable experiences might be Whitman and perhaps Macalester (no cakewalk to get in to either) -- Harvard is huge and urban -- so it'd be so very different. It might be more helpful to say "Brown" looks like you and then search out other schools that are "Brownlike" -- it's not just smart kids you want. It's smart kids that you'd enjoy.</p>
<p>Perhaps you should point out to your mother how Ivy-level schools don't necessarily have the top ranked programs in your areas of interest, or how you could get more individual attention at a slightly less prestigious school.</p>
<p>Is your Mom Russian? If so, you will never, ever disbuse of her Ivy League notions. I wouldn't even try. </p>
<p>Intelligence, defined in fairly strict and narrow terms, is highly, highly prized in Russia and everyone is finely calibrated as to their "smarts". There are very strict hierachies as to schools, etc. </p>
<p>Your Mom is, of course, wrong on many of these fronts. But she will never, ever be in doubt.</p>
<p>Maybe you should explain to your mom (if it's true) that intelligent people is not all that you are looking for in a school and there are other more important factors. Plus, being surrounded by really smart people all the time isn't exactly preparation for the real world.</p>
<p>Some of my daughter's classmates attended Ivy and other wise very prestigeous schools only to find their parent's dreams didn't equal their own.</p>
<p>Now , some of them are drop-outs, or attending local community colleges or EMT school.
It is hard to pursue your own goals, if your parent's see another path for you...particularly if you are an outstanding student.</p>
<p>Likewise for students who attend schools they have no interest in, but gave them a great bang for their buck, so to speak. Some of those students took scholarship money away from my daughter and her friends that have stuck to their school and goals.</p>
<p>As parents , we all want to see a return on our investment.</p>
<p>The creative arts are not necessarily the strong points of these Ivy-type schools, across the board anyway. If you're trying to make a list of schools whose excellence most closely matches your interest areas it would not surprise me if only a couple Ivies wound up making the list.</p>
<p>Creative writing was one of my daughter's interest areas, so during her search I flagged schools that seemed to have strong programs in it, from CC and other sources.</p>
<p>Here's the list I saved:
Sarah Lawrence, Middlebury, Hamilton, Kenyon, Pomona, Bard, Barnard, U Iowa, Grinnell, Oberlin, Northwestern, Trinity (CT), Bennington, Amherst, Williams, Vassar, Reed, Princeton, Stanford, NYU, Tufts, Cornell
U Redlands, U Denver, Johns Hopkins, Denison, Emerson, U Oregon, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, SF State
Beloit, U Pittsburgh, SUNY New Paltz, Knox (Il)</p>
<p>There are a number of highly-regarded colleges on this list, but only two are in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>I think if you looked into colleges that have the best programs in Art you will also find non-ivies highly represented near the top. The creativity and skill of some of the artists I know were not necessarily captured by their SAT scores or grades in high school academic classes. Nor did they feel an ivy-type environment would best advance their talents.</p>
<p>If you're trying to make a broader argument to your parents, you might trot out those "%PhD" lists that appear all over CC. I hate these lists, but they always favor homogeneous liberal arts colleges and the ivies won't show up on top, so you'll get what you want.</p>
<p>My boyfriend is very smart, but he learns on his own. He went to a ****ty high school and was the first in his family to go to college, so he ended up at a local state school. He always viewed school as ridiculous because he was smarter than what they could offer. Then, take my ex, who first went to Columbia at only 16. He is really brilliant when it comes to math and science, and a good writer, but I definitely would not consider him among the smartest I know. People get into ivies for different reasons. Current bf and ex are both smart, but in different ways, and my ex also had parents who knew how to navigate the educational system.</p>
<p>Also, some top liberal arts colleges could be filled with smarter kids, in theory, because the students decided to choose a challenging environment and interactive environment over name.</p>
<p>This might be useful:
Baccalaureate</a> Origins Study</p>
<p>eg. <a href="http://www.earlham.edu/%7Eir/bac_origins_report/socsci.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.earlham.edu/~ir/bac_origins_report/socsci.html</a> shows that in social sciences only Princeton and Yale are in the top 10 for ppl who go onto receive doctorates. </p>
<p>You could also remind her that the highest avg SAT score does not belong to an IVY. While this wont remove the Ivy from the top tier from her perspective, its a good way to argue that other schools can be just as good. (do not say 'better')
*
Also, some top liberal arts colleges could be filled with smarter kids, in theory, because the students decided to choose a challenging environment and interactive environment over name.*</p>
<p>hi2u</p>
<p>However, parents, however wrong they may be, are often too stubborn to listen to these kind of things. You are a kid in their eyes, and always will be, so you are fighting an uphill battle.</p>
<p>As parent who went to a NE LAC and whose kids chose to stay in the south (one at an excellent small Univ. mentioned in this thread and one in the application process), I agree with the comments made by those who say that the environment your mom sounds like she wants for you is one that is academically/intellectually stimulating. Sometimes this is seen in the small LACs, but you can find intellectual stimulation in amny fine institutions. There was a poster a few years ago who chose Vanderbilt over Yale, and wrote an excellent follow up thread the next year singing its praises. I will post it if I can find it. If your mom really believes the only smart kids re at the Ivys, well.. thats just silly. Good luck.</p>
<p>Here ya go - read this thread <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/37237-long-financial-road-matriculation.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/37237-long-financial-road-matriculation.html</a></p>
<p>russianrus:</p>
<p>I'm not sure if I agree with your mom or not, for YOUR particular situation and what would be best for you. Here's are some things I think you should consider:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>So, you want to study artistic things and Russian. Fine. What sorts of people are the types you most enjoy being around? Are they extremely smart people? Are they extremely artistic people who don't have to be very smart? Are they both? (And that last is a very important question, since I love being around performing artists, but not the kind who go to LA at 18 to do non-demanding on-camera roles. I like the ones who want to do Ibsen and Checkov, and find the intellectual demands of those plays stimulating. But that's me, not you.)</p></li>
<li><p>If your answer is that you want to be around artistic people, but they don't have to be very smart, then I would steer away from most of the Ivies and most of the Ivy equivalents in selectivity. Some of these places attract mostly pre-professionals who won't understand you and you won't understand them. Others believe strongly in the life of the mind, but have weak programs in the arts.</p></li>
<li><p>If your answer is that you want to be around people who are both smart and artistic, it narrows down the list of schools considerably. And that would be a good place to start, perhaps, with your mom, because it's very specific and very focused on what's best for you.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>There are some well-meaning people on these boards who constantly assert that classes at Directional Arkansas are the same as classes at Swarthmore. They're wrong. I have taught at four colleges, and I can assure you that this is not true. I have had to restructure and recalibrate all my undergrad classes based on the average academic skills of students in those classes. Some of my undergrad classes over the past five years have been simply appalling, and I have apologized to the bright kids in those classes on more than one occasion. And I find that my colleagues feel the same way in overwhelming numbers (I'd say 100% but I'm not sure I'd be right. But it sure feels like 100%)</p>
<p>Decide what you really want and what sort of people you want to surround yourself with and then go from there. But please don't delude yourself that your mother is wrong and that you'll find the classes at some schools every bit as intellectually challenging as classes at others.</p>
<p>It isn't true.</p>
<p>Bard College fits what you're looking for and has the rather unique hook of having a branch college in Smolny, Russia.
[quote]
The Bard-Smolny Study Abroad Program is at the center of a truly remarkable process: the evolution of a new kind of international education and the democratization of Russian higher education.
[/quote]
<p>BTW- Vassar fits your bill perfectly</p>
<p>jym626:</p>
<p>Yeah. I was thinking about Vassar too, IF the OP wants to be around artistic AND smart kids.</p>
<p>Vassr's Russian Dept and English Dept are also strong. And the arts are top notch!</p>
<p>One thing you might want to do is start gathering as much information as you can from students, professors, etc. Contact the undergraduate program chairs of the creative writing, art, and Russian departments of the schools that you're interested in (or equivalent clubs, literary magazines, etc.) do this for all the schools under consideration-- your schools as well as your mom's schools. See who gets back in touch with you. See what they have to say.</p>
<p>You'll be doing two things: 1) you'll be gathering research for your own sake about the quality of the programs, and 2) you're giving advantage to the warm and fuzzy LAC's over the large, less personal research schools. If the professor from Dream College gets back to you with a long reply and the one at Elite College snubs you, that might say a lot about the school and how professors are expected to treat their students. (Then again, it might not). If fellow students don't get back to you, that might also say something about the warmth of the community.</p>
<p>Hopefully, you'll get a variety of responses-- hopefully, most of them will be articulate and informative-- hopefully, you will have a better sense of what you're looking for after doing all of these research, and hopefully your mom will have more reason to put her faith in your decisions.</p>
<p>Look over the top 20+ unis and top 10 LACs, or even screen a recent Princeton's 36X, research 15-25 carefully, decide which are the best fit <em>for you</em>, apply to 5-10, and then tell mom to get a life if that is not good enough. Good grades, references and great social networks should be possible at all if you are a good fit at that school, some colleges will be be much stronger candidates <em>for you</em> than others. YMMV. I think the worst thing would be to go to a school that you get into that has the highest ranking or name recognition and then realize it is not really for you. Investigate closely, I liked StudentsReview.com for details from alums. There are 1-2 schools on the USNWR top 20 list that would be over my dead body for my students.</p>
<p>this forum is your answer. look at all the posts with views that differ from your mother's. just show her the responses, and hopefully she will understand</p>
<p>Ah yes, that assumption. Many parents seem to be stuck on the Ivies, as they are the conventional, classic definitions of a fine education. Show her things about schools like UChicago, Northwestern, Wash. U., Rice, MIT, Caltech, Duke, Georgetown, Wesleyan, Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Carnegie Mellon University, and many others. Show her rankings, but not necessarily statistics, for all of these schools. They're all outstanding, and some of their programs exceed the quality of some of those at Ivies. For instance, UChicago has an outstanding Economics Department. Wesleyan has an outstanding film department, and is well-renowned, quite possibly as the best in the nation. Also, you might even want to mention special schools like Juilliard and Parsons, where the students hold a different kind of genius-- one that engages the creative side of a person, which is definitely essential to learning and growing. These two schools may not be relevant to you, but they certainly support your argument. It's upsetting how people define intelligence on such a superficial (and, dare-I-say, conservative) level.</p>