<p>I too find it sad that all of a sudden a kid who can’t find her “fit” in the financially affordable option is being excoriated. Like “horrors” the kid who thinks Yale is a better fit than U Conn, and all the posters here going nuts that only a prestige whore would want to go to Yale.</p>
<p>I know teenagers who headed off to be a racial or ethnic pioneer somewhere and did just fine- others who lasted one semester (I think both Dartmouth and Cornell had to privately recruit a barber and stylist who knew how to cut African-American hair since Hanover and Ithaca didn’t have such a thing at the time.) Some people at the time said, “big deal”- get your hair cut when you go home for the summer. Others recognized that this was a not so subtle way of reinforcing all the other alienating experiences that kids had to deal with as a racial pioneer.</p>
<p>So OP’s sister may or may not come to love ND. Nothing wrong with her deciding that she’d rather be at a campus that’s more to her liking (for whatever the reason). I don’t see the PC police acting up when a kid chooses U Idaho over U Chicago (it’s so chic to choose a state school over the clearly overrated private) even if that kid decides that living on the South Side of Chicago with all those urban minorities is what’s bugging him/her about Chicago vs. Idaho.</p>
<p>So if you’re going to claim that it’s great to be a racial minority somewhere at least be consistent. Or call out the white kids on their racist assumptions as well. Or just concede that even if Sis didn’t choose her words with great care, it would be really hard to argue her siblings point that ND is a Catholic-infused environment with a lot of white folks and she doesn’t want to go there for four years.</p>
<p>What a great thread! Mini, I looked at the numbers and ratings of the “entitlement” schools listed on the post you provided so long ago. </p>
<p>The list confirms what my own D felt as she visited campuses last summer. She immediately crossed two off of her list as she didn’t like the atmosphere; they are both “up there” in terms of “entitlement.” She couldn’t get off campus quickly enough for one of them. She has excellent radar!</p>
<p>Has that list that you cited been updated, Mini?</p>
<p>The family can’t afford to send her anywhere else. It is either ND or CC. I don’t think anyone is saying it is a great situation. But sometimes you have to play with what you are dealt with. Going to ND is not the end of the world.</p>
<p>"What a great thread! Mini, I looked at the numbers and ratings of the “entitlement” schools listed on the post you provided so long ago. </p>
<p>The list confirms what my own D felt as she visited campuses last summer. She immediately crossed two off of her list as she didn’t like the atmosphere; they are both “up there” in terms of “entitlement.” She couldn’t get off campus quickly enough for one of them. She has excellent radar!</p>
<p>Has that list that you cited been updated, Mini?"</p>
<p>Sadly, no. Some of the data has gotten substantially more difficult to obtain, and I don’t have the time. But I doubt there have been many very significant changes (maybe Princeton). </p>
<p>I started the project as confirmation of radar as well. I wanted to find out if the data validated what my d. felt as she went from campus to campus, and in every case, it did.</p>
<p>Years ago, I met a young Asian-American student who was thrilled to be at Harvard. I asked her why. I might have expected prestige, Ivy League, resources, blah blah blah. She said it was the diversity. She had been one of six Asian-American students in a school of 2000 in Indiana. No one had ever been unkind to her, uttered racist remarks, discriminated against her. She just was tired of being asked to represent all Asians in the various classes she took. Not only was she not of Japanese, Cambodian, Indonesian, South Asian, etc… origin, she was first and foremost herself and no one else. No one, she said, expected her Caucasian classmates to represent all white Americans. The presence of so many other Asian-Americans at Harvard allowed her to be herself, she said.
Not all Catholic universities have the same atmosphere. I believe Georgetown and BC come across as less religious than Notre Dame possibly because they draw their student bodies from a wider cross-section of the population. Whatever the case, I think the OP’s sister ought to give ND a chance. It is an excellent school, and going the CC route is by no means a guarantee that the sis will end up at Cal or UCLA. In fact, it looks less likely all the time.</p>
<p>“But Westerndad, are you the one going to college?”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, no. My kids have all the fun. One is finishing up his undergraduate work (hurray!) and one is going to start his graduate program in September. I would love to be in the shoes of the latter.</p>
<p>Post #101
“I know teenagers who headed off to be a racial or ethnic pioneer somewhere and did just fine- others who lasted one semester (I think both Dartmouth and Cornell had to privately recruit a barber and stylist who knew how to cut African-American hair since Hanover and Ithaca didn’t have such a thing at the time.) Some people at the time said, “big deal”- get your hair cut when you go home for the summer. Others recognized that this was a not so subtle way of reinforcing all the other alienating experiences that kids had to deal with as a racial pioneer.”</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe that Cornell had to recruit a stylist who knows how to handle African-American hair. Back in the day, when I was a white student living in Ithaca, I rented a room from an AA hairstylist. There was and probably still is a sizable AA community there. I did learn a lot about what AA women had to endure in order to have straightened hair.</p>