People want others to be impressed with their schools, and most just aren’t struck in awe if you announce you’ve been to an elite college. If you say you went to Harvard they know it is a hard school and you are smart, but most are not going to hang on your every word.
I worked in a small department with lawyers, some who had gone to Ivy undergrads. One guy went to Yale and he was very impressed with himself but the rest of us looked at it as he had the same job that we did and we didn’t go to Yale. Another had gone to Dartmouth. She was also very impressed with herself but she wasn’t that good at what we did. She was smart but she wasn’t part of the ‘team’ because she looked down upon the rest of us. Mr. Yale, who I liked very much, worked “Yale”, “New Haven” or “The Game” into every conversation and his alumni magazine was tossed casually onto a table in his office for all to admire.
He really wanted us to be impressed with Yale and we, mostly Midwesterners, just weren’t.
You’re not wrong. But, look at the SES make-up of those Ivy/NESCAC colleges: Forty-five percent of the students at Wesleyan are from families composed of the top 5% income earners in the country. If Tiffany offered you a discount on one of those fancy tote bags with the name “Tiffany” emblazoned across it, wouldn’t you at least be interested?
When we moved to TX, my D20 was in 3rd grade. We live in a very small town with a lot of ranching and a genuine western vibe. It’s actually really beautiful here and we got a TON of tourists. Despite the pretty surroundings and interesting culture, D20 could not WAIT to get out and chose a college in the PNW. Of course, they did not open dorms this fall and just about all the rest of Texas colleges and universities did with few exceptions. She is soooo not happy. But generally speaking, people here have no idea what schools are in the Ivy League. Most of our grads go to A&M, UT, Texas State, and UTSA. There are very few SLACs and the best one (Trinity) is becoming very difficult to get into since they take a lot of Rice rejects.
Not really, but you make a valid point. Many people care about status symbols, even people who claim, or even believe, that they don’t care about status symbols.
Midwesterners are not easily impressed about much anything, especially things which originate outside of the Midwest…
I’m not sure what that even means. Most of our extended family lives in the Pacific Northwest. D21 wants to live in the Pacific Northwest after graduation. How is a group of Wesleyan friends from the top 5% of CT, NY, and MA families going to help her? And I don’t see Wesleyan offering any “discounts”. Their current cost of attendance is pushing $80,000 per year and they don’t offer merit aid so it is likely to be nearly double the cost of private offerings here in the PNW and nearly triple the cost of our in-state public options.
My kid has plenty of friends right here at her HS who are in the top 1% and I’m sure there will be no shortage of wealthy friends at any of her regional choices. To the extent that it even matters. The NE doesn’t have a monopoly on wealth. The community we live in here in WA is actually considerably more wealthy than Middletown CT, home of Wesleyan.
Wow. I can see, you took that the wrong way. My fault. FWIW, the average grant for the 40% of Wesleyan students who qualify for need-based aid, is ~$40,000. That’s the discount I was talking about and it makes Wesleyan pretty competitive with the best flagship universities in the country. But, that’s not the point of this thread.
I’m a native of CA. One of my D18’s HS friends (SF Bay Area public HS) had a graduation party at her home. I remember her parents telling me she would be attending TCU. I didn’t recoil, but I was certainly a little confused all things considered.
It’s quite rare when a HS grad from our area attends a college in the South or Southwest.
We are in NorCal. Moved here 6 years ago from overseas so didn’t grow up with any preconceived ideas, haha. A lot of parents in our town went to Cal or Stanford (one said to me about Stanford: “it was much easier to get into back then, much harder for our kids.”) But we also have a fair number of transplants into the area from the east coast or immigrants, so maybe that affects it too. Of D19’s high school class, I think around 40% -50% ended up in the UC/CSU system. A number went California private. Other west coast states are popular, but there were also a significant chunk of the class, maybe a quarter, that went east. So it doesn’t seem quite as “parochial” as some other areas described in this thread, even though we have an excellent instate public system.
D20 has a very close friend from TX attending her LAC. Both parents are Ivy grads and settled in Austin. It was an equal desire for both parents and student to look to the northeast for colleges. Good, bad, or indifferent, I think a lot depends on what anyone’s frame of reference is. People tend to know what they know and like what they like. D20 wanted to stay a certain radius from home, a small LAC and a certain vibe. It doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have an equal, or better, experience at a similar school in another part of the country.
We live in a pretty small town that sends kids to the same handful of schools every year. Even a T20 LAC with D1 athletics 2 hours away gets a blank stare from most people. With an eye toward grad school and employment, we know it was a great choice for her.
I commuted to a job in Texas from NJ for 2 years, and I literally gave up trying to understand the college culture.
The one major difference between TX and (maybe) anywhere else was the “auto admit” based on class rank in the state. My recollection is that if you were in the top 6% (?) of your class it is an auto-admission to UT or some of the other schools in the state. I’m sure I’ve got it wrong, but Texas made it really easy for the best students to stay local. The financial differences (including travel) make it very hard to justify the cost of NE schools.
Williams, Bowdoin, Amherst, Swarthmore…what are they? Penn…you mean Penn State? I’d bet most Texans can’t name 4 Ivies.
That’s not good or bad…but it was real. UT was the gold standard in the office I worked in.
Gotcha. I misunderstood. Instate tuition here at UW-Seattle is $11,745/year and total cost of attendance is about $29,000/year with dorms and meal plans. So even $80,000/yr Wesleyan with $40,000 of need-based aid which might be part loans and work study is going to be substantially more. Over at Washington State the cost is about $5,000 less and merit awards for in-state students are automatic for GPAs above about 3.7 which pushes the cost down to the $20,000/year range. As good as Wesleyan might be, no employer here in WA is going to question the credentials of anyone with a UW or WSU degree.
But I understand how the calculation might be different if you are a CT resident and comparing UConn to Wesleyan.
That is actually the result of court-ordered desegregation and affirmative action. And it’s a good thing in my mind. It means that kids across the state in inner-city minority schools, rural schools, immigrant schools along the Rio Grande valley and everywhere have a chance to get into UT and TAMU if they can graduate near the tops of their classes, no matter how poor and under-resourced their own schools are. You have just as good of a chance of getting into UT if you are an immigrant kid on the border in a run-down school without resources as the rich kids in the upscale Dallas suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
Without that top 10% rule (which has slid down to the 6% range in recent years as the state has grown), both UT and TAMU would be packed with mostly white kids from affluent suburban school districts. Now those kids just move on to Baylor, SMU, TCU, and out of state options like OU, Arkansas, and LSU when they don’t get into UT or TAMU. So they don’t lose much, while a lot of bright kids from disadvantaged backgrounds get an opportunity to go to UT or TAMU when they likely wouldn’t otherwise have that opportunity.
Top 10% class rank Texas resident => automatic admission to any Texas public university except UT Austin. UT Austin sets its own automatic admission threshold (currently top 6%) to fill about 75% of its admission space.
Automatic admission to a campus does not necessarily mean admission to a specific major.
No, that’s the average grant award. Or, was. There’s obviously going to be a lag between the announced tuition and fees for the year (which you were good enough to supply) and the published grant awards for that year. According to the Dept. of Education’s Collegescorecard website, the average annual cost at Wesleyan when last calculated (COA minus grants and scholarships) was $26,000, well within the budget of a native Washington stater. Not saying that won’t drift upward somewhat, but I don’t think by that much.
The overall average cost is not relevant to any given student compared to the result from the college’s net price calculator.
NCES also has average net prices for parental income ranges (e.g. https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=wesleyan&s=all&pg=2&id=130697#netprc ), but it would still be better to use the college’s net price calculator. Obviously, if the student has situations that make net price calculators harder to use (e.g. uncooperative divorced parents, complex parental finances), getting good data into and out of net price calculators may be difficult, but the averages by parental income ranges listed in NCES may be even less relevant.
We are in Chicago. When S19 chose Bowdoin, we pretty much knew we could lose him to the east coast and that’s fine. We love New England and Boston and NYC! Hardly anyone here knows the NESCACs. Some do and I would hope it wouldn’t affect his chances of getting a job in the Midwest but Bowdoin is certainly known more out east. Most kids here go to Big Tens or maybe midsized privates that aren’t too far away (Northwestern, Chicago, Wash U, Duke, Vandy).
We let S choose where he wanted to spend four years. It’s the only four years of his life to study and go live somewhere completely different than here! And he indeed knows at least two kids from TX at Bowdoin!
Oh, I agree. But, the NCES indicates a very strong correlation between the average net cost published by the scorecard and the amount that would be paid by a family earning the median income of families attending the University of Washington ($113,000) that is to say, somewhere north of $19,000 but probably not as high as $46,243. At least that’s my hypothesis.
wow really? Not everyone who goes to an elite school far from home is full of themselves. Sometimes, they go to a Dartmouth or a Harvard because they like what the school offered for undergrad. They don’t go there because they “want people to be impressed”.
If kids know they want to continue to live near where they grew up and like the colleges nearby then more power to them!
I think what gets overlooked many times with posts like these is the “actual undergraduate education” one gets at these top colleges. To me, it’s not really about prestige or elitism, it comes down to getting the best education you can get over 4 years. An education that stays with you the rest of your life no matter what job or career you end up in.
I have colleagues that went to TAMU (55K undergrads) and I can tell you that the quality of undergraduate education was not the same as my close friend who attended Brown (7K undergrads), as an example.
70% of Brown classes have less than 20 students. TAMU only 23%. Having small class discussions is important in the growth and development of the student.
At Brown, the quality of the student body is going to be much stronger from top to bottom. Studying, collaborating and competing with your academic peers makes you a stronger student.
Diversity of thought and culture is important. Brown has 11% international students; TAMU only 1%.
Endowment $$ per student is 3x greater at Brown than TAMU.
Almost 50% the TAMU students don’t graduate in 4 years.
I could go on but to me it really comes down to the actual quality of the education one gets not necessarily the name of the institution you attended.
Agreeing that it is regional – my husband and I are born and raised “back east,” and both went to east coast LACs. We’ve been living in the midwest for 20+ years, where most of the best and brightest kids aspire to go to public flagships or, because we are in Indiana, to Notre Dame. The kids who look outside the state often have parents who moved here from somewhere else. Both of our kids wanted to get out of Indiana, and did. They will likely settle in NYC/Mid-Atlantic, which is great for us because that is where the rest of our family is, and now we have even more cause to get back there.
