<p>My d2, a high-achieving kid, has been first in her class until this semester (she's a second semester junior). It's been important to her.</p>
<p>Her school is on the small side, and she is generally recognized as a stand-out
student.</p>
<p>She has a 4.0 unweighted GPA, but has participated in band and StuGo, which are non-honors, and has also taken a cc course, which shows up as non-honors. She'll take more of those next year, as she'll have taken all eleven APs her school offers.</p>
<p>The problem is this - she doesn't want to be number 2.</p>
<p>There is a decent gap between 2 and 3, but the non-honors StuGo is the problem right now - it is bringing down her GPA.</p>
<p>She's pretty upset about it, and there are some 'fixes'
available, but does it
really matter? She won't be able to hills on to the number one spot until the end, unless she only takes three classes senior year (not going to happen) but she would like to apply as valedictorian. Her top schools are BC, Georgetown, and Johns Hopkins. She is potential scholarship material at BC and Hopkins.</p>
<p>It really doesn’t matter to colleges. Frankly, some colleges may look at her obsession with perfection and first place as anti-intellectual. Is it nice to be tops? Sure. But to carry it forward to the point of being upset is a negative, in my book.</p>
<p>There has been more than one story I’ve read about the pursuit of the superior status of #1 vs. #2 or (horrors) #3. </p>
<p>The truth is that many kids get accepted to great places ranked lower than #1, and kids who are #1 get rejected. All the time. If being valedictorian is incredibly meaningful to her, go for it, but it’s not going to be a magic bullet.</p>
<p>The worst story I’ve heard is of a girl who ruthlessly pursued being #1 rather than sharing the title with another student, sued the school district, and it all ended up getting her so much attention that someone dug up that she may have plagiarized some things, and Harvard, which had accepted her, rescinded her acceptance.</p>
<p>Whatever your daughter does, if she doesn’t end up being #1, I think it’s a bad idea to try to make that the subject of any conversation with a school representative, or worse, an essay.</p>
<p>I get that, and agree to a point. (She has to lose to take more APs than her school offers, anyway, so strengthening her application is decreasing her class rank, and StuGo is more valuable than being a teacher aide, which would help). The issue is really in a small school that is not exemplary, she feels it reflects poorly not to be at the top.</p>
<p>She’s had to have a lot of intrinsic motivation to get there, and she wants to be able to have her record reflect that. She really isn’t a grade-grubbing kid.</p>
<p>Grades and test scores help indicate to admissions you are capable of doing the work. Several students from most classes can. For top ranked schools, LACs, ivy, the more important question then is So what? What are you doing with that ability? What interests you and keeps you curious? How do you connect with others? What will you get out of a specific college community? What will you contribute? The imperfect high school student generally has much more compelling answers to those questions.</p>
<p>Seriously, though, this kid does enjoy life - plays sports, does fun ECs, goes out with friends, etc. She’s a great kid, and she’s already decided that the Ivy path is not for her, even though she has the resume to be competitive almost anywhere. However, she does need to be competitive for scholarships, as she has teacher parents.</p>
<p>In my class (long long ago) a girl was #1 in our class pretty much the entire time we were in HS. At the last minute, one of the juniors decided to graduate a year early and knocked this girl to #2. There really wasn’t anything she could do about it.</p>
<p>If your daughter won’t be happy without being #1, she should do what she needs to do to get there. I think it is a mistake, that she’s giving up the fun things, but she’s the one who will be miserable without that #1 spot. She can then go to an elite school with a lot of other vals, and she’ll see that it just didn’t matter and she gave up band for nothing.</p>
<p>The other kid may be fighting just as hard to be #1.</p>
<p>Colleges know that being #1 is often meaningless, as at some high schools as many as 6 students share that rank, at others only the UW GPA matters ie the kid with few AP’s and Honors might be Valedictorian, etc. Being top 10 (or top 5 in a small school) is as big of a deal as being valedictorian.</p>
<p>Lots of high schools are not ranking any longer for just this reason. As a faculty interviewer for Illinois Tech’s Camras and Duchossois full ride scholarships, I have seen a lot of applications. To us it is more important that the student has good test scores in Mathematics (of course we are a Tech school) and has taken a challenging curriculum (think AP Calculus, AP Chemistry, and AP Physics) than the class rank which is only roughly indicative of the student’s ability. This helps us eliminate the differences between high schools, some of which have grade inflation and others which don’t. At the end though, the interview is the key. If the student has only a single-minded focus on being valedictorian it can come across as not being very well-rounded.</p>
<p>The children of teacher parents still can get grant aid from ivy league colleges so I don’t know why she would have already given up on ivies. Unless she’s terrible at standardized tests, there might be dozens of colleges in the country that would offer her full ride/tuition. Sounds like a very competitive kid. Neither BC, Georgetown, nor JHU are known for their generous merit. BC for instance offers 15 full tuition scholarships. Getting one of those is a crap shoot even for kids with 4.0s. Certainly there are colleges whose merit is much more of a sure thing than these 3 schools.</p>
<p>Aside from a scholarship specifically aimed at HS vals (not sure if one even exists), she’s in no better or worse position to get merit aid from colleges being #2 or #1. >>she feels it reflects poorly not to be at the top.<< It’s just not true.</p>
<p>There are some scholarships for valedictorians but they’re often also for Salutatorians.
For instance, Elmira College offers full-tuition for vals/sals.</p>
<p>However based on what OP said, Op’s daughter isn’t aiming for colleges at that level.
For the colleges she’s aiming at, she’ll probably get financial aid - top colleges have financial aid up to 180K and many others up to 150K, and I doubt teachers make more…</p>
<p>The following colleges, for instance, are very to highly selective, but all admitted applicants receive financial aid commensurate with their financial need. If they’re admitted, they have the scholarship. Of course, the difficulty is getting in.
<a href=“Colleges with Need-Blind Admission for U.S. Students”>Colleges with Need-Blind Admission for U.S. Students;
You may want to run a few Net Price Calculators to see how you fare at each school your daughter’s interested in.
Then there are the automatic merit scholarhips and the competitive scholarships that are posted on the Financial Aid Forum.
In none of these is being # a prerequisite.</p>
<p>Isn’t it important as parents that we discourage our children from pursuing irrational thinking such as “it reflects poorly not to be at the top”? Is it possible that this idee fixe is where she has lodged all her anxiety about going off to college?</p>
</p>