HYPS - The Parents' Perspective

Parents Forum
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<p>I thought, as the admissions season goes into overdrive, that a thread in which parents of HYPS students give a reasonably unvarnished picture of the college their kid attends might be useful to parents and students alike. I will start with Princeton, and hope that others will chime in.</p>

<p>Before I begin, let me say first that I am only choosing these schools because they are a set of schools that parents and kids who share a certain set of parameters might consider to be comparables. And it can be difficult to compare and contrast without spending a lot of money and time traveling, and a lot of time sorting through the to-be-expected boosterism here on cc. Which I myself have fallen prey to on occasion.</p>

<p>Let me also say, in hopes of avoiding the diversion of this thread into the why these particular Ivy League schools are or are not valuable topic, that many other sets of schools could also be examined in this way. Just that I happen to only have experience with Princeton, and the set of comparables for Princeton is usually HYS.</p>

<p>So. </p>

<p>Let’s look at the following categories, and the highlights and constraints of each:</p>

<li>Academics</li>
<li>Physical plant and location</li>
<li>Social ambience</li>
<li>The impact of the diploma</li>
</ol>

<p>Each in a separate post:).</p>

2

<ol>
<li>Princeton Academics:</li>
</ol>

<p>Highlights/Constraints:</p>

<ul>
<li> Your child will absolutely be exposed to some of the great minds of the century among their professors. My son has taken a class on African American studies from Cornel West. The day after Obama won the election the class heard a panel discussing the impact – Cornel was on TV later that night discussing the same issues. My daughter took a class from Elaine Pagels on the Gospels. However, my son has found that the preceptor (section leader) for his course is not exceptional, while my daughter I believe actually had Pagels as her preceptor as well as lecturer. As the university expands, it appears that the quality of some of the preceptors may be lagging for the larger courses.</li>
<li> The professors have office hours. They keep them. They have email accounts, they respond. However, Cornel West will not be calling you out of his lecture to 300 kids and saying come meet with me. </li>
<li> Great minds also visit. So far Toni Morrison, Meryl Streep, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, James Frey (not a great mind but a fun controversial figure), and others are the people my children have been most excited to hear speak at the campus and even in their smaller courses. But tickets sell out. </li>
<li> Some students will be outright geniuses. The majority of the students will be as able as your child (which he or she will absolutely love), top student though he or she was. However, there will be some students, I have heard particularly of recruited athletes, who will not be so academically able. Of course, some athletes will be among the top students too. No slam to athletes, simply reporting the anecdotal evidence I’m privy to. There are some kids at Princeton who aren't smarter than everyone in the world.</li>
<li> Your child, if he or she is academically inclined, will find the writing of their senior thesis, required of EVERYONE, to be an extraordinary experience. The caliber of research in which they can be involved and/or the output they can create and find national audience for will be limited only by their own ambition or lack thereof. I really can’t find a downside to the senior thesis.</li>
<li> Princeton is best known for the following departments:
o Engineering (operations research and financial engineering, essentially finance, falls in here) – within the context of other Ivy League schools i.e. not an engineering school per se
o Math
o Computer Science
o Physics
o Economics - #1 in country
o Philosophy
o Psychology & Neuroscience (new institute being built)
o History
o Music (musicology and theory)
o Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy
o Dance (within the context of other Ivy League schools) i.e. not a dance school per se
o Molecular Biology and Genomics (on the upswing due to recent faculty migrations and donations)
o African-American studies (due to the Cornel West addition)
o Creative writing – Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Muldoon, Toni Morrison, etc.</li>
<li> The large departments are Economics, History, English, Politics and Woodrow Wilson. Over half of the students cluster into these departments. The university is trying to change that with a program in place to recruit students to the smaller departments.</li>
<li> The university also has a grade deflation policy. Only the top 30% of each class is supposed to get an A or A-. In sum what this has lead to is that kids who study really hard can still get have a 4.0 average., kids with a lot of ECs will probably only get As in their majors and the classes they are natively good at, and the gentleman’s C is once more among us. I see no evidence and hear no reports of increased competitive behaviour among the students I have contact with, however, that’s just anecdotal and YMMV especially for pre-law, IB, and pre-med students.</li>
</ul>

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<ol>
<li>Physical Plant and Location</li>
</ol>

<p>Highlights/Constraints</p>

<ul>
<li> Princeton is in a beautiful suburb 1 hour from New York via a train that has a station right at the bottom of campus.</li>
<li> Princeton is in an affluent, conservative suburb with very little off-campus social activity. Few restaurants and coffee shops are what you expect from a “college town”, students don’t hang out in bars, there are no nightclubs or music venues in Princeton that I know of.</li>
<li> There are a lot of high end ice cream stores.</li>
<li> All the usual high end suburb chains, Banana Republic, J. Crew, plus wine shops, plus lots of jewelry stores line Nassau Street, the main street at the top of campus. The character of the town is wealthy and not full of hippies, to put it mildly. For some that is a plus. For others, a real problem.</li>
<li> The area around the campus gives way to the semi-rural fairly quickly, with parks and woods. The students can walk through the woods where Einstein walked.</li>
<li> The campus itself, if you arenÂ’t hankering for a city, is heart-stirringly beautiful, trees, lawns, towers, arches, gardens, courtyards.</li>
<li> The dorms vary. Some are new and have bamboo flooring in the single rooms. Some are old and crowd large young students into rooms the size of closets. The heat is overbearing and drying in the winter, air conditioning is not available in the summer except in a couple of dorms.</li>
<li> Food also varies from residential college to residential college, but kids can eat wherever they like. (More later on residential colleges and eating clubs)</li>
<li> Whitman, an enormous new residential college with amazing facilities was just built for $70M or some such number. Half of Butler has been torn down and is being replaced. Forbes is still an old hotel no matter what they do. Rocky and Mathey have been well-renovated or so I hear. Wilson College is some nice rooms, some rooms so small that with two kids in them each has to ask the other whoÂ’s turn to breathe it is. LetÂ’s just say my father was appalled.</li>
<li> Classrooms and labs and music rooms and theater spaces are just amazing. The Princeton art museum has world class art you can just walk up to with no one around you. The only department that is having issues in terms of facilities I believe is Chemistry, where the faculty is also in moderate disarray.</li>
<li> The buildings range from stone gray Gothic to modern cement, to post-modern brick. To my tastes the architecture at Princeton is astonishing. I donÂ’t have anything bad to say here, unfortunately for my mission of presenting a reasonably unvarnished picture.</li>
</ul>

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<p>
[quote]
I donÂ’t have anything bad to say here

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Not even about the new Frank Gehry science library? ;)</p>

<p>Other than that, I agree with you. It's an amazingly beautiful campus.</p>

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<p>Where do you stay when you visit Princeton? We've tried the Nassau Inn, and really disliked it.</p>

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<p>Wow, well done. Did you attend Princeton? If it is your child, how did you get so much information? My S graduated from an Ivy but I am unable to offer such detailed information, especially on the academics.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Where do you stay when you visit Princeton?

[/quote]
</p>

<p>When I go back for Reunions we stay at The</a> Westin.</p>

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<p>Thanks. I attended Princeton but I now have two kids there. My secret research methods are IM and texting....as well as looking through history on the cc Princeton thread from the posters who are good with published info. I will post the other two parts later today. I am hoping that some Harvard, Yale, and Stanford parents will join me. You know who you are:).</p>

<p>And I have no idea how that section double posted?????</p>

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<p>This is a wonderful thread in concept. Thank you. I eagerly await the compare and contrast info for the other schools---at which time I will forward the whole thing to daughter for review and discussion.</p>

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<p>Alumother: where did you find the source which ranks Princeton as #1 in economics? D wants to major in econ, so I've been looking for a ranking of undergrad programs. I've found rankings of graduate programs, and this one which bases the ranking on scholarly publication by the faculty. It has Harvard first, Princeton 7th.
U</a> of T : Economics : Department of Economics</p>

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<p>All of the economics department rankings I've seen have Harvard, MIT, and Chicago at the very top. I've never seen a ranking which had Princeton #1, although the Nobel prize for economics this year went to a Princeton professor.</p>

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<p>Any good economist would say that those rankings, one way or the other, are hokem. ;)</p>

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<p>Also note (TheGFG) that many, many kids who think they want to major in economics bail out fast. Most high schoolers have no idea what an economics major involves and it can be pretty dry. I would not get too hung up on how the top schools rank with regard to an economics major.</p>

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<p>Can we leave it at "Princeton has a very good Economics Department"? It does. Also, it's on a roll, having produced the most recent Nobelist and the current Fed Chairman (which of course means he's no longer teaching at Princeton).</p>

<p>Maybe Chicago will produce the NEXT Fed Chairman and the NEXT Nobelist. The former seems possible, and the latter, based on past performance, would seem statistically likely (if there were anyone left there who was qualified and hadn't won it already).</p>

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<p>An observation, D's room in Forbes is actually fairly large as these go, and has its own bathroom. A big plus, not going down the hall. Also, apparently the weekend brunch at Forbes is supposed to be among the best. But it does have the hotel look. Back side looks over a golf course not other buildings so if you like that sort of green environment it is nice. Location from other parts of campus may be an issue. Not pushing it, just giving more info.</p>

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<p>OK I don't remember where I saw it. I Googled something and that's what it said:). I am not too keen on #1 rankings etc. usually. Now I have looked at a bunch of Googled results trying to replicate it, and it seems to be up in the top 5 on average. Bernanke and the recent Nobel prize winner may have given rise to whatever it was I saw.</p>

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<ol>
<li> Social ambiance</li>
</ol>

<p>This is the trickiest part for Princeton. The stereotype is out there that Princeton is “elitist”. Is that true? Well, what does elitist mean? Does it mean white? Does it mean rich? Does it mean acting snobby? What about the eating clubs?</p>

<p>Let me just give my anecdotal knowledge. First, the eating clubs. In order to avoid an even more painfully long post, here’s the link to Wikipedia that explains the clubs pretty well. Eating</a> clubs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I was in a club in 1977. I hated it. I quit. I hated it because it was weirdly adult and involved a lot of alcohol and being served by African American men older than me wearing white jackets. Just hated it. </p>

<p>My D is now in an eating club that was once sued for not letting in girls. She participates happily in Viking Night. Involves wearing fur hats and for all intents and purposes is like Animal House. Self-serve. Chicken fingers on Friday. Not behaviorally elitist. However, majority white and certainly many scions of enterprise are members. The club that has always had the reputation for being the most elitist is Ivy. Ivy may however now be the most racially diverse of all clubs. This last Saturday night, it was “Casino Night” on Prospect Street. Three bicker clubs including Ivy, a couple of hundred students, many looking just like the cast of “Gossip Girl”, sequined dresses glittering in the rainy night and breathlessly handsome young men in suits and tuxedoes standing with both embarrassment and pride at their sides. However, a sizeable minority of those kids were Asian, African American, not white. So the clubs exist, there is selectivity, and yet the old rules of who is powerful and who is cool are changing.</p>

<p>The good thing about the clubs is that there is always a party you can get into if you want to. However, there’s more drinking than optimal in my opinion. And some kids bicker clubs and get turned down. You can always join a signin club, but still, for some it’s hard. My summary is that if you are highly social, you will love the clubs. If you don’t care about visible social activity and prefer to hang out with a few friends, you won’t care about the clubs. But if you care, and you for one reason or another don’t get in where you want to get in, it can be hard. On the other hand, the president of the senior class was “hosed”. He made it a badge of honor. Again, the dynamics are changing.</p>

<p>My S, as a freshman, lives on a hallway with a child of Nigerian diplomats, a child of a Hawaiian fish farmer, a child of a Christian realtor, a child of journalists from the East Coast, and a Fillipina/Latina girl from LA. All the hallmates hang out together. Anecdotally, Princeton is neither snobby nor segregated. </p>

<p>However, we should be more painstaking than that.</p>

<p>So how about the statistics? Race first. And it will have to wait for another post.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
I was in a club in 1977. I hated it. I quit. I hated it because it was weirdly adult and involved a lot of alcohol and being served by African American men older than me wearing white jackets. Just hated it.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I was in a club around the same time. I loved it. In my case it was very adolescent, involved a lot of marijuana (and certainly some alcohol), and there was a buffet line for dinner. But that was at a time when clubs were at their nadir, and not belonging carried no social stigma in my circle of friends. I had friends who didn't have the money to join a club - they hung out with us at the club all the time anyway, and came to all the parties.</p>

<p>(Alumother, this is great - I'm having fun reminiscing!)</p>

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<p>Not belonging still doesn't carry a stigma, at least among a large subset of kids. Many of my friends were independent and often hung out at my club and were at all of the larger social events and many of the parties. They just didn't eat dinner with us every night. The new plan that lets all upperclassmen eat in the dining halls 2 times a week gave us a chance to have brunch on the weekends regardless of club affiliation.</p>

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<p>I'm a double Harvard parent - a junior D and a freshman D. When Harvard first came up as an idea, my expectation was that it would be elitist, closed, uninviting. My expectations were almost entirely wrong. My Ds and I have found that there's a real commitment to diversity - racial, ethnic, religious, international, and socioeconomic. I haven't heard anything about snobby or elitist fellow students, though there are a couple old-time final clubs that require big money. Most students don't pay a lot of attention to them. The faculty access and attention are impressive, and the values-driven aspects of the campus culture are palpable. On the other hand, along with the showplace halls, I've found many of the facilities to be either so-so or in need of major attention. Freshman dorms vary from pretty good to cramped and plain, but they're on the Yard and you're living on the holy ground of American intellectualism, so few seem to complain. The variety, intensity, and creativity of student extracurricular life is breathtaking and inspiring.</p>