HYPS - The Parents' Perspective

Parents Forum
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<p>Ok, so I have to chime in here. First of all, Alumother, none of us can come close to the comprehensive information you provided about Princeton, so I won't even try. And congrats on having two little Tigers!</p>

<p>Princeton and Stanford similar? I just spent a few days on the Stanford campus when we dropped my D off, so I really don't have much first hand information yet about the school. I actually kept thinking that I would have been more wowed by Stanford, if I hadn't spent so much time at Princeton. The Stanford campus seemed huge and I found it difficult both to get around and find my way around. The Princeton campus is much more intimate. </p>

<p>I also got the feeling at Stanford that they are used to being "the only game in town." I can't explain it, but I felt that Stanford projected an image that was not used to competition. On the Ivy League campuses, I get the feeling that they know they're a great school, but there are many other wonderful schools within driving distance of each other. I didn't get the sense of self deprecation and understatement that I sense on Ivy League campuses. Part of it was that directions to buildings and events were not well marked. I'm used to having lots of signs to direct you where things are when new students are moving on campus. There was an event for Stanford parents and we were given the name of the building. They didn't tell us there were three buildings on campus with the same name and everyone was getting lost except the alumni parents.</p>

<p>Where I do find Stanford and Princeton similar is the rigor of the academics, the active social life, and the incredible levels of support for the students. My D meets regularly with faculty members and has all kinds of people to help her when she has a question or problem. She's having the time of her life and she is being academically challenged. She absolutely loves her dorm and her roommate, but she tired of the food after about two weeks. She'll have a chance to get better food next year if she moves into a smaller themed house.</p>

<p>My S is a huge fan of the Princeton eating clubs, both for the quality of the food and the social life they provide. I've eaten at his club a couple of times. The food is great and the students are very friendly. The buildings they are housed in are gorgeous and there is a great sense of tradition. It looks like it should be very elitist, but it really doesn't feel that way.</p>

<p>I know that Princeton has an elitist reputation, but that has not been my experience with the majority of the student body. Recently I was at a sporting event and I noticed a young man who, like many of his teammates, looked like he just walked out of a Ralph Lauren ad - blond hair, sun glasses and all. I thought to myself, "Now that kid looks like the stereotype elitist Princeton student." Imagine my surprise when he noticed my son and walked over to us with an outstretched hand, "You must be ----'s parents. I'm glad to meet you!" My son wished him luck in his event and he replied nervously, "Thanks, I'm really going to need it." He turned out to be humble and friendly. </p>

<p>Both schools do really try to make parents feel they are a part of the school and that being a parent of a student there means that you're part of the University. Of course, they want you to send money and there are some parents who are able to pay full tuition and still donate huge sums of money to the school. However, you also get the sense on both campuses that most of the families are not wealthy.</p>

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<p>Cookiemom's Princeton story reminds me of a time 20 years ago when my family stumbled on an Ivy League women's rugby tournament, and stayed to watch Yale play Princeton. The contrast between the two teams was almost cartoonish. The Yale team consisted of women whose height averaged about 5' 2", all but one had brown hair, and only a couple of them looked like an athlete standing still. With one exception, the Princeton team consisted of thin, glamorous blonde women over 5' 7"; that one exception was a 6' 1" black woman who was powerfully built and could run like lightning. The Princeton strategy was to get her the ball and watch her zoom down the field while one or two Yale players who thought they might have an angle ricocheted off of her. It was like watching the Valkyries play the Redstockings. </p>

<p>Now, I know that's the most superficial bit of anecdotal information imaginable. And of course it shouldn't be over-generalized. I have a contemporary-friend who went to Princeton and loved it, and who has dark, frizzy hair and a small but noticeable physical deformity. (My other Princeton contemporaries . . . more the cliche, but smart and nice people.) My wife taught a seminar there a few years ago and was bowled over by how smart, hardworking, and engaged the students were (something she, with a longstanding prejudice against Princeton, hadn't expected).</p>

<p>Still, the feeling persists that Princeton doesn't like urban students. My kids' public magnet high school sends 25-30 kids/year to Ivy League or equivalent schools, and it has been years since anyone there was accepted at Princeton. (Two of my older child's classmates were accepted everywhere -- Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Penn, Stanford, Cal Tech -- but both were rejected at Princeton.) It's too bad, because many of the good students yearn for more distance from their families than Penn provides, but especially in the case of immigrants feel uncomfortable going anywhere where they can't get home in a few hours on public transportation. Princeton would be perfect for them, if any of them could get in. One hears similar complaints from the New York City magnets. Obviously, there's no hard-and-fast anti-urban policy at Princeton, but I've never run into any of the Michelle Obama types who have gone there.</p>

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<p>Can you define what you mean by "urban"?</p>

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<p>Well, what I mean by it here is kids who live and go to school in a big city. I would say that at all the institutions I know well within the city of Philadelphia -- two public magnets, two high-performance Quaker schools -- there is a perception that Princeton is less likely to accept a top candidate than any of its peers (with an exception for recruited athletes). The private schools do send kids to Princeton periodically, but far fewer than they send to HYS. At the public schools, there is such a perception of hostility that few top students even apply anymore. And, as I said, this is a population where lots of kids feel strongly that they shouldn't go too far from home, so Princeton really ought to be attractive to them. One of my daughter's friends who was accepted everywhere she applied but Princeton would have enrolled there had she been accepted, in order to be close (but not too close) to home.</p>

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<p>By the way, I am reporting high school folklore, but I don't want to put too much weight on it. It's just folklore, and it can turn into something of a self-fulfilling prophesy if good students stop applying. But Princeton hasn't done anything to change anyone's mind, either.</p>

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<p>Our competitive suburban high school seems to be able to send kids to all the Ivies and other top schools except Harvard and Yale. Since the school is pretty comparable statistically to neighboring schools, but is relatively newer to the scene of top high schools, I've wondered if HY adcoms don't trust our school somehow. I will say, though, that kids getting in Princeton and Penn are usually smart athletes.</p>

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<p>JHS, I have to disagree with you. What you say USED to be true, and it's one of the reasons Hargadon is no longer Dean of Admissions. Princeton is now falling all over itself going to urban public magnets and saying WE WANT YOU!!! 17 kids from Stuy got in during a single year. I don't think Hargadon ever admitted more than 3 and the "word' was that almost all those he admitted were either legacies or recruited athletes. (Yes, recruited athletes from schools like Stuy are rare, but some do exist.) Hunter is also getting lots more kids into Princeton. </p>

<p>Hargadon believed in geographic diversity. That policy hurt Jews and Asians, especially recent Asian immigrants, because those groups are geographically "clustered." It hurt NYC a LOT because the NYC "quota" tended to be used up very quickly by legacies and recruited athletes in the prep sports--NYC independent schools sent a lot of kids to Princeton to play sports like lacross and field hockey and NYC is home to a lot of Princeton alums. If you have a pretty fixed number of slots available to NYers, not a whole heck of a lot of them are left for the "unhooked" kid. I suspect that things were not all that different for Philly. </p>

<p>However, a growing number of Princeton faculty were grads of schools like Boston Latin and Stuy and many are Jews. They realized that kids who were traveling the same path they had weren't getting in. They complained and a faculty study committee was formed. It issued a report about admissions. (You can probably find it in the archives of the campus paper.) Lots of people who know nothing about colleges thought it was "no big deal." Those who do said "If this is in the REPORT, Hargadon should be looking for a job." They were right. </p>

<p>One of Hargadon's complaints was that he was stuck because he had to accept so many athletes. P'ton was smaller than its competitors but it fielded as many teams. That was the impetus for the increase in the size of the student body. Hargadon claimed that the alums would stop giving if the quality of P's teams took a nose dive. So, the compromise was to recruit as many athletes but increase the size of the class. The faculty in the popular departments, like English and political economy, were unhappy about this. They felt that class size in those departments was already too large and that the increased number of students admitted would NOT be disbursed proportionately among the different departments. </p>

<p>Hargadon then shot himself in the foot. Yale was dumb and didn't have much of a security system when it first launched its program for getting admissions decisions on line. You just needed to enter your social security #. An assistant director of admissions at Princeton checked the site, realized he had social security numbers, and before mailing out decisions, checked to see whether some of the applicants had applied to Yale and been accepted. Much discussion at the time as to whether Hargadon was aware of this and encouraged it. In any event, it made him more vulnerable. </p>

<p>I think technically Hargadon resigned. However, the writing was on the wall that even if he were to stay P'ton would do some version of the UChicago game. (Ted O'Neal (spelling?) is the Director of Admissions, but at least for a while, UChicago brought in someone who was put in over O'Neal to change UChicago's marketing plan.) </p>

<p>Personally, I think a lot of the similarity between Stanford and Princeton is that Hargadon was the director of admissions at Stanford for a lot of years before he became the director of admissions at Princeton. He put his "stamp" on the student bodies at both schools. Right now, P'ton is trying hard to undo that stamp. It's a very good time for kids from urban public magnets to apply to Princeton. I suspect that there are some kids in Wyoming, Montana and Nevada who are less than thrilled that geographic diversity no longer is the same kind of plus for admissions at P than it used to be.</p>

<p>Oh, one more part of the story, which may be NYC urban folklore to some extent. P'ton gives an award each year to the most outstanding junior. During the latter part of the Hargadon years, the winner of the award was a NYC kid who graduated from one of the NYC public magnets. (That part is definitely true.) He was Jewish. The folklore part is that Hargadon had been very reluctant to admit him. Who knows? In any event, he was the only kid from his high school class to get in. He became Exhibit A for the faculty--this is the kind of kid we want MORE of. This is the kind of kid you turn away when you fix a quota for a geographic area and fill it with legacies and recruited athletes. We are turning down geniuses to get kids from Boise or Billings.</p>

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<p>NYers: Beware of sterotypical , parochial thinking ...there are kids from Boise, Billings and Landers who indeed are geniuses. Yes, perfect SATs, with Code of the West values (do NYers even understand the phrase?) and they know how wrangle cattle as well.</p>

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<p>I don't really think jonri meant that there weren't great candidates in Montana. (One of my roommates at Yale was from Billings, although he never went back there.) That's an interesting story, though. Hargadon must have been quite old -- he was the admissions dean at Stanford when my sisters applied 30 years ago, and he wrote my mother a beautiful (and extensive) letter in response to a letter from her when Stanford turned down one of them.</p>

<p>Maybe the message hasn't gotten through here, or maybe the fact that most of my data points are a few years old means that I'm behind the times. (And, thinking about it, I know that Princeton has been taking some kids from the private schools the past few years -- just mainly athletes, and fewer than HYS.)</p>

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<p>I'm sorry if it seemed that I was claiming you can't find smart people in Billings or Boise. I didn't mean that. I just meant that my understanding was that some of the faculty were upset by the emphasis on geographic diversity, because coupled with legacy and recruited athletes, its effect was to keep out the "Stuyvesant type."</p>

<p>I just searched the archives of the Princeton paper--there were several articles. While this one doesn't mention geographic diversity, it still gives you a flavor of what was going on. If the link doesn't work, find the paper on line and just put Stuyvesant in the search box. </p>

<p>Contentious</a> Hargadon deanship colors admissions' past and future - The Daily Princetonian</p>

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<p>JHS, just another feel at the elephant.
My daughter knows 7 other kids in her class from our very urban neighborhood at Princeton. The neighborhood is Hyde Park, but she and 3 others were not Lab School brats. Her idiosyncratic college choice was to expand her experience, having grown up in a major city, to go university in a different environment. Even New Haven felt a bit familiar. And Palo Alto? Don't they have earthquakes out there?<br>
Her best friend went to the public Whitney Young (same as Michelle Obama) and chose Yale. She too had no interest in the West Coast. She was admitted to Harvard as well, but believed Harvard people were far too conservative. Didn't even visit Princeton-she had read of a Princeton academic who (I don't know when) denied the Armenian holocaust. Not an Armenian girl at all.
With this sifting process on the buyers' end, how are there meaningful differences in the populations of kids at these schools?</p>

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<p>Jonri, I hope the Princeton Admissions Office understands that it will take time to repair the brand damaged by Hargadon at Stuyvesant.</p>

<p>Even though Princeton has now resumed admitting Stuyvesant students, the skepticism doesn't vanish overnight. The top Stuyvesant students, who are also cross-admitted at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, still tend to follow their top-of-the-class predecessors. At least anecdotally, at Stuyvesant it is against lesser colleges that Princeton tends to win the cross admits. Harvard and MIT have delivered consistent results over the years at Stuyvesant to make themselves the most attractive destinations. Princeton is the newcomer, and it will take time and effort.</p>

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<p>"Yes, perfect SATs, with Code of the West values (do NYers even understand the phrase?) and they know how wrangle cattle as well."</p>

<p>Not a NYer, but no, I've never heard of it and don't understand it. What are Code of the West values? And why is wrangling cattle important outside a ranch?</p>

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<p>Gallatin</a> County, MT - Code of the West</p>

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<p>Things have indeed changed at Princeton since 2003 and 2008. But the footprints of Dean Fred will take a long time to disappear:</p>

<p><a href=“TigerBlog: Mourning Dean Fred”>http://goprincetontigers.blogspot.com/2014/01/mourning-dean-fred.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>He admitted 5 from my graduating class with most having some sort of athletic or developmental legacy hook. In contrast, in the same year, 4-6 times the number were admitted to H & Y each with the vast majority being working/lower-middle class and having no such hooks. </p>

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<p>Um …
this is a 5 year old thread guys…</p>