<p>“puzzling” still taking resources. You can waste them, it is your choice. however, much smarter use of your resources is to focus on your own life / problems / obstacles / happiness…etc.</p>
<p>Ivy league schools can be a fantastic opportunity with substantial institutional aid making them affordable for those of modest incomes. In general, they have amazingly qualified professors, first rate facilities, and in some areas they are involved in cutting edge, or at least very important research. They have name recognition - people assume that an Ivy -league graduate is intelligent and possibly even worldly since those universities have become quite geographically, economically, and racially diverse at least compared to other private colleges.</p>
<p>I went to one, loved it, and would love to have sent one of my kids to one. However, they were not that interested. They wanted to go to smaller schools and did not want to compete quite that hard in high school to develop the necessary credentials to be in serious consideration for Ivy league colleges. I am not a hater at all.</p>
<p>In general, I don’t see “hate” on CC, just push back to the suggestion that failing to go to an Ivy league college, or it’s ilk, renders you a second class student, or a first class student who is somehow slumming. As has been noted above, attending an Ivy league college does not guarantee greatness. I have had a nice, though not “award winning” career. None of my college roommates have achieved notoriety on a national scale. Some of my classmates certainly have, but they are the exception, not the rule. While trite, it is a truism that extraordinary people come from all walks of life.</p>
<p>Investment bankers and financial corporation CEO’s do not come from all walks of life. They tend to be Ivy league educated or the equivalent. If you want riches, can excel in economics, and interview well, the ivy league might help you become one of the “masters of the universe” playing dice with the nations money. Entry to the upper echelons of the plutocracy is limited, so only some small percentage of Ivy grads will go there.</p>
<p>I had friends, not connections, when I graduated from an Ivy league school, and I left most of them to go west. I viewed my education as personally fulfilling and most people who knew me felt I had changed for the better between senior year of high school and senior year of college. Being around the “best and the brightest” and doing reasonably well instilled confidence in me. However, I suspect much the same process would have occurred had I attended Vanderbuilt, Northwestern, Berkeley, or been a regents scholar at UC Davis and it’s ilk. </p>
<p>What is important is going to a college with good professors (or T.A.s) and intelligent peers, and that can be found in many places. I suspect that the top 10 to 20 percent of students at the University of Oklahoma, or more, are Ivy calibre but chose Oklahoma for financial, social, or specific personal reasons. The elite students there presumably find each other through the class work, and many public schools have special programs for their best students that work like an LAC amidst a larger university. </p>
<p>In short, most people love or admire the Ivy league, but dislike the snobbery that often goes with it.</p>
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<p>Part of my job as a parent was to make sure that my kids indeed knew what-was-what. Look, I didn’t have any patience for the provincial gosh-why-would-you-ever-possibly-want-to-leave-the-state-of-Illinois and OMG-why-would-you-take-a-PLANE-to-college mentality that plagued a lot of my kids’ peers. I told them early on that other people’s mentality and other people’s limitations weren’t their own, and it was my / husband’s job to expose them to a bigger world, which we tried to do to the best of our ability and resources. Given that, I don’t know why I wouldn’t equally tell them to turn a deaf ear if their peer group had, instead, been of the OMG-Ivy-League-or-else-you’ll-only-be-flipping-burgers mentality. People who don’t know what’s-what are of little consequence in our decision-making. Again, it’s my classic Myers-Briggs INTJ operating here, but I’m really not so sure why I’m supposed to care that my kids’ high school peers think or thought XYZ, when the goal was to get them through high school and onto a bigger universe.</p>
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<p>What a shame that not every kid can have a parent as wise and informed as PizzaGirl …</p>
<p>I’m not comparing myself to other parents at all, annasdad. They can raise their kids as they see fit and more power to them. Live and let live. </p>
<p>I am just saying that part of MY (our) value system in raising OUR kids was to clue them in to some things that their peers might not be aware of. Whether their peers’ ignorance was around “you mean there are schools other than Northern Illinois University?” or “you mean that one can actually get somewhere in life without attending HYP?” was irrelevant to me. I know better, and therefore my children got to know better. I’m a little bemused that on CC, those of us who are in the midwest are supposed to easily resist the peer pressure that keeps kids at in-the-box state universities, but those on the east coast just somehow can’t resist the peer pressure that tells their kids that they are failures if they don’t get into HYP. It’s all the same to me – it’s pressure that is irrelevant. I don’t think highly of basing decisions on what less-informed-people-around-you may think of something, whether that less-informed is not understanding the world beyond the midwest or not understanding the world beyond the Ivy League.</p>
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<p>Perhaps not, but your first comment indicated that a kid who doesn’t realize that it’s not the end of the world not to get into a so-called “top” school is “stupid” - and then when I pointed out that 16-year-olds are influenced by the culture in which they live, and aren’t necessarily “stupid,” you responded that your kids would never be so influenced because of the parenting they received.</p>
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<p>I think any generalization based on regional characteristics is wildly misleading. At my D’s residential magnet school, populated mostly by suburban Chicago kids, I know a lot of parents who consider it a family tragedy when their kid “only” winds up at UIUC. OTOH, in the rural area where I live, it’s a rare event for anyone to make it into UIUC - I think our local high school has had one in the last six or seven years.</p>
<p>Yes, I can imagine that the pressure at your daughter’s residential magnet is likely equivalent to many of the upper-middle-class North Shore high schools (the New Triers and so forth). It may be somewhat socioeconomic in nature, as well. I’m betting you’ve got some well-to-do kids there (not implying in any way that they aren’t fully deserving of the opportunities your school offers).</p>
<p>“parents who consider it a family tragedy when their kid “only” winds up at UIUC”</p>
<p>-It is their family value. Why anybody worries? we cannot change it, right or wrong, stupid or smart is irelevant. The only rlevent point is that we cannot control it one way or another.</p>
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To go back a bit, it seems to me that changes over time have created some of the confusion about this. Thirty or forty years ago, this would have been a pretty easy question to answer–except for Stanford, you’d lump them together because they’re the most selective private universities in the nation and attract the most capable students. But since then, the landscape has changed, and there are a number of other schools that are just as selective as at least some of the Ivies. So “Ivies” used to be a much better shorthand expression for a group of similar schools than it is now. There just isn’t a neat new shorthand term, at least for those of us who don’t want to dignify U.S.News’ list too much.</p>
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<p>I was thrown off because if you’re referring to the school in St. Louis, people I’ve known usually state the full name Washington University in St. Louis or use the WUSTL acronym. </p>
<p>If someone said Washington U without that modifier, most of us would think the person was really referring to UW and switched the words around kinda like Chicago University instead of UChicago. </p>
<p>WUSTL was mainly known among HS classmates and neighbors for its engineering programs and generous scholarships. I do know of one online acquaintance who loves to refer to it as the “Harvard of the Midwest”.</p>
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<p>While some high school kids may want to go Ivy/elite college for such reasons, others may want to attend such schools because they need to have a critical mass of classmates who have similar/greater academic capabilities to feel sufficiently challenged in order to enjoy their college years. </p>
<p>Some HS classmates who weren’t able to get into Ivies/elite colleges at first for financial/academic reasons ended up at various CUNY campuses and found themselves confronted with a bureaucracy which wouldn’t allow them to skip intro courses even though they were more than ready, a system which seemed to prioritize the needs of remedial/average students over those of the academic achievers, and where they managed to get A/A+ level grades without learning anything because the majority of their classmates were holding the class back while getting Cs, Ds, or Fs on the curved exams/final grades. This was the situation even if they were in honors programs…which weren’t anything like the recently established Macaulay Honors program and didn’t exist when we were in college. </p>
<p>After a year or two of dealing with all that, they’ve decided that staying at such institutions would be a waste of their time. Consequently, they transferred up to schools like Reed, Columbia, Brown, CMU, Cornell, etc and found the latter institutions to be a far better fit for their academic capabilities which made for a much better college experience. The situation was so bad from their perspective that they were willing to risk heavy debt to attend these elite schools. </p>
<p>Many HS classmates who ended up in the SUNY colleges had a toned down version of that experience and also opted to transfer up. Granted, they were also driven by bad impressions of the campus environment and/or being around a critical mass of college classmates who were more interested in partying wildly.</p>
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<p>The top state universities do have large numbers of party-oriented students and others who do not seem to be as academically serious – but they also do have a large number of most academically motivated students (e.g. the math majors taking graduate level math courses as sophomores or juniors).</p>
<p>Would you say that SUNY was different in that the most academically motivated students were absent or less visible there than at state universities in other states? Perhaps if such students try to transfer out as soon as they can, that can be both a cause and a result of such a situation.</p>
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<p>IMO, they were driven to transfer because the political machinations between the SUNY admins and the NY State government are such that the campuses tend to prioritize the average/mediocre students from average/mediocre NY state high schools, especially with the budget cuts they’ve had to endure for at least 2+ decades. </p>
<p>Incidentally, CUNY seems to be making great strides to attract the academic achievers over the last decade…especially with the institution of the Macaulay Honors College, eliminating open admissions to the 4-year colleges which substantially reduces the burden of prioritizing the needs of remedial students, and the strengthening of some of the flagship campuses’ honors college. </p>
<p>Neither system could begin to match what California has with their UCs.</p>
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<p>While the UCs are the best known among the California public universities, California has a full range of colleges and universities for all students seeking to study to a bachelor’s degree:</p>
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<li>UC for the top eighth of high school graduates.</li>
<li>CSU for the top third of high school graduates.</li>
<li>Community colleges open to everyone and providing a transfer route to UC and CSU, allowing students who did poorly in high school another chance to get academically motivated and study to a bachelor’s degree. Of course, the community colleges also offer other forms of post-secondary education for students going into areas not requiring a bachelor’s degree.</li>
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<p>Well, again, your “most of us” refers to your little corner of the world, not “most of us” as in “most of the US.” To be honest, I’m not sure why I should care that students in one particular high school in NY wouldn’t have known what WashU was, or would have mixed it up with Univ of Washington, or whatever. They aren’t of any more importance than anyone else. IMO, the people who knew better knew what WashU was and that it was / is a high quality school, and those who didn’t – well, that’s their problem. And anyway, the impressions of high school students – anywhere – aren’t really all that important, IMO.</p>
<p>Wash U (like several other schools) carried on a major PR campaign to make it a national name–and it has worked.</p>
<p>Yep, so good for them. However, with or without that PR campaign, they were an excellent school.</p>
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<p>Cobrat, you make it sound like CUNY recently did away with open admissions, it has been 35 years since they had open admissions (along with free tuition).</p>
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<p>Engineering? Really? In the engineering-heavy Midwest, WUSTL is not known as a particularly strong engineering school. Not when you’ve got top engineering programs like Illinois, Michigan, Purdue, Northwestern, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio State ahead of it. Not terrible, but hardly distinguished.</p>
<p>In fact, the University of Washington is more highly regarded in engineering than WUSTL. Are you sure you (or your classmates) weren’t confusing UW (U of Washington) and Wash U (WUSTL)?</p>
<p>I’m sure WashU was an excellent school before to took steps to broaden its reputation nationwide. But I suspect that the students who enroll there now are, on average, more accomplished than those who did so in the past, just because it’s now drawing from a nationwide pool. I think there’s a loop between reputation and actual quality–they pull each other up.</p>
<p>I always think of two real world analogues to explain this Ivy phenomenon; BMWs and 1970’s IBM. In the first case, many people see higher ed as a luxury consumer good in the sense of being able to brand oneself, both literally and figuratively, as a well-heeled consumer. In this case, much as the general population will for the most part think of BMW, Mercedes, Ferraris and RRs as top luxury cars, so most consumers see HYP and other Ivys as top brands that will be universally respected.</p>
<p>The other example draws on the old adage, “no one got fired for buying IBM”. In this case, where so much time and money is going to be invested in one’s education, choosing an Ivy League school is seen as the safest of bets and one that few people will second-guess in the future.</p>
<p>So ultimately, I would say that it comes down to a case of perceived value and an attempt to mitigate risk in such a large investment. It is a self-perpetuating market.</p>