<p>I'm asking you the parents because as a 17 year old I have no clue what the college scene was like 10-15 years ago. Do you find there is a stronger drive (by society, education, etc) to go to a top 25 college in recent years? Why are kids applying to 10 schools? Is there more Ivy obsession than there was a few years back?</p>
<p>What’s your definition of recent?</p>
<p>9 years back…crazy</p>
<p>35 years back…not crazy</p>
<p>I’m not sure. I know at my HS, no one went to an Ivy and didn’t aspire to (this was almost 30 years ago. ouch!). At ds’s school (class of about 200), there are more than a dozen Ivy acceptances. Of course, his school is a lot more competitive than my neighborhood school. A GC told me most kids are applying to 6-10 schools, so that’s the norm. I heard of one kid who applied to either 15 or 17. I was the first in my family to go to college, so it makes sense that as you start to move up the ladder that your aspirations (for your kids) get greater.</p>
<p>I had friends from my large, suburban, not-especially-good high school who went to Ivy schools (Penn, Columbia, Cornell, etc.), good LACs (Oberlin, Earlham), other top schools (U Chicago). A lot of kids also headed for state schools, with many of them at Flagship State U. I don’t remember the frenzy, though, but maybe our parents (well, not mine, but other kids’ parents) felt differently about it.</p>
<p>I was pretty laid back about the whole college thing; started a semester late because I wanted to work for a bit, eventually attended four schools before finally graduating, went full-time, part-time, skipped semesters, and never applied to more than one college at a time. Hmmmm… I wonder if I missed out on something? :)</p>
<p>I think our society’s preoccupation with brand names is part of it. Getting into a well known selective school is a status badge that you are smarter than the average college student. </p>
<p>When I was younger, fewer kids went to college and things were much less intense and I applied to only three colleges. I went to a private but most of my college bound classmates went to the public schools. Privates were thought to be expensive. People didn’t have the mentality that they deserved a spot in one just because they did well on their SAT and the college had better pony up the financial aid.</p>
<p>A constellation of several factors, chief in importance being the coming of age of the Echo Boom and the fruition of abundant educational opportunities provided and accepted by these children of mostly successful, very well-educated Boomers, creating expectations, goals, drive within the family.</p>
<p>Boomers + Echo Boomers = 2 populations of “enormous” size.</p>
<p>But how can it be mostly Echo Boom? Are you saying admit rates will drop to pre-2000 levels after this wave of applicants is gone?</p>
<p>Supposedly it’s going to decline. But that of course does not necessarily limit the number of applications, just the number of applicants. I speculated on another thread that we may also see a decrease based on some degree of declining literacy & compromised academics due to media distractions among youth, but I have no idea how projectable my own encounter with declining literacy is. I just see a trend locally of declining competitiveness for 4-yr institutions among otherwise capable students. Some of this is due to decline in high school educational quality (that which I’m in a position to see), some due to student behavior about academics.</p>
<p>To answer the OP, for at least a generation, maybe longer, some people have cared a lot about getting into the “best” college they can. </p>
<p>To answer other questions above, it’s time for the FAQ again: </p>
<p>DEMOGRAPHICS </p>
<p>Population trends in the United States are not the only issue influencing the competitiveness of college admission here. The children already born show us what the expected number of high school students are in various years, but the number of high school students in the United States, which is expected to begin declining in a few years, isn’t the whole story. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/education/09admissions.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp</a> </p>
<p>First of all, if more students who begin high school go on to college, there will be more applicants to college even with a declining number of high school students. And that is the trend in the United States and worldwide. </p>
<p>Second, colleges in the United States accept applications from all over the world, so it is quite possible that demographic trends in the United States will not be the main influence on how many students apply to college. The cohorts of high-school-age students are still increasing in size in some countries (NOT most of Europe). </p>
<p>Third, even if the number of applicants to colleges overall stays the same, or even declines, the number of applicants to the most competitive colleges may still increase. The trend around the world is a “flight to quality” of students trying to get into the best college they can in increasing numbers, and increasing their consensus about which colleges to put at the top of their application lists. I do not expect college admission to be any easier for my youngest child than for my oldest child, even though she is part of a smaller birth cohort in the United States. </p>
<p>And now I would add to this that at the very most selective colleges that have just announced new financial aid plans, next year’s (and the following year’s) crush of applicants will be larger than ever. When colleges that are already acknowledged to be great colleges start reducing their net cost down to what the majority of families in the United States can afford, those colleges will receive more applications from all parts of the United States, and very likely from all over the world. </p>
<p>The Economist magazine published a brief article about these trends in April 2008. </p>
<p>[University</a> admissions in America | Accepted | The Economist](<a href=“Accepted”>Accepted)</p>
<p>This made me think back to my graduating class in the '70s. I can’t remember a single friend that didn’t go on to college! Applied to four schools. Accepted the one that gave me the most aid.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, I know what ellemenope is talking about 
and I agree 100%.</p>
<p>It always was an issue to a certain portion of the population. Now more kids and families than ever are on the mission to get into the most selective schools which makes them even more selective and raises the stakes and frenzy.</p>
<p>Still, most kids go to local schools and do not have these issues.</p>
<p>I know citing the economy for every single thing that goes on is getting old, but…we were clueless what the real cost of college would be, so we cast a very wide net. We needed to ensure we could afford one of the colleges in which she would be accepted.</p>
<p>My daughter, first to go to college in my family, applied to 15 schools. We were totally inexperienced with the college application process and included a wide variety of schools. We included the dream schools, the academic safety schools, the financial safety schools, the schools known for the best financial aid, and schools with the best known program in her intended major. We also were unsure of the admitt process, and inadvertantly applied to schools accepting students with far fewer credentials than hers.</p>
<p>In hindsight, we could have reduced the number of schools significantly and still been ok.</p>
<p>The uncertainty of the economy played a huge role in why she applied to so many.</p>
<p>I also believe that going to college 30+ years ago was pretty much optional. A high school diploma was perfectly satisfactory. I know through the more recent years of my career, I was often working side by side with younger, college educated kids. We had the EXACT same jobs. These days, a 4 year degree is ALMOST (not quite though) the same as a high school diploma was many years ago. I believe kids these days need the 4 year degree to even get into the professional workplace.</p>
<p>I graduate from a private prep school 30 years ago. We made ourselves slightly crazy. At least among my close group of friends we were aiming at the Ivy’s a bunch of which had just gone co-ed the year before. But we also generally applied to 3 or 4 colleges, took the SAT1 twice, the SAT2 once neither with any particular prep beyond a little more emphasis on learning vocabulary as part of English class. We had AP classes, but only as seniors. Our acceptance rate was pretty amazing - 10% of the class went to HYP.</p>
<p>Things have gotten dramatically more intense. When I was in high school the assumption was you either went to school, joined the military or went into your father’s career/trade. As mentioned, the Boomers went to college at a record rate in their time, now they have kids and they are simply assuming that their children will go off to school as well. College was seen as the next step up and with increases in Federal grants and loans, people made sure their kids took advantage of the opportunity.</p>
<p>Another factor is that as a society, we’ve become much more technologically complex. Most jobs/careers these days require some sort of technical expertise that was virtually unheard of three decades ago. UPenn2013, as a test, ask your parents to explain what it was like to go to a library and literally “look up a book”. What used to be time and labor intensive is now available at your fingertips on your Blackberry or iPhone. More of the base technical teaching is being pushed down to high schools, but to “get ahead” you now need a degree of some sort.</p>
<p>Which leads me to the next factor: access to information. When I applied to colleges there were a handful of brochures in the guidance office and maybe one or two guides at the library, (that you had to sign up for to use an hour at a time). Back then there were 2 schools, Harvard and Yale. After that it all became regional in nature. If you had a cousin living in California, maybe you heard him mumble about some place named Stanford or Berkeley, but that was it for out-of-state information. I applied to 4 schools, if you applied to 6, people thought you were nuts or incapable of making a simple decision. With more information about the quality of other schools, application counts have gone up steadily, leaving today’s high school seniors competing on a national basis.</p>
<p>Finally, rankings were unheard of back in my day. There was no all seeing, all knowing book that told you school A was 4 slots better than school B. Guides showed you where a school was, what it cost and what majors you could study. Prestige was based on some vague perception, not the result of the BusinessWeekUSNewsWorldReportSportsIllustratedPopularMechanicsKrogerSafeway Survey. As rankings started to appear, people got competitive. </p>
<p>“My kid’s in at the #8 fraudulent accounting program! Well my kid’s in at the #7 defective engineering school!”</p>
<p>Sure, there was a local pecking order but nothing on the scale it is today. Go to the message boards here and you’ll see your classmates torturing themselves over whether they should attend the 12th ranked business school with no financial aid or the 14th program and a free ride, (as if there’s some quantifiabl difference in the educations). It just didn’t cross our minds to compare schools in Boston versus Atlanta or Philadelphia, nor did we think we were at some dramatic disadvantage for not doing it. Today there seems to be an obsession with cherry picking your way into the best possible situation.</p>
<p>The end result is that you have the same 30,000 seniors applying to the same 10 schools, all stressed out by the fear that their neighbor will get into a better school and that they’ll be left out in the cold. Sadly, it never crosses their minds or their parents’ minds to step away from the ledge and realize that a great education is what you make it, not where.</p>
<p>Good luck and congratulations on getting into Penn.</p>
<p>I have a friend who was saying “Why are you stressing out over your kid getting into college. Mine went 20 years ago and it wasn’t such a big deal, . . bla bla blah.” Well, now it is. It’s much more competitive. It just is.</p>
<p>Hey! We got Sarah Palin postin’ here:</p>
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<p>I graduated from high school 34 years ago, and my experience is like mathmom’s. I went to a private school in NYC, and the top 10% at least of the class went to Ivys, MIT, etc. I took the SATs twice, four ‘Achievement Tests’ (as the SATII was then called), and 4 APs (two as a junior and two as a senior). But the APs were taken purely for placing out of prereqs in college, or at least that’s how we thought of them.</p>
<p>I applied to three schools: Princeton, Harvard, and Wellesley, my safety. Four was the maximum you were allowed, since it was a small school and they didn’t have the manpower to do more paperwork than that. Most of my classmates got into one of their top choices. While I had very good scores, I had absolutely no ECs at all, and probably something like a 3.6 GPA: I got into Princeton (my first choice) and Wellesley and was waitlisted at Harvard. Back then Princeton’s acceptance rate was 25%, and you didn’t need to walk on water to get in.</p>
<p>Oh, yea…it’s gotten way crazy! Back in the day, I went to a top suburban Chicago hs. You took the ACT once and didn’t pay all that much attention to the score. With the exception of a small strata at the top, most of us “knew” where we would get in and how much it would cost. Most went to state schools, some OOS but very few to privates. You applied where you knew you would get in based on class rank primarily; waiting for the acceptance was sort of perfunctory. Most of us did not take AP’s; those that did went to 6-yr. med programs or H,P,Y and there only a few of them. And, how did we “do” in life…for the most part we turned into successful adults in terms of career, family, friends, finances, etc. Many went on to grad school/professional degrees along the way.
While I think my own d’s choices are great, the anxiety of all the decsion-making is worrisome. And, do I think the students of today will be better off for it all…no way! I think they become stressed out and concerned with the things in life that ultimately don’t really matter.</p>
<p>Oh, sorghum, you wound me!!</p>
<p>Needs must cry into my tea (English Breakfast, for those interested) now, and find a petticoat tail on which to munch.</p>
<p>:: sniff ::</p>