It’s that time of year…unfortunately

Applying to College
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Yes, the unwritten rules are maddening! My spouse and I are both college professors for crying out loud. And we don’t know most of these, nor do our other college prof friends who have been totally bewildered by this process with their kids. Most of them left all the applications up to their kids and it didn’t go nearly as well as it could have if they’d helped. I think a huge part of it is that we’re not in a super wealthy community or school. My kid is in the top 3% of his very good large public school, where a handful of kids get into fancy schools each year. But those parents have been playing the game for sure, unbeknownst to everyone else. Kids in accelerated math as a super special option that doesn’t get offered to other qualified kids, nor do they know it’s even a thing? It’s because the parents agitated for it, for just their kid.

We assured our kids that they don’t have to make themselves sick with worry or effort trying to get into college, since they can attend our employment institutions for free. They’d be happy with that, but would love to go elsewhere. Our eyes have really been opened after discovering this forum.

We now know that our 1st kid (with 4.0UW and 1500SAT and good science ECs and APs but not much else) is going to be LUCKY to get into some good engineering programs. Very surprising even for professor parents (one at SLAC, one at large state U). I don’t regret our laissez-faire approach, though. I think. He will get into a solid school and will get a good degree with good employment prospects. Not so sure about the younger kid, who has disabilities.

My parents applied pressure without much practical support and I had a mental breakdown right before HS graduation. As a result I decided not to attend college. I gave up full ride scholarships at age 17 (NM scholar) and years later had to pay for all of it myself because I was too old for the scholarships. Never mind the fact that I was way more equipped to kick ass in college because of my maturity. I vowed I would NEVER pressure my kids that way. Our kid has worked really hard, all with his own motivation, and has never had us breathing down his neck at all. I guess that has to count for something. This whole process really is maddening. I don’t know how not-rich people do it and stay sane.

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Yes! I am a med school professor and I am the one who has to help my well-educated family members navigate health care. This is also true of all my other med school prof colleagues. Even the NURSES in my family need my help to figure out health care. And they are incredibly frustrated when they go to Stanford for care and things fall through the cracks. I have to explain that the system is broken, and that it would be SO much worse if they weren’t receiving care at Stanford. It is hard for them to wrap their minds around having to work so hard to obtain the best care at such a fancy place. Truly tragic for those patients who don’t have a relative who is doctor or the like (!!!) at their beck and call. Or who don’t know that they should go to the fancy place. Or who can’t afford the fancy place. Which is the vast majority of patients. Makes me sick.

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NO! They WILL get into some very good engineering programs. It’s a matter of how you define good.

My uncle was an academic engineer with a PhD from Stanford. He straight up told my son that if he wanted to be a practicing engineer, he’d be better off doing his undergrad at Iowa State than at Stanford (he ended up at Cal Poly, another respected teaching program). My Dad went to MIT, yet my sister turned MIT down.

Rankings have TOTALLY distorted the perception of what engineering students get from undergraduate training. There are TONS of great engineering programs out there. You just have to talk with engineers and get to know them. There’s a reason Wayne State ME grads and MIT ME grads make the same money on average 2 years out. This is in NO WAY a slight to MIT. It’s an affirmation that there are many, many very good engineering programs.

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I had a medical emergency a few years ago with no time to get to the fancy place, see a “highly recommended” specialist (just got whoever was on call, ended up in the ER along with the gunshot wound victims, the drug-seekers, etc. and I gotta say:

The care was fantastic. Yes, I have health insurance. But even in a situation where there were no strings to pull, no time to get a second opinion before surgery, no time to look up the surgeons “ratings” or even where he went to med school and did his residency… I had what turned out to be a complicated case with excellent results, even delivered by the “regular and routine” staff who happened to be scheduled to work that day.

The bill was eyepopping and disturbing, but that’s a separate point.

My point today is that-- just like Higher Ed- because the standard of care for a complex surgical procedure in most accredited hospitals in the US is so high- we get used to thinking that we need to “navigate” health care. And I don’t delude myself that if I’d had the time- I’d have been navigating along with everyone else and for sure have chosen an academic medical center, not the podunk hospital I ended up in. But I didn’t. I got everyone who was on the schedule- the MRI dude who brought extra heated blankets when he saw I was shivering, the transport orderly who said “Will it help you if I hold your hand in the elevator?”, the surgical nurse who went above and beyond, the attending in the ER who took my husband aside when we were freaking out to sit him down and explain the tradeoffs between operating immediately vs. waiting for another surgeon, a “fresh” team, etc, and the anesthesiologist who held up his hand after the team had all done “their thing” in the OR to say “Blossom, we are all ready to proceed but I won’t start the anesthesia until you feel like you understand what’s about to happen”.

I think this is like Higher Ed. We forget how fantastic chemical engineering is at Missouri M&T because we also have Cal Tech and MIT and the “famous” schools. We don’t notice that U Maine has one of the top Paper Technology programs in the world. We can’t be bothered to remember that University of Iowa is one of the top Actuarial Science programs in the country, and many of us don’t actually know that Tulsa University is a pipeline of talent from its Cyber programs directly to the NSA, FBI and CIA.

So maybe it is just like health care. Sometimes the quality of the day in, day out is so high that it’s easy to fixate on “getting the best” when the day in, day out is already extraordinarily great. I know that healthcare is broken in many ways- and Covid has been a wrecking ball in so many ways, but I am one anecdote that you can get dumped at an ER at a totally average hospital (thankfully with health insurance) and get A+ care by a bunch of “not prestigious” healthcare folks.

And maybe the kids who end up at U Maine will be fine?

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Your last sentence nails the question. My parents’generation were certain the kids at local state U would be fine. Most parents now are less certain of that, whether due to income inequality or globalization or personal experience.

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Well, that’s a relief, thanks for the encouragement! We are in-state for Purdue, and vaguely knew they had a “good” engineering program with low tuition. Both of our employment institutions also have solid engineering programs. However, our previous notions of “Purdue is a great school that should be a sure thing for admission” were woefully naive! Our kid will likely have very good options because he is mostly applying to tuition exchange schools that are truly targets or safeties. We have a tiny budget, so I don’t know if we could afford Purdue even if he gets in. So he is hoping for some sweet scholarship offers from tuition exchange schools. He’ll have a good place to go, no matter what (home institutions), but this process is WAY more complicated than we had realized.

The rankings have been helpful to identify schools we might not have otherwise considered (like Dayton, Syracuse, RIT). But they can really mess with your head too. We have forbidden him from considering any pressure cooker reach schools. Just not worth the potential damage to mental health, and he was totally fine with that. I honestly think he was relieved when we drew that hard line.

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We never would have known that, had I not read that here! Our kid fabricates computer keyboards for fun, and we tease him endlessly about this hilarious hobby. We thought it was a ridiculous way to spend hundreds of dollars of his money, but he likes it. Apparently it can count as an extracurricular?! This is another way the application process disadvantages families who are not in the know…

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Yes it is true that you can get excellent health care even when you’re not at a “fancy” place. I live in a very small city and most of the care we receive here is objectively very high quality. We only go to big city for major stuff. BUT, when you have a weird or serious condition, or when you don’t have the random luck of getting a good doc or nurse, it can be a much different story. You are more likely to receive overall better care at the fancy place, and you have to decide if going there is worth the tradeoffs. The local cardiologist was fine here, until they weren’t. Then it was off to the fancy place in big city, with much better results and peace of mind. I knew we could just decide to go to fancy place, but most people don’t know that. I didn’t need local cardiologist to send us there. I just told them we were going there, and to transfer our care.

I have taught a lot of premeds and nursing and med students over the years, and their quality is, uh… widely distributed. Also the way the system is set up, miscommunication between providers, and with the patient is the rule, not the exception. The problem is that a lot of patients don’t know any of this info, and have no idea how to navigate it. Their only option is to blindly trust the providers/system, which has varying results. I am glad your hospital experience was so good, that is nice to hear! I do totally agree with your assessments of higher ed. That’s a great perspective.

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Yep. Extremely widely distributed. As I like to say, 1 out of every 20 doctors graduated in the bottom 5% of their class. Some people dismiss this as a tautology, but I think it is better regarded as a profound truth and important warning.

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Yes, so common, and sometimes with tragic consequences. It really helps to either understand the system or have a family member who does.

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And here’s where my health care analogy falls apart… a sub-par team of providers (whether a bad doc, a bad system, etc.) can have tragic consequences for the patient and the family. For a kid whose parents are not “in the know” about college admissions- if that means the kid ends up at URI and not Brown, or University of Illinois Chicago and not the flagship UIUC… are the consequences tragic?

CC likes to talk about the kid who was “shut out” i.e. didn’t get in anywhere. It usually takes about 50 commiserating posts (“Take a Gap year?” “Have the GC call the Adcom’s to make sure the recommendations actually got there!” or my favorite “enlist in the military and try again in 5 years”) until it is revealed that the kid didn’t really get shut out. The kid was “JHU or bust” and is unwilling (or maybe it’s the parents) to consider any of the three fine choices which are affordable AND which admitted him.

I don’t know that “shut out” has an analogy in medicine?

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not only an EC, but potentially the topic of an essay that will be unlike anything that any other applicant will write!

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Interesting reading this today after my experience yesterday that set my stress levels back off the wall and has me back to reducing stress by eliminating doctor appts. It all started with, “I can bring the disc from my MRI back in 2016.” “We have it all here.” “Do you have the images, because he needs to compare pictures, not text.” “Yes, we have the images.” And ended with, “Well, I don’t have the images, so I can’t compare. Who told you we had the images?” Then getting home and seeing the visit summary with all sorts of exam results, but we never even shook hands (ok due to Covid, not a complaint) - just talked. How in the world could he tell all sorts of things were normal and put them into my file as such. Maybe they are, but who knows for sure? Then to be told it was an autofill… they’ll correct it. They never said when they’d correct it. As of this typing, it’s still there.

I can handle college apps and college advice (send those my way!). I can handle rooms full of teens at all academic levels, teach math and science - even to those who are sure they don’t like those subjects. I can handle all sorts of travel from buses that should never be on a road to fancy airports and delays out the wazoo at either. I can handle untrained horses. My mind can’t handle anymore doctor appointments unless it’s as simple as a broken arm or whatever. There are many roller coasters that are fun - tell the stories afterward and laugh about them. This is one that would literally drive me to end my life if I continued with it (almost happened last time). My mistake was thinking things would be different. Sure, the details are. The roller coaster isn’t.

Your posts helps me realize my limitations and be more certain of my decision. If health things do me in, so be it. I don’t need to die young due to health care stress.

But I can continue to offer college advice both in person with folks I know and occasionally on here. To me, that’s stress relief. (But I say that and my kids have graduated from college, so… )

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Agreed, no perfect analogy to medicine where true tragedies are possibilities. But I still think there can be big differences in outcome between schools. Businesses and banking recruit Classics grads from Brown, not so much Classics grads from URI. This is not to say that the grad from URI might not be just as smart, but my understanding is that these places have to stick to a recruiting budget, and so they chose to recruit Ivy and not as much at URI where maybe only 1 or 2 candidates are good enough. Same with STEM: sure you can get a solid education at University of Illinois, Chicago, but at MIT you are way more likely to have dormed with some future tech entrepreneur who will bring you along with him when he rockets his company to the top. It’s about opportunities for best outcomes, rather than just “pretty good.” If you have gangrene in your foot, amputation is 100% good enough. But at that elite hospital they would have been able to save your leg too…

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We’re getting off track, but this is part of the mythology. Most MIT grads are regular engineers like most Illinois grads. Startups are not about mental horsepower, but about entrepreneurial drive. The bulk of engineers don’t have that. That’s why they’re engineers. Chicago doesn’t have engineering BTW.

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I didn’t say UChicago. I said University of Illinois at Chicago (which is the school Blossom mentioned) and which does appear to offer multiple engineering degrees. Also I used MIT as a comparison example because even though most MIT grads are regular engineers, MIT also has a higher percentage of the entrepreneur types who do indeed rocket to the top (and sometimes hire their friends and bring them along with them.)

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Agreed. But, the fact is, according to College Scorecard, at 2 years, ME (chosen because ME is the largest engineering field) grads of Wayne State, San Jose State and MIT all make roughly the same money on average.

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What a cool kid! Love it.

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Wow, also wouldn’t have thought of that! Thanks for the suggestion :grin:

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In medical school admission, about 60% of applicants actually do get shut out.

In actual medical practice, people with medical emergencies got shut out of needed care during COVID-19 surges that overloaded the hospitals while reducing capacity when staff got infected.

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