<p>With respect to fundraising, it was our experience that not only do we get frequent requests from our respective undergrads and grad schools, but the minute our kids enrolled in their undergrads we were targeted by the schools for fundraising both by phone and mail. </p>
<p>My grad school somehow seems to think I am a bottomless money pit and have targeted me for large (6 figure plus) donations. Um, no. But maybe I should be flattered. I got a recent request from the development office to come meet me face to face when they were in town. Gee, what a shame that they happen to be scheduled to be here on a religious holiday of mine and I will be out of the office.</p>
<p>Haystack: obviously those are all excellent public institutions. Maybe they are better than NU across the board in every department. I have no idea. I am pretty sure the schools you reference don’t have endowments comparable to HYPSMETC. But I don’t know that for a fact.</p>
<p>QuantMech posted about choosing schools based on faculty and departments. Is it possible for the schools you mention to compete with HYPSMETC with regard to faculty salaries and support? Some years back Texas Austin raised their profile tremendously by hiring faculty away from supposedly more “elite” institutions. I believe they used state funds to do this, not an endowment created from alumni donations. Although maybe many of the state’s legislators are/ were alums? State schools usually don’t have the fund raising success of private elites. They usually don’t have comparable faculty salaries and resources.* Usually when professors get better offers they move. The “bigger name” professors bring recognition and outside funding to their departments and universities. They have more resources at their disposal which helps them to become even bigger names.</p>
<p>If I have time to search I’ll post a link to the thread where Dstark showed us the staggering amount of federal funds going to support already very well endowed private universities. Maybe someone else bookmarked it at the time?</p>
<p>So if a particular student wants access to the best faculty and department in a particular area of study, there is a strong possibility ** a very competitive school is the best fit.</p>
<p>Like Blossom points out, it’s not that many students - why do we care? In previous threads I seem to remember QuantMech suggesting some of those students may have something worthwhile to contribute to society if allowed access to appropriate educational resources and opportunities. I have already explained why I think for some students those resources may exist at a limited number of schools*** Opting out may mean completely changing what they intended to pursue as their life’s work. Perhaps that is a tad melodramatic. But maybe you can see what I mean?</p>
<p><em>I’m sure someone can find an exception
*</em>Sometimes the best faculty and department will NOT be at an elite private.
***Yes - those schools may not be the most prestigious on the USNWR rankings.</p>
<p>edit: To Sum Up:</p>
<p>If professors choose to opt out, it is possible they aren’t able to accomplish as much in their chosen fields, because of lack of financial support and resources</p>
<p>If students choose to opt out, maybe they have to pursue another field entirely - although this may be an over-the-top assessment. It will obviously depend on the choices which are available to them. However, does anyone realistically opt out of trying for the best opportunities? - I’m sure someone will immediately point out this is often the case :)</p>
<p>and adding:
well - obviously- financial circumstances force many to opt out of such competitions… sorry to be examining this from such a privileged point of view…</p>
<p>Note that you can major in English, history, or history and philosophy of science at Caltech. However, Caltech has a core curriculum with extensive math and science requirements for students in all majors, including these.</p>
<p>“The admissions committee, therefore, takes great care to attempt to identify students who will be outstanding “educators,” students who will inspire fellow classmates and professors.”</p>
<p>I remember reading somewhere that outside of the various institutional needs, extraordinary achievers of somekind, they do end up having a class of about 400 students who are considered really great students (high GPAs, SAT scores, and whatever else) based on an answer by Fitzsimmons.</p>
<p>So those who feel the kids should have gotten in based on academic achievements alone, are aiming for 400 seats at Harvard. That eliminates about 75% of the seats for pure academic achievers?</p>
<p>You jest, but there are actual adults on this forum - and not just those who are fresh off the boat from another country - who actually think that that the number of people who are successful in life from a Wisconsin or some-place-not-Ivy are few and far between. Such people are completely divorced from reality and it’s really very hard to take them seriously.</p>
<p>But the bigger issue is - the kid who wanted to go to Harvard and was one of the 95% who didn’t make it and now he “has” to go to Carnegie-Mellon or Purdue or Wisconsin or whatever – god, to listen to some of you on CC, you’d think the kid was forever doomed to be an also-ran in life since he didn’t win the particular college lottery. It’s asinine and ridiculous thinking. It also bespeaks a very negative, fearful view of life - that if you don’t scale the Ivy or a few other selected walls at age 18, you’ll never, ever live up to your potential. It’s a very passive view - success is what happens to you, as opposed to you creating it for yourself. Is that really how you teach your children to think? If so, I feel sorry for them.</p>
<p>And texaspg’s D is going to Stanford, I believe … why is anyone spending more than 5 seconds worrying about why she didn’t get into Princeton?</p>
<p>You can indeed. But it looks like practically no one does. In whatever year the statistics for which are presented on the NCES website, the total number of bachelor’s degree recipients who majored in any of those three departments was . . . 1 (a history major).</p>
<p>That said, Caltech has an impressive number of faculty in those departments. Much larger than the physics faculties at most LACs of comparable size.</p>
You do realize that most of this is probably money going to support medical research? Surely you don’t think cancer should only be studied at public institutions?</p>
<p>Well, of course. Look, in our hypothetical example, Princeton (why Princeton? tired of typing Harvard, no other reason) has 30,000 applicants; 10,000 are fully worthy of doing the work from Princeton’s standpoint, but they’ve only got 2000 beds so they have to pick 2000 kids. (And yes, I know there’s yield. We’re being illustrative here.)</p>
<p>So maybe all 10,000 kids ARE truly “worthy” of all of Princeton’s Greatness™. But, still, they can only pick 2000! That is what it is! So they have to come up with some way of doing so. They could rack-and-stack SAT scores. They could do a lottery. They could pick only the full-pays out of the crowd and to heck with you if you’re not full pay. They could pick only alumni/legacy kids. They could auction off the seats to the highest bidders. Instead, they choose to create an interesting “stew” by looking all across the different things we’ve discussed ad nauseum - well rounded kids, “slanted” kids, athletic talent, leadership talent, artistic talent, diversity in background, blah blah blah. Obviously their “stew” is appealing since everyone wants a bowl of it. Why do you find it so hard to live with? What- because it’s not predictable? Well, too bad so sad. Welcome to life. </p>
<p>There IS no systematic problem of bright-kids-not-getting-great-education. Maybe at the margins here or there, but the stats of the kids bear out that they are indeed attracting the cream of the crop. I know it’s fashionable to pretend that your own kid was indeed one of the “rightful deservers” who got usurped by (choose one) a URM / legacy / athlete, but it really isn’t so. There are no “rightful deservers.” At all.</p>
<p>ALH- I don’t think the students who opt out see it as opting out.</p>
<p>Kid wants to study Classics. Plan A is Stanford or Harvard. (whether they are truly the number one and two programs in the country is irrelevant. They both have high quality programs, great faculty, depth in the field, and “popular appeal”.) Plan B is Penn or Brown-- a smidge less competitive in admissions overall, top ranked departments in Classics. Plan C is Texas or Berkeley or UNC or Michigan or one of the public U’s with a top ranked Classics program if you are lucky enough to be in-state at one of these powerhouse programs. And Plan D (if you aren’t an academic superstar who can get into one of these colleges) is “somewhere else” where you will do just fine. And maybe you won’t end up majoring in Classics if you don’t click with the smaller peer group at a college where Classics isn’t a draw. And maybe you will- and can’t get into a funded grad program for a PhD – and that’s probably ok also because maybe you decided along the way that you want to go to law school or teach high school or work for a think tank.</p>
<p>I don’t think the sorting devices that exist are precluding large numbers of the tippy top talented kids from gaining access to the faculty and resources they need in the Humanities where the pecking orders are so extreme. Maybe I’m naive. For sure I believe it exists in the sciences.</p>
<p>Wow, what a simplistic, reductionistic view of how people really act and behave. You might want to acquaint yourself with Myers-Briggs and ponder upon people who have both strong “N” intuition and strong “T” thinking skills.</p>
<p>I’d seen some of the Simmon’s interviews before, but not sure if I ever read all of them before. I loved his comment the kid who got a recommendation from the school custodian:
<p>Interesting fact: I worked as a librarian for Professor Munger at Caltech who had his huge private library (60,000 books) available for the students and taught a course in African History. <a href=“News - www.caltech.edu”>News - www.caltech.edu;
<p>That may play a part, but that wasn’t what the supervisors/hiring managers at those hardcore tech companies were citing as main reasons why they viewed Harvard engineering/CS graduates with some skepticism. </p>
<p>It was more their perception their techie skills, work ethic, and cultural fit weren’t on the level of the Cornell, Princeton, and Columbia SEAS graduates…the top engineering/CS schools in the Ivy league as far as they were concerned.</p>
<p>A part of this is their not-so-wrong perception that historically Harvard tends to prioritize the needs of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences over the Division of Applied Sciences where their engineering/applied sciences departments are grouped. </p>
<p>A few also had bad experiences with Harvard Engineering/CS graduates not being up to snuff and having to transfer them to less/non-technical sections of their technical companies or firing them altogether. That’s not including my engineering uncle’s mostly negative experience with Harvard engineering graduates during his 50+ year engineering career (late '50s-mid '00s).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Among those who are/know/worked with hardcore folks in the engineering/CS, the above would never occur. </p>
<p>If anything, it’d be considered a non-brainer. If you had a choice between CMU, Purdue, or Wisconsin over Harvard…most hardcore engineering/CS folks would overwhelmingly choose the former…especially CMU…assuming they even bothered to apply to Harvard in the first place. </p>
<p>If anything, they’d be wondering at the sanity of someone who’d turn down those schools for Harvard. This was clearly shown in the reaction of most HS classmates when a HS classmate in my year turned down admission to Berkeley, MIT, and CMU to attend Harvard for engineering. </p>
<p>Turned out she regretted it and after going to Stanford for an MSE, said if she had to do it again…she’d have gone to one of the former three schools instead.</p>
<p>If this student’s character was indeed what was described, that’s worth a heck of a lot more than 200 SAT points, IMO. But that’s precisely some of what elite adcoms have to deal with - the 2100 kid with this kind of character vs the 2300 kid who is bright but can’t play well with others. And the 2300’s on CC who whine about how they didn’t get into their favorite Ivy League and the poor dears have to settle for Emory don’t often get that indeed, it’s quite “fair” that the 2100 kid who touches people around him got in when they didn’t. Because life success isn’t just about smarts.</p>
<p>I just don’t get how you can discriminate between Harvard, Stanford, Penn or Brown in terms of competitiveness in admissions, in any kind of larger conceptual picture. They are all extraordinarily competitive and reaches for everybody. I think the mindset of Plan A = H/S and Plan B = P/B is the first mistake being made.</p>
<p>Blossom - Thank you! Classics is a good example.</p>
<p>Assuming a student has the credentials to get accepted anywhere and might get accepted at the Plan A or Plan B schools - all private elites, right? In my scenario the student is deciding to opt out of the competitive admissions game to the best of her ability, not apply to what QM calls new-fangled-finishing schools (:)) The schools where pizzagirl says if we don’t like how they do things… just don’t apply!! Plan C is still pretty competitive. Isn’t something other than the academic record and basic decent character under consideration? Adding to the mix is the fact that for some students depending on FA, Plan A & B will be potentially more affordable than C or D. So opting out seems a little more complicated. Why isn’t a future classicist able to attend her state university and count on an education that prepares her for competitive graduate programs? oops! Those will most likely also be Plan A, Plan B schools with a sprinkling of C. (Please let’s not have a debate about classics dept rankings! It’s just a very general observation. The tippy top graduate program may very well be public but the student will probably have to apply to a variety of the A & B schools to have a decent shot at a spot) It is really hard to opt out of this system for a classicist imho</p>
<p>Except that some do teach themselves Latin and Greek for pleasure, outside a university setting. That is really opting out.</p>
<p>mathmom: I don’t guess I have a real opinion as to whether cancer research should be supported at public institutions over privates. It is interesting to think about, though, to me. I am not pretending to have any answers about all this, just that I think some problems exist imho </p>
<p>my opinions may be (probably are) totally off the wall
okay - I won’t bore ya’ll any more today.</p>
<p>My D got rejected by Harvard, Yale, and a few others too. It is expected at this level. My post was mainly about the letter itself and nothing to do with the rejection part. D was happy to visit the 4 schools she was most interested in. picked one she thought she would be happy at, which is the only thing that matters. </p>
<p>Others disagree with me but I just never liked that last sentence and feel it is in poor taste. </p>
<p>Btw, whoever is complaining about settling for U Wisconsin - 2012/2016 parents have one go to person for all medical advice about what we need to be doing. She went to U W for both undergrad and med school and we trust her online advice more than our own doctors. go figure!</p>
<p>Pizza- I think the example a few pages back was of a kid who was a true academic superstar, shining light, etc. and the question was does the emphasis on non academics in the admissions process mean that kids like this get shut out of opportunities. Apologies if I’ve used a bad example. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the top physics olympiad or Intel kids shoot for MIT or Cal Tech and see Cornell and Brown as slightly more reasonable admissions options so I tried to do the same for our fictitious classics major. You get my point.</p>
<p>ALH-for sure there are kids teaching themselves Latin and Greek. But are suggesting that kids who can’t or don’t want to attend one of the powerhouse schools for Classics should just lock themselves in their bedrooms for a few years? And at colleges that do not have a top 25 (I’m being arbitrary and please don’t argue with me about whose ranking to use) Classics department, a kid needs to have a lot of initiative to stitch together a program which will meet his or her needs. Top programs have lots of inter-disciplinary connections- programs on a dig in Sicily with the archaeology department, visiting scholars from the British museum who are experts in mud and clay, faculty from other U’s who are taking a sabbatical to collaborate with a team of curators and preservationists from the university’s own museum, etc. Non-top programs may have the department chair on sabbatical the year your kid gets there; the expert in Greek poetry out on maternity leave, an emeritus professor who hasn’t taught a class in 5 years, and a couple of adjuncts who teach Latin 1 and 2 trying to cover the rest.</p>
<p>So the kid who wants classics and ends up in this college either sucks it up, transfers, or discovers a latent interest in Russian Lit (all fine outcomes)… but for sure doesn’t have the experience of his or her peer is getting at Stanford or Penn or Texas or Michigan.</p>
<p>Sounds weird to me, too despite the fact this Wisc == settling mentality was prevalent at my public magnet HS. One younger HS alum who is a Wisc graduate almost didn’t attend one of our HS’s alum mixers because she was concerned she’d be disparaged by where she went for undergrad. </p>
<p>Not an invalid concern to be dismissed lightly considering how the jerk contingent in the top 25% of my and prior graduating classes tended to act not only towards anyone in the bottom 75%…but also to each other (i.e. MIT/Caltech/CMU admits disparaging HYP admits*). Fortunately, none of those jerks showed up. :)</p>
<p>In my family, Wisconsin was highly regarded and several family members are proud alums. </p>
<p>Heck, my father sometimes still wonders why I never bothered to apply there and didn’t understand that my reasons were solely for campus culture/social reasons(Too big and too much heavy drinking/partying big sports atmosphere). </p>
<ul>
<li>Same types to be really irritated when they asked about my HS circle of friends about our college plans and we said “Beach bumming in California”. :D</li>
</ul>
<p>Blossom - I think I understood what you were trying to do with the classics example and like it very much. What I am saying:</p>
<p>Student wants to be Classicist.
Realistically the best Classics departments are at the most competitive schools. The elitism is relative. As you point out the “top” schools have unequaled opportunities. Most state schools don’t offer a Classics degree that will prepare a student for graduate school.
Pizzagirl says “if you don’t like the game don’t play”
Student doesn’t like the game; follows pizzagirls advice; doesn’t play; can’t realistically become a mainstream Classics scholar at a university
“the game” includes more than HYPETC, right? I don’t think I ever suggested it didn’t?</p>