<p>If you are looking for a good education, Iviess do not have a lock on the market. They once did, but no longer. If you are looking for prestige, go right ahead but go with your eyes open. Until the mid 1970’s getting into the Ivy’s was more about your family connections and there are still highways between some high schools and the Ivies. My DDs boarding school routinely sends 30% of their classes to Ivies. Winks and handshakes still work … so for the remainder, it is a lottery.</p>
<p>I personally do not know why anyone would ever attend Harvard undergraduate, assuming the person had other great options. They are widely known to do a poor job for the lower ranks … for generations now. I would not want my child surrounded by folks a bit too impressed and not critically thinking about their education. Yuk.</p>
<p>Every kid I personally know (or know of) who has attended an Ivy League School has been smart, well rounded, and interesting. Every one of them has had a pretty normal (though they are achieving at a very high level) childhood and high school experience. In my experience, they are the kids who are intelligent enough that they can breeze through the academic hoops and have time left over to be passionately involved in other things. And all of them had a nice social life in high school. </p>
<p>They were NOT high school grinds, pasty or puffy from too many hours studying. They were vibrantly involved in life.</p>
<p>And you just can’t MAKE a kid become that kind of a kid by enrolling them in tutoring, or plotting their extracurricular lives starting in kindergarten, or finding some researcher for them to “work with”. As parents, we can help our kids along their way, but we can’t make it happen or manipulate our kids to “create” an Ivy admission.</p>
<p>The problem, in my upper class burb, is with the parents who work very hard to try to create an Ivy kid. Those are the kids who are burned out, tired, overscheduled, going from the SAT tutor to the private music lesson to swim team practice to their university mentor with no time for a childhood. The future Ivy admits are bouncing happily through high school, involved in much more than their high level classes, and doing it all in a self directed way. </p>
<p>I think it is hard to see that, though, until you’ve seen several groups of kids you know go through the admissions process. As a parent of younger kids, you just see the grades, the impressive extracurriculars, the research… All those things the older ivy admits have going for them… But you don’t see the way those kids achieved those impressive statistics.</p>
<p>What would you rather drive: a Honda Civic or a Range Rover? Both get you from Point A to Point B more than adequately, and so it becomes an issue of personal preference and relative need to “upgrade”. I think college choice decisions (and reputation/rank anxiety) are similar choices. Reality is that great numbers of colleges and universities provide comparable educations to Ivies; they just don’t have the same prestige and reputation factors.</p>
<p>I’m an Ivy grad school graduate myself, attended a Tier 2 relatively-unknown undergrad school, and have always noted that these two school experiences were very different but that the strengths of one school were the weaknesses of the other, and vice versa. The grad school experience exposed significant flaws in the “prestige school” experience, while the undergrad experience exposed the significant strengths of a non-prestige school experience that still focussed on individual student’s development and career growth.</p>
<p>My grad school roommate was a Harvard College grad; she and her undergrad friends had very mixed feelings about their Ivy experience and were quite vocal about it. I suspect the same issues are present now. Most business and community leaders in our major metropolitan area are NOT Ivy or prestige college grads, and there’s little evidence that a prestige degree has a discernible career push here over an academically-strong (ie: not a C-student) grad from a Big 10 school or a Tier 1.5 LAC. (Some of these senior execs come from truly obscure Tier 3 and Tier 4 colleges.) That background knowledge extinguished my personal interest in motivating our kids to ever apply to “Top 10” schools for mistaken belief that such an educational background is needed for career and personal success.</p>
<p>I don’t find this offensive. In fact, my husband raised exactly this issue with each of our two kids when they were applying to college.</p>
<p>Our state has a good flagship state university, for which both of our kids were realistic candidates. If they wanted to go elsewhere, my husband wanted to discuss the reasons why. </p>
<p>If the other school was substantially superior to our state university in terms of academic quality/reputation, or if it offered a program that the state university doesn’t, he was fine with it – regardless of cost. But he questioned the wisdom of paying extra to go to a college substantially inferior to the state university, unless it offered something that the state university did not. </p>
<p>One of our kids ended up at that state university. The other ended up at a private university that’s substantially superior to the state university in academic quality/reputation. Both had good experiences.</p>
<p>When DD was looking at northeast boarding schools, the rep from Exetor said the name of the game now is to go to an undergraduate school where the kid will thrive/shine and the school picks up the tab. Graduate school is when the prestige matters. No one really cares where you went for your undergraduate years.</p>
<p>Getting poor grades anywhere including ivies limits your options.</p>
<p>^This is what my university faculty friends say all the time too. Which may also be why so many professors send their kids to state flagships or LACs–and not necessarily the “name” ones, either.</p>
<p>I want to make something clear, I wasn’t saying that every student who got into in Ivy was a grind or lost their childhood or wasn’t a good kid. I’m saying that in order to stand out to the point you remove luck as a significant part of the equation, or as we like to toss around here, to be a solid admit, you have to have an experience well outside the parameters of what would be considered a normal childhood. That has a cost.</p>
<p>That may be true–but I think it’s rare for anyone to think they are a “solid” admit. And I don’t think anyone here would argue that aiming for that elusive goal is anything but crazy. If attempting that is your beef, we probably all agree with you.</p>
<p>Any whoever claims the Ivy’s ever had a lock on prestige? Look at the list of Nobel prize winners from CUNY and Berkeley and other public institutions- the people now being recognized are in their 60’s and 70’s- so graduated from college in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And even then, public U’s were turning out scholars and researchers who were going on to august careers.</p>
<p>It’s an overstatement to say that the Ivy League had a “lock” on prestige- just as it’s an overstatement to say that every kid at Harvard lost his childhood being “molded”. And it’s surely an overstatement to say that anybody whose kid decides to go UIUC or Michigan or UVA is doomed to a life of mediocrity.</p>
<p>Okay…veering off on a tangent for a moment…</p>
<p>At a recent final college night for seniors where the selection process was once more discussed…it was suggested that the highest loan amount a student should take on for college was 30K - or the cost of a good Honda:)</p>
<p>I know a kid who asked for, and got, a file cabinet for his 9th birthday. He’s now a proud Ivy graduate. His childhood ended about age 4 when it was apparent he was way, way smarter than the other kids his age.</p>
<p>I’d rather drive the Civic than push the Range Rover.</p>
Why not? Since the difference between school A is 99.45555 and school B is 99.4556. Anyone who thinks there is a huge difference between School #1 on the USNWR list and School # 15 is fooling themselves. Both my kids applied to School #1 and School #50ish and there was a difference, though in the departments my kids were interested in, School #50ish was still a great school for them.</p>
<p>And let me just join the crowd of those whose kids go to a high school where the kids getting into very selective colleges do indeed have a life without being athletes, legacies etc.</p>
<p>Why flog this dead horse? Because CUNY, Berkeley, UVA and Michigan don’t have 5% admission rates and charge the lucky few a quarter of a million dollars. As long as people place this select set of schools (any school that charges $250k and offers no merit aid) as their pinnacle and will pay the price should they be admitted every other institution will feel they have to follow suit and tuition everywhere will continue to rise. The only answer is for cash paying families to make a principled decision to look elsewhere, to the schools you referenced, and many of the other fine institutions out there. </p>
<p>Why do you think people continue to believe what you are labeling “myth” about the relative value of the elite schools? Eventually, everyone grew to accept that the earth is round and the moon isn’t made of green cheese. Why has this alleged falsehood not only persisted through the years, but grown stronger? Can you really blame it on a conservative news magazine that, like its competitor publications Time and Newsweek, almost no one reads anymore? Surely if the myth had been successfully disproven with the studies you cite, the belief would be fading–not gaining traction like it is.</p>
<p>What I see in my community is that people say they don’t believe the myth, but they still keep striving for those schools and sending in the expensive application fees. And judging by the daily attempts on CC to say “The Ivies aren’t all that,” people must still must believe they are. Why attack with such emotion what is a ridiculous and silly belief? If someone told you the sky is green, would you keep arguing with him?</p>
<p>A better analogy would be a stationary horse. EVery so often, some newcomer drags this immobile horse out into the square, where crowds attempt to move it in one direction or another, depending on their point of view. Of course, the crowds are almost always made up of the same folks who have been flogging the same horse for many years. Typically the horse is lashed for several hundred posts without moving an inch. Apparently nobody realizes that the horse is staying put.</p>
<p>People would apparently prefer to ride this horse over either a Civic or a Range Rover.</p>
Maybe for the same reason people continue to believe that all recruited athletes at these schools are just dumb jiocks who wouldn’t be there otherwise.</p>
<p>People believe a lot of silly things. Whether or not these schools are objectively better, the accepted mythology of the general populace does not seem a very good argument one way or the other to me… Typically it is unresearched, and overly absolute.</p>