<p>DD's school has published the report regarding each and every graduates. Out of about 180 kids, I think I saw two going for employment and about 5 with decision pending. The rest are going to all different colleges/schools. Two numbers surprised me. </p>
<p>One is that there are over 90 different schools students will be going to. Some of them I have never heard of before. It is so true that there is a school for any student who wants to go to college.</p>
<p>The other is the # of students going to Flag State U. This HS is one of the best in the state. However, only 9 students are going to State U. It could be read as that State U is becoming very difficult to get in. </p>
<p>I thouht "everyone else is going to State U" and apparently that is not correct. In this state at least, it appears that only above average students could go to State U.</p>
<p>There are many very selective state Us offering world-class education at half the price of private schools no one has ever heard of. Most educated people know this, except at CC which is dominated by Ivy-obsessed parents and kids.</p>
<p>You should have figured that out by now from this forum. Many of the state flagship universities are fairly selective, especially for certain programs and very much so for the honors programs at Penn State and UTexas. You don’t automatically get into your top state university! The state universities can provide an excellent education and even have some advantages over smaller schools with higher SAT averages. It really depends on the student and the area of study. I personally believe it is a waste of money to go somewhere besides a state university to study engineering (with a couple of exceptions). Also, DadII, there can be strong economic reasons for choosing a state university.</p>
<p>MoWC, if state U offers excellent programs and it costs less, you will image more students would go there. But out of ~180, I saw only 9 going. For comparsion, about 60 students are going to the other two public schools which are a couple of spots lower on ranking comparing to State U. That leads me to believe that State U is getting harder and harder to get in.</p>
<p>That’s the old SAT and the gpa is out of 4.0 for enrolled students. Some of the rejected students are opting to attend WWU and WSU which are considered less prestigious among our publics, but offer great education.</p>
<p>You may be right about StateU being tougher to get into. Then again, it may just be that this year, the programs the kids wanted were at the other two public schools, or that they got into honors programs there, or that the money was better, or whatever. In Maryland, there are big differences in in-state tuition between U of MD at College Park and some of the other public universities. Not to mention that room and board costs are cheaper at the other public universities than they are at the flagship.</p>
<p>It depends on the particular state universities. UCLA, UCSD, UCB are all pretty difficult to get into now. The average GPA of an incoming freshman is > 4.0 at these colleges and it’s surprising how many with pretty high stats get rejected from these state Us.</p>
<p>Not all ‘state Us’ should be grouped together from the perspective of selectivity and academic recognition just like all ‘private Us’ shouldn’t be lumped together.</p>
<p>While Ohio State has a lot of assets, there are many reasons why some in-state students would choose not to go there. In my case, there would be 37,088 reasons (and that’s only the undergrad size!). Ohio offers a wealth of other options, including smaller publics and publics that feel like privates.</p>
<p>my bad. I guess not everyone has been following my stories. It is Ohio State. </p>
<p>I had heard parents of upper% students said that their kids didn’t want to attend OSU because everyone else is going there. Apparently that is not true this year.</p>
<p>I always thought that UMass Amherst was easy to get into until I heard a conversation between two of my friends (who are probably in the 50th of 60th percentile of my class) who were both worrying about getting in. Only about 12 kids are going there from my class of 300-ish (though, admittedly, we also have 2 people going to Ivies, and 13 people going to Northeastern).</p>
<p>Honestly, even if all 180 kids went to a school w/30-40 K undergrads, you wouldn’t see very much of any of them. My HS had about 20 go to a comparably big school and I literally never saw those people except on a handful of occasions, over 4 years. But that’s the word around here - ‘I don’t want to go to MyHighSchool South’. It’s silly.</p>
<p>I do think that people who have the means to afford private schools (or the scholarships, or the loans) tend to go to those rather than Flagship, for reasons I’m still puzzling out. </p>
<p>Perhaps what DadII is seeing is that the majority of the students at his kid’s school who would have qualified for Flagship opted to go elsewhere, and the remainder, many of whom couldn’t get into Flagship, went to other state schools? Meaning that the student body at Flagship is, relatively speaking, more heavily represented by kids from schools that are not among the best in the state?</p>
<p>UC’s are a great example. Both my friend and I got rejected from UCLA and UCB, I had 4.2 and 1950, national awards, he was NMS, 2380 SAT, top 5 in class, two A’s at harvard summer school…</p>
<p>There are kids getting into NYU and BC from my school, who did not get into UCSB.</p>
<p>On the contrary, OSU has been on a nice uptick academically for at least the last 10 years, surpassing Miami as the eminent state U now. The Scholars and Honors programs are strong, OSU is enticing NMF like students with good FA and the athletic programs having been in several national championship finals in several sports recently, with more in sight, make OSU a very attractive option academically, athletically and financially for high achieving students in Ohio. OSU isn’t the “safety” that it used to be. Holbrook, the OSU community and now Gee have made strides to make OSU more than just a perennial athletic powerhouse.</p>