@postmodern - first of all, I believe it’s probably true - if they wrote practical midwesterners are better drivers than crazy east coaster drivers, I’d agree as well. And even if I didn’t agree, it’s hardly a huge insult worth making a big deal about. I’ve read about people who have visited the campuses my kids love and are/will attend and they hate them - call them ugly, or other negative things. I let it roll off my back and you should too. Too many bigger issues to get up in arms about IMO.
I don’t think Midwesterners are unconcerned about rankings. I think there are more prestigious colleges on the coasts than in the midwest. Midwesterners are concerned with prestige but not necessarily about the same prestigious schools as kids on the coasts. They also might be concerned with rankings without being obsessed with them.
I checked two top 50 schools that I am familiar with. Case Western enrolls about half of it its undergrads from midwestern states. Northwestern enrolls about 40% from midwestern states. That is enrollment, not applicants. Clearly there are plenty of kids in the midwest who apply to prestigious schools. It just isn’t the same group of schools as kids on the coast. My son attended Case Western.
I do think that midwesterners are more practical on the whole than people on the coast (I’m an east coast girl).
@myjanda , thanks for your very personal and specific suggestion as to how I should react to things I find wrong and insulting. I’ll keep in it mind.
I contend that your driver analogy, while certainly less offensive than implying they are better parents, is an equally unfounded, un-provable, and stupid statement. (I know you used it as an example, I am not calling you stupid).
Most of these newly selective college have increased their retention and graduation rates significantly. It is unethical for a college, especially a private college, to admit students with a very low probability of graduating.
Late bloomers can bloom in community college and transfer to a 4 year school.
My take on midwesterners is they just aren’t necessarily into east coast schools that east coast people think are the absolute best. They look at HYPM, and more so the elite LACs (Williams, Amherst,Swarthmore) and think, “eh, why?” whereupon, East coast people may take offense to this, waving their arms and saying “You don’t know??!” My husband looks at people living in the major metropolitan areas of the NE and says “They are all wound up a bit too tight”. Having lived in the southeast, and after meeting people in the midwest where my daughter attends college, I get what he means.
(born and raised in Philly)
Upon what are you basing this generalization? Who are these “offended” east coasters?
Remember my issue was not a discussion of differences between east coasters and mid-westerners, but rather the CLEAR implication that mid-westerners are better parents with more practical and admirable approaches to college selection for their kids.
I’ve lived all over the place. What do you call a Texan who moves half a mile so his kids can play football for a more elite public HS team? What do you call a midwesterner (a middle aged woman no less) who engages in a lobbying effort with women she hasn’t seen in over 20 years to get her daughter into the “right” sorority? People love to hear the stories about the family in Minnesota who is home schooling their kid so he can spend 8 hours a day on the ice rink in the backyard in order to qualify for an Olympic spot. Or the family in Florida where mom lives with the tennis champ who needs an uber-coach while dad lives in Pennsylvania (where apparently they’ve never heard of tennis) with the other kids.
There is elitism everywhere. Someone else’s form of elitism always seems bizarre. But this is America and we love football and hockey and tennis so we hear about the lifestyles of the elite athletes and we admire their tenacity.
But frankly, it’s no different from a parent in Boston who wants their kid to go to Harvard, or a parent in Atherton who wants their kid to go to Stanford.
I have seen people in the South and Midwest jump through the MOST extreme hoops you can imagine for the sake of their kids social life (the fraternity/sorority insanity) or for the sake of the kids athletic life, and the entire family jockeys and angles to be admitted to the “right” country club.
I don’t get it because I was raised in a town populated by teachers and librarians and the like in the Northeast which was filled with first Gen Americans like me. I never met anyone who belonged to a “club” until I went to college, and didn’t meet anyone who had joined a sorority until my first job, and didn’t meet an elite childhood athlete until much later in life.
But now that I’ve learned about ski academies (boarding schools with snow?) and the elite tennis circuit (who would do that to a child?) and 18 year old women who think they need to get a bikini wax before they leave for college-- why is one form of elitism any more ridiculous than any other?
@postmodern You are choosing to be offended by reading more into others’ posts.
@mom2and When I couldn’t find a post to meet my needs, I started my own . If you post, they will come. That’s what CC does.
@TomSrOfBoston , I am not “choosing” to be offended, (and in fact I don’t even know what that means).
I’ll clear it up again. I find this statement offensive:
“practical Midwesterners are not as taken with rankings as the ranking obsessed coasts”
“practical” is clearly a positive trait, and implies coasters are “impractical”
“rankings-obsessed” is clearly a pejorative and implies coasters are more concerned with family prestige that what is best for their kid.
Tell me how that is not insulting, please.
Seconded. I grew up in NYC and also moved here as an adult. I’ve never seen such devotion to a state school as exists here, for top students and also those who can only wish they could be Buckeyes. The very top kids celebrate getting into the honors/scholars program there, or the very selective majors.
I can’t recall any of my top classmates wanting SUNYs. We all went to selective colleges, mostly in the NE.
@Postmodern You are right in that personal perception determines whether one is offended or not. Maybe a better observation by @TomSrOfBoston would be some people are offended easier than others. Just an observation , not a criticism.
Having lived 20+ years on east coast and now in the midwest, I don’t see it as pejorative to describe the coasts as more rankings-obsessed. An upper middle class family in a major metro suburb/bedroom community, with kids at a high-achieving public high school generally will care about the real and perceived difference between Conn Coll/ Dickinson/Franklin & Marshall and Williams/Amherst/Bowdoin or even Haverford/Midd/Hamilton. The long history of private colleges back east, with a lack of renowned public flagships, is a factor in this. Many upper middle class families out here in the midwest, coming from high achieving public schools, wouldn’t think it rational, for instance, to pay OOS tuition to go to Michigan instead of stay instate at Purdue or Wisconsin. Or to pay full price at Northwestern when they are instate at Wisconsin. There is a different cultural personality – not suggesting everyone is that way, but there are commonalities generally found in the different regions.
Pace of life – work, school, traffic, pre-school admissions, are all generally more intense back east than out here. We had a taste of it before relocating, with the crazed pre-school application process, when we feared our kid would get locked out of the best program which would feed into the best k-12 program. Its the world we were in then, it made sense and we felt it was necessary for our kid to “compete” in that way. Out here, the “okay but not extraordinary” preschool program works just fine for most people, and people out here think you are kind of crazy if you spend money for “private” preschool. No one is suggesting that parents love their kids more or less in any part of the country because of those decisions, simply that there are different norms and expectations.
No, the Midwestern schools that are perceived (and often ranked) as “very good” or “good” are often (much, much) bigger, public, more affordable for their state’s residents, and actually accept a wider variety of students.
The exception to the latter criterion might be UMich, but that’s an educated guess.
Because more students are accepted at these, there is just less angst about the process.
However, these public flagships ARE considered more prestigious by Midwesterners than other schools - the smaller, regional state schools (and it’s true the flagships are more selective), as well as more prestigious than the small LACs like Beloit, Earlham, Knox, Augustana… Oddly enough, many of the LACs are probably more selective than the flagships, but prestige is often a perception.
eta: And Macalester? Carleton? Oberlin? Kenyon? Grinnell? Believe it or not, many, many people in the Midwest, some who live close to them, have never even heard of these schools.
So, they’ve certainly never heard of the top LACs in the East, either.
I agree that the “tippy-top” kids in the NW suburbs of Chicago, anyway, don’t seem to be interested in Ivies or east coast LACs much… they seem to flock to Northwestern, Chicago, Notre Dame, Case Western, WashU STL… I’m sure there are plenty of Midwest students who apply to, and attend top schools in the East - but no one hardly talks about it.
Part of it may be sports-related, too. This is Big 10 country, and the fandom is huge.
I don’t think the frenzy to get your kid into preschool in the northeast is any more intense than the fervor with which mom’s (the dad’s are usually less invested) debated different sororities at Indiana. As an outsider I could view it with sociological detachment- but it was a frenzy, and it was intense.
I saw people of modest means spend a fortune on a wardrobe for a college kid- because apparently you can’t go through Rush and repeat an outfit on some campuses. I saw women who got their own hair done at Supercuts three times a year (with a coupon no less) take their daughters for professionally done highlights AND lowlights at pricey salons before a sorority function.
Sorry. That’s frenzy. The mom’s would explain to me how competitive it was and my eyes would glaze over.
Give me competitive nursery school applications any day.
The sorority (and fraternity, too) situation at Indiana is completely over the top. I witnessed some of it while I was there a couple of decades ago. It sounds like it’s gotten worse, and likely never going away or changing. Yes, some of those young women and their mothers are RABID. Crazy stuff, and it’s all a whole other thread…
The whole thing tainted my view of sororities and Greek life, unfortunately.
Otoh, all of the Midwest flagships, including Indiana, are big enough that one doesn’t need the fraternities and sororities for either a social life or networking for jobs - it very likely helps, but it’s not needed, imo.
“practical Midwesterners are not as taken with rankings as the ranking obsessed coasts”
Practical doesn’t mean others are impractical. It might mean the Coasters are driven, unwilling to settle for the Big State U. Some people LIKE to be thought of as elite, better than others, not settling for anything but the best. Look at how many posts on CC are “I’m not going to Rutgers or UMass or (gasp) a SUNY.” Do you ever see posts of “I’d never go to Michigan or Wisconsin - I’d rather die!”? Ever see complaints about the size or the sports or the fraternities? Midwesterners may want a smaller school or no Greeks, but they don’t deny that the state U’s are practical and the right choice for the majority of their peers.
Kids in Wisconsin have UW as their first choice and don’t care that they might get into a school ranked #5 if they applied because they don’t care that it is ranked #5. From my sister’s class (about 500), she went to Middlebury (but left after a year and went to Madison because it was more affordable, more practical, and she’ll tell you she liked it a lot more), one boy to MIT and another to Harvard. People had heard of Harvard, but were not impressed with Midd or MIT because they hadn’t heard of the schools. Most who did look OOS had moved to the midwest from the east coast so ‘knew’ the schools. You didn’t see kids applying to Texas or Florida. People might look at them like they are hicks, dweebs, hayseeds from the midwest. You know what? They don’t care. Don’t care about the rankings, don’t care about the prestige.
I don’t think anyone but you said the parenting was better. We just weren’t raised thinking a higher ranked school was a better school (and were very unaware of rankings anyway). Wisconsin was ‘better’ than Michigan and Yale and Williams (who’d ever heard of that one?) because it was ‘our’ school. The fact that it was more affordable and closer to home made it also practical. Was it practical to pay $1000 to go to Wisconsin rather than $10k to go to Amherst? Yes, it was.
Does anyone have any more specific examples of mid tier schools that they were surprised to find were more selective or difficult to be accepted to than they had originally thought? This thread has completely derailed.
You don’t need the frats and sororities, but that doesn’t mean that a subset of the population isn’t crazy competitive about which one and why. That’s my point. People spend money they don’t have to position their kid in the just the right way to-- what exactly? Go to parties for 4 years so you can spend MORE money in order for them to look the right way?
And that’s not competitive?
@carolineamom2boys Not really mid-tier, but Pitzer acceptance rate has plummeted in the 6 years we’ve been involved in college admissions.