<p>Calmom… THanks for the info, but my S will happily got to the school he has been admitted to… he has already received a scholarship there for full COA, if all else fails… so we are good there. He has quite a few schools that offer merit aid and where is above their 75%. As far as the rest of his schools, we will just wait and see… it will be good to be able to compare packages… my S is as pragamtic as they come… so he will go where the $ is.</p>
<p>Calmom:
</p>
<p>This is total nonsense. If that’s the case, they would be taking everyone from my kid’s private school.</p>
<p>Why? They don’t need to. They just need enough full-pay ones (plus the developmental admits) - it doesn’t matter particularly (utilizing this rubric) where they get the individuals. What matters after that is making sure the feeder schools are taken care of (so they can go back to the same well again and again), making sure they’ve got the hockey goalie and the bassoonist, and enough “diversity” to enhance the college experience. Oh, and after that, turning down enough topflight candidates to increase prestige value.</p>
<p>You think your kids’ private school is the only place they can find affluence?</p>
<p>Whats TMS? I am guessing we are not talking about transcranial magnetic stimulation…</p>
<p>mini - are you following this or do you just pop in whenever you are in a bad mood. You could leave your snide remarks for someone else.</p>
<p>jym:
TMS is a very prestigious/rigorous program, which costs 22K a semester. 5boys said most kids from TMs end up going to Ivies. Calmom said it is not because it is academically rigorous, it is because those kids are wealthy and could afford to pay. That’s why I said it is nonsensen. If money is the only criteria, then the Ivies could just admit all private school students.</p>
<p>A School? A curriculum? What does the acronym stand for? Talent Management system?</p>
<p>TMS is [“The</a> Mountain School”](<a href=“http://www.mountainschool.org/]"The”>http://www.mountainschool.org/), which is a private school in Vermont affiliated with Milton Academy. They take high school juniors for a semester & the kids attend school and also work on an organic farm. As noted, current tuition is over $22K per semester. The kids tend to come from private prep schools or public high schools located in affluent areas, see: [Mountain</a> School of Milton ~ Sending Schools](<a href=“http://www.mountainschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=104877]Mountain”>http://www.mountainschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=104877)</p>
<p>“mini - are you following this or do you just pop in whenever you are in a bad mood. You could leave your snide remarks for someone else.”</p>
<p>But it was a serious question. Really. Why would you think they have to take everyone from your kid’s private school just because they are affluent? Wouldn’t that deflate the perceived value of an Ivy admit? Who suggested that money is the only criteria? I thought Calmom was very clear that they only need to fill up HALF the class with affluent students.</p>
<p>5boys’ son must be very outstanding to have received a full scholarship.</p>
<p>No, Calmom said the reason most TMS students end up at Ivies is their ability to pay. Are we reading the samething? We are not talking about Ivies admission policy, we are talking about quality of students at TMS.</p>
<p>To quote: (Post #98)</p>
<p>“So the college that are need-blind and promise to meet full need of all their students need a way to structure their admissions to guarantee that every year, roughly half of their incoming students will come from affluent families who can afford to pay full cost.”</p>
<p>In the previous paragraph, she indicated that TMS attendance is a a code (to Ivy’s) that indicates affluence:</p>
<p>“The reason most TMS kids go on to Ivy’s is NOT because the colleges are in awe of the academics, but because a semester at TMS is a code that signals affluence .”</p>
<p>For the record, I know nothing about TMS. I do know that Calmom’s first statement (with little bits of variation) is accurate.</p>
<p>
Actually I didn’t say that. My point was more complex. (Mini’s got it right)</p>
<p>I did say that the Ivies need to have roughly half of their students be full pay, and they need the remainder of their students, on average, to be able to pay about $20,000 annually. As their admission policy is “need blind”, they can’t consider finances on an individual level. So they rely on admission practices that favor factors associated with affluence, aiming for a target population that keep the numbers steady. </p>
<p>Take Yale, for example. Cost of attendance is $58K. Out of 1,305 students who enrolled this year, 40% were full pay. For those who qualified for financial aid, the average grant was $38K, leaving a $20K balance per student. Since we can reasonably assume that some Yale admits were poor enough to qualify for much more grant money, we can assume that some students got much more aid (grants in excess of $50K) and some got much less. </p>
<p>So lets just say we are looking at the population of students whose parents can afford to pay $45K or more for their child’s education. How do you have a need-blind admission policy that guarantees that half of the students admitted come from that group… and not the 94% of the US population with household incomes of under $150K annually? </p>
<p>If the admissions policies of those colleges were not slanted to the wealthy, then you would see a much higher proportion of public school students admitted – after all, as noted elsewhere on this this thread, there are about 24,000 public high schools in the US, and they all have valedictorians graduating each year, some even have multiple valedictorians. If there are 24,000 public schools and 6,000 private schools*, then 80% of all students admitted to Ivy League colleges should come from public schools. But that’s not the case – [url=<a href=“http://www.electricprint.com/edu4/classes/readings/edu-eliteschools.htm]94”>http://www.electricprint.com/edu4/classes/readings/edu-eliteschools.htm]94</a> of the top 100 feeder schools to Ivies are private.<a href=“*%20I%20don’t%20know%20the%20actual%20numbers,%20I%20just%20seem%20to%20remember%20those%20as%20being%20the%20ones%20thrown%20about.%20%20I%20do%20know%20that%20there%20are%20a%20disproportionate%20number%20of%20students%20at%20Ivy%20League%20colleges%20who%20come%20from%20prestigious%20private%20high%20schools”>/url</a></p>
<p>mini-
I wasn’t debating any other statement, but the one I quoted. I am sure Calmom doesn’t know much about TMS either, but I think 5boys would know it a lot better than most of us.</p>
<p>calmom - you are not saying anything we don’t already know. College is a business, they need enough students who could afford to pay in order to offer FA to other students. But it is incorret to say the reason many TMS students end up going to top tier schools is their ability to pay. If that’s the case, then a lot more students from my kid’s high school would be going to top tier schools.</p>
<p>Ahhh- thanks</p>
<p>5boys said she agreed with me 100% in post #99 – so whatever she knows about TMS doesn’t contradict my view.</p>
<p>
Maybe TMS is more selective in the students it accepts. Is your kid’s high school a peer to TMS or Milton? (Not trying to insult your high school… just saying that without knowing more, you are just comparing apples to oranges)</p>
<p>Maybe TMS is more selective than my kid’s school, mabye that’s why most TMS students end up at Ivies, NOT because their ability to pay, as stated by you earlier.</p>
<p>I also think that 5boys might be mistake about the number of TMS students who end up at Ivies – from the TMS web site:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Last I checked, Middlebury, Colorado College, Oberlin, and Wesleyen weren’t yet part of the Ivy League. All excellent colleges… but that’s not the same as, “most TMS kids go on to Ivy’s” (from post #96). </p>
<p>I think a more accurate picture is that 100% of the students at TMS have high aspirations for college, and probably at least 70% come from affluent families who have elite private colleges on their radars. So the reason that the kids are going to elite colleges is not because they attended TMS; rather, the reason they were at TMS in the first place is that they are the type of students who end up at elite colleges.</p>
<p>
Again, I never said that.</p>
<p>The context of my comment is that 5boys’ son, who is a young man in need of a lot of financial aid, has been “inexplicably” deferred from a set of colleges where he applied ED or EA, and it appear that some or all of these colleges follow need-aware admission practices. Therefore, 5boys cannot extrapolate the experience of of other TMS student to her son.</p>