MIT or Stanford may bring a brand name with them to be called for interview but at the end of the day it’s an individual who need to work on their credentials. With the way CS is going now, too many fields are branching out and too many specializations compared to the times I studied. Let her pick the best fit for her where she’ll thrive and excel. College admissions have become a frustrating experience for many such high achieving high schoolers. But if she’ll be able to excel at her college and earn a respectable career or become of those goldwater scholars, nobody can stop her progress. A very hearty wishes to her Christine!!
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I suspect this happens with a lot of kids. We well-meaning parents lovingly tell our kids - truthfully- that the can do anything they put their mind to, but there are consequences when the inevitable disappointments come their way. It is so hard to see these precious kids hurt.
But on the bright side, you have raised a capable, resilient child - woops I should say young adult- who really can do anything she puts her mind to. Nothing about that has changed. She just will have an added sprinkling of wisdom from this experience.
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Yes, we have driven around the area.
Your son and my daughter sound very similar in stats, including the “small business during Covid”. She has three of those schools are your list, and had similar outcomes.
I fall in love with all the schools on my daughter’s behalf, so I do hate to see them go 
It’s funny, with all three of my daughters, they ended up at the school that felt right very early on but two out of three agonized until the very end (like last week of April end!)
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I think your point is particularly true in the US but I also understand your D’s perception. If she stays with CS, she already has really good options. If she chooses another field where school prestige/name brand matters more, there’s graduate school. As I mentioned in a parents thread a while back about careers and school prestige, I went to a very mediocre state flagship but fortunately got admitted to a brand name graduate school that opened doors for me and those opportunities (particularly the stint at an MBB) created further opportunities (of course, luck has also played a role).
Reflecting further, I think when we were growing up, it was perhaps more true that if you worked hard, you could do/become whatever you wanted (including getting into highly prestigious colleges) because there were more “slackers” in those days (I was one of them!). There was also a belief (probably more prevalent in Asian families) that if you didn’t get into a “good” school, it was because you didn’t work hard enough.
But it seems to me that a higher proportion of young people today work quite hard (some to exhaustion) and, because class sizes at highly prestigious schools have remained largely static, some/many of them will not experience the “success” they were told awaited them at the end of high school. So, maybe our messaging to our kids (particularly implying that work hard = prestigious college admission) also needs to shift in light of current realities.
Given your D’s work ethic and accomplishments, I think she has an extremely promising future. My very best wishes to her!
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I wonder where kids initially get the idea that the only way to achieve success is if they go an Ivy?
Many of us have used the adage, “You can be anything you want if you work hard enough” but I’m doubting that many are following that up with “to get into an Ivy”.
Do they get the idea from the schools they go to? Their classmates? TikTok? Parents?
My kids went to a highly rated high school with very high stat students and there’s no “race to the Ivy’s” there. Lots of kids get into great T20’s & T50’s, service academies and maybe one or two go to an Ivy each year. Maybe it’s the area of the country that I live in?
Being stung by rejections is expected but I hate hearing about kids that don’t think they worked hard enough to get into an Ivy and therefore question their ability to be successful in life. I guess the messaging about working hard to get something you want has to be edited to include the harsh reality that many people work hard for things that they don’t end up getting, and life goes on.
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I think it is also a message that should be tempered as kids age. By high school, most should realize that regardless of how hard they work, they will not be Olympic or professional athletes, or symphony members. We seem to acknowledge musical and athletic limitations far earlier than academic ones. Nothing wrong with acknowledging that a student’s strengths are not in math ( or whatever) and thus some fields may elude them regardless of effort. They can still manage full satisfying lives by playing to their strengths and recognizing the talents they do have. Not everything is possible for everyone, regardless of how hard one works.
Luck also plays a huge role.
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I think this is the article you were looking for…
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I don’t think it’s about ending up in the same place. Many kids want to attend an elite college for the experience. That can’t be given or taken away. They’ll end up doing fine. But it has nothing to do with their eventual job.
I’ve often seen people on CC talking about how they went to state U and are managing MIT grads. But the MIT grad might have gotten exposure to some things which are unavailable to state grad.
Not everyone is at college solely for their job outcomes. It matters. A lot. But the experience of the college and the learning is what many want to experience.
The prestige definitely gets in the way. Kids that are 17-18 also want to impress their friends. This can be toxic if they don’t get the result they expected. They’ll do fine. But it stings in the short term.
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My whole family will definitely have it for 2 collegs, both are California based greatest colleges of the times in science and technology.
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I don’t agree with the Grown&Flown college meme.
I think when I was in high school in the 80s pretty much everyone I knew applied to a state school. We did have a few kids from my high school go to Ivies but I don’t remember anyone from my year, although some went there for grad school. I am in NC and most kids went to UNC or NC State or ECU or a HBCU. What has changed is now kids are trying to get into Ivies and the like and think because they have a 4.0 they should be able to. We did not have that expectation in the 80s.
And you certainly don’t need to do all that “going to college now” stuff if you are applying to state schools like we did. I mean you might want to do the FAFSA, but my B+ kid did 3 AP classes, did not take the SAT or a SAT prep course, did some volunteering at an animal shelter because she wanted to, took the ACT because every high school junior in NC public schools is required to, did do the FAFSA mainly for scholarship eligibility, didn’t play a sport, does have a part time job because she wants money (nothing to do with college apps), applied to 5 schools and got in them all.
I think kids need to not buy into the Ivy+ hype. Friends I went to high school with are among the most accomplished in their fields and they went to state schools.
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Where I grew up, we all thought that the 4.0 kid would end up at an Ivy (or MIT/Caltech) because it was so rare back then - in my four years of high school, there was at most one 4.0 student in each class.
What I discovered when I started gearing up for my D22’s college applications was that 4.0 and 1600 have been diluted and are now much more common, such that achieving such feats no longer guarantees college admission success.
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I don’t agree with the grown and flown meme either but for opposite reasons. The top 10% of my public HS class had all kinds of Ivy and peer school admits, but everyone was very active in ECs, even 30 years ago.
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Man, not my public school. Valedictorian went to Case Western. Salutatorian went to Virginia Tech. #3 in class went to Duke. #4 in class went to Rice. Good schools all, to be clear.
I was Early Decision to UVA, and I had all B’s my freshman year (except for PE, bless you PE class…). Hard to imagine that happening today.
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Yes, grade inflation is real. GPA 4.0 is way more common nowadays than, perhaps 20-30 years ago, especially when A+/A/A- are all lumped together. SAT 1600 is still a rare feat - only 300-500 a year out of millions achieve that (more so than ACT 36). I have also noticed that, # of AP tests taken by student has grown dramatically in the last 2 years, so have the # of applications per student (despite slightly declining high school population). The main problem today is that academic excellence is counted less and less in college admissions, more and more weight is given to other special interests (URM/athletic/legacy/donor/race/ etc…) and “holistic” factors. Test-optional or test-blind further diluted the academic standard. As a result, the system becomes less and less predictable and seemingly random to many people, contributing to kids submitting more and more applications in the hope of beating the odds/lottery, and a precipitous decline of acceptance rate - a vicious cycle, in my view.
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So he has now declined offers from all the other schools.
Of course there is one school where the AO spent so much time with S22 and if the stars would have aligned better, he really would have succeeded there.
The AO wrote a lovely reply email, not only wishing him academic success, but a thank you for allowing her to get to know him. It was so well worded and simply nice.
Sniff sniff.
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The experience part is what gets lost when posters say “you can always go to xyz school for grad school.” There are special undergrad traditions at my D’s school that students who attend for graduate school will never get to experience. My D chose her college, in part, because she wanted to be part of those traditions, to have those memories as part of her undergrad experience.
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I think that most 4-year residential campuses have a lot of traditions and similarities with respect to their lived experiences. The traditions might be different, but the esprit de corps among the student body can often be the same (barring highly competitive/cutthroat environments…but most students say that’s not the type of environment they want even if they want a highly selective/rejective school). But the camaraderie, and new experiences, and everything else that most people consider part of the “traditional” college experience are the same.
Now, going to a 4-year college and commuting from home? Not the same. A person may still get a terrific academic education, but the spirit and skills of living away from home, etc, are not the same.
I attended a big midwestern flagship for grad school. I attended a top grad school. Yes, the experience of grad school is different than one’s undergrad experience. But I will also say that I think I had a lot more enjoyment at my particular 4-year institution than I would have as an undergrad at the institution where I went to grad school. That’s when it gets into fit issues. But if a school is the right fit, it does not need to be exclusive to provide a terrific, multi-layered experience.
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That’s exactly true. By the time you get to grad school, most students are very focused. Some are even just there because they want the degree to get more $$ or a specific credential.
As undergrads, there are many kids who are in the exploratory phase. And this is an important phase and experience level.
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I don’t believe that a holistic approach to admission has led to a watering down of the academic excellence of admitted students. There’s no evidence of that in the Common Data Sets I’ve looked at. Take Stanford, example, which I happen to have open on my laptop. We can see that the most important factors taken into consideration during the admissions process are academic concerns (rigor of high school, gpa, test scores, essay, etc.), talent, and ECs, which help provide a fuller picture of a candidate’s character, abilities, and interests and what that candidate will bring to the campus. Two columns over, past “important” all the way to merely “considered,” you find legacy, race, ethnicity.
Have you seen evidence that academic excellence has been demoted in college admissions? Anecdotally on CC, I feel like we see the reality that there are simply more qualified applicants than seats at the tippy top schools.
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