<p>Sue, Or perhaps segment according FinAid grantee (ie pell, loans, institutional grant).</p>
<p>Mini - And I know someone who went to Harvard Business School, led a reasonably successful (in financial terms) upper middle class life, and was found to have had molested his adopted daughter. All this proves nothing, and thatâs not Harvardâs fault.</p>
<p>I have to agree with Pizzagirl here.
There are plenty of smart and hyper smart students who have gone to non elite colleges. My DS was one of them. His close friend was another. They are now both at âeliteâ GSâs- Caltech and Princeton.</p>
<p>Mini, are you suggesting that addiction or being a victim of violence is somehow correlated with attending an elite LAC?</p>
<p>Youâre the data guy. So please tell us exactly which point you are trying to make here.</p>
<p>Momneeds2no, the confounding factor that youâre ignoring is that the truly wealthier families donât <em>have</em> to have their kids pursue high-paying jobs. Itâs the wealthy who can most afford to have a kid major in art history and work for pennies at the art gallery, or classics and hole up in a garret writing poetry. Your metric of money would suggest that people who do these things âarenât successful.â </p>
<p>Conversely, the truly wealthy are often those who have family businesses or have connections where the kid <em>can</em> make a lot of money irrespective of the school he or she attends. One of the wealthiest families I know (huge family business) had 3 kids, two who went to GWU and one to Tulane. They all went into the family business and did / do very well. That isnât a reflection on GWU or Tulane. Their earnings would be the same if these kids had gone to Ivies or state flagships.</p>
<p>Accruing ANY of this to oneâs undergraduate education (as opposed to anything which comes with that education) is folly. As I said, I gained mostly from the opportunity to spend time around very rich people. Had nothing to do with the classroom, but was vitally important to my future life. Connections with family, other peopleâs families, and alumni plays a major role in dictating futures. </p>
<p>Every one of these schools has a âbottom quarterâ. The top quarter would probably have done fine wherever they went. The âmiracleâ of elite schools are the extraordinary things that happen to those who finish in the bottom of the class. It has almost nothing to do with the classroom education - and often (or usually) very little to do with intelligence.</p>
<p>Menlopsrk, thatâs so obvious itâs crazy it needs to be said. I donât know why âI value and am willing to pay for elite schoolsâ gets misheard as âthere are no smart kids at non elite schools.â</p>
<p>post 294 by Pizza âI think there is great value in being surrounded by a high density of very smart people, which is easier to find at top tier colleges than at âlesserâ schools.â</p>
<p>Should we not infer that Lesser schools have less âsmartâ people?</p>
<p>^^lets see now- the college/ University with the MOST National Merit Scholars is⊠USC. NOT HYPSMâŠ
nuff said.</p>
<p>I agree that success is measured by fatcors other than $$. What obective data points, other than $$, are indicitive of career success?</p>
<p>
No ⊠how about inferring what was written ⊠the <em>density</em> of very smart people is likely to be higher at a very selective school. Heck Ohio State probably has as many very smart people as all of the IVY league combined ⊠but the proportion of very smart people is not as high. (I didnât actually do the math but you get the point ⊠and by âsmartâ I mean academically smart as measured by GPAs, SATs, etc)</p>
<p>
I think it gets dicey here. You could look, in some areas, at how many people got tenureâbut even then, somebody who has tenure at Harvard may consider himself more successful than somebody with tenure at the University of Texas, whichever one earns more money. And whoâs more successful, a partner at a top New York City law firm, or a federal district judge?
Of course, at the threshold you can look at admissions into selective graduate and professional programs.</p>
<p>And itâs worth asking whether objective measures are the bestâperhaps subjective measures of satisfaction might be better.</p>
<p>So youâre measuring âsmartâ with SAT/GPA?<br>
By the way, I may not be the smartest girl in the room, but I do understand that density infers percentage/proportion. (Less meaning lesser percentage. get it? ) </p>
<p>8 pages ago, I asked a reasonable question. Apparently thatâs a stupid thing to do here on CCâŠ</p>
<p>Peace out!</p>
<p>I said exactly what I meant. The âdensityâ of really smart students is thicker at more elite / selective schools. Itâs possible to hold that belief and also hold the belief that there are plenty of smart students at non-elite schools. The world wonât explode by holding those two ideas simultaneously. </p>
<p>Thatâs why public universities have honors colleges (with honors dorms, etc.) - they are creating subgroups of that higher density to address the very fact that there are students who prefer that higher-density environment and would otherwise not choose that public university. Personally, I prefer a smaller, uniformly high-density over a high-density subgroup embedded in a lower-density pond. But thatâs my personal preference, and others can feel and choose differently.</p>
<p>The âdensityâ argument always confounds me. How much âdensityâ of any one attribute is necessary for happiness and success, in college or elsewhere? People tend to self-select according to the parameters they find important. It happens in huge public high schools with an even greater range of abilities than a state flagship or (the horror) âdirectional.â I just donât buy that smart kids with similar interests wonât find each other just because the DENSITY of them is not as high at one school versus another.</p>
<p>(x-posted with PG)</p>
<p>I think that gets down to personality. Iâm an introvert, though Iâm not shy. </p>
<p>I <em>absolutely</em> found it 100 times easier to find my tribe in a place where the âdensityâ was thick versus high school where the density was thin. I cannot describe how different and life-changing it was to be in a place where pretty much everyone was smart and took studies seriously versus the typical high school where only a fraction of students were like that, and how much it made me able to come out of my shell.</p>
<p>I really donât think I could have done so easily at my state flagship.<br>
Maybe other people are better at this than I am, and maybe itâs a weakness or flaw in myself that I wouldnât have been able to, but nonetheless, for me, that is what it is. And consequently itâs something I value highly. FWIW my H had the same experience.</p>
<p>" I just donât buy that smart kids with similar interests wonât find each other just because the DENSITY of them is not as high at one school versus another." </p>
<p>Extroverted smart kids may be able to handle this beautifully, and many do - more power to them.
Introverted smart kids are going to have a much harder time. It may be a growth experience for some, but it may also be a deal-breaker / de-motivator for others. </p>
<p>My state flagship was Mizzou. I know both kinds - extroverted ones who went and found their tribes handily, and introverted ones for whom the experience was so painful they dropped out. Iâm fortunate I had other options.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>For some academically high-achiever students, they need to be with a large critical mass of others like themselves to feel sufficiently challenged academically and in finding many more kindred spirits. </p>
<p>One illustration of this was the experience of several older HS classmates who started out in local public colleges which back then were underfunded, commonly regarded as the last choice even for those near/at the bottom of the class, and at their academic nadir.* Whether their reason was financial and/or due to exceedingly low HS GPAs, they found the academic pacing to be agonizingly slow and efforts to try getting into more advanced classes stymied by institutional red tape/prioritization of remedial/marginal admitted students. After a year or two, they ended up transferring out to respectable/elite private collegesâŠincluding some Ivies with some generous FA/scholarship packages and working part-time to pay the rest. </p>
<p>This is especially the case for students where being an academic achiever causes one to be targeted for serious bullying from classmates/teachers/admins/parents and/or who went through K-12 school systems where LCD teaching is taken to such an extreme that high academic achievers are not only not challenged, but effectively neglected academically as thereâs a common erroneous idea among some in the education establishment that such students âCan teach themselvesâ. </p>
<p>For some undergrads Iâve met, this K-12 experience became so serious they dropped out for several years because there were no other local options. When I met them, they were enrolled in college under their respective collegesâ special program for high school dropouts with high potential to succeed academically as judged by their SAT/GPAs. And most did end up leapfrogging academically over classmates admitted as regular freshman once they were enrolled. </p>
<ul>
<li>Several years later, that very public college system ended up going through a major turnaround through greater funding, tightening of admission standards to 4-year colleges, adding a topflight honors program, and delegating all remedial instruction to the systemâs 2-year community colleges. Unfortunately, thereâs already some grousing from some extreme educational activists that such tightening of what were exceedingly low admission standards is âtoo elitistâ.</li>
</ul>
<p>
According to <a href=âhttp://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf[/url]â>http://www.nationalmerit.org/annual_report.pdf</a> , the two schools with the most National Merit Scholars at the time of the Report (2012) were Chicago and Harvard. The bigger surprise was Tuscaloosa at #4.</p>
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</p>
<p>I donât think this is necessarily an introvert/extrovert issue. I myself lean more extrovert and several of those older HS classmates who needed the higher critical mass of fellow high academic achievers have no problems hosting large social gatherings or interacting with many people from all walks of life professionally or socially.</p>
<p>However, they also wanted an educational environment where theyâll be challenged and where similarly academically inclined folks like themselves are the majority.</p>