FYI, the top graduates of the magnet high school in Austin are choosing to go private. Valedictorian is going to Yale and Salutatorian to Stanford. Three are going to MIT, 3 to Cornell, one to Harvard and one to Brown, Columbia. Others schools include NYU, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Fordham, Northeastern, Grinell, Mt. Holyoke, Tulane, Trinity, New School, etc. UT Austin, TAMU, and UT Dallas are well represented as well. Some students are going to state schools outside of Texas with CA and CO popular.
Isn’t that true for the top magnet high schools and prep schools in any large city? A smattering to Ivy and related private schools, some go to strong flagships. True whether you are in Austin or LA, DC or SF.
@CU123, differences within states usually equal or exceed intrastate differences. Oakland is not Orange County and Austin is not Lubbock, nor do Fairfax and Lynchburg have much in common other than a geographical boundary. There are 38 million people in Cali, about 28 million in Texas; both are larger than many countries, so claiming a common culture is sort of silly.
The concern in TX is that the admission policy and relatively few spots at the flagships encourages top students to leave Texas at a higher rate than they would otherwise.
But are they leaving at a higher rate than historically they used to leave? Texas experienced enormous growth since 2000, and most residents were not born here, so perhaps it is not surprising they venture further for college. The top prep schools always looked to the Ivies anyway; more kids from everywhere seem to now.
There has also been a concern raised in CA that top students are going out of state for college for the same reason mentioned by ultimom for Texas, and that many of those top kids will choose to remain in those other states to work after college. And some of those kids are getting into Ivies and other elite universities after being rejected from the CA public flagship universities.
The list of Class of 2019 Valedictorians and Salutatorians for our ISD has come out. This is a suburb of Houston, very diverse, not all parents are TX natives. At some of these schools, most parents have at least one college degree, many households have multiple college degrees. The schools in this district range from very competitive to very low performing. The top High School has a huge number of National Merit students (more than double the next highest number) and the lowest performing schools have none.
Very interesting to see where the top students are going to college.:
2 are going to TX A&M
4 are going to UT Austin
1 is going to UT-Dallas
3 are going to U of Houston
1 is going to Harvard
1 is going to Princeton
1 is going to Columbia
3 are going to Stanford
1 is going to Georgetown
1 is going to Wesleyan
1 is going to University of Virginia
1 is going to Miami University (think this is Miami of Ohio and not U of Miami in Florida)
2 are Undecided
The various majors listed are either Business or STEM related fields.
So about half or less of our best and brightest students are going Out of State. Only 2 out of 22 are going to TX A&M, 4 out of 22 are going to UT Austin, so therefore, only 6 out of 22 are going to the TX flagship Universities where there is an automatic acceptance for the Top X percent of HS graduates. Only 10 out of 22 are staying in TX. Good to see that some students are staying in TX, I hope that the Undecided students stay in Texas.
There are a lot of good Universities in TX, but the perception is that only UT Austin and TX A&M are top notch. And this is probably because those 2 schools have the Automatic Admissions for the Top X percent.
I hate to see the best and brightest go out of state. It could be that some of these students may be going to one of their parent’s Universities, as a lot of our neighbors are not native Texans, and that is understandable. But I hope that the students who are going OOS have scholarships and are not going to be graduating with crushing amount of college loan debt.
Just my 2 cents worth.
But if the ‘best and brightest’ are going OOS leaving a spot at UT open, another equally talented student is coming into the state. UT isn’t changing its standards so those spots go to someone less academically qualified.
No one to Rice?
Which Houston ISD has 11 high schools? @AggieMomAgain
@3scoutsmom Which state is it?
I think all but 1 of the out of state schools listed will meet full need, so hopefully no loans involved. The list seems pretty well balanced to me-some Ivy, some flagship, and the some with presumably great scholarships to UTD and U of Houston. A good outcome.
TX lost one of my nephews. The one who was an excellent student but he did not get into UT-A. That was the only state school he wanted. He did get accepted to a number of private and public selective OOS and that’s the route he took. Yes , they lost him , but his brothers who were not as strong academically stayed in state. One went to TAMU, the other to TX Tech. Acc to my brother in law, this sort of thing very commonplace
I’m in a state who does lose its top students to OOS colleges and universities. The vast majority of top students, as well as kids from higher income families leave the state for college. NY is feeling it especially in tech, trying to keep these kids in state with a scholarship. Imo, they need to work on getting better national name recognition for their colleges, and better numbers.
@CupCakeMuffins Cypress-Fairbanks ISD has a bunch of high schools.
@CupCakeMuffins if you are asking about post #198 FSU and Miami are in Florida. I grew up in a small town outside of Pensacola (the running joke was that the town only had one traffic light and they couldn’t keep that working) I graduated from FSU in Tallahassee (different time zone than were I grew up) and very different from my hometown. My first real job after getting my BS was as an itinerant teacher in the Dade County Public Schools. I lived on South Beach until it became affordable, an efficiency downtown before it was condemned and in Little Haiti.
Miami is a very diverse city! It’s almost an 8 hours drive between Tallahassee and Miami and over 10 hours drive between Pensacola and Miami and the only similarity they have is that they have the same governor!
@88jm19 Wow! That’s huge. What is the average enrollment number at these schools?
@3scoutsmom It must be a a challenging time for you. I took time zone analogy literally.
@CupCakeMuffins I don’t know since it’s been over 20 years for me, but I would guess around 3,000 per school.
https://www.cfisd.net/en/schools-facilities/our-schools/high-schools/. Texas likes things big…lol.
As far as the state to state differences versus the rural to urban differences, my son felt more comfortable in Boston than in Dallas after growing up in Austin.
Strangely enough, I was surprised my son was so adamant about not going to school in a small town. In fact, he is excited about being downtown rather than in the outskirts. I had imagined him at a LAC. But, we went with what he wanted and I’ve come around to realizing that he does know himself well.
Nobody to Rice or SMU??
SMU is very expensive and much more popular with private school kids than public school students. Rice is a very popular application from the Houston area, making it particularly hard to get into locally.