Aren’t there some pretty terrible private schools out there, contrary to popular belief? I can think of a few just in my city that have low graduation rates, low standards for acceptance, weak academics, etc. Granted, there are also many public schools like that, but it’s not like all private schools are Harvard. Private schools aren’t all the same, nor are all public schools (there are some public liberal arts schools that might be a good compromise, for instance). So it’s really just the same old debate over whether prestigious schools are better than run of the mill schools, not really whether private schools are better than publics or not.
@SuperSenior19 very true!
In the 1950s, the elites like HYP were probably much less meritocratic than now for the majority of the students in their classes, which were taken from social elite (then not academically elite) private boarding schools, with some actual academic elite students from everywhere (mainly public schools at the time) and more likely on scholarship (financial aid). The social elite students were content to get “gentleman’s C” grades to graduate into their well-connected lives, while the actual academic elite students were striving for A grades and academic achievement.
Now, of course, even the “preferred” groups are held to much higher minimum academic standards than they were in the 1950s, and the social elite boarding schools have also increased their emphasis on academic achievement, so that the social elite scions can bring in academic merit instead of being too obvious as “preferred” admits of lesser academic merit.
@itsgettingreal17 yes, TOP students at flagships are competitive with elite school graduates.
@roycroftmom don’t know any professors like that, IOW your saying that the very top high school students somehow regress to a lower level once attending an elite college and the state universities bloom to great heights.
@MWolf In holistic admissions only about half of the admission decision is based on academics, the other half is based on what they think of the person as demonstrated by EC’s and essays. Harvard doesn’t want and more Ted Kazcynski’s. BTW my DD was floored by the talent at UChicago and she wasn’t talking about academics.
@CU123 I have been around academia for decades, and have seen the talent in a much larger number of colleges than just UChicago. As I wrote at least a half a dozen times earlier, there are more kids who are above the average for UChicago at UIUC than there are students at UChicago.
“Harvard doesn’t want and more Ted Kazcynski’s”. Wow, you really believe that T-20s are run by super-humans for super-humans. You really seem to think that “holistic admissions” means that every application is run through Precogs who create accurate psychological and intellectual profiles of every one of the 40,000 Harvard applicants, and choose Only The Very Best Of The Best Of The Best, including accurate 30 year predictions of the behaviors of every student who is accepted.
Responding to comment #183, waaay back up thread. In my kids’ mid-tier private HS in Seattle, about 10 out of a class of 70 went to in-state public universities (6 or so to the flagship, 4 or so to other public state schools). The rest went OOS, primarily to privates. I think there were like 2-3 CA OOS publics and 5 international public. Most of the kids going to OOS privates were not going to T20, but rather next tier down. Only one of the top 10% went to our flagship and he got into CS which is very highly ranked. However, very few of the seniors listed engineering as their targeted major (which surprised me). The public/private split at the public HS will be very different—many more will go to the in-state publics.
As someone else wrote upthread, I think this trend is simply that families of kids in private HSs can afford private college.
But a few thoughts on why this is:
- There are many more families at publics that cannot afford privates that don’t cover 100% need. And there are many more families who cannot afford their EFC at a school that does cover 100% need. I am not sure about the public school kids from families that fit more the private school profile (2-income, parents with graduate degrees). The kids of parents in my friend group also went OOS private, but that is a small sample size.
- Culture I. Even if your parents can afford your EFC, at the public HSs there is not the 'culture' of the majority of seniors going to OOS privates so there is nothing odd about going in-state. That's not the case at my kids' private HS.
- The families at my kids' private HS tend to be 2-income with graduate degrees. This is a highly 'migratory' group. It is very unusual to find someone who grew up in WA, much less Seattle, at any social school gathering. The kids come from a 'culture' of academic migration.
- Culture II. The decision to go 'private' happened long before college decisions. Most families at my kids' HS made decision in elementary school and they continue on that path. Note, ca 40% of HS students in Seattle are in private or parochial schools; I counted it up one day out of curiosity.
- Families are willing to pay extra for their kids to go to a school where there is more guidance and advising; they don't want to risk their kid to 'falling through the cracks'. A 4-year grad rate in the 80s versus something in the 60s or 70s (or 50s...).
@MWolf I cannot agree with you more. The assumption that every student who goes to an elite private school is automatically branded with an übermensch mark during orientation week is immediately dispelled once one expands their circle of friends and acquaintances. I went to our state flagship, while my business partner of 20 years had degrees from both Harvard and UChicago. UIUC grads can hold their own intellectually and professionally with graduates from elites. And, at the same time, not all grads from elite schools go on to be leaders in their fields. My colleagues, neighbors, and friends have degrees from a wide range of schools (and some have no degrees at all). It really is not apparent who went to Princeton and who went to Illinois State.
That being said, I think my own child benefited from going to a well-respected, private research university (but not tippy-top so without the “ooooh” factor that more popular schools inspire). I think she might have been intimidated in a larger school and would have played it safer there. It wasn’t the in-class learning or the prestige branding that made the difference. Instead, it was being in an environment where she felt the right combination of challenge and encouragement which resulted in a college experience that allowed her to be her best self. For another kid with her “talent” that balance might have been found at a large pubic flagship or a somewhat more elite private. I know “fit” is an elusive concept, but it’s real. At least in my experience.
Of course, to find higher graduation rates, just go to the most academically selective college with the students from the richest families (and where you can easily afford). The more academically selective college will have fewer weak students who have higher risk of dropping out for academic reasons, and students from rich families are less likely to drop out because they run out of money. Your personal risk of the latter is reduced by choosing a comfortably affordable college.
Around here there really is no emphasis on private vs public. Michigan and UVA are viewed as the same as exactly the same Vanderbilt or Emory. The reports from our students are that you get no more or less guidance and advising at these public’s that you do at the privates, though we see more sense of being disappointed by the privates on this score.
@ucbalumnus I should have written ‘where parents perceive…’. Parents at my kids’ HS are aware of these studies that say outcome is independent of UG school and yet across the board their kids choose OOS privates and the parents choose to foot the bill.
@liska21 The high school that I work at and both my kids have attended is similar to your kid’s HS. It’s located in South Orange County which is an affluent area. There are a few differences though…many, but not all of the parents and families are originally from Southern California or Northern California. Lots of parents who attended schools like USC (uni of southern california), UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, Pepperdine, etc. And we have a good chunk of kids who apply to attend and schools like UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Davis each year. That said, private schools are very popular and a LOT of kids from our school go to out of state privates. And going far away to college is definitely part of the culture at our school. That said, a good amount do stay in state and go to California publics and privates…
Here are the college matriculation lists for two schools near each other, one public, one private:
http://www.mabears.org/documents/Where%20Our%20Grads%20Go/Graduate%20Destinations%2015-18.pdf
https://www.menloschool.org/about/college-acceptances.php
It would be helpful if people provided a little background info when they make claims about the stark contrast between public & private. I suspect a lot of these clams are due to the usual (for CC) coastal vs. flyover bias. NY, NJ, Mass, Conn, & California seem to have quite a few drab, underfunded state colleges, so students prefer privates. Since people from these states are often uninformed about the rest of the country, they assume the public colleges in the rest of the states are similarly inferior to privates, when in fact there are many states where the best & most-interesting colleges are public. ( No, that wasn’t a typo.)
I can’t recall which thread it was on, but somebody on CC recently even claimed that private college dorms were uniformly superior to public dorms. Wow. So now the erroneous stereotypes are beyond assuming publics use 1000-seat lecture halls even for Chaucer seminars and Advanced Topology? Now the dorms at publics are hovels?
Ha on the dorms! One of the nicest dorm I’ve ever seen was at U. of Cincinnati. There was even news coverage about it because it’s so posh!
My D’s dorm at her state flagship was also super, as is the one she’s moving to next year. The worst dorms we saw on our tour of 15 schools were both at very expensive privates.
Our HS is suburban, in PA, ranked outside of the top 100 for PA HS. A lot of kids go to PSU, followed by Temple, followed by community college. After that it really opens up, with a lot of kids going to private schools. However, the majority of kids stay in state.
@moooop That and confirmation bias.
@moooop As I said somewhere up thread, it’s not that people from CA don’t want to send their kids to in-state publics. Most people I know would prefer it. But the publics are notoriously difficult to get into, especially the ones that have a residential college experience. If your student wants a popular major (like CS or engineering) then it’s really difficult to find a place, even for a very high stats kid. The state has not expanded its university system quickly enough for the growth in population of college students. Presumably they are just waiting out the population bubble, who knows. Silicon Valley hasn’t done its share to fund computer science programs, that’s for sure. The community college system is just good enough to keep people from complaining, but when you look at the facts, very, very few people finish CC in the two years that they are supposed to. So people turn to out of state schools. Many turn to out of state publics (Arizona especially), but often the math works out for high stats kids with financial need that out of state privates are cheaper. For people with a lot of money, the “bird in the hand” of an out of state private acceptance is a powerful draw, since the UCs are the very last to announce their acceptances. The ED system makes it even more likely that people who can afford to will just be “one and done” and not deal with the lottery that is UC admissions.
Also, nowhere has better dorms than UC Santa Barbara. Ocean at your feet! It’s not about the dorms, really.
@momofsenior1 Any minute now somebody will try to say your experiences were just isolated cases. So I’ll add to it…kid one’s frosh dorm at top-15 private: a dump (dark, dirty, smelly, cramped). Kid two’s frosh dorm at prairie state flagship: a palace ( bright & clean, sparkling laundry room on each floor, multiple study rooms on each floor, etc.).
Some of the oldest, smallest dorms we saw were at private schools. Most of the really nice on campus housing we saw was for upper classmen and this was true at public and private schools.
@moooop dorms really vary by school. I’m sure plenty of midwest flagship schools have drab dorms too. It has nothing to do with which region of the country the school is in…
Also, I would say most people in coastal areas send their kids to public Universities, they just aren’t on college confidential. Also, some parents and students want to stay close to home…maybe that’s why a California kid is going to USC instead of University of Michigan.
@ccprofandmomof2 I think anybody who has been on CC for more than a week has heard of overcrowding in CS depts at UCs & other similar problems. We (the flyover contingent) get all that. And we sympathize. What some of us don’t get is your response to that. It’s as if some Californians are aware of the Northeast, Washington (the state), Arizona, & Colorado. And that’s about IT.
There is a typical cc thread active now where a Californian’s list includes 5 colleges in SoCal, 2 in DC, 2 in NYC, 3 in Boston, & UWash. Three thousand miles from sea to shining sea, & not one school in the middle?
Look, people can go wherever they want–that’s their business. But when despondent people come on here & complain that UCLA is overcrowded, or that it will take 6 yrs to graduate from Berkeley, & they don’t have the grades for Stanford or the spare half-million bucks to buy their way into in USC, some of us feel compelled to say, “Look, as disgusting as the idea apparently is to you, as repugnant as the notion must be, there ARE other options OUT HERE IN THE MIDDLE.” Or “DOWN HERE IN THE BOTTOM-RIGHT CORNER.” We have clean dorms. We teach CS. Our professors will talk to you. We hold doors open for people we don’t know. We even offer merit aid at quite a few places. Come. Explore. Learn. Just stop saying our publics have the same flaws yours do.