<p>Marsian,</p>
<p>We are North Carolina residents as well and I do agree with much of what you’ve posted. However my D turned down Chapel Hill to attend a top 10 private with a 60,000+ price tag…Part of the reason being that with such good financial aide her school was less than Carolina despite our 6 figure income. Davidson would have been less too…</p>
<p>Oh,Yes, I know about The Game, or whatever it’s called ,Bay. That would be exciting. In general though, it doesn’t seem like football or basketball attracts as much excitement as at bigger schools. But still would be fun and Yale would certainly be a great place to go to school!</p>
<p>I know from experience that in some environments I will be more motivated to engage in productive activity than in other environments. I suspect that the great majority of young people who are graduating from high school also will be more motivated in some environments than others. Maybe it is partly because of fewer distractions, but it may also be in part because of a perception of greater rewards for greater efforts in certain environments. For those kids who will likely face no such motivation differential, possibly because they are already extremely driven, then paying more for an elite school might be foolhardy. However, for kids who have some reason to believe that they would be more motivated at a more presitigious institution, I can see why they would want to go and their parents would want to pay the extra costs.</p>
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<p>That is not what the research shows. It shows that there is a measurable difference in the quality of education from one college to another - but it does not correlate with prestige, cost, or selectivity.</p>
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<p>If you equate “education” with “acquisition of facts,” then perhaps. But according to Parcarella and Terenzini (642), the research shows that educational attainment is enhanced by “student involvement in the academic and nonacademic systems of an institution, the nature and frequency of student contact with peers and faculty members, interdisciplinary or integrated core curricula that emphasize making explicit connections across courses and among ideas and disciplines, pedagogies that encourage active student engagement in learning and encourage application of what is being learned in real and meaningful settings, campus environments that emphasize scholarship and provide opportunities for students to encounter different kinds of people and ideas, and environments that emphasize scholarship and support exploration, whether intellectual or personal.”</p>
<p>You can’t get those things online.</p>
<p>Anna’s dad, you can’t get them online but you can get them at a college which does not have an archive, a meaningful library with historical artifacts and documents where a student can conduct primary research, or a museum which seeks to preserve and interpret the past?</p>
<p>You like to argue out of both sides of your mouth. Many of the “not elite” colleges which folks here like to claim produce results “just as good as yer fancy colleges with all them fancy fixin’s” are, in fact, places which take place in real life but might as well be online.</p>
<p>What do get at Harvard? Not just the brand “Harvard”. World class libraries, archives, museums; curators and scholars who work at each of these; meaningful depth in the graduate programs (not just a professional school which grants Masters of Social Work and Education) where young scholars and post-docs and visiting professors from around the world vie to work and study and teach.</p>
<p>Harvard doesn’t need me to extol its virtues- but in previous posts you’ve claimed that folks who scrimp and save to send young Joey to Harvard are dupes who should be taking advantage of “local college which is just as good” down the road.</p>
<p>My local college down the road offers a fine degree in elementary education and a few other vocational degrees. It is accredited by our state. It even has a history department, with a couple of tenured faculty who teach the required humanities sequence to its students who will end up with Bachelor’s degrees in “not history”.</p>
<p>What it doesn’t offer is what Harvard offers in History. No fault of that college down the road- it wasn’t founded in the 17th century, it doesn’t have the largest college endowment on the planet, it doesn’t have grad schools in Divinity, Medicine, Law, Business as well as a slew of Ph.D programs in science and humanities, and it doesn’t have a single archive or museum to its name- but it has a lovely gallery which rotates the work of local artists and sculptors which is really nice.</p>
<p>You might argue that any student with a modem can retrieve any work of art or any ancient document or any historical artifact of piece of ephemera… and you’re right. So we’re back to claiming that you might as well get a degree online.</p>
<p>Figure out which side you’re arguing for. I’ll continue to argue forcefully that the elite universities of which you are so disdainful offer a banquet of meaningful opportunities for students to engage intellectually- in and out of the classroom. And when the college down the street from me decides to take the only faculty member who teaches a history class from before 1620 (as if there was no civilization prior to that) and upgrades him from adjunct to full time, we can all cheer that somehow, progress is being made.</p>
<p>How you can claim that a no name degree is just as good as one from the elites and then get riled that someone takes your point to its logical conclusion (i.e. get a degree from your living room online, who needs those high falutin professors anyway) strikes me as funny!</p>
<p>I’ll simply repeat the question I’ve asked before, yet to be answered: if the so-called “elite” colleges have all these advantages, why have 30 years of research studies been able to detect any correlation between prestige/cost/selectivity, on the one hand, and better educational results, on the other.</p>
<p>When S had a choice between a free ride at one of the top State U and his dream school HYP. I didn’t think paying full freight to HYP over free ride at top state U can be justified but we still paid.
My reasoning was that had our income been lower so that he could get full FA, he could afford to go to HYP. Now because of our income disqualified him FA and we refuse to pay his tuition, he cannot go. It’s not really fair for him.
I gave him choice, save this money for professional school or spend it on UG. He chose the latter.</p>
<p>You can measure prestige, cost and selectivity, but how exactly do you define and measure educational results? jobs and salaries are part of that equation, but there are other factors at play as well. Those Harvard and Yale graduates may earn the same salary as the others, but are they doing the same job? Do they really end up with the same education?</p>
<p>My D has spent 12 years in a series of decent public school systems, an above average kid, among average kids. She takes honors and AP classes, and is in the top 20% of her class, and did well on the SAT - possible top 1% among her classmates. She is not motivated to be the top student, and her grades show it. I would expect the same of her if she were to attend any of our local publics, as she would still be among roughly the same group of students. She is not applying to those state schools, because their honors programs are not as solid as some others, and would still place her in the same environment.</p>
<p>She has also spent 4 summers studying among other top students through the Center for Talented Youth. The evaluations from her instructors in those classes paint an entirely different picture - completely engaged and involved in classes, highly motivated. The opportunity to study at an elite school is more likely to place her among the same type of community, and more likely to motivate her. A small number of honors programs might provide a similar environment, and we are considering those - but they are at much larger schools, and she has not particularly liked any of the large campuses she has visited.</p>
<p>We did eliminate some elites from her list, because they will cost far too much than we are willing to pay. But she still will end up choosing between a range of options from full ride to $25,000. I am more than willing to pay the $25,000 because that particular school would be the best fit by far. It would not be a best fit for everybody, but all measurements aside, she is likely to be more successful, in her own terms, at that particular school. So I would argue that it really must be an individual choice. You can’t really compare previous results, because there is no control group, and you can’t really measure how successful any individual person would have been if they had gone to a different school.</p>
<p>A few words about FA, it is very nice for them to offer such generous FA. However I wish they took cost of living into consideration. if not, at least subtract state tax paid from income. There is such a huge difference for the same income in CA/NY vs. TX or many other states.
Our income was considered too high to qualify FA, but in reality we live a very frugal lifestyle. driving 11 year old minivan, buying non-brand name clothes, rarely dine out, etc.</p>
<p>For all those who insist that the only reason people send their children to wk,eps@ft’s is so they can brag about it, I am truly sorry that you’re exposed to boors. Now, can we do something about the people who brag about how they’re too smart to pay to send their children to those wk,eps@ft’s? </p>
<p>I see that Pomeranian and Tarantella has been dragged onstage. It’s rather like CC’s own special Godwin’s Law. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>For those who don’t qualify for need-based aid but want a private school education, why not go to a school that gives merit aid? Then you get the best of both worlds!</p>
<p>In the New York times there is a story a girl that could probably go to many of the Ivy’s free and is leaning toward, John Brown, a small quality regional college:</p>
<p>[College</a> Applications Are Out and Most Decisions Are In - NYTimes.com](<a href=“College Applications Are Out and Most Decisions Are In - The New York Times”>College Applications Are Out and Most Decisions Are In - The New York Times)</p>
<p>Interesting story about a lovely, modest girl with great potential. I don’t think she has been given much direction by her counselor. I wonder if her family is pressuring her to stay close to home and preferably attend a religious college. It’s too bad, because she would be a great candidate for substantial merit aid at many schools. Unfortunately, she might have a hard time with the secular environment at a lot of them.</p>
<p>I think she would have a greater chance of breaking out of her family’s cycle of poverty if she dreamed bigger. At least she had the chutzpa to take the test to get that 33+ to get free college in Arkansas.</p>
<p>One thing that hasn’t been addressed in this thread is whether, for a student admitted to both an elite university and a flagship or similar state school, whether there can actually be an advantage to the student attending the state school, in terms of standing out academically at that school, receiving scholarship and other recognition, and perhaps even receiving more individual faculty attention and better prospects in job and grad school applications, vs being lost in the crowd of top achievers and being at the bottom 25% at an Ivy, MIT, etc?</p>
<p>In other words, putting aside issues such as finances and “fit”, is it clear that the elite schools are the better choice for a high achieving, motivated student?</p>
<h1>275, I think that is a salient question, triseradad. The issue is that you have no way of knowing whether your child will end up #1 or equivalent at a lower-ranked college, whereas you <em>know</em> that your child will have the Ivy, MIT, etc. credential when s/he graduates if s/he goes there.</h1>
<p>“whereas you <em>know</em> that your child will have the Ivy, MIT, etc. credential when s/he graduates if s/he goes there”</p>
<p>Sure, but is the institutional reputation going to help the student in the long run as much as their own accomplishments while at college? Surely a student higher in the admission pool has a better change of being higher in the achievement pool while at that school. Whereas in an elite institution that is so selective that it admits 100% top students, the odds are very low that a particular student will remain at the top of their class, or even above average, once admitted. </p>
<p>I hypothesize that the psychological effect of feeling successful in college will translate to similar success in work and life, whereas going from the top of one’s class in high school to the bottom, or even merely average, could have a crushing effect on self-esteem, as would subsequently achieving “success” based on something external like the brand name of one’s school rather than on one’s own actual accomplishments.</p>
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<p>My small experience, from my son and his friends, is that self-esteem is not damaged from being part of such a vibrant community, and that even in Year 2, they’re thinking “wow, we’re lucky to be here.”</p>
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<p>I say yes.</p>
<p>Many interesting discussions here.</p>
<p>Parents should have some idea about their kids’ ability. If a top HS student only studies two hours a day, you would know that he/she could elevate him/herself to a higher level in a top college. On the other hand, if such student has given every ounce of his/her effort, it could be risky going to a top college. The same judgement can be made based upon standard tests.</p>
<p>For middle class parents, the premium of sending their students to a top private school over the state school should depend upon the students’ ability/major/professional degree, schools’ aid package, and parents’ financial situation/health/age. If a parent only needs to pay $15K a year more to send the student to a top private school, it is definitely worth considering. </p>
<p>DS3 has told me that he would be happy going to any of the schools he is applying. He and I will talk it over if he can be accepted with an aid package comparable to the NPC. Then, I may come back to ask for your advice.</p>