<p>Recession-wary honor students are using community college as door to elite schools</p>
<p>Article here: More</a> of the best and brightest heading to community college</p>
<p>I’m not convinced that all of the named goal colleges could be classified as “elite.”</p>
<p>Just a general point of information, since the handful of “elites” as discussed on CC (and of those, the U’s that accept transfers) have approximately the same rate of admission for transfer students as for freshman students. (i.e., small)</p>
<p>But the point of the article is that some students who might have gone to 4 year schools directly out of high school are now considering community colleges because of the cost benefits. I think this is significant in the DC area (I live there) because there seems to be such a bias against cc’s here. I think that’s what is news here. Hey, I am grew up in a midwest community where the best and brightest have always attended cc’s in large numbers and have done very well, thank you.</p>
<p>I think it’s another manifestation of the financial effect that’s causing people to turn to honors colleges at state flagships as well. How it works as a strategy to get into better schools, I don’t know.</p>
<p>The more selective schools may then adjust their transfers admissions. Perhaps some will restrict them further in anticipation of a surge in applicants, or perhaps they realize than more transfers are highly qualified and so they will play up the transfer process.</p>
<p>Yes, Fallgirl I agree that it is somewhat regional. Every year (I’m in the midwest) a few of the senior scholars start at the CCs prior to transfer. This was the “transfer” year for the one’s from my oldest son’s class and all 3 of his friends landed at their desired schools. It’s where you graduate and go forth, not where you start that counts.</p>
<p>Their diploma will be from the four year school no matter where they began- I have mentioned before that two of D’s friends began at Seattle area community colleges and got their degrees from U Chicago & Oberlin three or four years ago.</p>
<p>Students with a two year solid transcript are a proven commodity although spaces in the junior year are much fewer than freshman.</p>
<p>I really, really hate the expression “the best and the brightest.”</p>
<p>This girl is clearly a good student, but she is not among “the brightest” based on the info they give here. Nor are the other students in the Rouse program, with their average of 550 per section or so on the SAT.</p>
<p>That said, the program sounds like a very good one. Nothing like that is available at CCs around here, as far as I know. It is more the norm for kids to have a hard time transferring to the 4-year campus. (But isn’t this “honors” program something like 145 out of 9,000 students, according to the article?)</p>
<p>It was a nice article. Yes, around 1600 out of 2400 isn’t what I would consider best and brightest but it would be interesting if this were the start of a trend which will boost the scores of CCs overall. If so, it would also have the effect of pushing out some less-qualified students.</p>
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<p>And I really, really hate the CC mythology that somehow one’s performance on a single narrow test somehow is a measure of “brightest”. </p>
<p>Not defensiveness on my part (we are a family of high standardized test scorers) but please, stop using this as the end all be all to who is smart and who is not.</p>
<p>Owlice just titled her thread “best and brightest” because that is the heading of the article.
Be nice to Owlice - she has food! :)</p>
<p>OMG, do I ever!! Still WAY too much!!</p>
<p>Thanks, eddieodessa, for picking up where the title of the thread came from. [_]o <– Hot chocolate for you; it’s cold outside!!</p>
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<p>I really can’t get over the standardized test worship on here. Darken the right bubbles on some scantron and suddenly you’re Linus Pauling. If you get a 35 ACT and a 2.0 GPA you’re a misunderstood genius, but a 30 ACT with a 3.9 and it’s officially grade inflation. </p>
<p>That said, I don’t see here where it even says what the main girl’s scores were. Or am I missing something? It just says they were all above 600. That could be 2400. Of course, I know the logical inference is that they were in the 600s, but it doesn’r really say that. An inference like that could cost you on your SAT.</p>
<p>And she did get accepted by UVa, which is a pretty good school.</p>
<p>The average score in their honors program was just under 1600/2400.</p>
<p>^^^^
Is this just a general comment, or is it supposed to be a reply to my post? </p>
<p>Because my post refers to the score of a single student (Kira Cassels I think her name is), and that, absent any other information, the average score for the program doesn’t indicate anything about the score of one particular student.</p>
<p>If there’s one thing that I thought was apparent here on CC, it was that many admitted students score well above the average for any program.</p>
<p>Actually, there has been somewhat of a trend toward having some pretty good students go to CCs instead of 4 year colleges & then transferring into the Us they wanted for some time now. It does make it somewhat tougher for the CCs & those students, academically.
When my D went to CC for 3 semesters, most (perhaps all) of her teachers taught the SAME material to the flagship U in much larger classes. She has not missed a beat when she transferred from CC to the private U which is pretty competitive and would otherwise not have accepted her with her subpar HS grades.
The things which bothered her the most about CC there was NO campus life at all and many of her classmates had not idea what they wanted to do or be and had no particular goals.</p>
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<p>Many score below too. It’s that math thing.</p>
<p>Off topic, but wanted to add that some are doing their last high school year through dual enrollment at community college, which gives simultaneous credit for high school and college. Most of you know about this, but mentioning it for those who don’t.</p>
<p>My D goes to a HS where only a couple percent of the kids don’t go on to college, and most go to 4 year colleges. You rarely saw kids going to our community college - until this year, when more students in the class of 2009 went to the local CC than to any other single college. I have to assume the reasons were mainly financial. </p>
<p>I know and am in contact with one girl who chose the CC. Her initial plan was to transfer out after one year (she’s an extremely bright girl who didn’t apply herself in hs, so had very high standardized test scores and an anemic GPA). It turns out she loves the CC. Many of the students are older and very focused, her professors are interesting and engaging (and more than a couple of them have Ivy degrees), the class sizes are small and she’s enjoying learning much more than she did in high school. It took a few months, but she’s now made some good friends, and she’s decided to do a second year there before transferring. She’s not aiming for an “elite” school, but her choices will be better than those she had coming out of high school because her CC GPA will be much better than her HS GPA - more in line with her ACT score.</p>
<p>Beth’s mom - This is a great example, unfortunately in the past when I have suggested this route to parents of similar students I practically had to duck in fear of being punched out. “How dare I suggest that their child who did not apply him/herself in HS apply to a community college”?</p>