The elitism debate

<p>"My oldest daughter is a high school junior. She's very bright, has done very well, and could likely choose, if she wanted, between a large number of highly ranked schools. She won't consider any school though which doesn't have a big time sports program--she wants to be a sportwriter, and for her, college football Staurdays on a big stage are an essential, as is a journalism program affording her opportunities for a wide range of internships."</p>

<p>I'm exactly like your daughter, although I am undecided on my career plans. </p>

<p>People scoff and give me an incredulous look when I tell them that at this point I would choose Notre Dame over Stanford if I were to get into both. A campus with school spirit and a bigtime football aspect are that important to me, and Stanford lost to UC-Davis!</p>

<p>BTW my nephew is a freshman at Mizzou and is deliriously happy. He is jumping into everything, including the newspaper, as a freshman-- and has been welcomed.</p>

<p>Dadx3 - Duke, Cornell, and NW all have serious D1 programs and a big emphasis on sports. <plug for="" alma="" mater="" coming=""> I know Duke doesn't have a J major or much of a football team, but writing for The Chronicle (daily) has been good enough to launch the likes of John Feinstein and Andy Katz (SI Sr Writer). Plus it is serious about Women's sports - see b-ball and golf.</plug></p>

<p>I am always a bit leery of playing up the comfort factor in a student's choice. Without challenges from people and ideas different our parents or our HS buddies, how would any of us ever evolve past our 18-year-old selves? I am certainly not advocating that kids go where they are UNcomfortable, but just not to be afraid of the new and different.</p>

<p>Yankeegirl, I am surprised your D has NYU on her list as it definitely is NOT big with sports. Not knocking NYU, after all my child goes there but it does not have that rah rah sports thing going and also no football. </p>

<p>For the OP, when a kid is looking to go into a certain field, like your D is, then she is looking for a school that is strong in that field and that does not always equate to the university at large being the most selective even if the department/school within it IS! This is true with some journalism programs. It is very true with musical theater programs too. For example, when people unfamiliar with BFA musical theater programs heard my D was applying to places like Penn State and Syracuse, they'd say, "oh, she can surely get in there" (she is a good student), I'd say, not so fast. Maybe the university is not highly selective but their BFA program in my D's field had an acceptance rate of 5%. So, how elite the university is, or even how big it is, was not the prime factor. Finding the right program in her specialty was a significant criteria in choosing colleges. And that is what your D is doing, and is right on track. Picking schools that match the criteria you want is what this process is about. Rankings? Not in my opinion. My kids were unaware of the college rankings in fact. </p>

<p>In reading about those of you who have a strong preference to go to a school with big time football and sports, you obviously are not alone! My D's boyfriend from high school who is currently a senior....I asked him where he'd like to go and what he wants in a college. The main criteria he told me was that he wanted football to be big there. </p>

<p>Susan</p>

<p>"Give him the 200 person class with the brilliant prof any day of the week!"</p>

<p>It's possible to have an under-50 class with a brillaint professor.</p>

<p>My two cents.</p>

<p>Sooz...
We live in NYC and while it's not her top choice, she loves the NYU location as well as what they offer academically. Believe me, if they had a big sports program, that would be her first choice.
She is applying for the JP Morgan Chase scholarship (are u familiar?). If she were to get it, she would probably choose NYU. If not, she's going to end up somewhere else.</p>

<p>
[Quote]
It's possible to have an under-50 class with a brillaint professor.</p>

<p>My two cents.

[/Quote]
</p>

<p>Obviously, but I think he was referring to hearing the professor speak rather than his classmates. See this satirical article in the onion (warning obscenity alert): <a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40984%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40984&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Small and large classes:</p>

<p>I was recently talking to a Harvard senior and asked her what her favorite classes had been. She mentioned two classes: a 1,000 students class with a brilliant prof and mesmerizing lecturer; and her tutorial--a class organized by departments for students in these departments. Her tutorial had had 5 students in it, and was reading and writing intensive; class-time consisted of discussing the materials. Apparently, it had been nothing like the atmosphere in The Onion.
There's no moral to this anecdote except that there is no always right format.</p>

<p>FYI, regarding sportswriting, Vanderbilt University offers a sportswriting scholarship
<a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/admissions/06RussellRice.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.vanderbilt.edu/admissions/06RussellRice.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Please don't get me started on Vandy...
Been trying to convince my daughter to at least look into it for well over a year now. The response I get is a very loud " I AM NOT GOING TO COLLEGE IN TENNESEE". She has this thing about what she calls "hick states". I told her that Nashville is a city, she would have a great shot of admittance and merit $$ given that she is from the north east, and they have a good reputation. No go..won't even go to the presentation they are doing at her HS.</p>

<p>Yankeegirl, you might direct her to the posts by Evil Robot, a CA student who was admitted EA to Yale but went to Vandy because it offered good merit money. ER later came back to CC to post that he is extremely happy at Vandy.</p>

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<p>A 200 person lecture vs a 50 person lecture is a distinction without much of a difference. In a classroom setting you are either having a discussion or listening to a lecture. Above a class size of about 12 the discussion option goes away and it becomes a pretty much purely a lecture. When listening to a lecture it doesn't really matter whether there are 49 or 199 other people in the audience with you. It's much the same experience.</p>

<p>Marite...I remember that whole thread, but she won't budge, doesn't even want me to mention the "V" word. I'm backing off on this one, after all she's the one who has to be at school for the next 4 years, not me.</p>

<p>The size issue gets debated quite frequently here on CC. My son's favorite freshmam class at UPenn has 600 students. He loves it! He loves the way the professor uses lots of technology (guess he has to) and presents the marterial. On the day before the start of fall break, he attended this class and was disappointed that only about 300 students were in the class (the other 300 had gone home already). He said it was "boring" to not have eveyone there. He also ejoys his freshman seminars with 30 students....but likes the large class better.</p>

<p>(this is a kid who came from a graduating class of 80 at his small k-12 private school - he was MORE than ready for a big school). He loves the big school feel. He says he's already amazed at how many people he knows and how many more he meets everyday. He can't believe that he doesn't miss having his car....because he lives in a "city of students" which is why the area is called "University City".....(2 schools - Penn and Drexel in one campus community - 20- 25k students in all and more for them to do and see than they can uncover in 4 years). </p>

<p>I don't knock those students who feel overwhelmed by this sort of environement. It's like living in NYC, you either love it or you hate it. But, I agree that there are going to be plenty of bright and "gifted" kids who will thrive on a large school with the pulse of a major city. </p>

<p>I do hope the CC parents with kids interested in larger schools will feel OK about it. The push to smaller schools isn't good for everyone.</p>

<p>I don't think there's a push to smaller schools. Whatever fits, fits. My daughter came from a HS graduating class of about 90, and moving up to a college class of about 500 uber-motivated kids was just right for her. My son, coming from the same HS, will need a much larger pond. They're just different.</p>

<p>yankeegirl--my son, who is from NY, is a freshman now and is having a fantastic time at Vandy. The student body is from all over the U.S. with a great increase in kids from the northeast. He loves Nashville which offers a great deal--including professional sports, concerts, restuarants--not to mention great weather! As parents, we've enjoyed visiting there. We were all unsure about it, whether it would feel "too southern", until we went down to visit.</p>

<p>Yankeegirl, no I have not heard of that particular scholarship at NYU but admit to not being well versed on their scholarships. My D was an applicant to Tisch. I did not even know that they had merit scholarships until she opened a letter (from a hospital bed no less) that said she was the recipient of a $20,000 (each year for four years) Trustee Scholarship. We did a double take, lol. Perhaps some scholarships are for one school at NYU and some for another. My D is loving being at NYU, by the way. It is a very large university but by the same token, she is in a smaller school within it (Tisch) and then three days per week is in a smaller "school" within that, her studio which is called CAP21 which has less than 300 total in it. By the same token, my other child would never have looked at NYU. She wanted medium sized schools. Different options are best for different kids. I was just thinking yesterday how both my kids' schools (Brown and NYU) are WAY bigger than the population of our entire town which is about 1700 people! You know how big NYU is and Brown is about 6500 undergrads. But in both kids' schools, they are in BOTH very small classes and big lectures. Those types of classes exist in most colleges settings.</p>

<p>About Vandy, my kids would have said the same thing about the south and you need to let them pick. I have seen Vandy from across the street. My younger D performed once with the Nashville Symphony and I went with her (she was only 12 or 13 at the time) and the hotel they put us up at was across from Vandy and it looked quite nice. And yes, it is a city with lots to do. The school itself is an excellent one. But yes, the south seems like a foreign land to those in the northeast. Your D's stance on this, whether founded, grounded, or not, is rather common for kids from a place like NY.</p>

<p>This is a repsonse to the Vandy subthread, not addressing the issue of elitism (in fact, I think size of school is a matter of personal perference, not prestige--if anything, larger schools are often more widely known and have more obvious prestige). I just want to say as a northeasterner, that Tennessee is a beautiful state, at lease the part of it I've seen (eastern mountains). And I would be very surprised if people from Tennessee were any more or less smart/nice/fun to be with/interesting than people from similar socioeconomic levels in North Caorlina, New Jersey, Vermont, Illinois, Wisconsin...and so on. </p>

<p>Regional bias is a form of elitism now that I think of it. (And really, what is the worst that might happen if a northern kid goes to school in the South? Might say "yes ma'am" without thinking when asked a question by a stranger, which might cause a raised eyebrow in some settings but is hardly a bad thing:))</p>

<p>Soozie,</p>

<p>I think Yankeegirl is referring to the Chase Smart start scholarship</p>

<p><a href="http://www.jpmorganchase.com/cm/cs?pagename=Chase/Href&urlname=jpmc/community/grants/educ/smartstart/ny%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.jpmorganchase.com/cm/cs?pagename=Chase/Href&urlname=jpmc/community/grants/educ/smartstart/ny&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Mattmom, just to be clear, I totally agree that it is regional bias and not necessarily well founded differences. I was simply saying that her D was not alone in not wanting to go to school in the south having come from the northeast. It is not that different than some kids in the south saying they don't want to be in cold winters or in rural Vermont. It is just their perceptions. One kind of school or setting is not more elite or better but I'm just recognizing that kids think this way. </p>

<p>My older D did not want the south. She wanted to be within proximity of skiing. She wanted the East Coast though we would have allowed our children to go anywhere to college. We did not influence their choices. Nashville is fine by me! </p>

<p>My younger child wanted east coast or eastern third of the country but was unwilling to go to the south. It is not for a valid reason but just how she preferred. Clearly the schools in the south are just as good!</p>

<p>Susan</p>