<p>SWH, I have a couple of million paid words in print and pretty much know when to conform to a rule and when I can break it. Get paid for maybe a quarter as many words and maybe we can talk. Until then, you may save your concern for other recipients who might be more appreciative.</p>
<p>As for inherently snobbish, I don’t think so. I look at college as an incubator for bringing out a student’s potential, primarily intellectual but in other areas as well. There are scores of colleges where the diligent can get a degree by turning in their assignments and where they’ll seldom have a test that doesn’t involve filling in bubbles on a Scantron form and where a main focus is four years of consuming alcohol. It’s true that I have absolutely no interest in these and if that makes me a snob in your eyes, so be it. </p>
<p>Some of the arguments in this thread have been misplaced and mis-focused, the defensive “my [by implication] smart kid can get a good education at good ol’ State U.” </p>
<p>Why, yes, he or she can and that’s not the point and nobody ever said differently.</p>
<p>Or “my [by implication] perfectly smart kid is going somewhere where he or she will be able to deal with reg’lar folks after graduation,” a self-congratulatory false dichotomy, with an anti-intellectual premise that intellectuals somehow can’t do tasks such as tieing their shoes or talk to the plumber without making fools of themselves.</p>
<p>My experience has led me to believe in “fit” to the core of my being, at least for many students. Different students have different needs to optimize their experiences. Indeed, many students may have relatively interchangeable options; their degrees and experiences will be qualitatively similar after four years across a broad range of options. But for others—and the OP’s D is one—the soup of the intellectual environment is going to make a huge difference. It’s no accident that the most vibrant centers of the Renaissance were the product of the cross-fertilization between many minds.</p>
<p>Student can go to one school and graduate with a 4.0 or close to it, and still not have the educational experience that develops them fully, the result of immersion in atmosphere where everyone else is as smart, as driven, as focused as they are. Sound elitist? You betcha.</p>
<p>Now I’ll go ahead and flip over a hole card: back in the day of search and applications, I met NMD’s daughter. Can I say I know her? Not really. But I observed her over a couple of hours at a dinner table and took her measure. (Sorry, NMD, you and I never discussed this and I’m keeping a couple of serial numbers filed off.) I can think of exactly one other high school student I’ve met over the years who has radiated such intensity and the other, I can tell you, had nowhere near the same sense of self-discipline and focus. She was quiet, perceptive, and considered well what she said before she said it…a contrast to my own D who will just throw stuff out and see what happens, LOL.</p>
<p>Her accomplishments in the intervening years aren’t particularly surprising to me. And back to NMD’s OP, it is perfectly comprehensible to me why she set her sights extremely high, why she was disappointed in her initial rejections, and why she ultimately found U/Chicago to be a splendid experience. If U/Chicago were off her radar screen as a “lesser” option in the beginning due to her local high school culture, then peace be with her…I understand.</p>
<p>I’m “semi-retired” in my ad hoc college advising activities though I still stick around here for a number of reasons. I have two main areas of interest: first generation to college, many of whom are completely lacking in the social capital to navigate the system and even less equipped to map out their options beyond the closest school they’ve heard of, and students like the OP’s D (and mine, for what it’s worth) who are high achievers who need to have options beyond the almost reflexive HYPSM pool. </p>
<p>Research uni, LAC, regional flagship, second-tier state school…there are students for each who will have optimal experiences by going there. To pretend that some schools don’t provide a richer “intellectual soup” for some high-achieving students to thrive in is an exercise self-serving myopia. And so it goes.</p>
I did get lots of free Skype calls from overseas. But I admit it was from a developed country.</p>