<p>Here’s something you all (or some? or none?) might find interesting and possibly relevant–an undergrad English course offered at Yale.</p>
<p>Has anyone’s S/D taken this course?</p>
<p>"Sec. 07 College: The Best Years of Your Life?
Allyson McCabe MW 9:00-10:15</p>
<p>Current acceptance rates at Ivy League schools hover at approximately ten percent. Beyond merit, what are the elements that make a candidate competitive for admission to a highly selective university like Yale? How does campus life in the Ivy League imagined by outsiders differ from the day-to-day lives of real students and faculty? Does learning for learning’s sake prevail in our hallowed halls or is college just a social networking opportunity or stepping stone to a career? What will colleges like Yale be like twenty or thirty years down the road? </p>
<p>In this section of English 114 students will engage in issues and debates that are at the heart of American higher education. In the first section of the course students will learn about the admissions process at elite universities by tracing its history and considering arguments about who gets in and why. The second part of the course builds on this foundation by focusing on related issues: how college life in the Ivy League is depicted and lived; the mission and purpose of top-flight universities; and the pressures faced by students, faculty, and institutions as they strive to meet new challenges and demands. Students will engage in a combination of independent and collaborative projects. In addition to honing students’ critical reading and interpretive skills, this course facilitates advanced proficiency in descriptive and analytic writing; including effective thesis identification, text summarization, rhetorical analysis, source integration, comparisons, and critical responses.</p>
<p>Students will also improve their research skills through an introduction to resources at Yale (e.g., the library, film studies center, and the Internet) and by working on our course projects. Because this course is skills-based as well as content-driven, individual consultations and writing workshops are an essential part of the class. Each student will self-critique drafts of his/her written work and will receive feedback from the instructor. Because the course emphasizes the importance of writing as a process, revision (in the sense of “looking again” rather than merely spot proofing) is built into the syllabus. In fact, students will revise all of their essays before they are graded and their major research project will be conducted incrementally with ample opportunity for independent revision before it is submitted for a final grade."</p>
<p>DonnaL: There is no “burden of proof” on me, since I have not been out to prove anything. If you haven’t guessed, I have been second guessing my son’s college choice. It’s great that your son has found the best place for him–some of us have not been so lucky. I must say that Chicago is the only school I have found on these boards which seem to have parents that can’t abide any questioning about it, even to go so far as to engage in personal attacks. Mr. Zimmer’s dictum that “argumentation rather than deference is the route to clarity” sure doesn’t apply when it comes to discussions about Chicago I (or to any parent who has attended both Harvard and Yale, lol).</p>
<p>TheDad - I don’t know where you heard that NU Greek participation was 60%, but that’s completely inaccurate. And NU’s Greek system is not the stereotypical Greek system at all.</p>
<p>I find some of this “hassle to take a plane” highly disingenuous. I’m supposed to believe that upper middle class families from the northeast, who expose their kids to all sorts of cultural offerings, travel extensively, juggle high powered EC schedules and stop at nothing to ensure fabulous opportunities for their kids all of a sudden are caught up short by the prospect of getting on a plane and so therefore they just won’t look outside HYPSM? However do they get their kids to Stanford, do you think – do they think it’s in Stamford, CT? I call the bs card on this one. These responses about how it’s so hard to get on a plane are completely disingenuous coming from people who either are, or aspire to be, the elite. Really, people have been going away to colleges for years now, and the pool of “acceptable” colleges for top students widened past HYPSM years ago. </p>
<p>How does it get to be flyover country if you haven’t even flown over it?</p>
<p>Well I suppose if one is paying full fare, it nevertheless could additionally stretch the budget to add transportation costs to everything else – unless the family is truly wealthy. And if one is not, then transportation still comes out of one’s personal budget. (The Elites fund the equivalent of one RT plane ride/yr for those on full FA.) </p>
<p>I do agree, however, that truly casting the net widely is not believably being done if “close to home” is the radius being considered. I got into a cc discussion about this a couple of years ago, with parents stating that “not coming home to (name the relative),” and for every possible important occasion (not just major holidays), was “unthinkable.” Gee, those of us across the country, and looking nationally at choices, don’t have that luxury!</p>
<p>I flew a lot in the 80s and 90s. Late in the 1990s it stopped being enjoyable and felt much like cattle cars and we mostly stopped flying. If you’re in the Northeast, there are a ton of schools where you can visit without flying.</p>
<p>PG: Why is it disingenuous? No one is claiming that it is the over-riding criterion. Take two pizza places of equal quality. One is within walking distance, the other much further. Why would you want to go further? Only if the one further away was clearly superior. As I have pointed out, NE is full of great colleges.
I know that many kids go to college to “see the world.” I, for one, did exactly that. My kids, however, did not feel the same urge, having been dragged to Europe and Asia when they were still in diapers. I have quite a few photos of them asleep in various picturesque spots.
As S1’s GC pointed out, while drawing up a list of LACs all close to home, students start out wanting to go far away, but when push comes to shove, they end up going close to home.
I don’t know how financial aid at various schools compare, but I am sure that for many families, the extra cost of flying at specific times (not when airfares happen to be cheapest) must be a consideration.</p>
<p>epiphany: Now that S has graduated, I rather miss playing host to some of his roommates at Thanksgiving; but my basement is finally clear of their stuff!</p>
<p>As Marite pointed out, for Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, you don’t have a lot of flexibility. The airlines know this and price accordingly.</p>
<p>To change the topic away from traveling, I do want to relate another “rhodes” story to you.</p>
<p>On graduation day, while waiting to get into the commencement quad, I started talking to the family behind us. The father let me know early on that his daughter was an applicant for the Rhodes - she was one of the university’s best students in his opinion. But his daughter did not win because the process was “political”. I did not tell him that my daughter successfully navigated the politics. But I did think it sad that he viewed his daughter as having “failed” in this effort, in spite of her accomplishments. </p>
<p>In the spirit of other posters here, it is interesting how we can take a success (our kid is good enough for…) and turn it into a failure (my kid did not…).</p>
<p>Others have described the difference in student culture. I do think there is another difference, based on the faculty. Northwestern has an excellent faculty in almost every field; you’re absolutely right, mummom, that these people are well qualified. But Chicago’s faculty is simply a cut above, with some of the world’s top scholars in discipline after discipline. An update of the National Research Council faculty rankings by academic discipline is long overdue—the latest we have is from 1995. But those 1995 rankings are probably still pretty accurate as to how the faculties at the two schools are perceived by their peers in the same fields. In a survey of 41 “core academic disciplines” in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, natural sciences, and engineering, Northwestern’s faculty ranked in the top 10 in 6 fields and in the top 25 in 17 fields. That’s a very strong showing. Chicago’s faculty, on the other hand, ranked in the top 5 in 10 fields, in the top 10 in 16 fields, and in the top 25 in 28 fields. What makes this remarkable showing even more extraordinary is that of the 41 “core academic disciplines” in the survey, 8 were in engineering—and Chicago has no engineering school. So, according to its peers, Chicago’s faculty was in the top 25 in 28 of the 33 fields in which it had faculties, in the top 10 in nearly half of them, and in the top 5 in nearly a third. This puts it in pretty rarefied ranks. Harvard had 2 in the top 5, 25 in the top 10, and 29 in the top 25. Yale had 5 in the top 5, 18 in the top 10, and 25 in the top 25. Princeton had 2 in the top 5, 21 in the top 10, and 27 in the top 25. So Chicago’s right in there with them, matching HYP pound-for-pound. </p>
<p>A lot of people on CC want to say this is something that doesn’t matter, and for many students, perhaps most, that’s probably right. Who cares whether the professor teaching your entry-level Macroeconomics class is a present or future Nobel laureate, or instead “merely” a highly skilled, accomplished, and very well-qualified academic economist? But for those with a deeply academic bent, it may matter a great deal. You’ll find a greater density of the Nobel laureate-caliber types on the Chicago faculty, and a lot of the “merely very well qualified” on both faculties. To my mind, that’s a significant difference, and I think in many ways the difference in cultures at the two schools begins there.</p>
<p>Give me a break. These are the parents who have given their children major opportunities all their lives in private lessons, tutors, college counselors, travel, etc. These are parents who can afford to live in the poshest suburbs with top notch public schools, or elite private schools that might be $20-30K / year. Plane tickets are pocket change in the context of $50K/year schools. They can’t really think that getting on a plane is some big life burden (and it sure as heck wouldn’t be some big life burden if their kids went to Stanford). Just be honest – it didn’t occur to them that there was intelligent life beyond HYPSM. In that regard, they just aren’t that different from Flyover Family who doesn’t understand why anyone would go anyplace but Flyover State U or East Flyover State.</p>
<p>I stand corrected re NU’s Greek presence. It’s still a very high percentage. The feeling we got from the tour was that it cast an outsized shadow on NU student life. Which figures…an organized 32 percent is going to have more of an impact than a bunch of disorganized GDI’s. My own alarms go off any time Greek participation goes much above 10-15 percent. YMMV.</p>
<p>Exactly. Heck, my first econ professor at NU had been a member of a former presiden’ts Council of Economic Advisers and was routinely called upon by administration to offer his insights. But it’s a different kind of culture at NU than U of Chicago. Which is not to say that there aren’t many students who would flourish at either - it’s just that their experiences might take them in different dimensions. Please don’t make it a competition between the two. The only reason they get compared so often is because they are in the same city.</p>
<p>mummom, you’re one of the people who began this whole ridiculous discussion by making snide remarks about the U of Chicago and the students there (intellectual poseurs, etc.). (Speaking of personal attacks.) And you’re the one who demanded that people explain why they think Chicago is the equal of the Ivies. Well, I’m under no obligation to answer that question either, because I’m certainly not trying to “prove” anything myself.</p>
<p>It astonishes me that some people are so incredibly hostile to the idea that there might be something “different” about the academic culture at the University of Chicago that makes it a better fit for certain kinds of students than just about any other school would be. Nobody seems to take that attitude when people say that other schools (particularly Ivy League schools) have specific strengths or qualities. </p>
<p>And anyone who knows anything about the history of the University of Chicago should realize that it’s <em>always</em> viewed itself (not without justification, given the 73 Nobel prize winners who’ve been on the faculty, more than any other university) as a Midwestern Ivy League-type school, from the time it was founded in the 1890’s; the original faculty and administration were predominantly Yale or Harvard graduates. Even the Gothic architecture is very reminiscent, something that struck me the first time I visited. So I’m not sure why this appears to be such a surprise to some. Maybe it’s the name. Sometimes I suspect that if John D. Rockefeller had permitted the U. of Chicago to name itself after him, this sort of discussion wouldn’t be occurring at all anymore.</p>
<p>Speak for yourself. a $500 plane ticket may be “pocket change” for you. It is not for us. </p>
<p>Tuturs, college counselors, travel? Driving a 10 year old car to do a college tour was our idea of travel. Tutors, forget it. Too expensive. </p>
<p>During college, we gave up almost all meals out (OK, I confess, we did go to a restaurant for our anniversary one year!), had no cable, old car and such.</p>
<p>Get serious for a change. Stop stereotyping. You just have no idea.</p>
<p>“These are the parents who have given their children major opportunities all their lives in private lessons, tutors, college counselors, travel, etc. These are parents who can afford to live in the poshest suburbs with top notch public schools, or elite private schools that might be $20-30K / year.”</p>
<p>$15 trillion went up in smoke in 2008. Most of that was probably in the hands of the wealthy. The country has borrowed a few trillion and tossed it back in but a massive amount of wealth has been wiped out.</p>