<p>“are basically just “Good Enough” Colleges”</p>
<p>Depends who you are and what you want. Temperament plays a big role, not just intellect and motivation. So does the subject you want to study. I regularly, and enthusiastically, recommend Bryn Mawr to my students whose temperament and interests differ from mine. Different stuff rolls off the back of different people. As you can tell, I’m a real grouch if I feel like others are slowing down the class (or the rehearsal, for that matter). A lot of people, especially hard science folks, could not care less about that. They might get grouchy about other things that I wouldn’t even notice, or they might be people who just never sweat the small stuff at all.</p>
<p>In my judgment, when it came to the psychology department, Bryn Mawr was NOT good enough. If I’d been a chemistry or classics major, different story.</p>
<p>Hunt, I’m the last person to advocate “good enough” if the kid clearly wants, needs, and has the temperament for more intense. We were full pay for all our kids, and did so happily, and frankly, were thrilled to see them work hard and take advantage of the opportunities afforded them at their U’s.</p>
<p>As I suggested above, I fully agree that a smart, motivated student can get a top-quality education at a place like UGA, especially if she’s in the honors program. I’m just saying that parents who think the same kid can get the same quality education at West Podunk State College are fooling themselves.</p>
<p>Sample of one: Hanna worked with my D – Bryn Mawr was her second choice behind Wellesley, and Hanna most certainly recommended it wholeheartedly for my D, whose interest areas and temperament are far different from Hanna’s. </p>
<p>To the concept of “you can receive a good education most anywhere” – I do think it’s temperament-dependent. I have the type of temperament where I would have easily gotten discouraged, unhappy, depressed if I had had to go to a Big State U where I perceived that most students weren’t serious about their studies. (And indeed I know of people who had no choice but to do that type of thing, and wound up dropping out of Big State U and having to regroup.) There are other temperaments that are better able to say “I’ll find my tribe in Big State U and enthusiastically seize every opportunity!” I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing that I have the first temperament described - frankly it could be considered a weakness on my part and / or a strength on the part of the second type of student I described.</p>
<p>Our first three kids went to excellent schools and our daughter to a state U. If things had been different in regard to our daughters emotional health she never would have been at the state U. I really beg to differ that all schools provide the same education…not by a longshot. I agree that students should not have great debt, and I will also agree that a student can learn just about anywhere but I completely disagree with those who insist on saying that kids experience the same education, experiences or opportunities across the board. That just is not the case with any kid that I have met.</p>
<p>Perhaps it could also depend on the student’s major. If the high achiever going to Big State U is majoring in something that attracts high achievers (philosophy? pure math?), that may result in finding a different peer group compared to majoring in something known as an “easy” major at that school (or yet another type of peer group in majors popular with pre-med or pre-law students).</p>
<p>To move from my-anecdote-tops-your-anecdote to some data, the NSSE (as reported in “Academically Adrift” and elsewhere) shows much more variation within institutions than between institutions, in measures of student academic engagement. </p>
<p>This means that yes, some schools have more academically engaged students than others; but a student who is determined to get a good education (as opposed to just a credential) can do that at any school; and a student who is determined to skate through with the minimum effort possible to get the credential can do that at any school as well.</p>
<p>So what does the name on the piece of parchment tell you? Probably how good the graduate was in high school; certainly how much somebody paid for the process; but not necessarily how educated the bearer is.</p>
<p>There may be fewer ‘bad’ students at a good school (no point being bad and paying for it) but it’s more of an effort to quantify ‘bad’ than anything else… </p>
<p>At Cajun State, we had the good students (I’d like to think I was one) and we were pretty good; the bad, well, they could not code their way out of a paper bag…</p>
<p>At Purdue, I was still among the good students, but even those who ‘struggled’ were exceptionally good overall. </p>
<p>And, as noted in a previous post, the higher minimum standard for the “bad” students may allow for certain courses to go at a faster pace, have more difficult assignments, projects, and tests, and cover more advanced material. However, this may not necessarily be true for all courses at the more selective school.</p>
<p>Some big universities with a relatively wide range of student abilities offer rigorous honors courses to the most motivated students, even as they offer joke courses that allow the “bad” students to pass. Or some majors may be known as “hard” with high levels of course rigor, and the “bad” students avoid going anywhere near those majors.</p>
<p>This could also be caused by factors having little to do with the intelligence or intellectual capabilities of the students on a given campus:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Campuses with a critical mass of students with pre-professional bents tend to create an atmosphere which discourages such “magical” or “intellectual” discussions. Not too surprising considering most pre-professional students IME find such discussions to be a “complete waste of time”, not relevant to what they “need to know for their future profession”, and/or over their head…though they’ll never admit to this if confronted. </p></li>
<li><p>A given campus/department/class may attract a more introverted type student who may be too shy or not interested in publicly participate in class discussions. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>That’s not to say I seek to excuse students who exhibit such lack of willingness to participate in such “magical” or “intellectual” discussions without being constantly prodded by the Prof. Instead, I cite these as ways to account for such factors so parents, Professors/TAs, and concerned classmates can better attempt to overcome these issues. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The high school classmates from my graduating class who ended up at Harvard were there around the same time you attended. Some of them had the exact same observations of their classmates’ writing abilities in their expository writing classes as you did in yours. Others had markedly different experiences in their respective writing classes with classmates whose writing abilities left much to be desired. </p>
<p>However, the proportion of such lackluster or poor writers in relation to the Harvard student body is smaller than what one would experience at a lower-tiered institution.</p>
<p>my question is: if you know your child, and have a sense of what kind of educational environment they need, how do you know you’re going to get it in a specific school? You’d really have to sit in on a few classes and hear students speak up in class (or not). You can’t tell what the student body is like, academically, from walking around campus on a tour. This is what kills me – we all visit the colleges with our kids; we read the reviews on clg ******* and other sites; we check out their listing on USNWR, but how do you get reliable info on the texture and quality of the academic experience before your kid actually attends?</p>
<p>Exactly. Some campuses encourage kids to sit in on classes during their visit, and even if they don’t it should be possible to do with or without prior arrangement. Our child sat in on the same Psych 101 class at a LAC and at one of the UC’s. The LAC class had 16 students, most of whom participated in the discussion led by the professor. The UC class was comprised of 500 students in an auditorium, most of whom were perusing Facebook during the movie shown while the prof stood near the exit texting.</p>
<p>When I was in junior high and high school, my mother, who was a divorced woman with a modest income, managed (through help from a family member) to buy a house in a very nice neighborhood. Everyone around us had much more money than we did – which is similar, I think, to the situation of the family that buys the smallest house in the neighborhood. </p>
<p>It was an unpleasant experience for my sister and me. The kids around us had many opportunities that we didn’t – extensive family travel, fancy summer programs, expensive sports like skiing, and in some instances, private schools. We never felt that we belonged there. We always felt inferior.</p>
<p>A generation later, both of my kids made the decision not to apply to any reach schools. Each of them – separately, three years apart – chose colleges for which they were well qualified and where their statistics placed them in the top half of the student body. It worked out well. Not only did both of them get into their first choice colleges, they found plenty of interesting opportunities during college that might not have been available to students in the lower half of the class. One got involved in research (not a routine thing at a large state university) and completed an honors thesis. The other graduated with an extraordinarily high GPA, which facilitated getting a job in an industry that greatly values high GPAs. Both had the chance to work as undergraduate TAs, and both found good summer internships. </p>
<p>If your child goes to the most selective school that he or she is qualified to attend, your child will not be one of the better students there. There are disadvantages to this.</p>
<p>Edited to add: Perhaps I should mention that the colleges my kids attended were not bottom-of-the-heap schools. One went to a state flagship, the other to one of the less selective schools in the Ivy League.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. I knew many college and HS classmates who were initially at the bottom end of the admit pool at their respective reach schools who ended up excelling at their respective reach schools. I myself am an example of this considering how cringe-worthy my HS grades were…especially in the first two years.</p>
<p>Obviously, there is departmental variation here. Philosophy students and business students at the same school may differ in this respect.</p>
<p>But even within the same department, there are variations. For example, subjects like computer science, engineering, math, art practice, and music are often seen as pre-professional subjects (and certain other subjects like biology, English, and political science are often chosen for pre-professional-school reasons). But it is often obvious that some students really do like the subjects and willingly engage in intellectual discussions about them, while others are just in it to qualify for a job. The former are more likely to be at the top of their class.</p>
<p>Agreed. The fact one friend was in the former category…sometimes to the great annoyance of his mostly extreme pre-professional classmates is one crucial factor why he’s now working at a topflight computer technology firm(i.e. Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) whereas the vast majority of the latter classmates are currently underemployed, unemployed, or moved out of CS related careers altogether.</p>