<p>Oldfort, this thread wasn’t ever about T20 or bust.<br>
Anyway, the best way is to choose really rich parents with open checkbooks, LOL.</p>
<p>Hmom - great quote that it’s a much more elite concept to believe in fit.</p>
<p>Not something I was thinking of, but it did then occur to me some of my daughter’s day school friends did end up doing a 13th year at a boarding school.</p>
<p>The title to this thread is leading some posters (like me) to post the responses we are posting.</p>
<p>Another thing…if your child has an unweighted GPA of 3.6 but a weighted GPA of 4.2 and SAT scores exceeding 2100, they will be in a very different admissions situation stats wise than a child with an unweighted GPA of 3.6 and the SAME weighted GPA…and an SAT in the 1500 range. Sorry…but that is a fact.</p>
<p>In fact, there are some schools (no not in the top upteen) that actually have a formula for admission and/or merit aid based on GPA and SAT score (a combination of these two criteria).</p>
<p>So…having a 3.6 GPA isn’t the WHOLE picture…there are a lot of other criteria that impact admissions.</p>
<p>So, what are the sweet spots (I’m liking that concept) for each group of said kids?
And yes, I’m not looking for “top 20-30” vs “top 31-40” or that fine a level, but just an understanding of the range.
I do view USN rankings as “bands,” but I’m trying to figure out the relative size and overlap of the bands.</p>
<p>The Common Data Set for each college will tell you the admissions statistics for the previous school year. They will give you the %age of incoming freshman with certain GPAs and the %age with certain SAT scores. </p>
<p>In addition, if your school uses Naviance (I believe someone else already pointed this out), the scattergram will also give you at least an indication of where your child’s stats and the acceptance from YOUR kid’s school lie.</p>
<p>Those are the best places I know of to find the “soft spots”.</p>
<p>blossom, whoa. I usually love your wise and wonderful posts, but I don’t get the anger here. I can tell you my kid hasn’t been phoning it in the past four years. He chose to attend the program he’s in and knew it would likely mean a decent hit to his GPA. If he’d wanted to phone it in, the neighborhood HS is right down the street. He works a hell of a lot harder than his older brother who racked up the goodies two years ago. As I mentioned upthread, he doesn’t even know what the rankings for the schools on his list are. I didn’t til I peeked last week. No Ivies on his list, either. </p>
<p>OTOH, he has a pretty nice list of schools where he feels he’d be happy and challenged, and they run across the spectrum. Heck, the list he decided not to apply is as balanced as the list he did choose!</p>
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<p>Pitifully, for me at least, so far I havent even gotten to the ones that arent brand name yet. It was more about discovering other brand name schools outside the T20. Why did I missed them before? A bit of ignorance and a bit of out of touch with reality. May be because I didnt realize how dominant GPA weighs in the admission process. Anyway, here are some of the schools I discovered: Tufts, Brandeis and BC. They all have good life sciences program that DS1 is interested in. They all have quality students and all are competitive enough that DS1 wont have much of an opportunity to slack off, and yet not too competitive to the point of choking. To be honest, they all may still be reaches for DS1.</p>
<p>
[Mount</a> Holyoke College :: Prospective Sudent FAQ](<a href=“http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/sfs/19552.shtml]Mount”>http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/sfs/19552.shtml)</p>
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<p>[Smith</a> College: Financial Aid](<a href=“http://www.smith.edu/finaid/prospect/policy.php]Smith”>http://www.smith.edu/finaid/prospect/policy.php)</p>
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<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/education/31college.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1</a></p>
<p>R124687 - I salute you for raising up a fine daughter on your own! Don’t you worry about her college apps. If she just be herself and write up good essays, she can get in to many good schools. You’ve achieved as a parent something that I envy very much.</p>
<p>Naviance just being introduced, so of little use esp given where kids around here apply which is generally in state.</p>
<p>I hate to be really dumb, but is there a Common Data set across all colleges that I can search, or do I have to search college by college? Is it in Excel?</p>
<p>Colleges are like cars; some people just have to have a Ferrari, Bentley or Rolls.</p>
<p>Others will buy a Cadillac while secretly envying a Mercedes.</p>
<p>Still others will get a Volkswagen and then explain to you how it’s really an Audi with a less expensive cover.</p>
<p>Then there’ll be those who buy a Ford or a Chevy and wonder what all the fuss is about.</p>
<p>Cash for Thinkers I guess.</p>
<p>^^ There is a common data set thread on cc, pizzagirl, started by tokenadult, I think</p>
<p>Pizza Girl</p>
<p>Here is a thread on common data sets <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/76444-links-common-data-sets-posted-colleges.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/76444-links-common-data-sets-posted-colleges.html</a>. </p>
<p>I have found lots of useful information on this thread - many thanks to the posters.</p>
<p>This thread is growing faster than I can keep up! So many great posts.</p>
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<p>They absolutely can. They can certainly pore over the websites and stats on their own, but the rankings from USNWR is more than just a list. They have consolidated a bunch of relevant stats and info into one place for you. I certainly use more than just a rank number from them in my search of suitable schools. Of course, you must also talk to folks who know the school from personal experience.</p>
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<p>Make sense to me, especially considering private school-to-private college transition. However, I always believe the best public school kids would outshine the best private school kids because, without the “benefit” of close supervision and careful grooming, the public school elite kids tend to be more self propelled. Many public school elite kids also went through and survived hardships that made them more mature and street smart. Just my little unproven theory.</p>
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<p>This seems to be the prevailing belief that somehow smaller schools would be more “nurturing”. Well, it might be, but if things don’t work out for junior, the alternatives are also limited.</p>
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<p>It really depends on the kid. If you kid is self-propelled type, he will find challenges in any college. He’ll take on a grad level class or an independent research, if he can’t find other challenging undergraduate work. If he needs a little or a lot of peer competition to push him along, then go to a school where his stats are either in the middle or lower end of the pack in his interested field of study.</p>
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<p>True, but the real question for most parents is what will trigger my kid to challenge himself? See the above.</p>
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<p>This is the kind of passion that I was describing as necessary for our kids to hopefully make up some of the ground they lost on GPA. It validates what I wrote upthread - that passion is transferable. hyeonjlee - thanks a lot for sharing this with us, and congratulations on your son’s accomplishment.</p>
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<p>Very nice analogy. The nice thing about life is we will have many opportunities to change boat and start over. Btw, what if after being on a boat, my kid wants to be the captain? Lol.</p>
<p>I believe the issue of fit is really like physical training. I want both of my sons’ education to be like a good work out. Strenuous enough in areas and domains that matter to them to tear some muscles in the process of rebuilding them to bulk up and become stronger, but not strenuous enough to damage them. Along the line of this philosophy, I don’t believe a blind pursuit of T20 or T40, or whatever, is the right strategy.</p>
<p>S1 has an extraordinarily gifted intellectual mind. In order for him to get a “good workout” in this domain, he needs to be in an environment where the intellectual challenge and vigor are in the air he breathes and water he drinks. Though one can find an island of such environment in a large state university, the nature of the state schools’ mission simply does not let them create an environment where there is the highest concentration of like minds uniformly all around as a default. Collective intellectual development is like a chemical reaction. There has to be enough concentration of the active agents/ingredients before the chemical reaction takes place. Historically, you see a spark of extraordinary development confined in a small geographical area during a very short burst of time - like the birth of Renaissance in Medici’s Florence or Voltaire’s France during the enlightenment age. This is not a coincidence. You can call me the worst name in the dictionary for being an elitist, but I don’t think we can ignore this reality. This is the reason why we let him turn down a full ride scholarship offer from a good school and are paying a full sticker price for U Chicago.</p>
<p>For S2, we are looking for different kind of strenuous work out environment. He wants to join Army upon graduation as an officer and eventually pursue a public career. We apply the same philosophy here, but with a different “active ingredient/agent” in mind for a different kind of chemical reaction, and I believe T20ish environment is not necessarily the best fit for him. Instead of “huffing and puffing” to keep up with the academically super competitive student body which may leave not enough energy to cultivate and nurture different kinds of capabilities, he would be better off where academically he is comfortably upper middle of the road, with spare brain parts that can be directed to further his interest in government and military related issues and extra curricular activities. He is a rising HS junior. Next spring, he wants to enroll in a very intense mountain search and rescue certification program sponsored by Air Force. It’s such an intense commitment and mostly targeted at adults, in all likelihood, it will impact his grades and SAT prep seriously. He already has a very exciting ECs in all things related to Military, so any further enhancement in this area will yield a meager marginal return. If he were to maximize his chance of getting into a better school, the better use of his time is to improve his grades and SAT scores. Yet, I am fully behind him. That’s what he wants to do, well, that’s what he will be doing - if that bumps his school choice from top 50 to top 100, that’s fine. </p>
<p>Even putting aside the philosophical issue above, there are mundane considerations for why T20 is not a panacea for everybody. It really depends on what the kid wants to do upon graduation. In my industry (high tech), we are not really into the brand name diploma obsessively. My former company was Fortune 100, global elite company in my field. When I was hiring people, I did not obsess at all what undergraduate school they came out of. We were much more merit based. If the goal is Ph.D. degree, then again, a good public state school provides all the opportunity you need to get into the top tier Ph.D. program and from then on, it’s the Ph.D. degree school that matters, NOT a whit of which undergraduate school you went to. Furthermore, if a top 10 law school is a goal, then you are actually much better off getting 4.0 from state schools than struggling to get 3.5 in a top notch school full of grade grubbers. On the other hand, through the whole process of learning about S1’s career path, I discovered that Wall Street is full of diploma bigots so much so that if you are not going to one of the well known “target schools”, even getting a job interview is a major huddle. Hence, the reason why S1 really wanted to go to U Chicago even though he had a full ride offer somewhere else.</p>
<p>I reiterate the point I made in an earlier post I made: which race do we want our kids to run? 100m or Marathon? I would rather see my kids train for the marathon than 100m. Entering that “brand name college” is not even 100m run, maybe just 50m -these kids have another 80 years to live well past the age of 18 when they enter college. Let them take a deep breath and pace themselves.</p>
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<p>This almost made me cry. We often underestimate how fragile and sensitive our kids are, boys or girls. As they move along their teenage years, they may not appear to care much of what we parents think, but deep down some of them really really care a lot of what we think of them and whether or not we approve of them. In fact, what we parents think of them has a dominant impact on their own self-esteem and self-worth. One timely praise to a child hungary for parental approval not only can put a beaming smile on an angelic face, but also leaves a lasting well of strength from which the child will be able to draw from again and again. I still remember the impact I felt while watching a 12-year old home video showing me wrestling with my kids, when DS1 turned to me and said, “Dad I thought you were God then.” We absolutely have to be sensitive and careful on what we say to them, especially in our anger and in our own disappointment.</p>
<p>^^^This is why it’s so important to have rolling/EA/solid matches and safeties on the list. One of my kids is sensitive to disappointment, and I believe that tailored some of the choices on his list. This college process can be brutal to one’s self-esteem, so I think it’s important as parents <em>we</em> don’t get too wrapped up in acceptances as defining our child’s worth and communicate that (consciously or unconsciously).</p>
<p>Our kids will need all the self-belief and confidence they can muster to head off to college and make their own paths.</p>
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<p>Well said. I spent most of the morning trying to explain this to my husband. He’s very smart and successful but he’s a ‘doer’ (and I mean that in a good way!). For him, being in an intellectually invigorating environment means nothing, for me, it was everything. Unfortunately, I ended going to the state university because it was all I could afford at that time but I would have loved to have gone to a small, intellectually challenging college.</p>
<p>Our son is exactly like me in this regard. U Chicago seems just like what he is looking for (although a little on the larger size than most on his list) but if he can’t get in there, there are a number of schools that would fit the bill. Although, he has a few top 20 on his list, I don’t think he has much chance getting in to them. But you never know - anything is possible.</p>
<p>This is hard stuff. A lot of us have spent 18 years thinking our kid will go to a brand name school (top 20 or not) and then you realize that is not at all what your child has in mind. To be honest, there is a large part of me that only wants our son to find a good fit and then there is another (smaller) part of me that thinks ‘for $50,000 a year he should be going to a school that at least people have heard of’. That darn ego keeps rearing its ugly head!</p>
<p>Any one else having this problem?</p>
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<p>I struggle with it every day.</p>
<p>^^^And I’m thinking, “Who the heck pays $50,000 a year for college?” No matter HOW great the school is.</p>
<p>We have sent our kids to the best schools that will give them money for being the fairly outstanding kids that they are. HYP schools don’t give that sort of money, unless you are lower income, which we are not.</p>
<p>Now with child #4, we are trying to find a good fit and it is not as clear as with the other 3. He’s smart, great test scores, great grades, but…not as much of a self-starter as the other 3.</p>
<p>Will he be shortchanged if he goes to X school (that gives money) when a “better” school that costs us twice as much might be better for him? Who knows?</p>
<p>'Tis a puzzlement.</p>