@data10 Unfortunately, my knowledge of CS106A is from when my daughter attended and so no idea if Zuckerberg is coming around anymore. Even back then (2012-2016), he only did one quarter in the year if I am not mistaken.
I still remember Hennessy telling a parent at parents day that their kid needs to take one computer class at Stanford to be successful in the job market as an english major when a parent lamented about their job prospects. He said a stanford graduate must be able to speak coherently about computers in order to be able to walk into any company in the bay area and demand a job and thats all it took.
You took me too literally. Sure I had heard of a few, but I couldn’t tell Williams from Middlebury from Colby. I had no sense of their quality. At my HS school, the best students go to the major research universities… So, it kind of creates the impression that they are second tier…
Oops, sorry I wasn’t clear. In this case, the “people” in my post are the students and parents at my daughter’s high school. She had one classmate go to an LAC and I’m pretty certain most in her class did not understand it is a good school. There were a handful of T20 admits and I think the only one that probably impressed people was the football player who went to Cornell. At her school the top students usually end up at our state U (which is a good school and has fairly reasonable tuition).
It might not be that simple to compare LACs to other colleges with these rankings.
My D22 was accepted to 4 of tier 4 colleges listed here, none from tier 1 to tier 3, yet she was accepted to Amherst.
I also know two kids who turned down tier 1(MIT, Stanford) and going to Williams and Amherst.
Almost none of the LAC’s mentioned above get the “middle of the class” except at perhaps a handful of top exceptional private or magnet schools. And even then not likely.
That’s really bizarre. Houston is extremely diverse. I dont think your counselors have ever been to the city.
Houston has over a million Hispanic residents. Over 40% of the city is Hispanic. It also has one of the largest amount of Asians outside of NY and California - which is why Rice has so many Asian American students.
There are literally parts of the city with Chinese street signs. The Greater Houston area is also home to the second-largest Vietnamese population in the country.
My kids are mixed (Asian/White). They were born and raised in New England and when they were young, random people came up to my wife and asked where she “got these adorable kids”. My wife finally started telling people she got our kids from Target. They were buy one/get one free so she picked up two. Or they assumed she was their nanny.
I’m not saying it’s equal, nor am I looking for any validation of what I think. It’s just a question based on legitimate curiosity for why you’d have Midd that far apart from the other group. And let me be clear: I don’t have a kid at Middlebury and didn’t attend myself. Just one somewhat distant family member, who himself wouldn’t care at all about this topic.
@prezbucky began this (useful IMO) approach of thinking about these schools in tiers earlier on before I joined and was just reading the boards. I may not agree with every last point of her inclusions and exclusions on the margin, but her justification for that approach make sense. These schools have so many strong indicators of quality that it’s generally a fool’s errand to try and surgically distinguish them to any meaningful degree. Middlebury has a 13% acceptance rate, Williams, 9%. They’ve both been higher than that. Middlebury is great at a lot of things as is Williams, and they’re great at some of the same things and great at different things. Williams has a much higher endowment per student, but if you’ve ever been to Middlebury you’d have to wonder what else a kid could ever want, need or expect from a college. They’ve got it pretty good up there, so it’s not a resources issue. I’m sure someone here can make the case that Williams is the better school, but I don’t think they’re far enough apart to put one in Tier 1 and one in Tier 4 or even 5. That struck me as curious, which is all I was getting at. Nothing more.
Clearly I know about them now. However, I’ll just reiterate that the top students at my HS (myself included) were steered toward Ivy, Duke, Stanford, and MIT, with a few safeties (eg Emory or Vanderbilt). Clearly times have changed, but so little scholarship/innovation comes out of LACs in the first place that very few HS students were aware of them…
I agree. I was replying to a comment about perceptions and a Japanese person not applying to Rice. I do not know what our counselors (plural - meaning more than one said this) were making their guidance based off of.
