<p>It is hard for the parents to decline a full ride, but it is even harder for the child to decline admission to a top school.</p>
<p>I guess the child needs to be practical too and think of the future. It needs to be a combined effort. And in your case,colodad DU/CU is a top school - you and your daughter are getting the BEST deal.
ANyway, best of luck and hope you decide what is best. Keep the forum informed :)</p>
<p>DU is a fine school. Condi Rice graduated from there and she’s not doing too bad (or just too bad), depending on your political view :-)</p>
<p>From several thousand miles away here, Colorado College means a lot more than University of Denver. Maybe not if one plans to stay in Colorado, though.</p>
<p>This is so tough on the kids! They want to “go away” from home. They want to go to the school that “appears” on surface to be more well known. I know, I went through the very same thing 30 some years ago. I ended up at the (what was really the best choice) school in my home state. As a parent we can tell the kids that they won’t be sitting next to their high school classmates. We can tell them after a short period of time they will stop thinking “what if”, that they won’t be coming home every weekend… but it’s so tough. I would vote for DU also over Boulder just because of everything that’s been pointed out. The cost difference between WashU and DU is just too much to ignore as a parent. Hopefully she will come around to that decision and be happy with it. My oldest looked seriously at DU and some of my friends’ kids did, including the daughter of a Colorado College grad. It’s a solid school for undergraduate work.</p>
<p>I’m not a big fan of DU – but given the choice of this school free vs. WashU & debt, there is no doubt I’d recommend DU. Your child is clearly a very good student who, like most good students, will make the most of DU and go on to a satisfying, enriching graduate program of her choice – without the burden of debt on either of you. After she gets her BA take her to Europe, live it up, and smile with satisfaction that the trip is costing you a teeny tiny fraction of one year’s tuition :)</p>
<p>JHS, Colorado College means a lot more than DU in Colorado as well. It’s very different in orientation and much more selective. </p>
<p>625M, I don’t know if your child needs financial aid, but I hear Colorado College is suffering in this economic climate. You may want to check out its financial status if getting grants/FA is an issue.</p>
<p>Thanks for your replies. Our son is leaning towards DU as he wants a slightly larger school. What do you all think about choosing the “less selective” school? Are the professors really that much better at CC vs DU?</p>
<p>Pre-med at top colleges is highly intense, designed, it would seem, for those who want to get into big-name med schools. Two close friends of my daughter, both top students at an academic powerhouse high school and both with MD parents, started out premed at Wash U and at Northwestern. A slacker guy from their high school class attended Colorado College pre-med and is now a sophomore in medical school. My daughter’s two friends? They dropped out of pre-med in the first year.</p>
<p>If I had a pre-med kid, I would send him/her to a fine, second-tier small college where the program is rigorous but not ridiculous, and where the chance of getting the all-important good grades is much higher.</p>
<p>Actually, many people say that pre-med isn’t the best route at Colorado College simply because their block system is not ideal for the sciences. </p>
<p>625M – Professors at DU will be just fine. It is so hard to get academic jobs in the US that a decent school in a highly-desirable place to live will attract very high caliber faculty. I also think Denver is a far more interesting place to live than Colorado Springs - and closer to skiing/snowboarding :)</p>
<p>Thanks for your messages SuNa and Katliamom. But why do high achieving high school students drop out of pre-med at competitive colleges? Is the competition so brutal at Wash U and Northwestern? I have heard of similar horror stories at UChicago, UC Berkeley and UCLA, and I used to wonder how the kids must feel when they drop out of the pre-med race. Must be heart breaking, isn’t it? All the studying, worrying and going into debt ( at least for some families ) for nothing to show at the end? Has it always been this competitive? How was it 10 or 15 years back?</p>
<p>I don’t know about 10-15 years back. But I can tell that 35 years back it was the same. My alma mater, #1 LAC, claimed a 90%+ med school admissions rate. The reality was that from pre-med to admissions, it was (and likely still is) well under 30%. The weed-out was (and is) very, very real. And the reality was also that, while 30 got into med school, likely another 50-55 would have become very good, very dedicated physicians had they gone to second-tier state schools and been stars. True - there was another 25-30 that had only declared pre-med to please their parents, or truly found other interests, or might not have been able to cut it. But they were the exception, not the rule.</p>
<p>“The reality was that from pre-med to admissions, it was (and likely still is) well under 30%. The weed-out was (and is) very, very real. And the reality was also that, while 30 got into med school, likely another 50-55 would have become very good, very dedicated physicians had they gone to second-tier state schools and been stars.”</p>
<p>Wow! Less than 30% make it from pre-med to admissions? That is sobering statistics indeed! Is this fact widely known among students with pre-med ambitions and their parents?</p>
<p>Yup. And none of the top schools will release the data (they have it, but they won’t release it.) And this is a school with a claimed 90+% med school admission rate.</p>
<p>mini, but isn’t the low premed-admissions rate also due to the fact that many kids simply change their minds? Long before graduation? </p>
<p>I would think the weedout process is no doubt a factor, but I also think the tough reality (and high cost) of medical school, declining incomes among doctors, and growing numbers of doctors leaving the profession are also profound reasons why so few actually enter med schools.</p>
<p>Mini has his take on things; I have mine! Many kids start out pre-med because they like the idea of it all and they are 17 years old and have watched ER and also think that being a doctor will give them prestige and money and a good profession. Then they grow up and find that they are not so interested in medicine after all, and that ORGO is hard and Biology is hard, and they took this GREAT film class or psychology class, and Mom and Dad’s expectations aren’t right there in their faces - and so they switch majors. No tragedy at all!
Go to DU. It’ll be great and free and save money for med school or a european tour. ;)</p>
<p>Well, they ALL changed their minds, except those that applied. That’s almost a tautology. The question is WHY they changed their minds? What induced them to change their minds? Would they have changed their minds had they been in other environments, where they weren’t being weeded out? As I mentioned 25-30 of the students likely were not destined to be doctors in any case, they didn’t have the commitment, or the talent, or had just said they were premed to please their parents (or to have something to say.) But I’m confident that at least double that number would have been great doctors (and gotten into medical school, which would not have been nearly as difficult as getting into #1 LAC) had they gone to a second tier state school, where they would have been academic stars. </p>
<p>It would be easy for any of these schools to release the data - after all they have it. But they won’t. Nor, in the case of some schools, will they release data on students who are denied recommendations by their school, or (in some cases) applied with under a 3.4 GPA.</p>
<p>Maybe if we started calling these schools Top 100 instead of “Second Tier,” the kids would start to get a little more excited!</p>
<p>Just a thought.</p>