<p>I think a better question is, why did you apply to a clearly higher ranked college if you’re planning to go to clearly lesser ranked college?</p>
<p>I second that. One needs to look beyond college to make a best decision. Your chances of getting into professional or graduate school, opportunities for internships and research, cost, grades potential are better at large state schools than anywhere else. Forget the rankings. Position yourself best for postsecondary education.</p>
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This is the first I’ve heard of this. The Jefferson Scholar’s Foundation is independent and UVa Admission was not involved in that email.</p>
<p>Sounds to me like the Jeff folks might have been looking into adding partial scholarships to their awards. Again, this is the first I’ve heard of this.</p>
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<p>Sounds reasonable, expect very few students (6 to 7 a year) from Berkeley, the top public school in the country, end up at Harvard law. That compares to about 200 from Harvard, 65 from Yale, 40 from Princeton, all much smaller schools. Most large publics send not a single student to Harvard Law in a typical year.</p>
<p>If the objective is to get into the top law, business or medical schools, you have much better odds as an undergraduate at a top private, whether LAC or university. Same thing with many graduate programs. If your objective is to get into MIT for grad school, by far your best chance is to start as an MIT undergrad.</p>
<p>My d. turned down Williams (and a bunch of others) to go to Smith. In her two main areas of interest - medieval and Renaissance music/opera and Romance Languages - Williams is clearly academically inferior; in fact, it wasn’t even close.</p>
<p>^ (cellardweller’s post) Right, but people who have been accepted at Harvard represent a very small portion of each class at Berkeley. One suspects they may have better-than-average chances of being accepted at Harvard again for law school.</p>
<p>(Does HLS really take 40% of its class from Harvard College? That’s a little hard to believe. I would believe 20%, but not 40%.)</p>
<p>87 UCBerkeley students applied and 17 are admitted to Berkeley Law in 2008. 148 Yale students applied and 51 are admitted to Berkeley Law. UCB has sent only 1 or 2 to Yale Law each year. Considering the size of schools, it must be hard to be the top in UCB.</p>
<p>[post</a> about stats of Harvard Law](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061859874-post7.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061859874-post7.html)</p>
<p>My niece turn down Stanford for UC Berkeley because of cost. She end up attending Columbia law school. I firmly believe it is the person, not the school, that counts. She will most likely end up at a very good law school if she attended Stanford as well.</p>
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<p>If that statement were true it would necessarily imply that students at average private colleges are much more capable than their counterparts at even the top publics based on admission results to top professional and graduate programs. Since we know that highly talented students do enroll at public universities, it follows therefore that the school one attends as an undergraduate does have a significant influence, after correcting for individual ability. </p>
<p>The fact that SOME students from public universities get into top law, medical, business and graduate programs simply demonstrates that they are not completely shut out of the top programs. Their odds of admission though are far worse. A number of studies have clearly shown a strong correlation between cost tuition by itself and return on investment in the form of greater income. Whether it is smaller class sizes at private colleges, greater resources per capita or simply the signalling effect to admissions committees or employers, the correlation is substantial. </p>
<p>So the “stash your cash strategy”, go to flagship U for undergrad and hope for top private for grad or professional school may actually be extremely risky. A more likely scenario will be: hope to graduate in four years if the stars align, and attend flagship U for grad or professional school.</p>
<p>mini - But what if your D’s academic interests had changed in four years? I’m sure there are other academic fields in the humanities/fine arts where Williams is academically superior to Smith. I understand that social (and locational?) fit also played a part in your D’s decision, which are less mutable factors, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that Smith will offer superior preparation for Ivy grad school than Williams for the majority of students, based on one anecdote. (With other arguments, sure; but you rarely present those alongside Smith->Princeton.)</p>
<p>Post #201:</p>
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<p>Because you did not have a guarantee that the clearly lesser ranked college would admit you?</p>
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<p>The person may not have “planned” to go to a lesser ranked school. The person may have applied to the higher ranking school hoping for a good F/A or merit package but got zilch or not enough. The person may have applied to the higher ranking school hoping to win a competitive scholarship. The lesser ranked school may have been the “financial safety.”</p>
<p>And…many people don’t know what their EFC is until it’s too late…so, they go to a lesser expensive and often less ranked school.</p>
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A person may have been planning on attending the “clearly higher ranked” school … and then visited their options … and decided the lower ranked school was a better fit for them and they liked it better.</p>
<p>“mini - But what if your D’s academic interests had changed in four years? I’m sure there are other academic fields in the humanities/fine arts where Williams is academically superior to Smith. I understand that social (and locational?) fit also played a part in your D’s decision, which are less mutable factors, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that Smith will offer superior preparation for Ivy grad school than Williams for the majority of students, based on one anecdote. (With other arguments, sure; but you rarely present those alongside Smith->Princeton.)”</p>
<p>The question asked was “why did your kid turn down a clearly highly ranked college”? I answered that - for her, better academics. (Not even close - in Romance Languages, for example, Williams wouldn’t even make the top 30 LACs.) As to changes in fields, always possible, though, in hindsight, I now know that advising at Smith is far, far, far superior to that of Williams (where students complain about it regularly.) As for grad school, I wouldn’t know. Most students, at most schools, don’t go to grad school, so as a general argument for a more highly ranked school, it is a particularly poor one. I do know that, for example, for the best study abroad language programs in Italian, Williams students can’t even apply - they can’t get the pre-reqs. There isn’t an undergraduate opera consortium. These were the two critical items that propelled my d. into graduate school. </p>
<p>But I am not attempting to argue HERE that Smith’s academics are superior (I have elsewhere, as you know, and you pretty much had to accept the argument - the data are quite overwhelming - if folks are interested, they can do a search.) Only that this is why my kid turned down one for the other.</p>
<p>interesting discussion. the Cal over Stanford for cost reasons is understandable but the notion that outcome (grad school, job, etc.) is more important than the experience in the moment at a school that’s the best fit for you shouldn’t be diminished, after-all that’s life…what you’re doing now!</p>
<p>and it’s not logical to say Stanford is the same value to a student as a state school because the real value is the “person”. That’s just wrong.</p>
<p>I think it’s really important to consider which school makes you “feel at home”. I decided against a higher ranked school because I just didn’t feel right there. I also came across this article about college rankings. Thought it was a great perspective: [Ranking</a> the US College Rankings | myUsearch blog](<a href=“http://myusearchblog.com/ranking-the-us-college-rankings]Ranking”>Ranking the US College Rankings | myUsearch blog)</p>
<p>You might find it interesting</p>
<p>My niece was a top student in high school. We have no doubt that she will be successful in college, no matter where that may be. Her family is middle class and she did not qualify for any need base financial aid. The cost difference between full cost Berkeley and full cost Stanford was substantial. I was surprised to hear about her decision but it sure make sense when we look back. She graduated with no debt and got in a Top 5 law school. To say Stanford is a better value than Berkeley will be a subjective statement. It cannot be proved one way or the other.</p>
<p>which has more value, Cal or Stanford…that’s a religious discussion/war:) Although experience has generally taught me that you pay for what you get. And I have yet to experience a government anything that out performs or provides more value than the private sector in the same business.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I would agree with that in most areas…including K-12 education. </p>
<p>But, I must say that public HIGHER education in the US is pretty darn good in many cases. And, they rival or exceed many privates.</p>
<p>However…using your logic that “you get what you paid for,” implies that the person who pays huge OOS tuition to go to Berkeley gets a much better education than the in-state student who paid a fraction. Obviously, not.</p>
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<p>I’ve posted quite a lot about the statistics involved and will compile an FAQ at some point. The short answer is that the NY Times / Revealed Preferences chart is not a report of actual student decisions, but of “robo-cross-admit” decisions made by a predefined statistical algorithm. The robo-decision options are different from the real-life student decision options in that the menu of colleges is the same in each case, but financial aid, geographic distance, and a few other factors are approximately equalized between schools (using another statistical algorithm that may or may not equalize these things correctly). Actual cross-admit decisions of the 3000 students surveyed only play a role in calibrating the parameters of the algorithms. The method was chosen not for being a realistic model of how the decisions are made, but for being the only readily available method that is easy to calculate (i.e., is doable with standard software packages).</p>
<p>The end result is that the Revealed Preferences / NY Times chart is, at best, somewhat correlated with real-life cross admit results. </p>
<p>The only reliable output of the Revealed Preferences model was the huge gap between the top 5-6 schools and all the others. Other than that, the method couldn’t decide whether the upper tier should be a top 5 (HYPSM) or a top 6 including Caltech, nor could it rank linearly within any tier. Every detailed prediction of the model is suspect — for example, their algorithm has Yale beating MIT among science and engineering students.</p>
<p>There are other methodological flaws but the above should be enough of a clue that the NYT chart is basically nonsense and should be treated as such.</p>