<p>I have friends that turned down Harvard, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, UChicago for Wesleyan because they visited and fell in love with the school. We’re so small and there is NO academic competition so majority of my friends knew that college was stressful as it is and didn’t want the additional stress brought on by peers.</p>
<p>That and because Wesleyan is just awesome.</p>
<p>^ This is an awesome example of knowing what you want and what you want to avoid and staying firm with your choice. Good post, norolimasfaloth.</p>
<p>Bump up this thread for the this year’s EA round. Does your student plan to turn down a clearly higher ranked college? If so, why?</p>
<p>I have been amazed at how many of the examples don’t speak to colleges that were “clearly higher ranked” being turned down, despite the call of the question. There is, of course, debate on what “clearly higher ranked” means, but to be a salient response to the question, the college turned down would have to be clearly higher ranked in a way that is almost beyond debate. </p>
<p>To answer the immediate question in the thread-bumping post, we are still waiting for regular decision round results and announcements of financial aid packages to be 100 percent sure what to do. My son has some very clear preferences at the top and bottom range of selectivity on his application list–it’s the middle of the list that is hardest to rank clearly by his preferences.</p>
<p>PCP, you already know this from our discussions in the Under 3.6 thread, but to answer your question here: My son is waiting for decisions from Stanford, Rice, and Rochester and has said that he would seriously consider taking a full ride to Pitt, if he gets it, over all of those schools. I wouldn’t say Rice and Rochester are “clearly higher ranked” than Pitt by tokenadult’s definition, but Stanford is. It would be a tough choice, but Pitt’s northern, urban setting (snow!) combined with the prospect of graduating debt-free has him intrigued.</p>
<p>
Well, my DD turned down a great offer at Wellesley which at that time was ranked #1 among LACs. She chose Bard which was clearly ranked somewhere around #30. Other schools she turned down were UVA, #1 public U at the time, William and Mary, usually a top school, too, and Wesleyan which is generally considered a similar school to Bard with a much higher ranking in such polls. </p>
<p>Not sure what this tells us because in her mind (and mine, too) my daughter had already ranked these schools in the order of what was important to her. She paid no attention at all to the USNews ranking of any of the schools and had only applied to Wellesley because she won their award at her high-school. </p>
<p>It’s all about Fit!</p>
<p>It’s not always about cost. DD attended a competitive academic private HS here in the middle of Ivy League territory. She said four years being surrounded with Ivy-envy was enough. No regrets.</p>
<p>Bard over Wellesley and Wesleyan counts for me. Pitt over Stanford (and probably Rice) would count, too. But I’ve known quite a number of kids who were offered the great Pitt scholarship, and I only know one who turned down a clearly-higher-ranked school (Penn) to take it. It’s common to “seriously consider” it like mantori’s son in February, or even in April, but talk to me in May after you’ve signed on the dotted line.</p>
<p>Does turning down Brown for Williams and Barnard? I don’t know how far that Ivy umbrella casts shade.</p>
<p>I was rooting for Brown for DS because it is slightly less rigorous. Ranking had nothing to do with it.</p>
<p>DD just wanted to be in NYC, and to be fair, her feminist self was intrigued by the all women’s college. She hates Providence (a bit snooty, I think.)</p>
<p>Have known many at Williams who turned down Dartmouth and Brown, and even a few (though many less) who turned down Harvard and Yale.</p>
<p>Of course scores turned down Amherst. (LOL. Just kidding.)</p>
<p>I don’t know, US News ranking doesn’t always tell the whole story. D. turned down Chicago for Barnard, clearly Chicago is “higher ranked” – but I really feel that academically Chicago=Columbia and Barnard=Columbia - so I’d put them all on the same level as far as options. </p>
<p>I understand the concept --I just don’t necessarily agree with the way US News does its ranking.</p>
<p>From what I have seen, flagship honors programs may not have impressive overall yields, but they do have lots of students who have turned down higher ranked schools to attend. What seems to happen is that many of these schools are rolling admissions schools and offer honors college acceptances, scholarships, and personalized campus visits well before decisions from higher ranked schools come out Students who initially apply to these schools as safeties often end up knowing quite a bit about opportunities there for top students before they become aware of their other options. Some students who get offers early enough even ditch plans to apply to more reachy schools.</p>
<p>These honors programs also seem to draw from a specific demographic of families who do not qualify for need-based aid, but who find paying full tuition at a higher ranked school to be a hardship. While students who qualify for need based aid may find that it is cheaper to attend an Ivy or similar school, even after a scholarship offer of full tuition, others find a clear financial advantage in attending an honors program. Another consideration seems to be that honors programs seem to offer types of opportunities to all of their students that might not be available to the average student at a highly ranked school.</p>
<p>What I have also seen is that students in these honors colleges admit that they would have gone with a more prestigious (and expensive) offer, even taking out loans, had they not been admitted to the honors college.</p>
<p>What I do have to wonder about is how the rankings would appear were honors colleges to be considered separately for ranking purposes. I am not at all sure that going with PSU Schreyer instead of, say, Cornell, is an instance of turning down a clearly higher-ranked school. I would also be interested in knowing how students who accepted these honors college offers feel about their decisions by graduation, or a few years after.</p>
<p>Anybody who reads my posts knows that I am a Pitt fan. But for JHS, my daughter turned down Chicago, Michigan, and Georgetown for Pitt and one of her friends got in to both CMU and Cornell for engineering and is at Pitt. Both are being challenged and clearly had many options. But these are both kids who have never done things to look good for admissions nor have they been competitive with peers (they both love learning versus earning the grades). If you did a survey of the kids at Pitt who earned those great scholarhips, you would be shocked as to where they were accepted and most chose Pitt so they could graduate debt-free. Smart kids.</p>
<p>This is a “maybe” situation.</p>
<p>Unless I get merit from Scripps and Smith, I will be headed to UAlabama this fall(i hear mom2collegekids cheering somewhere…:))
I also applied to Yale, and even if I get in, it’s not my first choice. Smith is</p>
<p>I’m just contradictory</p>
<p>I’m not receiving merit money from Scripps, so if I get in, I’ll turn it down, probably for either Green Mountain College (fourth-tier) or Hendrix College (second-tier).</p>
<p>my friend turned down harvard, chose to go to CaseWestern for the following two reasons - </p>
<ol>
<li><p>cost. - Harvard offered her scholarship but it’s based on need. Her family is not poor and she has already a lot of scholaship money from other places like intel. so she probably won’t get any money from Harvard. Going to Case, four years her family didn’t spend a penny, not even on books because her merit scholarship covered everything.</p></li>
<li><p>Case Western has good medical program. She wants to be a doctor. She was afraid going to Harvard her GPA won’t be above 3.7 so she won’t be able to go to medical school like Case Western even, after 4 years of college.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I chose Oberlin over Pomona because of the large scholarship offered to me by Oberlin and also Oberlin’s particularly strong neuroscience program. Now that I’m here, I’m so, so glad that I came.</p>
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<p>Good you do not agree with US News … otherwise you’d have to agree that, based on a Barnard yardstick, there are about 20 LACs ranked higher than Columbia and Chicago!</p>
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<p>Right. Some of the examples here:
<p>Just don’t even fit into any classification of “turning down a school for a clearly higher ranked school.” These are all schools in the same general band with one another. These are choices being made between generally equivalent schools with equivalent student bodies. It’s actually kind of pretentious, honestly, to pretend that it was such a sacrifice to drop down to a “lower ranked school” when you’re dancing on the head of the proverbial pin to find differences.</p>
<p>Sorry, Pizzagirl. No insult to you at all, but when a relative turned down Harvard for Northwestern, I thought she was turning down a clearly higher ranked school. So did she and her parents. (And she regretted it later, too.) It would be the same with Yale.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t turn down Harvard for anything. Are you kidding? Harvard is like once-in-a-life-time chance and it’s hard as hell to get into. There’s so many factors it’s not even funny. </p>
<p>However I’ll turn down every other college for any second or third tier if I have to if I get >$20,000 debt.</p>