<p>is it because these states also have the best colleges?</p>
<p>California
UC's
Stanford
Claremont Colleges
CAL States
CAL Tech</p>
<p>New York
Columbia
NYU
Cornell</p>
<p>Massachusetts
MIT
Harvard
more i dont know of...</p>
<p>These states have strong, long-established (less so for California) middle classes and, overall, a greater degree of wealth than other states. This wealth allows them to have better schools, private tutoring, etc.: this creates stronger students, and the competition from having such high population densities around the major metropolitan areas forces those students to stand out even more.</p>
<p>Massachusetts also has Amherst and Tufts–as well as a number of other fine institutions of higher education that don’t rank in the Top 40 (BC, BU, some of the old Seven Sisters), Hampshire, etc.).</p>
<p>Actually, New York and Mass schools are fed by NJ and MD high schools, two states with highest PSAT cut-offs in the country for National Merit scholars.</p>
<p>i would put connecticut in there as well
and they have some decent schools</p>
<p>trinity, yale, uconn, conn college, wesleyan</p>
<p>Higher concentration of educated parents might have something to do with it. Take the Bay Area for example, most parents are college educated and so must be their kids.</p>
<p>i would put connecticut in there as well
and they have some decent schools</p>
<p>trinity, yale, uconn, conn college, wesleyan</p>
<p>Student body strength tracks income. You just need to go down the list of states of highest per capita income and not surprisingly they are also the states with highest average PSAT and SAT scores. It even tracks down to counties and zip codes. I live in CT and a disproportionate number of HYPSM admits come from wealthier Fairfield County and the most successful high schools are in high income towns such a Westport, Darien and New Canaan which also spend the most on education on a per student basis. </p>
<p>The combination of higher income, college educated parents and strong local spending provides students with a major advantage. The flip side is that the student bodies are also very competitive in those areas and top schools will only accept so many students from a single district, however qualified they may be. It is often much harder to stand out.</p>
<p>CA is ranked I believe 48th in K-12 student success. Having the best colleges (arguable in the case of NY and CA anyway) has nothing to do with anything.</p>
<p>They are just the states that made the investment in higher education. And we need to seperate out state schools and privates. MA’s good schools are private.</p>
<p>Yet CA, and NY to a smaller extent, are now underfunding and overcrowding so who needs where they’ll go.</p>
<p>The northeast as a whole is where a concentration of excellent students and colleges are located. It has to do with the culture that education is very important, which is much less prevalent elsewhere. Massachussetts in particular has a huge number of top-tier schools (Harvard, MIT, Williams, Amherst, BC, BU, Wellesley, etc.)</p>
<p>California is this way more because of the sheer number of people than anything, although they definitely have some great colleges as well.</p>
<p>haha yeah in california our public schools k-12 suck but no state can beat our public colleges. UCS FTW!</p>
<p>Have you visited the UCs? I don’t understand, after my visits, why anyone thinks they’re great! Cal and LA have some great grad schools but all of them are an undergrad nightmare to me-huge, disorganized, lacking resources due to funds, kids can’t get classes needed to graduate, prices rising way faster than at privates…</p>
<p>California doesn’t.</p>
<p>guys forgot Julliard is in NYC…best music program in the country acceptance rate lower than Harvard’s</p>
<p>and just to add to the conversation…its not so much that those states ahve great schools (most northeastern and upper midwestern states have their share of great schools [from UChi in Ill to Dartmouth in New Hamp]) its just that the other states dont value education the same. Like most of the midwest isnt heavily populated enough to be a big enough draw for great professors and the south is like the hub of republican anti-intelicualism (and even they have some pretty amazing institutions of higher learning) </p>
<p>so in short i dont think the schools you mentioned are so different from those states directly around them and the other states have their reasons for not having the same kind of thing going for them</p>
<p>yes i visited ucla and the chicks are mighty fine good looking there… better than those northeastern broads</p>
<p>cellardweller, your post looks interesting. I also live in CT though I’ve only moved to there Feb. 2008 and is currently a high school junior in a town called Waterford (just right by New London). I guess all the highest incomes and psat scores came from that area?</p>
<p>Cardweller, how could you forget Greenwich? The other thig you have in huge numbers in Fairfield county is legacies and recruited athletes, those kids have been coached by pros since birth!</p>
<p>Tzar I find the comment about “republican anit-intelicualism” really offensive as a conservative republican from texas i will tell you that the south is not anti-intellectual, but in fact look at my state. Texas is well represented in all national competitions, has more fortune 500 companies than any other state( except maybe California), the highest number of billionaires (after CA and NY), and also has the second highest GDP in america. It is absurd to classify a region as anti- something and even more offensive to charcaterize it in terms of political affliation. Even being republican makes you dumb then why is Condi Rice a provost at Stanford and she came from the south.
The south has a far amount of smart students and school, and also by schools for the most part there is a correlation between length of time being open and quality look at the Ivies oldest and have time to gather endowment and early leaders went there bc they were the only institutions. Population density is more indicative of academic success than anything else. Because closer population plus limited number of slots in schools leads to higher competition, amplify this over years with increasing number of ppl going to college and those New yorkers are bound to be successful, bc they have to be.</p>
<p>What i have noticed is that ppl on these boards from the north are very ignorant when it comes to the south, I remember one said that ppl lynch blacks in mississippi, perhaps attitudes such as these are a reason southerners do not want to attend the schools in the northeast and therefore since there is less competition, less incentive to be competitive.</p>
<p>newyorka:</p>
<p>Actually Greenwich doesn’t do as well as some other Fairfield County towns because many of the wealthiest residents actually have their kids in private schools in NYC and elsewhere. This is not true in Darien, New Canaan, Westport, Ridgefield or Weston. Greenwich HS is not even in the top 10 in CT. </p>
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<p>It is true there are lots of legacies from elite colleges in Fairfield County. The problems is, there are often so many qualified students applying to HYP from FC, many legacies don’t get in. As far as recruited athletes, much less so.</p>