<p>Probably not so much that they <em>need</em> to associate with their own kind in order to flourish, but that when they <em>do</em> associate for 4 years with others at their intellectual and achievement level, they gain more in the flourishing department than if they spent the same 4 years with others who are less intellectually capable/curious/accomplished as they. </p>
<p>If it makes no difference in whose company you learn, then why even go to college? Why not just take all your classes on the internet?</p>
<p>parent57, I have no interest in discussing the vastness of my experience. And I have no interest in getting into a pointless argument. </p>
<p>There is a young man and a family grappling with a pretty major decision that will impact not just the next 4 years of his life but possibly well beyond that.</p>
<p>I do not believe in running down schools that I know nothing about. I have repeatedly said that I know nothing about USD. Nothing good, nothing bad. I have a positive experience with Yale and I like to share it with people who have an interest in knowing.</p>
Except that it is relatively simple to quantify golf performance but quite difficult to quantify academic potential.</p>
<p>Further, even if we conclude that Tiger Woods is a better golfer it is not at all clear that I should choose to golf with Tiger instead of with you. That choice is entirely dependent on what I hope to achieve from my day on the links as well as my personal evaluation of both Tiger and yourself.
I would have much more sympathy for your argument if you had not chosen to open your post by continuing the swan/duck metaphor. Because that metaphor is an exceptionally clear example of considering oneself superior to others.
But it is very difficult to determine what will cause desirable personal growth. Or even what kind of personal growth might be beneficial. Higher education itself has no universal monopoly on such experiences.
Money is simply a means by which one can obtain goods or services. The message is not necessarily that “money is more important than education”. It may simply be that some alternative uses for said money have more to offer than whatever the difference in education may be.</p>
<p>Also, any time loans are in the picture the situation becomes more complicated.</p>
<p>First, I did not start the use of that metaphor, I was just going along with it to point out that people tend to get inflated egos when they are surrounded by others of less ability and they tend to become more modest when they are surrounded by others of equal or greater ability.</p>
<p>Second, I don’t think a duck would agree that swans are superior or prettier than them.</p>
<p>Perhaps the more appropriate metaphor would be from sports. If you are an average NBA player and if you want to keep playing at a top level and keep improving your game, it would be most helpful if you could practice with and play with other top level basketball players. Sure, there may be reasons why you would much prefer playing with the regular guys in the neighborhood. Maybe you get along better with the guys in the neighborhood. Maybe you like being a superstar in the neighborhood league. But if that is all you do for 4 years, you should not be surprised if at the end of it all, your game is not as good as it would have been had you continued in the NBA. </p>
<p>Where that analogy fails, though, is that you generally come out ahead financially if you play in the NBA :)</p>
<p>^ While I do not disagree entirely with the basketball metaphor, I think it is important to recognize that basketball offers a number of fairly clear ways to evaluate the quality of your game. While different approaches may have their supporters, there are a number of stats that do provide strong evidence of superior play.</p>
<p>No such metrics exist for education. I can probably say that Kobe Bryant has achieved more as a basketball player in the NBA than I have shooting hoops in my driveway. But it is not nearly so clear that a student at Exeter has attained greater educational achievement than I have at a public high school because the relative worth of different kinds of education is subjective.</p>
<p>I’ve read here on cc that there is a presumably objective study out there that concludes that a high-achieving student will fare the same vis-a-vis eventual income whether he goes to a top college or a lower ranked college. If true, then OP’s son will make the same money whether he goes to USD or Yale. If income is the only thing that matters to OP’s son, then he might as well go to USD.</p>
<p>I assume he is looking for something more out of college than earning capacity, or else he wouldn’t be having trouble making a decision.</p>
<p>Yale and USD obviously offer different experiences, otherwise USD would be just as popular and highly regarded as Yale, right? It is not, so Yale either really does offer something better, or everyone, including the “experts,” must have been duped like the Emperor and his new clothes.</p>
subjective: taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias <a href=“link”>url=WordNet Search - 3.1;
<p>It is entirely possible that Yale offers something better for some people but not for others. That is my argument. If I am correct, then the only people who are “duped” are those who apply “expert” rankings to themselves without first determining whether the so-called expert’s methodology is in line with their own values and needs. I believe the dictionary contains a term for such people as well…</p>
Well, I guarantee that playing with me will not improve YOUR game, while playing with Tiger might. Although I guess you might get in some extra putting practice while I’m in the rough.</p>
<p>The sports metaphor is a good one. Another one would be this–if you are an instrumentalist, you want to be in an orchestra with other instrumentalists who are at least in the same league with you–you might want to be first chair, but you don’t want to be the only virtuoso in a group of average players. Is the difference between USD Honors and Yale like that? I don’t know enough about USD to really say, but based on the scores and grades of its incoming freshmen, I would say that the non-honors classes at USD are likely to be significantly less challenging than similar classes at Yale because of the makeup of the student body. This kind of decision is tougher the greater the gap is between the no-cost college and the high-cost selective college–I don’t know how big the gap is here, but I do know that people agonize over this even with the gap is much smaller.</p>
<p>Nobody would deny there is some significant benefit to attending these elite schools, and part of it is the student body. In general and on average, the student body at Yale is obviously more academically apt than the student body at most other schools. The OP’s question would be absurd if this wasn’t true. However it is truly bizarre to me how some posters cannot see how snooty and elitist their posts come across. Maybe that’s not how they intend them, but that’s how they come across to me, and I’m not alone apparently.</p>
<p>Not even the administrators at these schools claim to select the student body based on a pure academic meritocracy. Take a look at some of the accept/reject threads on this website. And if you read the blog posts from MIT they make it clear that a majority of the applicants could handle the rigors of their curriculum. If you consider that there are also a number of students who could handle those academics who don’t apply that makes for a large number of brainy kids attending other places.</p>
<p>Maybe like Larry Page, who attended U of Michigan for undergrad, or Sergiei Brin at Maryland. Or maybe Lee Bolinger, president of Columbiam who I think was rejected at Harvard and attended the Univeristy of Oregon, of all places.</p>
<p>That’s why I posed the “swan and dove gore point” question (somewhat facetiously I admit) earlier in this thread.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’ll bid farewell to this thread. I’ve contributed enough silliness to the hijacking of the OP’s serious thread.</p>
<p>
If the goal is to improve your golf game, maybe the new Tiger should play with a clone of the old Tiger.</p>
<p>Both of our girls have done ballet since they were little. We had to move them to more advanced and serious ballet studio as they progressed. They loved their first studio where it was very nurturing and fun, but they were bored after a while.</p>
<p>People who are familiar with ballet (or dance) would know the same movement could be done in different degrees of difficulty, that’s why anyone could take an open class and get what they want out of it. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be much of a difference in going to a top ballet studio vs a mediocre studio. But in our experience, when our girls were around better dancers, they pushed themselves harder. A more serious studio employ better teachers (dancers), those teachers expose students to different/unique techniques. Students at those studios have more oppotunity to perform. They also perform on better stages (Detroit Opera House vs local middle school auditorium). Those students walk and talk ballet.</p>
<p>Our girls, at some point, did come to realization that they weren’t the SAB (Yale) material. They didn’t have the body type or talent to get that brass ring. They did have an opportunity to study with some ABT teachers, and it was an experience they would never forget. Both of them came back from those summer intensives as better dancers.</p>
<p>College education is very similar to ballet training. They are not all equal. Top tier colleges offer better academic opportunity. It is not right for every student, and not every student needs it or could handle it.</p>
<p>By going to a top tier school doesn’t make someone a better person (my kids are just as good of people as those SAB dancers), but we are just fooling ourselves in saying there is no difference in what those colleges have to offer.</p>
<p>I think one thing to point out, and which may explain a little bit of the anti-Yale reaction here, is that an education at one of these highly selective schools is a luxury, not a necessity. As with all luxuries, people who value it will defend it, and people who don’t value it that much will say it’s not worth it. Some of the people who defend it may be elitists, and some of those criticizing it may really exhibiting sour grapes. But, yes, it’s a luxury.</p>
<p>But for the OP–you have been offered a substantial discount from the sticker price of this particular luxury. It is probably a luxury that your kid would very much enjoy, and which will benefit him in some ways. He can do without it, and you shouldn’t pay for it if it will cause undue economic hardship. But it’s a great deal if you can swing it.</p>
<p>^^ Oh, I definitely didn’t mean to imply that the OP is a fool! It seems to me that the OP is exercising good judgment by attempting to discover information about whether Yale would be a good investment.</p>
<p>My point is simply that the opinions of the majority and supposed experts may not be worth a great deal in this situation, and that the only people who are being suckered in the status quo are those who don’t recognize that their situation is unique.</p>
<p>Put another way, we cannot assume that Yale is better for everyone simply because many people consider it better.</p>
<p>“I also never learned that there are smart people who arent smart. The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for ones advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The best are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.”</p>
<p>“It didnt dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. Id just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didnt have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. Ivy retardation, a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldnt talk to the man who was standing in my own house.”</p>
<p>These excerpts is from an article titled, “Disadvantages of an Elite Education” written by a Yale graduate. Here is the link:</p>
<p>parent57 - I don’t know what is it you are trying to say on this thread. Are you saying there is no place for an education from a school like Yale? It is not for everyone, not necessary for everyone, but it is special and right for some people.</p>
<p>I read the following on a college counseling website:</p>
<p>“But someday, you’re going to turn 40. And how your life looks then will have just about nothing to do with your SAT scores or whether or not your dream college said yes. Your life will be defined but what you do once you get to college and what you keep doing once you leave. It’s going to be defined by the people you meet and whether or not you treat them right. It’s going to be defined by what you learn about yourself when you discover what you’re good at (and what you’re not-so-good at). It’s going to be defined by your ambition, how hard you work, and whether or not you have the guts to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves to you. The day a college says Yes or No is just one day. It’s the next 8,000 days that will determine the life you have at 40 and the people who are in it.”</p>
<p>People here would do well to think about what this person is saying.</p>
<p>OP’s son should think about that. Less than 1500 students are given an opportunity to study at Yale each year. Does he have the guts, and will the family give him the support with the opportunites that were presented to him.</p>