Advice: DCI vs. Pyle/Whitman for MS and HS
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Anonymous
What? No. Also, VA schools are not relevant to OP’s question. |
Anonymous
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I believe the kid can get in-state MD college tuition based on the MD parent’s residence regardless of which high school is chosen. You’ll want to confirm this before deciding. And not sure about DC Tag based on DC parent’s residence.
Agreed with the PP that you can switch from DCI->Bethesda anytime but the reverse option isn’t available. Good luck (& congrats on the 5th-grade graduation!)! |
Anonymous
| I second doing middle at DCI. If you’re kids an athlete, Whitman will be better than DCI for that |
Anonymous
| Middle school at DCI. That's what we did and I'm an MCPS teacher. |
Anonymous
| Choose private over Pyle (if you can) My child’s has friends who left public and came back and went back to Whitman and love it. From what I have heard kids don’t like Pyle, it could be their age? |
Anonymous
| I went to Pyle and Whitman and have friends who are sending their kids now. It's such a pressure cooker I would avoid it at all costs (and I had the chance to move my family to my childhood home). I also am parent to biracial kids and don't see my friends' kids spending any time with non-white kids; while I had a number of Asian American friends growing up, Black kids were few and far between. YMMV of course, but it was (and seems) pretty segregated, and the over the top pressure to be the best at everything and get into a top school can be hard to navigate, especially if shared custody means you and ex don't always agree on how to help your kid figure out how to navigate. (it's like no one there knows that they are swimming in ultracompetitive waters; they think it's just regular water and that's what it has to be like) |
Anonymous
Unless your kid is a top athlete, is is going to be very hard to make the team. In very large, wealthy schools, the kids have been playing sports since they can walk and then doing travel sports, not to mention private coaches and such. This is even more applicable in the burbs because it is so boring and the parents lives and weekends are spent around the sports. DCI is more like private schools when it comes to sports. Lots of options but smaller school so not as competitive. If your kid is good but not great, they at least have a chance at making the team. Some popular sports like soccer though are very competitive bit DCI at least has a few teams. |
Anonymous
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Look into what's been happening at DCI with efforts to remove the executive director. I would be concerned if I were potentially starting out in sixth grade there. (I have an older kid at DCI.)
For us, middle school was tough. Kid learned how to get away with a lot, there are very few consequences, it took a long while for her to start learning work ethic (it is finally happening in high school), but we also wanted to avoid a pressure cooker environment, did not want to feed her anxiety. Don't know about Whitman or Pyle, but kid became a lot more independent commuting to DCI. Also, if you are coming from a feeder school, with friends cohort, it will be nice in terms of having a community (both friends and parents). |
Anonymous
I never understand this metric when its thrown out (for any school, not just DCI). It says nothing about what my kid might get and I have never heard anyone explain if this is across offers (like one kid got 4 different merit aid packages) or provide context ($25K off Vanderbilt is not particularly helpful). |
Anonymous
I'm sorry. People have posted this number before and I simply don't believe it. Every student earned more than $1,000,000 in scholarship money? Like more than double a full scholarship -- every student? |
Anonymous
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for example, BASIS just announced that their graduating class of around 60 earned $12,000,000 in scholarship money. There are I think 2 kids with full scholarships and 3 or 4 with full tuition, and the average scholarship amount was something in the $100,000 range. Everyone was very proud of the group and the college counselor worked hard with each kid.
So DCI for a class maybe 4 times that size getting 300 million? That didn't happen. 30 million I would believe. |
Anonymous
+1 such a weird flex. Also no way this can be true. |
Anonymous
Ok I just googled around and found a school social media source that said the DCI class of 2025 secured $33 million in scholarship money. This is plausible and good for them. But then someone from the school mistyped on the school website that it was $300 million, so off by one order of magnitude. This is completely impossible but people I guess accepted it and now keep repeating it. |
Anonymous
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The metric is so hard to understand that I am sure many people don't question 33 million vs 300 million.
It might be useful to say something like 95% of DCI kids were accepted to at least one college and among those 70% received scholarships/aid for 50% or more of base tuition. That gives me some sense of what to expect if my kid is a senior there. The total value without context for number of kids or how many kids got multiple offers is meaningless. |
Anonymous
No school is going to say above. All schools report their total scholarship money and that includes if a kid got scholarships from mutiple schools. So just 1 kid could get a total of 3-6 million dollars. BTW, I heard that Banneker, which is much smaller than DCI, got over 100 million in scholarship money so if that is true, I don’t think 300 million is hard to believe. I would also believe a school website over social media. |