DH is not impressed with college admissions from the private schools
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Anonymous
Why are you trying to convince your H to send your kids to private school? If it is for college admission it is misguided. How old are your kids? K or are you looking for HS BTW - the answer may be different for each child. |
Anonymous
Tell your DH to compare the % of students going to Ivy colleges from local private schools versus local public school. He'll soon discover the difference. |
Anonymous
| If you and your husband both went to Ivy League schools then your child will have legacy admission status. I assume your child get straight A's otherwise you would not be thinking about an Ivy League school so it doesn't really matter where he goes to high school does it? |
Anonymous
Good point. Assuming your child is reasonably smart, he should have no trouble getting admitted to Ivy. So why do you care where he goes to high school? Why would your husband care either? |
Anonymous
Don't do this, because the comparison is stupid, as PP well knows. Many kids from area publics aren't planning to go to college, or they are in that middle position between qualifying for FA (about $50k household income) and being able to pay the full $60k/year at an Ivy (none of which give merit aid). So many public school kids are not even considering Ivies, instead they are looking at state schools or 2nd-tier privates that will give them lots of merit aid. This might be a useful comparison if we could compare private school exmissions to the public school kids who can afford at least $30k/year (what the private school kids are already paying) in tuition, but we don't have that data. For the PPs with tons of classmates going to Ivies, times have really changed since our day. Most Ivies take fewer than 10% of applicants, and they take an even smaller percent of unhooked kids. Send your kid to private school for the small class sizes, and for better art, music, science, social studies and PE in elementary school. As for Ivies, some here think that private schools do a better job motivating the middle-of-the-road kid and then championing him with the college admissions teams in their Rolodexes, but there's no hard evidence to say one way or another. |
Anonymous
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It's about the journey and the adult your child becomes over the next few years that are important.
Ivies are disasters for some kids (even those who get accepted) but at our school, we had quite a few who didn't want to apply to an Ivy and their parents were upset with their child. Good luck to your husband in trying to force his teenager to do what he wants them to do with their life. |
Anonymous
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If you and your husband do not see that attending private school gives your child way more than just an in into an ivy league (which it is not necessarily) then perhaps that route is not for you.
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Anonymous
Yes, but how many years ago was that? Things have changed. A lot. Some of these ivies are admitting like 7-8% of the applicants these days, an anyone without a hook is an extreme long shot. |
Anonymous
I'd go a step further and say no high school is going to get your child into one college or another -- by the time a kid gets to high school, there's no bluffing about his or her academic ability. Pick a high school that will help your child develop as a person and, provided the academic challenge is sufficient, the rest will take care of itself. I agree with the other poster who suggested that if your child is Ivy League material, you would know it by now. |
Anonymous
That's just stupid. Public schools have to take kids. If you look at the top 50 entering Whitman or Churchill in 9th grade, the outcome at 12th grade will be about the same as the top 50 entering a private. |
Anonymous
I assume your DH graduated from HS ~20+ years ago. At that time, Ivy League acceptance rates were (in many cases) triple what they are today. As recently as the mid '90s, there were Ivies with acceptance rates upwards of 40%; today the highest is 15%. I would bet that the proportion of Ivy acceptances at his public HS has declined since he graduated, just as it has in private schools. |
Anonymous
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There are four good reasons one might pay to send their DC to private school:
1) They want a religious/spiritual component to their DC education 2) They want single gender education 3) They live in an area that has substandard public schools (only DC for this area) 4)They want smaller class size The draw for the most popular private schools in this area are: STA 1,2,3,4 Sidwell 1,3,4 NCS 1,2,3,4 Holton 2,4 Landon 2,4 Visitation 1,2,3 Gonzaga 1,2 some 3 Prep 1,2 some 4 GDS 3,4 Maret 3,4 Bullis 3 |
Anonymous
| You missed athletics. |
Anonymous
Also differentiated learning styles. |
Anonymous
Don't do this, because the comparison is stupid, as PP well knows. Many kids from area publics aren't planning to go to college, or they are in that middle position between qualifying for FA (about $50k household income) and being able to pay the full $60k/year at an Ivy (none of which give merit aid). So many public school kids are not even considering Ivies, instead they are looking at state schools or 2nd-tier privates that will give them lots of merit aid. This might be a useful comparison if we could compare private school exmissions to the public school kids who can afford at least $30k/year (what the private school kids are already paying) in tuition, but we don't have that data. I don't think it's stupid at all. First, just as there are many public school kids who don't consider Ivys, the same applies to many private school kids. Second, just as there are some public school kids who might have the grades/scores to be admitted to an Ivy, but don't attend because they cannot afford it, the same applies to many private school kids. Your points may carry more weight if comparing Bethesda private schools against public school from low-income areas. But I suspect the public schools we're talking about here are ones in Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Potomac/McLean, so I doubt the "admitted to Ivy but couldn't afford it" story is too common. And finally, to the extent your points have some merit, I'd consider them where the public school has only a little smaller % than the private school. But where the private school is sending 3-4 times more students to Ivys on a % basis, your points don't account for the difference. Also, if you look at factors not-so-easily dismissed by supposed family income -- like National Merit Semifinalist % for example -- you see the same pattern as with Ivy attendance. The strong private schools will have 3-4 times as many Semifinalists on a % basis. Surely even if some highly qualified public school students were admitted but chose not to attend Ivy colleges because of finances, those same students tried just as hard on the SAT and PSAT tests. Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking public schools; I'm a proud public school grad. And I'm especially not knocking public schools in the DC area; they're incredibly strong. But looking at the objective data on student success, it's inaccurate to claim the strong private schools don't have better outcomes. If you want to argue those better outcomes are partially the result of the strongest students flocking to private schools over public schools, I'd probably agree. It's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison of which situation will bring out the best in any particular kid, and harder still to say by how much. But again, saying the objective data doesn't favor the strong private schools just seems to be ostrich-like to me. |