Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:We moved to a small college city (about 50k locals, grows to about 65k with the state university kids). My DD is on track to be valedictorian of her public HS class. This is not as impressive as it sounds. Almost all kids who are UMC here or a professor kid goes to the local private - the top kids from there go to places like Cornell, Michigan, Wisconsin, not many SLAC since kids here don’t know what Bates/bowdoin/Colby even are. We are sending our kids to public school for a variety of reasons. The top kids from the school (graduating classes of about 250) typically go to the state university honors program or another state university that has tuition reciprocity discounts for our region. DH and I went to fairly highly ranked schools (both non Ivy top 20s) and would love for our daughter to go somewhere like Georgetown, UVA, Hopkins, rice etc. At the end of sophomore year she is ranked number 1 in her class, straight As in honors courses (one A- in freshman math). This has not been hard or challenging for her at all. She’s taking all APs next year and will do the same senior year. It’s too early to say if it will still be manageable to have straight As, but it’s a definite possibility. She is a varsity athlete, but again, this is a random town and sports aren’t competitive - swimming and tennis everyone makes varsity, she won’t be recruited but may be a captain. She also does some very focused community service with the Native American community in our area and volunteers at the college art museum. Would a kid with this profile have a shot at the top 20 colleges now a days? I can say with confidence she would not stand out in the DMV - she was at a private in DC for elementary school - 7th grade and was a very average student. It’s just so much less competitive here I think it was a confidence boost. We’d be fine sending her to the flagship state school as well, but we would love for her to have a top 20 college experience. We will have SAT tutoring and hopefully her scores would be competitive, at least above the median. We are full pay but otherwise not special.
I've seen this similar play out hundreds of times: Your "superstar" kid goes to state flagship, declares pre-med and tells everyone they're going to be a surgeon, and by her second semester she's trying to get into the nursing program because the gunner pre-med kids who went to strong high schools are years ahead of her.
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