Why can't non top tier privates just increase rigor and test prep to remove the perceived gap?
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Anonymous
| Or is increasing rigor actually quite difficult and/or expensive for a school to implement? Or perhaps parents would pushback if their children suddenly had a lot more homework and nightly studying and As were much tougher to earn? |
Anonymous
| They need to pay teachers more and be able to turn away students they don't think can meet their rigor. That would be turning away money. |
Anonymous
| They are filling a niche. There are people who don’t want stress factories for their kids and there are kids who just couldn’t keep up at those types of schools. Prestige is all in the eye of the beholder. If you think happiness and success in life will come from getting admitted to a top 20 college then good for you. Lots of people don’t think that way and that is why these schools exist. |
Anonymous
I don't think it's necessarily top 20 college obsession, it's more a college readiness, and more to the point, a readiness for challenging departments. Any private school student can get into college, but are the seniors prepared to handle pre-med, engineering, computer science, nursing, statistics, pre-law tracks? That's where rigor helps. |
Anonymous
| And prepared to graduate on time or even early versus taking five or six years to finally complete a BA. |
Anonymous
| Would love to know what you think the so-called top tier and non top tier schools are ... |
Anonymous
| Sidwell, NCS, STA, GDS, Holton, Potomac . . . |
Anonymous
| The difference between so called top tier and second their schools is that most or all students at top tier schools are required to take the most challenging classes, whereas at some schools in the next tier a minority of the students are in those classes. There isn't that much of a gap, and among people in the know about this there wouldn't be much a perceived gap either. The perceived gap comes from ignorance. If 20-33% of a Big 3 school lands in an ivy league college, the mistaken assumption is that the school was more rigorous -- it taught more content, taught harder critical thinking etc. But if near 100% of the students in one school take those tough courses, but only 25% of the students in another school take the same courses, then it should be no surprise the absolute number of students in the latter school attend the same top colleages in smaller proportions. |
Anonymous
So your view is the top private high schools do nothing different — they merely admit superior students, while also having the privilege of rejecting students who would bring down median stats? |
Anonymous
I know this will shock you but a lot of kids who don’t go to your top tier privates schools go to top 20 colleges. In fact the vast majority of kids in any of those college majors you listed haven’t gone to what you would consider top tier high schools anywhere. There are smart kids in every school. And yes most schools in this area prepare kids well to succeed in college. |
Anonymous
According to whom? |
Anonymous
| Because their students couldn’t handle a more rigorous curriculum. |
Anonymous
Really? You realize some people choose what you perceive to be “lesser” schools for lots of reasons, right? We aren’t applying to them because, frankly, they’re overpriced and we don’t want to be around people like you. |
Anonymous
| What makes you think the top ones have a better education? Often the "rigor" is fusty or half baked pedagogy. Its often about connections and prestige, which the other schools cant "create". That being said, who do those connections really benefit? The people that dont actually need help no doubt, not the ones that do. |
Anonymous
| False premise. OP, you are making an ignorant assumption. |