Reply to What type of kid attends Sewanee?

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[quote=Anonymous]It is not just that. There are also just more good schools than there used to be. In part this is because of overall population increase in the last 30 years. More kids>more colleges>more good colleges.

And it part it is b/c of changes in the higher ed job market. Universities have produced more PhDs, including in areas where there is frankly not a ton of demand (classics! medieval studies! philosophy! etc). There are not enough new jobs at the traditional top schools to employ all those PhDs as professors, so the "top" PhD students- the ones with PhDs from Harvard and Princeton, who once assumed they would get jobs at same, now find themselves competing with one another for the jobs at Outer Podunk Community College... which means that the quality of the teaching and scholarship at Our Podunk goes way up... and kids get a better education there than in the past... so Outer Podunk starts getting a better reputation and attracting kids with higher GPAs and test scores.  This phenomenon has lifted up a lot of colleges and universities once considered second or third or fourth tier.

I tell my own kids that there are literally hundreds of colleges where they can get a top-notch education. The crazed competition is all for a handful of fancy brand names in the top 20 or so (using USN's very arbitrary ranking system), and if they are not obsessed with name brand, they will have no trouble finding a great college where they will have smart, interesting peers and smart, interesting professors.

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