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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My daughter, who's white, quit CS during her first year to do political instead. She got great grades but found the culture and department to be stressful and alienating as a woman from a low-income Midwestern background. Her best friend, Asian American from CA, stuck with CS but took 6 years to graduate and enjoyed her English and Classics classes a lot more. Of course, it all worked out; DD got into a T14 law school and best friend is a Product Manager at FAANG but neither enjoyed college very much.[/quote]

PP with the unhappy Black daughter here. Yes, “neither enjoyed college very much” really resonates — the happiest students at Stanford tend to be either the Greeks or the ones who are happy with the competitive, fast-paced, and achievement-oriented culture. [/quote]
And the athletes! My son and his teammates had a blast at Stanford and have gone on to do well in a variety of fields, as have their friends from other teams. Both the general alumni network and the athlete one are very strong. [/quote]

PP here. Yes, the athletes are quite happy too — they’re a tight knit group. [/quote]

Stanford is one of the places where the recent athletes don't seem to do quite as well professionally though. There are wonderful exceptions but it was too bad when I was on campus how concentrated athletes, especially in sports like football and basketball, were in certain majors. What is Science, Technology & Society anyway?[/quote]

I am an alum and I disagree with this. Their alumni athletes do very, very well, probably because they tend to be excellent students too. In some ways they fit the current Stanford mold well: exceptionally competitive and exceptionally project management oriented. [/quote]

The academic profiles of Stanford's revenue-generating or close to revenue-generating sport athletes also don't stack up well with the Ivy League athletes in those sports, so it isn't shocking they might not do quite as well. Science, Technology & Society has been big in football for a while. The athletes have a lot of academic support though, which Stanford doubled down on after some trouble with the Lopez twins.
Guys like Andrew Luck and Christian McCaffrey have done better than just about anyone in their years too  :lol: [/quote]

Their academic profiles might not match the Ivies, but you are flat-out wrong about their outcomes. They do exceptionally well and also as a group are some of the wealthiest and most regular donors to the school.

Maybe you don’t have visibility into the alumni? You said you were “on campus” — what does that mean? Because I don’t know any alumni that would say what you did about the outcomes of the athletes. [/quote]

+1 many of Stanford’s athletes go on to successful careers. The closest comparison is Duke and many of their athletes go on to success in business and other endeavors (as we saw in recent news with the group of Duke athlete alumni making that $7B bid for the Washington Commanders), Stanford is likely the same. It shouldn’t be too surprising as first and foremost Stanford and Duke are crème-de-la-crème universities, with athletics second.[/quote]

+1 The education at the top non-ivies means even elite athletes there tend to be pretty smart. Even if you look across Stanford's and Duke's NCAA championship-competing athletes many of them will go on to have successful careers, and in large part they would've chose those specific schools for that reason. The main exceptions would be Duke basketball and Stanford football. But either way Stanford and Duke are outliers since they're really in a class of their own being at the top of both athletics and academics.[/quote]

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