Reply to Does everyone on here with kids applying to top 50 schools really have the $80K per year to spend?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Re the Midwest PP.   It sounds wonderful to grow up in the Midwest. Your friends are doing something right. This keeping up w the Jones’s is not good. [/quote]

Agree.

No shame in the Midwest going to in-state flagships.

Plenty of $$ left for Fancy family vacations /summer houses etc….Family time together…[/quote]

I sent a college kid raised in the DMV attending a pretty diverse college to a Midwest flagship for more than 2 months for a special summer program this year. They came home with a pretty negative impression— basically, it that was very, very white and very homogenous (and they desperately wanted good Indian, sushi and Raman)— and my kid is white. I grew up in the rural south.  Which was “diverse” in that half the students at Mt HS were black. But, it was the 80s, so everyone “kept to their kind”.

My point is the grass is always greener and you have a very idealized view of life in the Midwest. I grew up in a town a lot like Friday Night Lights. Which Connie Britton and Coach Taylor make look pretty inviting. But is not somewhere I would raise my kids.   Living in this area has drawbacks. Faster pace, high COL, traffic, competition. But there is also raising kid in a more global society, near museums and concert venues and the Kennedy Center, (good Indian food :) ).  And our kids push harder because their peers push harder and because they see a bigger picture of what is possible. Their dreams may be bigger than marrying/becoming the small town pediatrician.

I think that easing kids CAN be a great thing. Especially if your kid doesn’t conform to the white upper middle class homecoming Court, sports ne cheerleading, clean cut stereotype.   And it’s our job as parents to guide our kids towards careers that suit them and their talents and personalities, not just expecting them to be an engineer or lawyer or Wall Street hedge fund manager.   And we decide that the car magnet and cocktail party college name drop do not matter. Finding a college that is a good academic, financial and social fit is what’s important. And if that means deciding that you will make peace with the a college ranked 120 and speak about your kids college with as much pride as the Ivy parents, that’s what you do. Anyone who snipes at you isn’t worth knowing anyway.

You kid learns by watching you. You live here and choose to raise them in a less competitive way, and place less emphasis on a prestige college. It is possible.

Just my 2 cents. [/quote]

Why do people persist in thinking that (a) all small towns are alike, and (b) the small towns they left behind 30 years ago have not changed in the interim? We left DC for many of the reasons pp suggested, and live in a small (about 20,000 population) town in the South — not even a college town —  that has Indian, multiple sushi, Lebanese, ramen, Vietnamese restaurants (just to name a few). Did it 30 years ago? Of course not. In fact, the high cost of living on the coasts has led many creative restauranteurs starting businesses in small towns across America.

Just as you can impart your values to your kids in a big city, you can instill bigger dreams in a kid raised in a small town. Our kids know about the successful careers we had in DC, and they have traveled & they’ve experienced a world that is much larger than the small town where they spent the final years of their childhood.  Our youngest wanted to go to a big city for college, and did so, but now they’ve been away, they have told me how much living in the city makes them appreciate the “vibe” (their word) of the small town we live in. Will they move back? Probably not, but they won’t spend their lives with parochial views about what people who don’t live in urban areas are like.

It drives me nuts when DC people pretend to be open minded, but then act like poverty and lack of ambition is somehow infectious. [b]Our town is less racially diverse than DC, but it is much more diverse economically. [/b]In DC, [b]my kid went to school with rich kids of many different ethnicities, which is hardly “diversity.” [/b]Living here has made my kid much more mature, empathetic and grateful. Could I have instiilled those values in DC? Maybe. But there is nothing like experiencing something yourself. [/quote]

Racial diversity is very important to many people, especially non-white people. Just because YOU don't value it doesn't mean others do not. Ask a Hispanic kid (poor or wealthy) if he rather be somewhere where there are Hispanics or a bunch of white people of different socio economic degrees and see what he says. Or a black kid. I can tell you it won't be all the varying white people.[/quote]

Sure a black or Hispanic kid can value attending a school with more people like them, because it makes them feel comfortable. That’s fine for them.  But diversity is touted as a means of exposing people to new viewpoints and ways of thinking, and having seen the school that has rich kids of different ethnicities and a school that has some (but fewer) ethnicities with widely varying socioeconomic backgrounds, I believe, in this day and age, the kids with the different socioeconomic backgrounds taught my kid more about the real world and having empathy for people with different experiences than hanging out with his rich black friends. Read this forum, even just this thread. These people tout “diversity,” but they fear exposing their kids to low income people, like somehow their kids will become poor by being around poor people. Talk about prejudice. [/quote]

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