Reply to Admission to SLACs after TJ

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are a total of 9. And that is not counting those who were rejected due to not having high enough GPA and the expected liberal arts classes. TJs history courses are minimal language tough to fit in, English geared towards technical writing etc etc.
OP you are trying to make TJ something it is emphatically not. Maybe it was 10-20 years ago but not now or likely in the future with STEM so popular. 
You are putting your student in an awkward if not impossible position. It's very hurtful to the student. And so much time wasted on very tough STEM courses which are much harder than they need to be for a liberal arts student. [/quote]

What "expected liberal arts classes" are TJ students missing? We just went through the college admission process this year with several top SLACs. Once my child showed interest in a school, he was "heavily recruited" (for lack of a better term) as a STEM student and not once did anyone mention a lack of a liberal arts education. He's taking AP Lit this year and the class is significantly more challenging than the version that's taught at our top NOVA base school. The curriculum at TJ does not hurt a student's chance of admission at a SLAC.

I just looked up our base school admissions to some SLACs. Yes, PP, you're right, specifically for Davidson it looks like that would be easier to get into than at TJ - it's also much more popular. However, for other top SLACs there's only 1-2 admissions over the last 3 years - and the base school has a much larger graduating class than TJ.

In the end this goes back to a theme that runs through all of these TJ discussions: a kid should not go to TJ with the intention of getting into a "top" college, he/she should go there because they want to be challenged, have opportunities in STEM that they wouldn't have elsewhere, and go to school with equally motivated students. Maybe my kid's a unicorn - he loved all the STEM opportunities at TJ, but he also loved the class discussions in his history classes with his bright, engaged classmates, as well as reading Dostoyevsky and Toni Morrison. I know he would've been bored out of his mind at our base school. And now he's probably going to a SLAC where he can double-major in something like math and philosophy. Maybe OP's kid is the same type of kid.
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