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[quote=Anonymous]I teach college.  Seriously, don't worry so much about the individual school.  Choose the place that will provide the best environment for your kid as a person.  The vast majority of the problems we see are not academic: they are psychological / personal.  Academic problems we can nearly always fix, and I've been privileged to see some near-miracles in that realm.  But if a kid is depressed because he hasn't made friends, or misses his family, or can't play a sport he loves, or can't manage his meds on his own, or doesn't eat right, that we can't really fix.  Colleges try to provide help, but most of us personnel are not interlocked into the kind of wraparound support that a destabilized 19-year-old really needs.

Professor's wish list for sending a kid off to college.  If:

-&gt; they have stable, strong relationships with family and friends that can support them at a distance
-&gt; they are resilient and can set aside minor setbacks and contextualize major ones
-&gt; they are independent and have sufficient executive skills to get up on time, eat decently, care for their health, get where they need to go, and do most of their homework
-&gt; they like themselves and are ok with spending time alone and exploring their world on their own sometimes
-&gt; they are reasonably responsible and are able to keep themselves and others out of trouble (much of the time)
-&gt; they can take fair criticism without taking it personally and are open to learning from it
-&gt; they can summarize prose accurately and pick out items that could be used to support an argument
-&gt; they can write in a mostly correct fashion (with or without digital correction)
-&gt; they can perform mathematical or scientific calculations at the freshman level expected by their future major

...then they will probably do just fine.

Notice how little of my list is academic, and how it says nothing about test scores, APs, or learning differences.  Give your child these other things, and we who teach will be able to help him learn.  I for one would be happy to have a student like yours.[/quote]

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