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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]1.  College admissions is vastly more competitive now than it was for you, your peers, or even for your kid's older siblings.

2.  Further to that, a number of schools that didn't have especially strong reputations a generation ago are competitive and highly regarded now.  Some people remain shocked by that.

3.  As one might expect of a socially competitive environment like greater DC, there are some on DCUM who treat the choice of college like picking a luxury car, and will endlessly invent reasons to disparage excellent schools that aren't in the so-called top T5 (notwithstanding that fewer than 1 in 20 applications will gain an admissions offer from those five colleges).

4.  Despite the widely available data on how tough admissions is for certain schools, some entitled parents on DCUM will guide their kid to apply to those schools alone, and will then be outraged when their kid doesn't win acceptance to their "reaches" or even to often-unrealistic "targets" or "safeties."   And will then bitterly blame it on some mixture of demographics, minorities, prejudice, test-optional-policies, colleges' refusal to grant sufficient consideration to an investment in private high school education, and/or poor counseling.

5.  The US News rankings are flawed in many ways, including by magnifying small differences (many of the universities on USNWR's "top 100" list are actually tied, and smaller colleges aren't even included in the same list).   There are better ranking systems that have sprung up in response, like the WSJ, Forbes, or even Washington Monthly.   But for status conscious DCUMers, rather than draw on the good info available elsewhere, all that matters is the difference is whether a college happens to be in USNWR's "T20" or "T30" of "National Universities" or falls just outside it (in which case, can one truly consider it a college worth attending?).

6.   DCUM readers are surprisingly provincial, and apart from USNWR's revered "T20" or "T30," tend to be (moronically) dismissive of other excellent universities across the nation that aren't located in the DMV or adjacent states.  But hey, if you don't know anything about a school, opine about the climate in that state.

Those six points distill about all you'll learn here on DCUM.  There may be other useful tidbits of information that accidentally surface from time to time, but those are swamped by a tidal wave of bile, attitudinizing, stereotypes, groupthink, and bad information.   For the rare helpful comment about a school that falls outside the top 100 on the USNWR list, there will be about ten unhelpful ones saying "I wouldn't even let my kid go to that college for free -- it's no Harvard."  DCUM/Colleges is like Mean Girls [and Boys] grown up (but not matured) sitting in the high school cafeteria passing judgment on the choices others make, or have to make.   The toxic sentiments expressed here will get in your brain like a cancer, completely corrupt your thinking about a challenging process, and likely lead you and your kid astray, or make you feel bad about the choices you end up making.

Run from this site.  There's vastly better information about colleges available in many other places.   Consider yourself forewarned.

[/quote]

+1000. You covered everything [/quote]

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