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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What difference does it make? Seriously? Now that I have a senior myself, I am even more baffled by all of this ranking stuff. I've been on hiring panels for 25 years now and had hiring authority for 15 years and college rank signals something but its not the only thing in the world, its not even one of the main things we are looking for.

There are 2 million college graduates each year. The "top 30" universities are not that big, usually under 10,000 students, so we're talking about how many total--maybe 60,000 kids in each class? The amount of time and energy and angst people -- parents -- spend, and put their kids through, over this stuff just amazes me. We have to prepare our kids to be functional adults!

Focusing on this one small thing, acceptance (not success!) at a certain small group of colleges is just crazy. I get that DCUM is a narrow lens, but it clearly consumes a lot of time and money in the DMV--look at real estate prices, look at school boundary discussions, look at private school tuition, look at how many tutoring companies there are. So much seems to be focused on getting kids into these schools, not on getting kids prepared for adulthood. [/quote]

Should clarify -- my husband and I both went to top-10 (he would say he went to the #1) schools in the 90's, when it was not so crazy to get in. We were just smart kids from regular public schools. Now we work at places where all of our work peers have similar credentials and we hire out of those schools. But we are definitively not putting our kids into this rat race and neither of them have been motivated to do it themselves. [/quote]

You start with "what difference does it make" and you finish by saying that you hire out of the top 10 schools you went to.  I guess that is the difference it makes![/quote]

We don't [i]only[/i] hire out of those schools, I said at the beginning what college you went to is not much of a factor for us at all. Allegheny, Gettysburg, Reed, Bennington, Earlham--none of them are ranked that highly but they are all good schools and I have hired great people from them based on their interviews, writing samples, and references. [/quote]

WAIT? Those are what you consider "Top 10" schools? Sorry I called you racist. You're just clueless. [/quote]

OMG. No. We hire out of the Ivies and top 10 SLACs. We ALSO hire out of many other schools, including state schools and colleges like those listed above, because we DON'T CARE WHAT SCHOOL YOU WENT TO IF YOU ARE SMART AND CAPABLE.

And my original point was, if I'm raising my kid to be smart and capable....which is in and of itself a chore....I don't get the fixation on certain schools unless I also envision a very specific, narrow career path (which is not my choice....it's my kid's). I know that, to a degree, better credentials = more options. But it does not seem worth the insane level of anxiety and pressure that parents put on themselves and their kids around here. I work with people who went through all that, and plenty of people who did not, and in adulthood we all seem about the same. So what was the point of making high school so stressful? [/quote]

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