Reply to APS: New High School forum tonight 7-9 pm at Yorktown

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I hear so much about what a great school system Arlington has, but I was [b]unpleasantly surprised[/b] when I checked out the college choices of a recent graduating class (Arlington Magazine maybe did this?).  I went to a small private high school with a graduating class under 100 students and we had 8 national merit scholar semi finalists. Arlington with its huge numbers should be churning out more of these if they are really amazing, and should be doing better than party schools and community colleges for 70% of it's college bound graduates, really expensive liberal arts schools for another 20%, and the remaining 5% at top ~30 schools with great reputations. It's just weird that APS's rep does not at all seem to correspond with college placement for all but like 10 kids total. [/quote]

I have 2 in college and a high school senior who all went thru APS in the last 4 years.  Each ranked in the top 10% of their class and had a range of perfect to excellent SAT and ACT scores, as well as excellent ECs and most likely teacher recs.    Our DCs attend/will attend either the ins-state flagship or an out of state SLAC that I'm sure would be an "unpleasant surprise" to you.  When they each decided which colleges to apply to one of the biggest factors was if they were picking a SLAC it needed to be one that provided merit scholarships.    Some of their college acceptances were from top 20 SLACs with decent merit aid.

My husband and I both graduated from Ivies and both of us wholeheartedly agree that our DC at the "unpleasant surprise" is getting a far better education than either of us did at our Ivies.

I don't give a sh_t if you and other DCUMers don't approve of our families' choices for college.

My guess is that you have young kids and are years away from the college application cycle.

[/quote]

Yeah you're right, my kids are young and what I know about college is what I learned when I went ages ago. Apologies to you for painting your choices with my bleak and biased paintbrush. It's good that your kids are getting scholarships to these expensive schools and I hope they are well served there.

I too went to an Ivy and it co to used to open doors for me for years, probably decades, after I graduated as I moved to different jobs. Smaller schools can provide other things that may be better for individual kids, but Arlington should still be getting a larger share of kids into ivied and the like if the school's really are as good as they say. The results don't seem to match up (though maybe, as an earlier poster suggested, I'm not seeing all the data).

I'm just worried I'm going to wind up like my cousin in New Jersey who was always boasting about how her kids were doing GREAT in school and reading above grade level and then they went to community college and almost flunked out. I mean, that could happen to anyone depending on circumstances, but if our schools are actually kind of sucky, I want to know NOW and not ten years from now when my kids are applying to college. [/quote]

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