Reply to My DS is a freshman and is really happy, but I feel depressed that I limited his options.

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[quote=Anonymous]I had no parents in my life.  Father abandoned the family.  Mother very ill.  On my initiative without doing any homework i took an athletic scholarship to Duke, thinking well it is a high ranked school and I can't even go to community college so Duke looked great. I did intuit they had smaller classes and given my very high level of immaturity thought it would help attending class on a frequent basis (turns out athletic departments of any quality enforce going to class).

The education within the four walls of the classroom was very good.  The social life for a poor person was awful. Not sure that was so bad because as a scholarship athlete sport comes first, academics second (the scholarships are one year renewable so you better perform at the sport) and social life third.   There was time for a social life of a kind, but not for someone like me who was poor.  Just not a good fit in that regard.

Had quite a few Big 10 offers (I am from the Midwest) that I turned down.  Michigan did not have a scholarship available that year - and they were world class, not just national class - in my sport -  so I stupidly wrote off the Big 10.  I regretted not looking at these 50/60 ranked schools relatively quickly.  The social life would have been far better, the quality of the athletic competition about the same or slightly better, and the schools I looked at had majors that interested me that could also lead to immediate post college employment, something I needed being desperately poor.  I did go to a very top graduate schoool and did better than I imagined, but really in hindsight it was just a result of being the first time in my life I did not have to focus on athletics.  I do wonder if I could have done even better from the Big 10 schools.  I was admitted to the honors programs in every one.  And Duke, while a great education, had so many well off kids the curriculum was really designed to send a student off to more school after undergrad - perhaps good for many but certainly not for me.   Duke dropped its business majors the year before I arrived, and the engineering school was very small (even the facility was small - not the case today).  You went there to get a liberal arts degree, and then go on to grad school with its expense and opportunity cost.

In any event, school is what you make it no matter where you go, and the right mindset is to get the most out of whatever school you attend.  By way of example, in the decades since graduating I have always wondered what would have been a great fit for me. Virginia Tech has a five year program (not easy to get into) where one earns an MS in econ.  Enough math for me but not too much.  And a real fit.  Tech was in an odd conference back then and likely not a place which would have recruited me, although I was clearly beyond their standards.   I would be happy if my kid was at a large public and doing well - choices are great and the task of finding your place at a big school is invaluable (I sent my two to Princeton and Michigan, respectively, so I have some perspective).   [/quote]

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