Reply to Why the middle class has a huge disadvantage in admissions.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why not use the state school option?[/quote]

A lot of middle class do it.
But the conversation with your teenager is not going to be easy.
Kid: I am so excited to be accepted to my favorite and top college in the country.
You: We can’t afford 80k a year, instead you should go to state university.
Kid : So, tell me why I was working so hard in high school?
You : Well…[/quote]

I love the inanity of this post. It only makes sense inside one very specific bubble.

I can't even imagine what parents from my rural Midwestern town would say to it. Maybe, because you were raised to work hard. Maybe, anything worth doing is worth doing right. Maybe, keep up that nonsense and you can take a couple years off to work and pay your own way through State Flagship U.

Maybe implied here is that all of the kids who work just has hard knowing only State Flagship is at the end of the rainbow for them are inherently raised better than you raised your kids. [/quote]

While I wholeheartedly agree that hard work is its own reward and that "anything worth doing is worth doing right," you as someone from the rural midwest are missing a lot of the context that informs the exchanges quoted above. There are only eleven elite post secondary institutions in the midwest region, two of which (Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison) are flagship public schools and arguably the academically strongest universities in their respective states; most of the midwestern states are home to no more than one elite college or university; and in the one midwestern state whose two elite schools are both private universities (Chicago and Northwestern), the flagship, Urbana-Champaign, is overall an academically rigorous institution with one of the most challenging comp. sci programs in the country. In other words, most of the smartest, talented and hardest working students in the midwest attend their public flagship. By contrast, the flagship universities of most states are intellectually quite weak, while the majority of rigorous schools in the northeast are private universities and colleges that students in the region routinely choose over in- state public options. Given the pervasive idea that the U.S. is a meritocracy and that affiliation with elite institutions, fair or not, does confer some very real opportunities that are not readily available to graduates of other colleges and universities, it is quite understandable that a student who busts ass to earn, say, a 4.5 GPA and a 1550 SAT might wonder why s/he/they did so only to end up at a school where the average SAT is an 1160, the average ACT is a 22 and their classmates perceive college as an extension of their high school years rather than as an opportunity to engage intellectually. [/quote]

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