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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Yes, if your goal is to send your kid to a school to meet the child of a billionaire who might allow your kid into their inner circle, TT is way to go, but I’m not sure Turtle from Entourage is the highest aspiration my kids will have. So much of the argument for the value of these places is “you get to be close to really rich people who might like you and invite you to a party.”

quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]All fair — I think what we are responding to is the very one dimensional take that these
places are a guaranteed meal ticket. I worked like a dog in high school (outside NYC) and was motivated to do it, but I never expected it meant that I was destined for great things. It just meant I might get into a college which might be a boost if I worked hard there and took advantage of the opportunity. There is a mystique to the NYC prep school that you are destined or owed greatness that a lot of parents really start to buy into and instill in their kids. Some of these schools are fantastic, some once were but are now poorly run or mismanaged. All are only really important to the people who attend or send their kids there, but they think of themselves as national brands. I went to a really good prep school outside of NYC, got into one of THOSE colleges and sailed through. I have classmates from that school who didn’t go to one of THOSE colleges who are engineers and very successful people, doctors, math professors and some who aren’t much of much but are happy.

NYC prep schools aren’t a notch above everyone else, but they train the kids to think they are and for some kids, it’s not good for their longterm success. No one is surprised mediocre people graduate from Horace Mann other than people who went to or send their kids to Horace Mann.

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The network you get from a TT in NY is better than any other HS in the country and it’s not close. I went to an Andover Deerfield level boarding school in the last 20 years. Take away financial aid recipients, affirmative action, day students, athletic recruits, and you don’t really have that many classroom aces or daughters of billionaires. TTs are full of them and can carry you through life. [/quote][/quote]

I’m the trin/harvard poster again. Not sure wtf the person talking about networks is saying. Things don’t work that way. Think it’s just a bad faith argument which holds about as much truth as a lot of other assumptions people make about tt schools. mostly exaggerated or just false.

I agree that, at trin, there was a fairly pervasive sense of entitlement. BUT it was mostly contained within a certain clique, and never extended much beyond it. For most of us, it was the opposite: we worked like dogs all through school in part because none of us believed we would be handed anything. If we wanted to get into harvard or yale or stanford or whatever, we all knew that there were minimum 40 other candidates at least as good as us. COmpetition was FIERCE. You needed to be smart and figure out a way to differentiate yourself from a pretty talented student body all while navigating the strange politics of trinity and (occasionally) new york’s stratospheric classes and dealing with the insane workload. It’s a weird scene. Some of this is true at every school of course. But competition is so extreme at new york privates that it really feels zero sum. And thinking on those terms is itself a destructive, harmful way to go through high school - one of the things i only learned once i was in college and was able to breathe for the first time.

What I’d say about the mystique of ny tt is that some of it is cultivated by the schools, but so much of it comes from the outside and all the school can do is try to manage it. It’s what happens when there’s that much competition for few places in the biggest US city. And honestly, what people do to get their kids into these schools can be hilarious. I don’t think most of my trin classmates or my sib’s believed it was a ticket to anything, but an opportunity we had the choice to seize. Some kids did, some didn’t, but we were conscious of our choices.

I also don’t think anyone, NYC privately educated or not, who denies that you can go to any school and eventually become successful or that people who go to TT’s can wind up pretty poorly off. Mediocrity abounds wherever there are people, because most people (myself included) are pretty average.[/quote]

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