Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

I went to Collegiate. And can honestly say no one from my graduating class is doing anything special. Yes we went to fancy ugrads and grad schools, but no multi-billionaire start-ups or firm founders.

What I would say is that everyone is happy. That may be due to an inherent confidence or in some cases $ignificant family $afety nets. That means less pressure, in many regards. I thought I'd add that since it's missing from the conversation thus far. There are some very happy-go-lucky wealthy kids out there and I wish that every at MC and UMC would relax and be happy as well. FYI, I am UMC, as is my Dr sister.

For most people gunning for the ivies, this is what they aspire to for their kids: an ivy league degree that will lead to a cushy and respectable low to mid six-figure job. Most people do not have aspirations of becoming the next billionaire or crazy inventor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

yeah, because of legacies and recruited athletes. not because those kids are inherently smarter than those attending Stuy, TJ, etc.

Athletes at Harvard Westlake rule HPY and Wall Street. Many return to LA and just run their own lifestyle fund.

Anonymous wrote:For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

I went to Collegiate. And can honestly say no one from my graduating class is doing anything special. Yes we went to fancy ugrads and grad schools, but no multi-billionaire start-ups or firm founders.

What I would say is that everyone is happy. That may be due to an inherent confidence or in some cases $ignificant family $afety nets. That means less pressure, in many regards. I thought I'd add that since it's missing from the conversation thus far. There are some very happy-go-lucky wealthy kids out there and I wish that every at MC and UMC would relax and be happy as well. FYI, I am UMC, as is my Dr sister.

Anonymous wrote:Outside of MIT, what are the other couple elites that are Ivy-esque -- I'd guess Duke, Stanford, and Chicago?

What does "Ivy-esque" mean? Not trying to be confrontational, but just curious how you define this. Do you mean super-strong academics? Or something else?

Anonymous wrote:"Landed at a top private college (now top 15, was top 10 when I attended) to follow my dream of attending med school."

Brown? I think Brown sends higher % of grads to medical school than any other college in the US. And I think it used to be top 10 in the 80s.

No, wasn't Brown. And I went to college in the 90s.

Anonymous wrote:Outside of MIT, what are the other couple elites that are Ivy-esque -- I'd guess Duke, Stanford, and Chicago?

Berkeley and Caltech.

Outside of MIT, what are the other couple elites that are Ivy-esque -- I'd guess Duke, Stanford, and Chicago?

Anonymous wrote:For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

Not true.

I haven't read the whole thread. It seems singularly focused on the college admission advantages provided by attending a top HS.

I attended Bx. Science which is viewed by most as a pretty good school. A lot of my classmates went to tippy top colleges - much more so than at my kids suburban CT HS.

That said, that wasn't the benefit of attending Bx. Science. It was the experience of attending HS with the students that elected to attend Science.

There was an open mindedness. A wealth of cultures. It was ok to be a geek and smart for the first time.

I didn't attend elite colleges and yet wen on to decent success in the software industry where I worked with folks from Yale and Princeton. I always thought Sciend prepared me for that world much better than the elite colleges. I found Science kids smarter with less expectations.

Why I am writing this ? Send your DC to the elite HS for that experience and things will work out. A friend of mine Mom pulled him out of Science to send him to Exeter on a full ride. The social connections were insane but in life he didn't do any better or worse than the average Science grad.

Encourage your kids to get educated with like minded, open minded classmates and give them the luxury of truly being an educated person in this world. That a rare gift.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I live in San Francisco. The best public high school is Lowell (followed by Sota, a school for the arts, but it has a heavy drug culture). The girl who gave us (me and DD, then an 8th grader) a tour, CRIED DURING THE TOUR. She said she never gets to sleep before 2am, and cries from stress every day. I wouldn't even let DD take the exam to get accepted. I don't want her spending four years being miserable.

She's going to attend a high school that's considered decent (no significant gang or drug culture, engaged and driven teachers) instead. She'll do very well, fairly easily. She will have a higher GPA from this school than if she went to Lowell. She will rank higher among her peers at this school.

DD won't get into Stanford. She'll wind up at some other UC, and do fine. My goal is not an Ivy for her. It's that she learns and has an enjoyable life.

I'm not sure that I understand the obsession of some for "an Ivy." While the schools may be in a sports association called the Ivy League, there are leagues of difference between, say, Yale and Princeton versus Cornell. There are a number of great colleges and universities that are not considered "Ivy" but which would fit comfortably along that continuum.

Very disingenuous to say that the ivy league is a mere sports association. For the majority of people it is synonymous with elite higher education, and many non-ivy top schools are routinely confused to be ivies. Plus all ivies are comfortably within the top 15 schools in the US.
I agree there is a difference between Yale or Princeton and Cornell, but leagues of difference? that is kind of pushing it. The non-ivy schools that fir comfortably in between are not more than 2 or 3.

Anonymous wrote:I live in San Francisco. The best public high school is Lowell (followed by Sota, a school for the arts, but it has a heavy drug culture). The girl who gave us (me and DD, then an 8th grader) a tour, CRIED DURING THE TOUR. She said she never gets to sleep before 2am, and cries from stress every day. I wouldn't even let DD take the exam to get accepted. I don't want her spending four years being miserable.

She's going to attend a high school that's considered decent (no significant gang or drug culture, engaged and driven teachers) instead. She'll do very well, fairly easily. She will have a higher GPA from this school than if she went to Lowell. She will rank higher among her peers at this school.

DD won't get into Stanford. She'll wind up at some other UC, and do fine. My goal is not an Ivy for her. It's that she learns and has an enjoyable life.

I'm not sure that I understand the obsession of some for "an Ivy." While the schools may be in a sports association called the Ivy League, there are leagues of difference between, say, Yale and Princeton versus Cornell. There are a number of great colleges and universities that are not considered "Ivy" but which would fit comfortably along that continuum.

Anonymous wrote:For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

yeah, because of legacies and recruited athletes. not because those kids are inherently smarter than those attending Stuy, TJ, etc.

"Landed at a top private college (now top 15, was top 10 when I attended) to follow my dream of attending med school."

Brown? I think Brown sends higher % of grads to medical school than any other college in the US. And I think it used to be top 10 in the 80s.

For the select few super-elite boarding and prep schools (think Trinity, Horace Mann, Collegiate, Chapin, Spence, Lawrenceville, Choate, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover, St Paul's, Harvard-Westlake etc...) there is a substantial advantage for ivy league admission. Each of these schools tends to enroll at least 5-10 or more kids to each one of the ivies every year.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. This thread is a few months old but I find it fascinating and am wondering if others have more to share. Ultimately the bottom line here is that we are all trying to do what's best for our kids based on our own experiences.

My experience: I'm from a solidly middle class family and went to a super mediocre public high school. Huge, not well-regarded locally, problems with gangs. There were some good teachers, but I skated through with straight A's pretty easily. Landed at a top private college (now top 15, was top 10 when I attended) to follow my dream of attending med school. Man, I got rocked pretty hard when I first started college; I would agree with similar reports from others in this thread that I had some catch-up to do, as I realized fast that I really didn't know how to study as I had never had to work that hard. But.....I had a crew of friends who also started off pre-med, many from wealthy families that attended well-regarded private schools or nationally ranked publics, and I am the only one who made it through the pre-med track. I'm now a physician. So despite a rocky start it all worked out in the end.

My kids aren't high-school aged yet, but I intend to send them to our local public high school (very solid and well-regarded locally but not the best in the state....I'm not in DC). The selling point? Its diversity. One of the things that really shocked me when I got to undergrad was how blindingly white and economically privileged the majority of the students were, after having spent my formative years in extremely diverse public school environments, diverse not just racially but also socioeconomically. College was such a bubble. I don't want that for my kids as they grow up, nor the kind of fake, curated diversity that the local private schools seem to have. The literature on this shows that it's really the perseverance of the kid and their parents' education and level of involvement that leads to academic success, not the school itself. So it's my hope that attending a super-diverse, good-but-not-excellent public school can strike the best balance.

I hear what you're saying, but I have known many kids from excellent, involved families who have succumbed to negative peer pressure during their high school years and ended up not reaching the same level of educational/financial success as their parents. You want your kids to "be around" low SES kids, but what if it goes beyond just exposure? What if your kids actually become part of the group that get high across the street before school and doesn't value academic success? What if your daughter decided to become a hairdresser instead of going to college because that's the norm among her group of friends? Don't be too confident that your parenting will shield them from actually becoming part of the low SES group that you are trying to "expose" them to. Again, I have seen it happen many times.

PP here (the one you quoted). I hear your point as well, but I don't see how enrolling in an elite school will automatically make a kid immune to any of this either.

For what it's worth, the vast majority of the kids in my high school did not attend college and did not value academic success, as you put it. This includes some of my close friends. There was a very large vocational ED program at my high school that enrolled more kids than the AP classes. I am only the second person in a very large family to attend college, so I didn't get a lot of strong encouragement from family either. None of this stopped me from chasing what I wanted.

On the flip side, my DH grew up in an upper-middle class household and attended a $$$ private school through high school, the kind of place where everyone seems to go on to an Ivy for undergrad. DH has done well for himself, but some of his high school friends, despite getting that elite HS boost into great colleges, are STILL really trying to get a foothold in life, even now when firmly entrenched in their 40s. And *every* person I know who attended an elite private school has story upon story about the way sex and drugs ran rampant, even in the "smart/nerdy" social circles.

All anecdotal evidence, of course, but still goes to show that there are no guarantees in life. I could send my kids to top private schools and they may still want to pursue a nonacademic path off the fast track. I could send my kids to our local public HS and they may shine brighter there than anywhere else. Ultimately I agree with others about trying super hard to find the happy medium -- I don't want my kids to look back at their HS years and remember it being an unhappy pressure-cooker. At the end of the day they're still kids! I had actually been encouraged by a few teachers to apply to a competitive local magnet high school, but I declined to do it because I wanted a "real" high school experience, and not once have i regretted that decision.