Anonymous wrote:I know Jeff Selingo isn’t universally loved here but his Dream School book had a stat that stuck with me: for every 10 point higher SAT score your peers have at college, it increases the likelihood of dropping out by like 2-3%

I wish I would have made note of the study he referenced.

This is not to say, attending reach schools is a bad idea IMO. But, if you do, I think it’s important to be able to be prepared for what that might feel like

Sure. I attended Harvard and had to contend with weaker preparation compared to the elite private school kids, and imposter syndrome as a first-gen student who had no concept of how this daunting new system worked. Was it challenging, in every sense? Yes. Did I learn resilience and perseverance, together with some humility? Also yes. Those qualities were even more beneficial to my professional life than the academics.

It sounds trite, but it is essential to cultivate a growth mindset in your child and allow for mistakes along the way. But I am a big fan of the growth that stems from competing with a high-performing peer group. For the right temperament and with the right support---also feel perfectly good about avoiding overly toxic environments.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

I think you are overestimating the difference between Brown students and UMD students - especially those in the honors programs. There are tons of smart MC and UMC students who are choosing state flagships over Ivies and similar because not everyone has $400,000 in their pocket. And most people don't want to take on debt for marginal differences in prestige. I'm quite confident the honors students at UMD are every bit as impressive as Brown students.

No, I am not overestimating the difference. The 25th percentile SAT at Brown is 1500. The 75th percentile SAT at UMD is 1520.

What you are saying is true, but it’s not the point. It is absolutely true that there is no ceiling at UMD, and that there are more kids who score over 1500 at UMD (a large school) than at Brown (a small school). You are 100% correct about all that. But UMD admits a wider range of students. And that is the point here.

A 1510 student at UMD is constantly reminded that the world includes all kinds of people, including many who cannot score anything approaching a 1510 (but who will go on to contribute to the world in careers that don’t require that particular kind of intelligence). They keep perspective. Meanwhile the same student at Brown is very likely to develop a distorted sense of the world, to conclude that they are objectively bad in the very areas where they are, in fact, unusually strong, and therefore to abandon the goals that brought them to college in the first place.

That is the risk of attending a reach school, and that is one more reason (besides all the excellent ones you mention) that a student like this hypothetical one might be well-advised to choose a target like UMD over a reach like Brown.

Eh I'll take the engineering and CS students at UMD over Brown.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

There are far too many PhDs generated anyway, and we want the ones who get academic jobs to be the ones who tough it out at Brown, not the ones who are coddled at a state school.

“High level of discouragement” should be purposely incorporated into PhD programs.

Yeah, it’s not the best example. Here’s a better one: long ago, my brother (a white man with an 800 SAT math score and a very healthy ego) called me to say he was going to drop his CS major because he was “the worst student in the department.” At Stanford. At the height of the dot com boom. I was the one who had to be like “the worst CS student at the most selective school in Silicon Valley is probably still pretty good?” He did finish the major. He did not earn departmental honors. He still works in the field. That’s a net positive, for him and for the world.

Anonymous wrote:I know Jeff Selingo isn’t universally loved here but his Dream School book had a stat that stuck with me: for every 10 point higher SAT score your peers have at college, it increases the likelihood of dropping out by like 2-3%

I wish I would have made note of the study he referenced.

This is not to say, attending reach schools is a bad idea IMO. But, if you do, I think it’s important to be able to be prepared for what that might feel like

Dropping out of the major, not dropping out of the school. The study is here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/239260. I was also able to find an unpaywalled PDF through Google. The title of the article is about URMs but the quoted research is from p. 445 where the authors are discussing all college students, not just URMs.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

There are far too many PhDs generated anyway, and we want the ones who get academic jobs to be the ones who tough it out at Brown, not the ones who are coddled at a state school.

“High level of discouragement” should be purposely incorporated into PhD programs.

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Anonymous wrote:The classes are hard at DD's 1st year's reach school. It does somewhat depend on proposed major and natural proclivities. So many are pushed onto a STEM path, and those classes have extra hours due to lab, hard tests, hard math, etc. Whereas humanities and social science majors generally may not require as much study.

It's a fallacy that humanities courses are easier. My freshman kid is at his reach school and is taking Bio, Chem, and MVC this semester. He said his China freshman seminar workload is heavier than those three classes put together, due to the lengthy reading assignments and papers. He has high As in the STEM classes and will be lucky to pull off an A in the humanities course.

lol no humanities courses are far easier, that’s why countless students switch majors from STEM to humanities but not the other way.

It depends on how one's brain works. For some, reading 400 pages a week and writing 15 and 25 page papers is extremely challenging, especially these days when most 18 year olds have the attention span of gnats.

It’s not difficult, it’s just time-consuming.

I was in the bottom quarter of my major at aT5, largely because HS did not prepare me with decent math courses and calculus. I graduated, got a decent GPA by not taking harder courses that required lots of math. I would have been upper quarter or better at a stare school. I would have had confidence and a better career.

Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

if you prep him for the competition then he might better deal with it.

"Mismatch" was always the criticism of affirmative action and DEI. It would have been better for all involved if this person had gone to schools such as VCU, VaTech etc. and majored in Accounting/economics as opposed to attending HYPSM and majoring in ethnic studies, communications etc.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

if you prep him for the competition then he might better deal with it.

Sound pretty patronizing - if anything, UMD Bio is more rigorous due to the lack of a P/F option.

The example isn’t great, but generally, I do agree.

If you don’t know what you want to do, you should go to a prestigious college because the name will open doors for you and give you some flexibility. If you are very clear in your path, go to an easier school, get the straight As, professor recommendations, best internships, research, all of that, and use it to your advantage.

That’s assuming you’re in vast majority of people who can’t get straight As at the most rigorous colleges.

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Anonymous wrote:The classes are hard at DD's 1st year's reach school. It does somewhat depend on proposed major and natural proclivities. So many are pushed onto a STEM path, and those classes have extra hours due to lab, hard tests, hard math, etc. Whereas humanities and social science majors generally may not require as much study.

It's a fallacy that humanities courses are easier. My freshman kid is at his reach school and is taking Bio, Chem, and MVC this semester. He said his China freshman seminar workload is heavier than those three classes put together, due to the lengthy reading assignments and papers. He has high As in the STEM classes and will be lucky to pull off an A in the humanities course.

lol no humanities courses are far easier, that’s why countless students switch majors from STEM to humanities but not the other way.

It depends on how one's brain works. For some, reading 400 pages a week and writing 15 and 25 page papers is extremely challenging, especially these days when most 18 year olds have the attention span of gnats.

Yes, that's right. My kid can skate through problem sets and lab reports. Mastering complex cultural and philosophical ideas and completing original analysis of literary texts takes far more time and deep thought for him.

I know Jeff Selingo isn’t universally loved here but his Dream School book had a stat that stuck with me: for every 10 point higher SAT score your peers have at college, it increases the likelihood of dropping out by like 2-3%

I wish I would have made note of the study he referenced.

This is not to say, attending reach schools is a bad idea IMO. But, if you do, I think it’s important to be able to be prepared for what that might feel like

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

Was that discouragment and negative feedback coming from an internal dialog, or were other people discouraging her? Is it impostor syndrome, a toxic culture, or are her professors literally telling her she hasn't got what it takes?

It's weird. I see the value in being in an environment where with normal hard work you can be one of the top students, but if a bright, motivated, high achieving student accepted to Brown is not being provided with support and set up to succeed, that's a failure of the institution. And if it's failing institution, we shouldn't be calling it prestigious.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

I think you are overestimating the difference between Brown students and UMD students - especially those in the honors programs. There are tons of smart MC and UMC students who are choosing state flagships over Ivies and similar because not everyone has $400,000 in their pocket. And most people don't want to take on debt for marginal differences in prestige. I'm quite confident the honors students at UMD are every bit as impressive as Brown students.

No, I am not overestimating the difference. The 25th percentile SAT at Brown is 1500. The 75th percentile SAT at UMD is 1520.

What you are saying is true, but it’s not the point. It is absolutely true that there is no ceiling at UMD, and that there are more kids who score over 1500 at UMD (a large school) than at Brown (a small school). You are 100% correct about all that. But UMD admits a wider range of students. And that is the point here.

A 1510 student at UMD is constantly reminded that the world includes all kinds of people, including many who cannot score anything approaching a 1510 (but who will go on to contribute to the world in careers that don’t require that particular kind of intelligence). They keep perspective. Meanwhile the same student at Brown is very likely to develop a distorted sense of the world, to conclude that they are objectively bad in the very areas where they are, in fact, unusually strong, and therefore to abandon the goals that brought them to college in the first place.

That is the risk of attending a reach school, and that is one more reason (besides all the excellent ones you mention) that a student like this hypothetical one might be well-advised to choose a target like UMD over a reach like Brown.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

I think you are overestimating the difference between Brown students and UMD students - especially those in the honors programs. There are tons of smart MC and UMC students who are choosing state flagships over Ivies and similar because not everyone has $400,000 in their pocket. And most people don't want to take on debt for marginal differences in prestige. I'm quite confident the honors students at UMD are every bit as impressive as Brown students.

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Anonymous wrote:From Malcolm Gladwell - there are a lot of MIT Business majors that started as STEM majors. You judge yourself with those around you - at top tier school you are likely at the bottom. He gave an example of a Brown Bio major who dropped out but in retrospect she thought if she went to UMD she'd have a PHD in the field.

Likely the other way around.

I was going to say, why didn't she just go to slacker UMD and skate her way to that PhD?

The bad news is that a PhD at a less-prestigious institution is just as much work as at a more prestigious one, but with far less chance of getting an academic job afterwards.

Switch majors after your freshman year, though, and there’s a 0% chance you’ll get an academic job in the field.

That’s what Gladwell is talking about: if a kid who would be 25th percentile at Brown but 75th percentile at UMD goes to Brown, they get four years of discouragement and negative feedback, even though they’re objectively one of the best (that’s how they got into Brown) and would have been recognized as such at UMD. Not a lot of people have the emotional resilience to take four years of constant discouragement without getting thoroughly discouraged.

Getting into reaches feels great. Attending them is often a different story.

This is what it’s all about - resilience!

I went from being a huge fish in a shallow pond to being a huge fish among other huge fish at a T10 school.

It took me an entire year (and many B- and C+ grades, back when there was a B- curve) to realize I was underprepared on the executive function / time management front.

Until college, I didn’t know what I didn’t know in terms of the PROCESS of keeping up with a heavy workload without external prompts. It was a very stressful first year (though FUN because I was using my time for that 😂) and I struggled with self doubt quite a bit. But I got a tutor for math second semester, and she also helped me learn how to structure my time. It was a lifesaver, and I did better each semester after that.

My DS is similar to me, and this is already on his radar screen. No, he does not love school or do anything beyond what’s necessary. But he’s struggled with EF and is learning that he can make it work if he follows a schedule.

Not sure how it will go in college, but I do think he’s internalized the resilience piece. He’s felt the struggle quite a few times over the years and has chosen to hunker down and get himself out of the hole, rather than shut down. So I’m hopeful ….

That’s what I would consider if I were you:

Is your DS fully aware that this is something he needs to focus on, rather than try to glide through freshman year?

Has he had experienced feeling the pain of his EF mistakes and the power/resilience that comes with battling back rather than shutting down or giving up?

And finally, is he willing and able (!) to seek help in college - a tutor, regular meetings with an academic advisor, or visits to the writing center for feedback five days before a paper is due etc.?

Kids mature at different times, and boys can be slower on the EF front. But I wouldn’t necessarily shy away from a reach if he gets in. With proven resilience and the right structure in place, he could do great!