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Anonymous wrote:Even if true, which I disagree with, is it worth it? What is the end goal? So you “succeed” at the pressure cooker and got into Harvard at the cost of mental health, time to develop socially, and time to experiment with interests. Now what? In what paths are you at an advantage vs an equally smart kid who went to, for sake of keeping a consistent example, Browning and then a non-Ivy top 25 college? I guess the parents get to feel good that the “service” they paid for got them some Harvard merchandise?

Yeah, this is a key point in this whole discussion too. Harvard versus the non-Ivy T25 school is going to help for a few specific things you might want to do, namely:

- Work at a top Wall Street or consulting firm;
- Get into a top medical school, though this mostly matters if you want to enter a very competitive specialty;
- Get into a top law school, though this mostly matters if you want to work for a top law firm;
- Get into a top PhD program and from thence to academia, though that's a pretty bleak job market nowadays even for Harvard grads

There was a period where it helped for tech jobs but it no longer particularly does. And with the current upheaval in academia, and ever-dwindling acceptance rates meaning more and more qualified kids are turned away from Ivies, other pieces of this could easily fall apart too by the time it matters.

At any rate, if the vision you and your kid have for their future does not run through any of those paths, spending half of their childhood fighting for a spot at Harvard is pretty hard to justify for anything other than bragging rights.

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Anonymous wrote:K-8 schools should be graded on the same scale as K-12 schools. Some of the K-8 schools prepare their kids so well that they often become top of their class in high school. People are starting to see the real benefit of K-8 and that’s one of the reasons why it was extremely competitive (especially all-boys) this year.

Which would be the “TT” K8? In terms of exmissions, academics and competitive to gain admission. I can only think of St B and maybe Buckley

St B sounds right

St Ignatius but a niche audience

Lol

Anonymous wrote:I don't think it really about destination. It is teaching a well-off child to have the hunger, drive, and ambition to work hard by learning to compete at a young age. Going to a sweet school and telling the child they never have to aspire to anything is a different path.

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At any rate, if the vision you and your kid have for their future does not run through any of those paths, spending half of their childhood fighting for a spot at Harvard is pretty hard to justify for anything other than bragging rights.

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Anonymous wrote:For a certain type of kid, studying calculus bc or e.g. learning Latin and discussing Cicero after having read it in the original is pretty rewarding in itself, especially in the company of similarly minded peers. Just saying.

You don't need to go to Trinity for either of those things; hell, Brooklyn Latin is one of the easiest SHSAT schools to get into and they spend 11th and 12th grade reading literature in Latin. If you want BC calculus, a bunch of private schools make a whole big point of *not* offering that, but you can get it at most of the other SHSAT schools and LaGuardia along with the top GenEd publics.

Anonymous wrote:For a certain type of kid, studying calculus bc or e.g. learning Latin and discussing Cicero after having read it in the original is pretty rewarding in itself, especially in the company of similarly minded peers. Just saying.

Anonymous wrote:Even if true, which I disagree with, is it worth it? What is the end goal? So you “succeed” at the pressure cooker and got into Harvard at the cost of mental health, time to develop socially, and time to experiment with interests. Now what? In what paths are you at an advantage vs an equally smart kid who went to, for sake of keeping a consistent example, Browning and then a non-Ivy top 25 college? I guess the parents get to feel good that the “service” they paid for got them some Harvard merchandise?

Anonymous wrote:No, it’s dumb because admissions offices certainly do attach significance to whether or not someone attended one of those schools.

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Anonymous wrote:This may be the dumbest thing I've read on here.

Why? Because most kids actually can afford a private school or because most TT private schools do not in fact turn away far more qualified applicants than they accept?

I know people who send their kids to Trinity don't *like* to think that their admission there was a lottery ticket and that the only reason their kid is spending 4 hours a night doing homework is so they can edge out the other kids doing 4 hours a night of homework for the handful of Harvard acceptances, but it's true.

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Anonymous wrote:K-8 schools should be graded on the same scale as K-12 schools. Some of the K-8 schools prepare their kids so well that they often become top of their class in high school. People are starting to see the real benefit of K-8 and that’s one of the reasons why it was extremely competitive (especially all-boys) this year.

Which would be the “TT” K8? In terms of exmissions, academics and competitive to gain admission. I can only think of St B and maybe Buckley

St B sounds right

St Ignatius but a niche audience

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Anonymous wrote:Yes, it's clear.

It’s really not; if you’re smart enough to keep up at Trinity, you can go to a lower tier private or a public school, be in the top 10% of your class, do 2 hours a night if homework instead of 4, use the extra 2 hours to pad out your extracurriculars and/or simply enjoy being a teenager, and have pretty much the same odds of getting into Harvard that you would have had at Trinity.

The “pressure cooker” thing is about internal competition - colleges don’t give you much credit for it, because most kids don’t go to those sorts of schools and can’t be faulted for not enduring a similar workload.

So you’re saying for a really strong student, their odds of getting into Harvard are the same from Trinity as they are from Browning?

no. not unless an athletic recruit. for athletes, there are reasons for going to an easier school

Even if true, which I disagree with, is it worth it? What is the end goal? So you “succeed” at the pressure cooker and got into Harvard at the cost of mental health, time to develop socially, and time to experiment with interests. Now what? In what paths are you at an advantage vs an equally smart kid who went to, for sake of keeping a consistent example, Browning and then a non-Ivy top 25 college? I guess the parents get to feel good that the “service” they paid for got them some Harvard merchandise?

You do realize that, even though it’s hard, you still have time to develop interests and make friends. It’s not bootcamp (even though we kinda called the trinity history department that)

People get such melodramatic/romanticized ideas of what school was like. It’s funny

Not sure your age, but, no, school was a joke for me and I mostly just messed around and still ended up at a top college, and I was hardly unique in that regard. That’s not really the case today, at least for the junior level kids my firm hires (which includes sufficient sample size from TT nyc school). The hoops you have to jump through are insane and non-productive long term.[/

You're not actually giving an opinion on high school experience based on the kids your firm hires, are you? Come on now. I’ll be the first to say that trinity is not a happy place. I worked constantly, was constantly stressed (wrote about it elsewhere on this site), went to a good school, and even said I’d think long and hard before sending my kid to trinity for high achool (my kiddo’s at Dalton). I won’t speak for other schools. But trinity wasn’t exactly a trauma farm, either. It’s a hard, demanding school. The social pressure is extraordinary, but that’s because New York is a place of extremes. most of us managed to pursue the things we wanted outside of school and if you wanted a normal high school experience, You could have it. The cost would be potentially losing out on a spot at a top school. That’s true everywhere. It’s ultimately just high school. Bear that in mind while writing delulu posts about the lack of character development you judged when hiring some hm kids or something.

This comes off way ruder than intended. It’s just weird having to dispel these weird, baseless opinions.

But those are the only recent grads I know! Small sample anecdotal evidence is the best, right?

But really, I arguing that Trinity to Harvard path is usually not worth it, not that you can’t have a normal high school experience at Trinity. We need to bring back valuing the “normal high school experience”. So maybe my criticism is more about what Harvard and the like have become, not Trinity per se.