Anonymous wrote:

First of all, DC is fairyland so I would not consider it a benchmark. Most people here could not survive professionally in other markets (NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, Boston). Although you can find serious players here, there are not many. Second, certain privates help students land a spot at the top schools. In NYC, top prep schools send 60% of their classes to the Ivies and top privates. So yes, it is worth in to send your DC to the right school. Third, there are more CEOs of major companies from Harvard/Stanford than other schools. Do your homework, punk. Finally, I don't think anyone said that you needed a degree from a top school to succeed. The point is that it helps more than a degree from a non-elite school ( See link: http://www.ceo.com/flink/?lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.for...uce-the-most-ceos%2F&id=305480).

First of all, I don't live in DC anymore, but I don't know that that is true about NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, or Boston. The degree to which the DC market or those markets are more competitive depends entirely on your field.

I don't know about 60%, although that depends on how to define "top private," but this list suggests to me that it is not nearly 60% http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html. I don't know that it is so much helping people land a spot as selecting groups of people who are highly academically competitive and whose parents have money/legacy. I know that you get a fantastic education at some of these prep schools, but if you are really Harvard material, going to BCC or Whitman isn't going to hurt you. Going to some bumfuck rural school or some shitty inner city school certainly will.

Third of all, while peer group is important, and all other things being equal, I would recommend that people send their kids to the most competitive school they can attend, there was a study that showed that part of this phenomenon of greater professional success is because top schools select the most outstanding students. If you look at the earnings of people who got accepted to Harvard but chose not to go due to financial pressures, their level of professional success is identical. The only time that an advantage was seen was for minorities who grew up in poverty.

PP, You make some fair points. Although I would add the following:

DC does have several strong sectors but unless you are a lobbyist, the cities I referenced are stronger overall and most business school/law school grads are likely to chose other areas over DC.

The WSJ list includes only eight schools. If you inlude the Ivies, Little Ivies, Seven Sisters, Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, Duke, U of Chicago, Georgetwon, and NYU you approach 60%. If you include the top state schools including UVA, U of M, and UC Berkeley the number climbs higher. I think you also make my point re: importance of top prep schools. If your husband had access to one of these prep schools he would have found his way to a top university. Admissions people at the leading schools use certain schools as pipelines because they know the quality of the students and that the students at these schools are well prepared. Sure, they will take a kid from a rural school once in a while but with that kid they are taking a risk. Similarily, top graduate programs use the same rationale.

Anonymous wrote:Unless PPs were on the small law review affirmative action committee the year Barack applied for law review, they do not know whether he got on because of his grades or the writing competition or affirmative action. The process then was not quite the same as what is quoted above from Wikipedia. Just so you know. Not sure what difference it makes now, anyway.

Of course everyone on the Law Review knows who made it on grades and who made it on write-on. It's the first year
(Grades) students' job on the review is to return to HLS in late July working with everyone else to create what will become the massive write-on exercise to be offered to anyone who wants to take it after everyone else returns for the fall term. The teachers know who made it by grades or write-on. The students know. The students themselves put it "by grade" on their resume if they did. Certain judges will take only clerks who made it onto HLS via write-on. And if that isn't enought, then the professors themselves will tell the judges when they call for a reference if the candidate was a "grades" or "write-on" member.

I definitely agree that is you really want to go to an ivy, go to a public in bumfuck nowhere. Top students at a private school, whether in NYc or DC are a dime a dozen. The schools would rather accept a smart, lower middle class kid from no where over a rich, sheltered, tutored kid from a private school.

Actually, that's not what I said. My husband went to a bumfuck rural school and he is brilliant, great test scores, 4.0, valedictorian, super impressive, self-taught advanced classes that his high school didn't offer (self-taught AP chem and advanced math, for example), etc. He didn't apply to any competitive colleges because he wasn't aware of financial aid opportunities, and his guidance counselors didn't have any advice to give him, and his parents didn't help him out with college so he was scared off by the sticker price. He applied to the nearest school with instate tuition and an honors program, and that was that. There were only a couple AP courses offered, no peers who were intellectual challenges to him, no real college counseling office, no test prep, and of the half of his graduating class that actually went to college, all but maybe a couple went to the two nearest in state colleges and most dropped out after freshman year. He also doesn't have a network of peers who went on in professional careers the way I do, growing up upper middle class. So I think that going to a rural school or an inner city school puts you at a disadvantage...because you have to be a pretty exceptional person in those circumstances to even think to apply to a top college. Perhaps if you do apply, you are more likely to get in, but my husband didn't even realize that MIT was a top engineering school until he was in college...so there's a matter of awareness that comes with growing up in a metropolitan area upper middle class. The resources are just not there for lower middle class families. For upper middle class families, I think if a kid is really Harvard material, whether they go public or private doesn't matter in the least.

Anonymous wrote:

First of all, DC is fairyland so I would not consider it a benchmark. Most people here could not survive professionally in other markets (NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, Boston). Although you can find serious players here, there are not many. Second, certain privates help students land a spot at the top schools. In NYC, top prep schools send 60% of their classes to the Ivies and top privates. So yes, it is worth in to send your DC to the right school. Third, there are more CEOs of major companies from Harvard/Stanford than other schools. Do your homework, punk. Finally, I don't think anyone said that you needed a degree from a top school to succeed. The point is that it helps more than a degree from a non-elite school ( See link: http://www.ceo.com/flink/?lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.for...uce-the-most-ceos%2F&id=305480).

First of all, I don't live in DC anymore, but I don't know that that is true about NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, or Boston. The degree to which the DC market or those markets are more competitive depends entirely on your field.

I don't know about 60%, although that depends on how to define "top private," but this list suggests to me that it is not nearly 60% http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html. I don't know that it is so much helping people land a spot as selecting groups of people who are highly academically competitive and whose parents have money/legacy. I know that you get a fantastic education at some of these prep schools, but if you are really Harvard material, going to BCC or Whitman isn't going to hurt you. Going to some bumfuck rural school or some shitty inner city school certainly will.

Third of all, while peer group is important, and all other things being equal, I would recommend that people send their kids to the most competitive school they can attend, there was a study that showed that part of this phenomenon of greater professional success is because top schools select the most outstanding students. If you look at the earnings of people who got accepted to Harvard but chose not to go due to financial pressures, their level of professional success is identical. The only time that an advantage was seen was for minorities who grew up in poverty.

There is no way the top NYC privates are sending 60% to top Ivies. I graduated from one of the top NYC private schools in 1990 and even then about 20% percent of the class went to an ivy and that includes Cornell, where about 10 people went. It has gotten even harder to get into an ivy since, so there is no way it is now 20%.

I definitely agree that is you really want to go to an ivy, go to a public in bumfuck nowhere. Top students at a private school, whether in NYc or DC are a dime a dozen. The schools would rather accept a smart, lower middle class kid from no where over a rich, sheltered, tutored kid from a private school.

First of all, DC is fairyland so I would not consider it a benchmark. Most people here could not survive professionally in other markets (NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, Boston). Although you can find serious players here, there are not many. Second, certain privates help students land a spot at the top schools. In NYC, top prep schools send 60% of their classes to the Ivies and top privates. So yes, it is worth in to send your DC to the right school. Third, there are more CEOs of major companies from Harvard/Stanford than other schools. Do your homework, punk. Finally, I don't think anyone said that you needed a degree from a top school to succeed. The point is that it helps more than a degree from a non-elite school ( See link: http://www.ceo.com/flink/?lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.for...uce-the-most-ceos%2F&id=305480).

First of all, I don't live in DC anymore, but I don't know that that is true about NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, or Boston. The degree to which the DC market or those markets are more competitive depends entirely on your field.

I don't know about 60%, although that depends on how to define "top private," but this list suggests to me that it is not nearly 60% http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html. I don't know that it is so much helping people land a spot as selecting groups of people who are highly academically competitive and whose parents have money/legacy. I know that you get a fantastic education at some of these prep schools, but if you are really Harvard material, going to BCC or Whitman isn't going to hurt you. Going to some bumfuck rural school or some shitty inner city school certainly will.

Third of all, while peer group is important, and all other things being equal, I would recommend that people send their kids to the most competitive school they can attend, there was a study that showed that part of this phenomenon of greater professional success is because top schools select the most outstanding students. If you look at the earnings of people who got accepted to Harvard but chose not to go due to financial pressures, their level of professional success is identical. The only time that an advantage was seen was for minorities who grew up in poverty.

First of all, DC is fairyland so I would not consider it a benchmark. Most people here could not survive professionally in other markets (NYC, LA, SF/PA, Chicago, Boston). Although you can find serious players here, there are not many. Second, certain privates help students land a spot at the top schools. In NYC, top prep schools send 60% of their classes to the Ivies and top privates. So yes, it is worth in to send your DC to the right school. Third, there are more CEOs of major companies from Harvard/Stanford than other schools. Do your homework, punk. Finally, I don't think anyone said that you needed a degree from a top school to succeed. The point is that it helps more than a degree from a non-elite school ( See link: http://www.ceo.com/flink/?lnk=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.forbes.com%2Fsites%2Fsusanadams%2F2013%2F09%2F25%2Fthe-universities-that-produce-the-most-ceos%2F&id=305480).

Anonymous wrote:Amusing as it is, sometimes I wonder how many people on this forum are actual adults working in the real world of super high achieving Washington D.C. If you are -- look around you. Smart, successful people come in every variety, from every background, every type of school -- and in fact the one thing they generally have in common is their natural, organic, God-given excellence, which can't be instilled by a "Big 3" or the Ivy League or psychos mom debating Holton vs NCS. In other words, yes, getting into a better college is a stupid reason to go to a top private school. It's all about personal development. Which you can achieve just as easily at the University of Vermont.

For those of you who work in the private sector did your CEO come from HYP? Ours came from Perdue I think. OP, I write this though I have lots of anxiety about how my kids turn out, I think being an engaged parent is far more important in K-12 than where they go though I wouldn't recommend Ballou.

Anonymous wrote:(Another reason I like the private school forum is reading complaints from rich white people who can't stand it that their rich white kid didn't get into some elite something and a non-rich non-white kid did. When everybody knows perfectly well that rich white kids are by definition better than non-rich non-white kids!)

Outstanding +1,000,000,000,000,000

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Just read the article below. My favorite quote: "A former roommate told the magazine GQ recently that Cruz preferred to study only with graduates of Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, dismissing the rest as “the minor Ivies.”The five-member study group included one member, Jeff Hinck, who attended Northwestern."


http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2013/11/10/ted-cruz-was-polarizing-figure-harvard-law-foreshadowing-his-partisan-profile-senate/gEUPs0iVgOyoidafkNe94H/story.html

Is this supposed to show that HYP graduates are better, or that Ted Cruz is a fool?

Exactly. I am an HLS alum, and was invited to one of those exclusive study groups 1L year. I never went back. Bunch of aholes. graduated cum laude without them.