Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

As I've said before, dogging is definitely good for $$$$.

My SIL (now a pediatric dentist) cashed that in back in 2003-ish.

Yeah, I was all over the opt-out bandwagon, too...


until I realized-- and more to the point, my DD realized-- that just going to "Local Uni" meant that her classes were going to be filled by the same caliber of classmates that she's been suffering through in her honors coursework for the past several years.

In other words, she NEEDS for college to be different, and she recognizes that the kids at the homegrown option.... just... aren't bright enough. This trend is a bigger problem than it used to be what with initiatives that have expanded "college-for-all" to include those students who would have been conditional admits at best ANYWHERE when we were in college 25-30 years back.

Well, colleges accept them and do what they can to RETAIN those students now.

Having read that post, I'll say one thing - that cub is a fine writer.

It is also rewarding to see that gifted is rewarded and not pilloried over there. Getting into the school that she will be interning at makes getting into an Ivy like a cakewalk.

That's because college is now high school.

Literally.

Your second to last paragraph sums up EXACTLY why I am busily trying to sock away the moolah right now

Yes... this is one reason I was all over the college search from early on. As hard as parents work out here to get acceleration and differentiation for their kids in the lower grades, you have to realize that most state universities and lower priced colleges also do not have a lot of intellectual peers for our kids.

My D attended THINK at Davidson for a couple of summers, and one thing she said in several of her college essays (the "Why College X?" essay so many schools want) was that the reason she wanted to attend their college is because they matched the intellectual environment she found at THINK. Seemed to resonate with admissions. She only used this with the colleges where she truly felt it was the case (did not say it for her "safeties"). But I think it was the deepest desire for her in her college search. And she would not get that at our state university -- at least not in our state.

The point of college right now (from the administration's perspective) is apparently to vacuum in as much "free" government debt as possible.

With every passing year, this problem is getting worse.

However, I don't expect the system to break or anything major to change anytime soon. I don't see a reason for it to change.

I simply expect it to keep getting worse for some time.

The students are clearly functioning as excellent sources of tax revenue (now at 6+%), the colleges are happy (free $$$), parents are happy (college is good! education is good!), and students are happy while in school (look at these perks! We have a spa! the government is giving me beer money! Yay!!!).

I also expect the median wage to continue its punctuated decline (in real terms). I expect that the next recession (whenever it hits) to drop this lower.

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos2013/household-income-real1-13a.gif

The system seems to be solidly locked into making things worse because there are enough people who are getting what they want at the moment.

I expect health care to be a major "problem" before college is really noticed as a problem.

See, I think that the difference on our end is a couple fold:

1) dd's school has the most bizarre weighting system that I've ever seen. I thought that dd misunderstood what they said until we reached this year when she was taking AP classes. For an A in an AP class, you get a 4.02 rather than a 4.0 figured in. They also take nine classes per semester. So, if your unweighted GPA was a 3.96 coming out of your junior year, I don't think that you could get the weighted number much over a 4.0 even if you'd taken every AP class available and gotten As in all of them when you are only getting an additional .02 points per AP classes and spreading that over the 54 classes you would have taken by that time. Also, to have gotten to AP science courses by your junior year, you would have had to have taken two science courses each year since pre-AP bio, Earth Systems, and pre-AP chem must all be completed before any AP science that is weighted. There is no AP lit class available until 11th grade either and pre-AP gives you no GPA bonus.

2) my dd is not blessed with speed. Her processing speed is very average or even a bit below. Her depth is amazing and she out performs her grade peers on achievement tests by a lot (still 99th percentile compared to national and her school's norms) but the other kiddos seem to be able to do good enough work to get As faster or they just aren't sleeping - lol!

If I am defining "effort" as time, she does require as much as the bright and MG kids easily. Where she differs is that the quality of the work she is putting out (like writing for instance) is beyond what those kids can do even with a lot more time than she.

Right-- and the system as it stands is poised to mostly reward kids like mine (or those who can be made to LOOK that way, anyway)--

who can pack more than seems humanly possible into a day-- every day. I feel very strongly that this is WRONG, by the way. A kid like Cricket's ought to look like a great prospect for college by virtue of the quality and depth of her output.



A word about GPA here-- 'weighted' is very significant at some high schools, and hardly at all at others. AP is about twice the volume of work compared with the standard issue course, but an A in an AP course is a 5.0, and the standard course, it is a 4.0. An honors course is not that much more work than standard (but all the assessments, etc. are different and more... erm-- 'enriched') and that is a 4.5-- which explains why my DD's GPA is what it is, I hope. She does have a couple of A-'s and a B on her transcripts. She's just packed a LOT of classes into her past four years.

We also successfully lobbied for her to be able to take some things at the AP level without having had a full year of the regular course first (which I think is stupid-- at least for kids that actually BELONG in an AP class to start with, let's just say). Physics, for example. Policies like that really hobble highly capable kids from distinguishing themselves come college time. Grrr.

Because they are on semesters and use Carnegie units to calculate graduation credit, she will graduate with-- I think-- 26? maybe 27 Carnegie Unit "credits." That's nine classes a year-- on average-- and technically, students can graduate with only 24 credits.

This is why admissions offices use unweighted GPA, though. Trying to parse what it all means otherwise is Byzantine. To say the least.

The hardest part of all of this (back to the OP's question, I mean) is that with a super-accelerated kiddo, you wind up DRIVING THEM to all of this stuff that they do...


And with that, I'm off to pick my DD14 up from her internship and schlepp her to a piano lesson, after which I'll take her downtown again, to a local writer's group moderated by a YA author... before swinging by the grocery store on our way home in at 8:30 PM.

She has been at work since 7:30 this morning-- after working with the dog for 45 minutes before getting ready for work.

This is a TYPICAL day in her life.