Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ivy League Admissions.

Um, that's because Wall Street *was* the last recession.

Apologies. I wasn't aiming for your daughter, but for a educational culture that generally celebrates superficiality over depth.

I would have, too. But I managed to get a top-notch education at a small public directional college. Weird, I know-- but when you're that smart at a place like that, the faculty still know what you are, and they nurture it because they don't see it all that often. NO anonymity-- even if you might sometimes prefer that if you're on the underachiever track. Not that I'd know anything about that... {ahem}

Look the top notch graduate programs churn out top-notch PhD's at a regular clip-- and fair numbers of them wind up at small schools-- even public ones. No, they aren't FAMOUS... but some of them are still VERY bright, and engaging educators who are excellent mentors, focused on undergraduate education. It can be like a SLAC, if you're at the sweet spot there.

The other thing-- and I think this is why my education worked out the way that it did, honestly-- is something that HAS changed. It's that NOW, college administrators are so worried about "retention" that they have become increasingly willing to compromise academic integrity to get it. That is, loads more hand-holding and fluff assignments, etc. When I was a student, nada. If you didn't EARN a better grade, nobody was going to go out of their way to get you extra help... and you were going to flunk that class. {shrug} Nobody ever imagined the lengths to which modern college faculty are expected to go in making things EASY for students who are struggling.

So yeah-- I'll buy that the cohort argument may well be more applicable now than it was back in the day.

To derail this thread a bit, I'd like your recommendations on colleges for my dd. So I have a rising 9th grader (not the computer addict I mentioned in another thread yesterday) who is not a pleaser. She tests well (her 7th grade SAT scores would be the envy of most HS seniors), is likely to get great grades through high school, and may even do something interesting outside of academics in high school (if it doesn't interfere too much with her tumblr habit), but will. not. play. the admissions game. She is a deep thinker about big things, and takes *nothing* for granted. She has a prickly personality and disdains the material interests of her peers. I think "her people" are out there somewhere, and she will shine in college if she can find them, but they are going to be hard to find. She is leaning toward science right now, but her interests are very broad (philosophy, fiction writing, art, ….) Anyone know of any colleges well-suited for deep-thinking porcupines? It seems the Ivies are out of the question...

amylou-- I'll let you know how things go this coming year. My DD had a somewhat similar profile. We opted for an honors college in a land-grant flagship with a large research footprint in STEM. That way, she gets the SLAC treatment via the Honors Baccalaureate requirements (and specialty coursework, priority registration, etc.) and also gets the research environment to be found at a larger PhD-granting institution with professional schools attached to it.

It was this, or a consortium-member school like HMC or MIT, where she could have taken humanities courses at a high level outside of her major. She has interests that are too broad for a place like SIT or RPI, much as they would have loved to have her. This also has the additional merit of being-- FREE given the amount of merit aid they tossed her way.


Depending upon her specific interests, Reed or St. Johns sound like very good fits, too, Amylou-- but Reed is quite "crunchy." (Wasn't my DD's thing at all).

Thanks, HK. Our large state flagship does not have something like your honors college, so I'd worry that she would get isolated here (I am on the faculty), unless her interests are more focused by then. But perhaps another state….

And thanks also for the other interesting ideas. HMC had kinda slipped my mind, as had St. John's (the one in Santa Fe, right?). Those are good ones to have in mind. And of course Reed - crunchy might be okay to a point, but I expect a low tolerance on her part for band-wagon crunchiness. And getting into MIT is by no means a given - I think a bit of admissions game-playing is needed there and it will really depend on how hs goes. And I've not heard of SIT - the School of International Training?

My middle kid has received a lot of info from St. John's (they have a MD campus too, in case you are on the East Coast). While I think she would love the intellectual aspect, I don't think she could attend a school without varsity sports (and that touts their intercollegiate croquet team).

There are lots of great LACs in the NE part of the country. They might have your kid's people Amylou - check out the list of top LACs on College Confidential.

And the take-down of the WSJ article (including the cherry-picked and non-expert status of those researchers) is contained in that very same Wikipedia article.

Well, no. A thing that can make false predictions is called a "hypothesis." Some hypotheses turn out to be supported by the evidence and some not. Being proved wrong doesn't retroactively make it not good science.

You're misunderstanding what scientists mean when they say that a theory generates predictions. It specifically excludes re-observations of the original phenomenon from which the theory was derived. They have to be new predictions, preferably ones that uniquely distinguish this theory from what would be predicted by the competing theories.

Stevens Institute of Technology. It's the tech school that nobody but alums seems to know about, but MAN, is it a good one.

Arthur Jensen, one of the signers, would meet anyone's definition of an expert on intelligence. His magnum opus "The g factor" cited "The Bell Curve" extensively. Julian Stanley, another signer, was a giant of gifted education. Someone knowledgeable about psychology, especially psychometrics, will recognize many of the names on that list.