Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion College choices

Personally, I find it hard to believe that a top-tier consulting firm would spend time and money on several rounds of interviews and then cut someone over a fact they should have seen on the application.

I would not want to work for a company that lax anyway - as it happens, I think that your friend lucked out!

I've checked my list of irrational abstractions and I was not able to find any third option.

It may have simply been the whim of one of the glorious awesome people.

When you reach a certain level of glory, you can indulge your whimsical playful side.

Totally get the bit about the sub patrician population being irrelevant too.

Top tier tertiary education institutions are businesses and they want rich benefactors and alumni - as money begets money their most rational choice is to select from the global patrician offspring.

Keeping tuition high to all but a tiny minority keeps out the riff raff, don't you know.

Really!

If you have borrow the money to pay for tuition at their school then they are going to be utterly ambivalent to your being there.

The way I figure it is that either way, there's a lot of uncertainty -- is this the career I really want, is this the school I really want, who will hire me, etc. Either way you don't know what will happen after college, or whether things will change by then. Add that to the fact that, as HK mentioned, the HYPS admissions race is, in many people's opinions, at least somewhat morally...questionable.
Yes, look at your options. Don't choose just off of finances, or prestige, or anything else for that matter. A college with a full ride might be not as good of a choice as a college requiring a small (like 10K small, or whatever) loan.
But in my opinion, I'd rather take a free or 10-15K chance than a 200K chance. That's what college choice, college admissions IS: it's a chance. You might choose the "wrong" school. However, it's hard (I hope?) to choose a college that will leave you with no job prospects and no education. If I'm uncertain, the free school sure seems like the safer bet to me.

It's possible that a factor in the elite college graduate preference is that many kids have to work like dogs to get into those schools and may have to work very hard to get a decent GPA at them. Consulting firms are known for the long hours they require, and many graduates of elite colleges have spent their youths being conditioned to the idea of working 70+ hour weeks. So picking people who won't question the hours could be a "rational" factor in the decision-making process. I don't know; I'm only speculating here.

As for the SAT scores, scores of 700 and 800 are separated by 3-ish wrong questions, and I'm not really sure that this is a real difference in terms of predicting how well someone will do in a job. There are way too many other factors influencing that outcome.

A family friend just made a very similar decision. OP's daughter should make the decision that is best for their family. I've known kids who have gone to elite school only to find out it's not working out for them for one reason on another. That can be a costly mistake if you have taken out huge loans. Making a decision now that would put a family in huge debt for some potential high paying job at some elite company sometime in the future seems risky.

Fruitydragons, that assumes that there isn't a fire, and that the people running around shouting about one are, erm--

well. That they have their own view of the world, which may or may not be completely aligned with what most people consider to be reality.




To be clear, I agree with you-- the college admissions game now is about whether or not you believe that the building is on fire, and that your survival (?) depends upon Doing The Very Bestest Thing Ever by Attending The Most Prestigious Institution.

It's not a simple thing, figuring out what is "right" with respect to a college education. Or any other major life decision. This is only the first of them, really.

It's just that it is nothing more than ignorance to claim that:

a) Everything about HYPS is, well-- hype. No. It isn't. The prestige is there for a reason. It is a premium education. Of course, it also comes at an extremely premium cost, so there is that.

b) The system is bimodal, with elite institutions on one side, and all the rest on the other. Well, no, actually-- it is POSSIBLE to get an incredibly fine and life-changing education at-- for example, University of Wisconsin-Stout. It really is mostly about what students bring into the environment as much as anything else.



Can you get a "premium" education without paying for one? Well-- yes and no. No, your diploma from UW-Stout won't say Princeton. Will your education be as good? Maybe. There's no way to say, actually, because it is individual and largely unwritten until it's over, and because nobody can say what you'll value about your college education in retrospect-- not even YOU. It is true, however, that your education at UW-Stout will cost about 1/6th, on average, as much as it would at Princeton.

ROI is a thing, I suppose, but the trouble is that most people who go to college do so for reasons which aren't purely economic to start with.

It's not even clear to me what "education" is.

I still don't know why I had to endure the college experience, so I'm not really a fan of paying for it. It struck me as a form of torment and wasted years more than anything else.

In terms of financial benefit, it was definitely a big plus, so I tend to look at it as an ROI issue.

Yes. The problem is that it's not black-and-white, and it's hard to tell how things will work out just by looking at a college -- you really can't know until you get there. HYPS will get you a good, high quality education amongst a large quantity of intellectual peers. But so will, say, a small, private, liberal arts college, but (maybe? probably? not?) to a lesser extent.
That being said, there are plenty of people at prestigious universities with little student loan debt. And for them, assuming everything else is going well (which I guess is assuming a lot), that's a pretty good choice.
Furthermore, one could argue that a lot of it is the student, not the college, and that certain students flock to certain colleges.
One could argue a lot of things college related, for that matter, and never reach a clear conclusion.
However, I personally feel that loans of 200K (or 100K) plus are best reserved for things like houses, not college educations. To me, there are few things that could make Harvard -- or any school, for that matter -- worth that much more than our hypothetical, affordable universities. At some vague point the benefit to cost ratio is tipped too far, and I think many colleges of all types and ranks and tiers or what have you have reached that point. Honestly, I can't say I know what to do about it -- I don't think anyone knows what to do, but you can only try to know what's best.