Here’s a crazy idea when thinking about what high school to choose for your kids. What colleges will be in the running?
Between the intense competition and budget cutbacks, you can’t just stroll into a UC campus with any old HS grades – heck, you need a 3.50 GPA just to get into many majors at San Diego State!
Should you consider an easier high school, in order for your kids to get a higher GPA – and increase the college choices?
Wifey thinks this thought is preposterous – of course you send the kids to the best high school available. But in this budget-conscious era, if you want to get into the best colleges, the 4.0 GPA might be required – especially if you have young kids, and are looking at 5-15 years from now.
The thought of glossy high schools doing a better job preparing kids for college with more-rigorous school work makes sense, but if good HS grades are tougher to come by, and a lower GPA occurs, it could make getting into a top college harder, not easier.
At the upper-echelon high schools, there is also some peer pressure to attend a big-time college, when you hear others around you are going to Harvard, MIT, Cal, and Stanford. The budget cutbacks at big-time schools will likely continue – did you see where Cal dropped it’s baseball program this week, after 100+ years of existence and winning two national championships?
Should the difficulty of getting into the best colleges be considered when choosing a high school?
By the way, on the thought that Cathedral Catholic HS is full of rich kids; they do reach out to the community – at least one-quarter of those enrolled are on scholarship.
Attending an “upper-echelon high school” has another drawback. If you want to go to a college that a lot of the other kids in your school want to go to, it can make it harder to be accepted. Colleges don’t want a lot of kids from the same HS. Your best bet to get into a top college is to excel at something unique, along with the 4.0+ GPA.
Our one and only graduated from a high school rated a 7 (per your link). Was slated to attend a 10 rated. We chose the 7 for a variety of reasons. Our student would be considered slightly above average (taking some honors/AP level). Graduated in the lower top third. Applied/auditioned/accepted/attended/graduated from the oldest most prestigious arts college in the nation, which was considered head and shoulders above all other graduating class acceptances on record that year.
What I really think – what good is calculus if you aren’t even capable of balancing your checkbook? High school students would benefit most by being taught/able to apply their basic math skills in every day life, so that they might avoid making ill advised home purchasing decisions (like going way beyond the simple 3X gross annual income formula) in their collective future/s. Not to mention avoiding exiting the college experience with a boatload of debt (loans/credit cards).
This does seem like a good way to get into college, be the best student as a lesser HS instead of an above-average student at a top HS. There are only so many kids who get to be a valedictorian each year.
This does require a lot of motivation and discipline because the student will not be surrounded by other students striving for college and may even have access to less resources to help them get there.
For example, you may have a hard time enrolling in college prep classes at some San Diego City Schools – (http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/sep/29/sd-unified-struggles-college-standards/).
A lawyer friend once told me that the best thing you can do to get into a good law school (besides a high LSAT score) was to have a high GPA. So you should major in something easy as an undergrad to make sure your GPA is high.
I went to a school that is now rated a 6 (no idea what it was back then).
Valedictorian went to Harvard, later graduated from Wharton
Salutatorian went to MIT Grad (State School undergrad)
First honor went to Notre Dame (almost flunked out, but got in)
Second Honor I have no idea what happened to her, I think she went to a state school
So maybe you have something there, never thought about it before.
I consider sandbagging to be bad parenting. College admissions boards look at more than just GPA and test scores.
For the record, anyone good at calculus will be more than able to balance their checkbook.
-Armchair Parent
“anyone good at calculus will be more than able to balance their checkbook.”
I’m personally observing several cases where that remains to be seen.
Who has a checkbook these days? Got it all real time on my phone and laptop! Just sayin!
Parents need to be more skeptical of college rankings, especially US News’ rankings. Those criteria, are in large part, a joke. Take “selectivity”, which is just the ratio of admissions to applications and is an easy number to juice. The party school rankings have more meat on them than US News’ rankings. In general, there’s a college experience to fit anyone who wants to go to college.
That said, I have the luxury of having a degree from an “upper echelon” school, so at least in the fields where I seek work, that alone has opened doors for me.
To get in, though, I couldn’t just coast by with acing regular classes. I had to take what feeble AP course offerings our HS had, take some additional AP tests on my own, and take some community college courses. If your aim is to enter one of the elite colleges, GPA and test scores are just the starting point. They’re going to look at the kinds of classes you challenged yourself with, and whether you made an effort to go beyond your high school curriculum if that curriculum is not competitive with more elite high schools.
aside: Personal finance is not about mathematical ability. It’s about self-discipline. There are plenty of tools to do the math for you, but you have to go use them.
It is harder for many because many of those Universities no longer count `legacy` as a major factor. Unless, Daddy donates a new building…
I think there’s something to letting your kid go to a crappy high school as long as you know what you’re getting into. I grew up in Denver and was friends with a blonde Jewish girl that lived downtown in a restored Victorian in Manuel HS school district. Her parents could have easily sent her to Kent ( the leading private HS ) but instead let her go to Manual. (predominately black, latino) She was above average but not super smart. At Manual this got her into all the advanced AP courses and competition between students wasn’t as extreme as it would have been at a private school.
When she graduated she was accepted to everywhere she applied. Ended up attending Duke.
What HS did you go to shadash? I grew up in JeffCo.
Manual was a real PoS. My parents were both teachers (not at that school) and some of the stories I hear from back then still trip me out.
I think that girl would have enjoyed the same opportunities had she gone to Kent Denver.
I think at least half of the dozen or so good friends I made in engineering school have horrible personal finances today, and they all had to excel in calculus to get through school. I wouldn’t put much stock in that assumption as everything I learned about personal finance was from my father, not from anything HS or University taught me.
Also, I imagine a good portion of the 25% on scholarship at Cathedral Catholic are the star atheletes?
I wholeheartedly agree with choosing a 2nd tier high school to increase your GPA.
College admission is just like any function in the corporate world. People are basically lazy, and try to think as little as possible. A GPA is an excellent minimal-thought judgement and selection factor. Sure, a few high end institutions may actually read your admissions essay, and care about your extra-cirricular activities, but the GPA will still decide if you make the first cut.
I attended Banana Slug U. (also known as University of California Santa Cruz) which at the time was famous/infamous for its system of grading: the narrative evaluation. Students did not receive grades, but rather a written assessment of their performance for each class. Of course the amount of information varied widely based on the inclination of the teacher, size of the class, etc. In some classes of 500+ students, you would get the standard once sentence: “Ross’s performance was (excellent/good/satisfactory/unacceptable).” From smaller classes you would get a paragraph, maybe 2 or 3, of actual information about your work.
The narrative evaluation system was controversial because some graduate schools simply would not accept it, demanding a GPA. So an option was offered to receive a letter grade along with the narrative.
Furthermore, I would carry this same idea over to the choice of colleges as well. Unless you are planning on entering a profession where the snob factor of a Ivy League school is a necessity, a good but not great college will be a much better value in the long run.
I’m probably not a normal case, but I went to a high school that’s rated 10 by ‘greatschools’ (and has probably been a 10 since greatschools ). My experience there was that getting an A is really a matter of doing most of the assigned work, rather than particularly exceptional work, and that my grades generally reflected my level of interest in the subject, rather than anything else.
It’s up to your child which college they end up in, but a good school does help. Even though there was intense competition at my school making it harder to get a good GPA, the fact is GPA is only one factor out of four. There were 7 Harvard acceptances out of a class of 200 to give you an idea. We were comparable to Palos Verdes in our Ivy acceptance rates.
The suggestion that somehow it’s harder to get into an Ivy league college because you’re competing against your classmates is pure fantasy. If anything, there’s a bias the other way. A big part of the Harvard application is your interview, and let me tell you there are a lot of alumni in the area giving these interviews.
The one thing a good school does is motivates you and shows you that studying hard is normal and even admirable. Kids don’t give up as much when they see everyone else around them working their ass off.
Shadash = Arapahoe HS
And BTW Genius you are 100% correct regarding Manual. As our football coach once said “Manual sucks so bad there’s a vortex on that side of town that doesnt let anything good escape from it.” Here’s why…
My softmore year we played Manual on their field. It was a natural grass but hadn’t been maintained (mowed) in over a month and large patches were cement like dried mud with broken peices of glass mixed in. The Manual players jerseys and equipment were all ripped, torn, and over 20 years old. We were able annihilate them because their coach and players had no idea what there were doing. During the game there was 4-5 fights. Here’s where it gets fun. When the game ended our team huddled up and picked glass out our knees and hands. While our coach was giving us the post game speech suddenly Manuals PARENTS started throwing ROCKS at us. When one wizzed by my coach he yelled “everyone back in the bus, RUN”. As we’re running to the buss with Manual parents in tow. We all fly onto the bus where glass is startin to break from the rocks. Our coach is yelling at everyone to stay down while at the same time trying to count that were on the bus. Once coach got the count he screamed GO to the driver and we were on our way out. I know this story is kinda long but here’s the best part…
While we’re driving out with windows getting blown out with rocks and the coach yelling for everyone to get down our linebacker runs to the back of the bus, flips off the Manual parents throwing rocks, pulls down his pants and starts mooning them. Pure awesomeness 🙂
I took ‘balancing a checkbook’ to mean in the literal sense. My mistake. Either way, calculus is important and you shouldn’t say mean things about it. And never, ever, drink and derive.
XD
Interesting topic. I attended a school that’s now listed as a great schools 6… but at the time (more than 30 years ago) was one of the best high schools in San Diego. My junior year produced more National Merit Scholarship finalists than any other school in CA. And my classmates went on to UCSD, UCLA, MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard… and a bunch of us to Mesa, City, and SDSU. (I went to Mesa then SDSU). Classmates have gone on to be VPs of major corporations, professors at MIT, work for JPL, researchers at Harvard, and one classmate who’s got more than 15 million books in print.
I think having a college prep high school is important – one that offers AP courses, etc… but it doesn’t have to be the tippy-top absolute best school.
One of my nephews went to grade school and middle school in the Philadelphia suburbs. The family moved to Kentucky when he was in high school. He said it was a positive factor when he was applying to Wharton – not as many applicants for Wharton from Kentucky compared to Bucks county PA. Schools do look at diversity of student body based on geography when picking applicants.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was in my brother’s high school class up in northern California. Stanford then Oxford and Rhodes Scholar etc. Her family was Catholic, but didn’t attend the 2 nearby private Catholic high schools. Those aren’t given a score on greatschools.
That high school is listed as an 8 currently by greatschools. The students that went to the big bopper schools were around 20 out of 400 in the class in my opinion.
Anyway, I think the chase is on for elementary schools when attached to the housing picture.
Genius/Shadash, good to see there other other Denverites reading this blog. I grew up in Denver, went to Cherry Creek. Crazy story btw.
I agree that if you want to go to a good college, the one possibility is that you become the top 1/2 at an less rigorous high school. However, I still think that the top colleges still look at courses that are taken and how the student challenged themselves inside and outside of school.
But one point that isn’t mentioned here is that the better school districts in general have better funding, more resources for teachers, more AP/IB classes, etc. Especially as the states and schools have less money, parents in the better districts are more willing to pay additional taxes to keep their schools quality.
I went to school with Tiger Woods (lived 2 doors away on my street) for elementary thru high school. Our school is an 8 on GS.net…
Given what they must have taught us (or not taught us) my goal is to stay married!
Shadash, we played Compton in football one year and had nearly the exact same experience…good times.
Always read, rarely comment – my 2 cents.
Went to an average high school, then paid my own way through community colleges and then SDSU. Always had average grades – never applied myself academically – was always working.
I’m a great worker – scrappy, tenacious, worked my behind off for the next promotion. I’m better off financially then my friends who got a free ride (from their parents) to highly rated universities. I think college is overrated, I know several wealthy plumbers and electricians.
I have degrees from three really good schools, including an Ivy League Ph.D., but I truly believe that the most important part of my education came during High School. I’m not saying this to brag, but to make a point.
To me, the answer to your question is another question: “What is the point of an education?”
If an education is a means to make more money and acquire more “financial security,” then a gut school where your kid can be a big fish in a little pond might be the answer. But if income and a guaranteed job is the ultimate goal, why not trade school? Trust me, an Ivy League degree is no path to security and stability.
IMO, what would more likely happen is that the kid would get an overinflated sense of self-worth, while remaining ignorant of the bigger pictures in life. Is being a douchebag a life worth living? Sure, for some people…
If, instead, an education is about preparing your child to have an intellectually fulfilling life, then the best GPA in the world is irrelevant.
CR
P.S., I don’t care if Cal cut ALL of it’s sports programs. I think it’s the FIRST place Universities should trim budgetary fat. My time at a major Southeastern engineering school included a national championship season in football (by some pre- BCS era polls) and a final four appearance. I couldn’t name a single one of the players or tell you what thay ultimately did for the school over the long run.
Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.
Problem is, you’ve got to make a lot of these decisions before you know what kind of folks your kids will grow up to be.
I wouldn’t sandbag the kids’ schools just to boost their GPAs. But then I wouldn’t recommend taking on six figures of debt for an Ivy League liberal arts degree or law degree either.
I’d take a good look at the Coast Guard – get some leadership skills, get college paid, grow up a bit. Beats waking up at 22 with six figures of debt and a worthless degree. Some of the most successful and well-rounded people I know are enlisted folk who went on to great educations after military service.
What Carlsbard Renter said.
Going to a “worse” school to get a higher GPA is not a good idea. Selective colleges don’t just look at GPA as an absolute scale across schools. A 4.0 at Hardknocks High is not the same as a 4.0 at Spiffy Prep. GPA isn’t even half the story in college admissions anyway.
How about going to the school that will challenge your kid the most? And a hugely underrated factor: provide him or her with achieving peers? I did my best academic work when I was surrounded by peers who were really smart and hard-working.
Finally, as I’ve said before, the metrics offered that rate high schools should be taken very, very skeptically. Everyone wants a single number to to rate everything, and the world just doesn’t work that way.
Grabbing data from http://statfinder.ucop.edu/ let’s take a look at three schools, rated 10, 9, and 8.
Let’s look at year 2008-2009 graduating class, removing students on subsidized lunch program as unfortunately they tend not to be in the college hunt.
Torrey Pines had 620 graduating seniors. minus the 5% on subsidized lunch program, we get 583.
Mt Carmel had 495 graduating seniors, removing the 36% on the lunch program, we have 317.
San Marcos had 268 graduating seniors, removing the 34% on the lunch program, we have 177.
363/583 in Torrey Pines applied to an UC school. A 62% rate. Once applied, 327 got admitted. That’s a 90% success rate.
136/317 in Mt Carmel applied to an UC school. That’s a lower rate at 43%. Once applied, 126 got admitted, the success rate is slightly higher at 92.6%.
40/177 in San Marcos applied to an UC school. The rate is down to 22.6%. Success rate is the same as Torrey Pines, at 90%.
What does the number tell us? Somehow the better the school is, the more likely they are to get their students to want to apply to college. Once the students are motivated enough to apply to college, admission is really not an issue.
The bottleneck is therefore student desire for college, not whether they get admitted.
So the most important question is why is a level 10 school better at motivating its students to be college-bound vs a level 9 or a level 8 school?
Sorry, Jim, but I gotta side with your wife on this one. I went to San Dieguito High School – highly rated but not as high as Torrey Pines. I was one of 9 people from my HS at UCLA. TP sent something like 20 (yes, I’m suggesting I went to a good school.) I think there were similar numbers for Cal. We sent 1 to Stanford, TP sent 6 or 7. There were similar numbers for other Ivy League universities. I think they absolutely have their favorite high schools.
I don’t buy the strategy of going to a “lesser” school to stand out more. Being the tallest midget won’t get you in the NBA. And speaking of the NBA, what’s up with the sports bashing? Jim, you gonna allow this on the blog?
What college you go to is vastly less important that what you study when you get there. Majors are much more important than college selectivity for earnings, spouse hotness, anything you care to measure.
OCR, GREAT, Absolutely GREAT. THX!
ocrenter – thanks for your info. Lots of people are quick to look at API scores or greatschools.org. But that statfinder website is a tremendous source of information for people willing to make some sense of it.
thanks
the scary thing is the huge drop off just going from one level to the next. 20% drop off in students even applying to the UCs per level. essentially, that really makes all schools at or below level 8 not worth considering.
the bottomline is children are influenced by their peers just as much as by their parents. If 80% of your peers don’t want to apply to UCs, then the 20% that does apply to UCs are just nerds and geeks. But if 2/3 of the graduating class are applying to UCs, then that’s just the norm and the 1/3 that are not applying are just losers. Hate to break it down like that but that’s how kids look at things.
Ehem,
I’m dying to know which major yields the hottest spouse.
“I’m dying to know which major yields the hottest spouse.”
All the guys I knew that went into Education did pretty well. During their Junior/Senior year the breakdown was usually around 1-2 guys and 15-30 girls in each class.
The term “fish in a barrel” was often thrown around.
Wifey says I should keep my crazy ideas to myself.
One of these days I’m going to listen.
Jim:
Not a crazy idea if you want your kid to go to a California university. The CA education master plan mandates that UC accept the top 1/8 of a high school graduating class – the top 1/3 for Cal State. So long as your kid is in the top 1/8 of her graduating class, she is guaranteed a spot in a UC, although she may not be accepted in the UC of her choice. My friend with a PhD placed both his kids into a middling school district with the intention that they go to UC – much cheaper.
http://www.ucop.edu/acadinit/mastplan/mpsummary.htm
“2. The establishment of the principle of universal access and choice, and differentiation of admissions pools for the segments:
* UC was to select from among the top one-eighth (12.5%) of the high school graduating class.
* CSU was to select from among the top one-third (33.3%) of the high school graduating class.
* California Community Colleges were to admit any student capable of benefiting from instruction.
Subsequent policy has modified the Master Plan to provide that all California residents in the top one-eighth or top one-third of the statewide high school graduating class who apply on time be offered a place somewhere in the UC or CSU system, respectively, though not necessarily at the campus or in the major of first choice.”
Being black/hispanic, legacy, or an athelte helps tremendously, regardless of the high school.
http://www.princeton.edu/%7Etje/files/webAdmission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20Walling%20Dec%202004.pdf
An acquaintance of mine, white kid, knowing full well the racial realities of admission, out of frustration, left the box to check for “race” blank, took a picture that came with his wallet of a black young man, and attached it with his other submission papers to Stanford. He fully expected to be rejected, and to his astonishment, he was accepted! A few days after settling at his dorm, he started receiving mail from assorted black-oriented student groups, soliciting his participation. He ignored them. Carried on, and graduated without incident. He said he has no regrets regarding what he did, since he felt he easily had the SAT score to qualify for entry. He felt that he never stated that he was black. He just sent them what he thought was a nice picture-and also got a degree at Stanford.
Thanks ocrenter. That’s the first really useful comparison of schools vs college acceptance that I’ve seen.
That’s a great story, tru story! 🙂