Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor

Which one of those schools is not like the other? I'm sure VT's administration claim it's the Ivy League school of Blacksburg.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/14/colleges-with-the-highest_1_n_796136.html#s206355&title=Harvard_University_98

Many elite universities will do anything possible to keep a student enrolled so they can preserve their graduation rates. Please scroll the above post and look at the schools at the top.

They do not have "weed out" courses like you see at many state universities.

Ivy schools are about "getting in" and state schools are about being able to stay in.

 

VT is a bitch to get into. I have heard students not getting into Tech, in state, but getting accepted to Ivy schools.

 

You're generally correct about it being hard to flunk out of elite schools, but wrong about "weed out" courses.

At least in the past, so many kids arrived at Duke thinking they were pre-med that Freshman Bio and Chem were designed to convince them otherwise.

 

I betcha they have weed-out courses at MIT ...

You have a bit of a tautology in place at the Ivies, because they do attract strong students who are very motivated, so there's not too much concern among the faculty about holding students' feet to the fire. So the idea that Harvard's 98 percent graduation rate reflects something special going on at Harvard is a bit misguided.

One other thing: The emphasis on retention is very, very strong even at much lower-level schools. Before latching on at my current gig, I was at a moderately prestigious, primarily undergraduate school in the Southeast. We actually turned away quite a few applicants, because we were a fallback school for very good students. Yet once our freshman darkened the door, we fell over backwards to keep them there (not me; I taught at the junior/senior level). And if a student was a fuck-up, he/she still merited lots of attention and hand-holding to stay in there. I was always very troubled by the resources we directed toward keeping Suzie Snowflake enrolled even when she wasn't showing much interest; I had it in my head there were other students out there who would be thrilled to take Suzie's seat and actually do something with it.

 

Aside from the occasional disinterested legacy student whose parents funded a library or a science lab, I'd guess that most of the "weeding out" happens on the front end. The type of people who are selected by elite schools are the people who are prepared and motivated to succeed at elite schools. It's a huge enough shock to some of these kids when they get a B grade instead of the straight A's to which they'd become accustomed in prep school.

 

Fascinating program.
Who funds it, and how involved are the parents of the students?

 

True.

But the admissions system is no better equipped to identify them than it was to identify Suzie Snowflake.

 

They don't try to weed anyone out at the really expensive private schools. I'm not saying good grades there are easy, but it's typically tougher to fail than it is at the public schools... The private schools know that if the parents are paying some ungodly amount of money to send their kids there, they're not going to keep them there if they're failing class.

My cousin went to MIT and said he had classes where he did virtually nothing and should have failed, but got Cs and said it was incredibly rare for anyone to get a D or an F. I've heard the same things about Stanford, Emory, Harvard, Princeton...

One of my best friends went to Stanford for two years and Cal for two years and said Cal was so much harder than Stanford that it wasn't even funny. He basically said, "Stanford will do everything in its power to make sure you don't fail, but at Cal, they don't give a shit..."

 

You're right ... I should have explained more. Suzie had shown, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn't interested in doing something with that seat. My take was that since she'd shown she wasn't going to put it to good use, maybe a better use of our limited resources was to let someone else have a chance with it. Even if that someone else was a fuck-up, too, at least we hadn't blown through those resources.

 

But having won the seat - and the admissions process being no more predictive of success on the part of any replacement - doesn't Suzie deserve the chance to succeed?

Lots of high-achieving folks rich and poor unpredictably wash out when they get to the next level - of education or baseball or music, etc. Why kick Suzie to the curb before you've given her the chance to right herself?