Posted on 04/06/2012 6:23:00 AM PDT by sitetest
I don't engage in vanities very often, but I thought this one might be interesting to some folks, and I wouldn't mind a little (courteous) input.
Some of you may remember that we homeschooled our two sons through eighth grade and then sent 'em off to a local Catholic high school. The older guy, who is registered here as swotsonofsitetest, graduates in June and will be off to college in the fall.
We're now coming to the end of the college application and admission process and it's decision time. I'm interested in folks opinions about that decision.
After eight years of homeschooling, he did very well in high school, received very high scores on the SAT and his SAT subject tests, may or may not be valedictorian this year, and has pretty good (although somewhat run-of-the-mill and not-terribly-exciting, it turns out) extracurriculars. Thus, he applied to some top schools and met with some success.
He applied to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Washington Univ in St. Louis, Univ of Virginia, Notre Dame and the Univ of Maryland, College Park. He plans to double-major in civil engineering (where the school has civil engineering, otherwise mechanical engineering) and classics.
He is quite the classicist, more of a language guy than a math and science guy, but that's only a relative measure. He's very, very good at math and science, just off the charts in language stuff.
After months of application process, filling out FAFSAs, Common Apps, IDOCs, etc., it comes down to: Waitlisted at Washington Univ in St. Louis; rejected outright at Yale and Princeton; accepted to UVA; Notre Dame; Univ of MD; Hopkins and Harvard.
Although UVA is a nice school, it doesn't quite light his fire. We don't expect much by way of financial aid (we live next door in Maryland, and UVA is kinda tight with aid to out-of-state residents). He visited Notre Dame and prefers not to go to a pseudo-Catholic school.
So, it's down to Maryland, Hopkins and Harvard.
Hopkins had been his favorite through the process. Great engineering school, great classics program, great campus feel for him (lots of nerdy kids having a blast studying their hearts out). He met one of the classics professors there and they quickly hit it off.
Maryland had been his "safe school." I hesitate to call it that, because Maryland is not the school it was when I was young (party school that took most folks with a pulse and respiration). Today, the median CR + M SAT of incoming freshmen is over 1300, much higher for their Honors College and school of engineering (to both of which he was accepted). So, I will say it is his safe school in a whisper.
Maryland has a great school of engineering. Their classics program is pretty good, but nowhere near what it is at Hopkins and Harvard.
Harvard, too, was a bit of a dark horse, for reasons with which many posters here would be familiar. But they have a decent engineering school and one of the top classics programs in the country. Plus, it's Harvard. As well, the folks just exude a happy, pleasant, non-bureaucratic competence. And have made him feel welcome and wanted. Which is something Hopkins has not done. However, they only have mechanical engineering, not civil.
Anyway, the money aspect is worth mentioning here. Hopkins is coming in with a decent financial aid package, but it leaves $22K to me to pay per year. Ouch. The loans that my son would need to take out are very modest - a total of $5K over four years. This all includes a modest amount of work study during the school year for my son.
Harvard came up with a substantially-better package - $16K per year to me. Which is nearly affordable, LOL. It includes no loans (unless I want to borrow what I'd owe them) and modest work study.
Maryland is offering a full merit scholarship including full tuition, room and board, books, and a small stipend for educational endeavors such as research, travel, conferences, etc.
So, what do you think? His original first choice with great engineering and classics for $22K per year with modest loans? Harvard (can't beat the brand name with a stick) with good, but not great engineering, phenomenal classics for $16K per year with no loans? Or Maryland, with great engineering, decent classics and, did I mention, absolutely FREE?
Then go Harvard! But if he really, really wants Hopkins, let him go...it is his life.
I went to a SUNY school on a full scholarship for bio, gently knudged there by parents who knew I would get the regents scholarship. I disliked the school and it wasn’t intellectually rewarding aside from my science & math courses which might as well have been autotutorial (organic chem actually was autotutorial but you had to pass each chapter with an A in the lab exam.) Sometimes saving money is not all it is cracked up to be.
I understood the intent, but I also understood the final effect.
“Just curious. Had he checked into what those in the engineering field think of a degree from Harvard vs Maryland?”
Yes. But frankly, views here have been all over the map. Your post demonstrates that. I'm sure there are folks who think RIT is better for engineering than MIT, but I just don't actually know anyone like that. LOL.
My brother, who has been an engineer for nearly 40 years, thinks I'm mildly insane to pay for Harvard. Maryland, yes. Harvard, no.
My cousin, who ran a large civil engineering firm for years, went to Georgia Tech. Great, great school for engineering. One of the best.
The problem is, with classics as a non-negotiable part of the package, Georgia Tech is out. No classics program. At all. So are a lot of other really great engineering schools.
sitetest
Final effect? Let’s see...I took the time to write two posts that were obviously intended to be helpful, and then I wrote one in jest with a wink. You might consider whether your reaction is appropriate.
I appreciate your previous posts.
It's clear that you don't appreciate how you came off in the next one.
It also seems that you may not appreciate how much you look like the mirror image of the folks who are rabidly anti-Harvard or even anti-Ivy (or anti-elite anything). Like the poster to whom I directed you.
At this point, I'm a little turned off by the more absolutist views that don't appear to see that the final decision doesn't seem so straightforward to my son and his family.
sitetest
Yeah, engineering and non-engineering interests and abilities just don’t very often come as part of the same package.
That's very true. I think that's part of why he got into Harvard and why Maryland gave him their top scholarship - both schools noted his dual interests in personal communications with him.
I think that's also why Hopkins has been a little disappointing - the classics people loved him, and wanted him to go all-classics, the engineering folks liked him, too, but were a little nonplussed by the classics stuff.
The funny thing is, I can see how each interest is really just part of the continuum of the same person, the single personality.
sitetest
Your son's "quandry" is that he's trying to decide between three excellent choices: no matter where he goes, he will have to try, and try hard, to get a bad education.
All three schools will look very good to potential employers.
All three schools will enable him to get a major in the Classics; Hopkins has spoken of starting him with graduate-level courses.
All of the schools will act as a sufficient springboard to a Master's or PhD: Maryland and Hopkins in fact will give him a Master's in five years. Not bad.
The question to my mind, if you will bear my "sententiousnessosity," is threefold:
1) Which will give him the best undergraduate experience (friends, lifestyle, overall "feel" and atmosphere, accessibility of professors instead of TAs, ability to change emphasis within engineering, or major?)
2) Which is the best in terms of
i) absolute cost
ii) cost-to-benefit ratio
3) What does he want to do with his life? "Hands-on" engineer, climb the corporate ladder, start his own business? For hands-on I'd rank Maryland, then Hopkins, then Harvard; for climb-the-ladder Harvard would give an initial advantage, but corporate politics or other factors could negate this; for catapult-into-corner-office it's Harvard; Harvard would give "man in the street" cred for his own business, but within the engineering community, it'd be Maryland, unless he wants to work for a "Beltway Bandit" in which case both Maryland and Hopkins would be good -- the whole local thing.
His MBA-style decision tree will have to weight the probability of each of these factors and their relative importance.
As Zasu said in The Lion King:
(sighs) "Simba...Good Luck."
Cheers!
Harvard
Then John Hopkins
If you don't wish to read it, go to the last paragraph of the article and click on the hyperlink for something written by an Ivy League grad about the advantages of attendance at Yale...though I assume it applies to Harvard as well.
Cheers!
The advice that in the end people initially pursuing diverse double majors generally end up having to choose one is generally sound. Indeed, when the interests are this diverse, it is a case of pursuing a double degree, as a B.S. is not a B.A. for a very good reason. As you point out, the advice may not apply in this specific case, but in my experience of advising incoming students, even in most potentially exceptional cases, the general norm rather than the exception prevails, and one can usually not be sure of the exception prevailing until after the fact.
If he is really intent on pursuing both, I would suggest Maryland. While generally one gets a better education by being challenged by the best peers one can find, so being in the top ranks of a school is detrimental, in this case I would think that it would be useful as the dual interests will prove challenging enough (this is spinning your post 56 in a direction which you anticipated but did not do). If, however, the Harvard Classics department is able to provide recent examples of students who have successfully pursued similar doubles there, this would reduce (though not eliminate) the relevance of the point.
That said, it has been said (I do not know how accurately) that the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in, which might eliminate the point.
Classics is also a good pre-seminary degree and if done well—integrating most, if not all, of languages, philosophy, literature, history, and patristic theology (there are a few programs that do include the last) —a very good degree for people who will be dealing with people. I am guessing that your son’s competence is in the linguistic end of things—today very good Latin or a level of Greek that exists is one of the goals of such a program, while a century ago, it was an admissions requirement.
I would also echo Mad Dawg’s concern on the quality of chaplaincy etc, and suggest that this, while generally relevant, ties particularlly into classics considerations, if the program is well-integrated. A few 20th century popes made the point that one’s education in Catholicism needs to be porportioned to one’s educational level, and that one major problem in society is that this is not happening, which applies across the board. In areas that are most pertinent to the faith, such as philosophy, it is doubly true. If the classics department does include a serious philosophical component, he should have ready access to a Catholic mentor who is competent in these areas. There is an Opus Dei presence around Harvard (or at least there was two decades ago and I doubt very much that it has gone away) which will include at least one, and probably multiple, people capable of aiding in this area—like every religious movement in the Church, Opus Dei has strengths and weaknesses, and philosophy is one of their strengths. The classics-engineering double actually sounds like classic Opus Dei (particularly the engineering).
Like Mad Dawg, I greatly respect the eastern province of the OPs, but given all that you have said about Hopkins, I doubt that would off-set the rest.
I have no idea about Maryland in the chaplaincy area, but this is worth considering and talking through. Especially if Maryland’s chaplaincy is awful and he opts to go there, the talking through can be profitable. I went to a school with a pretty bad chaplaincy, and for the handful of us that worked to change things, the experience was undoubtedly good (I went onto seminary and now teach theology) but a great many (most) fell away completely or became/remained cultural Catholics with cultural habits and virtually no belief.
I hope that is helpful.
I think you've hit a lot of the key issues with which my son is wrestling.
I think he (and I) may have our own take on some of the answers that might be a little different than yours, but we're all in the same ballpark, here.
For better or worse, I think the decision will likely be driven by some short-term answers to short-term questions, if for no other reason than it's a lot easier to figure out what's important in the short-term than what's important in the long-term. Some of the issues you raise (and that we've thought about) are pretty long-term (corner office of a big company? entrepreneur of your own firm? get involved in start-ups and move from project to project? international work? stay local?).
I think some of the questions that will drive this will include: Will Harvard grant him Advanced Standing, making it much easier to pursue both engineering and classics? He seems to have already met the criteria, as far as we can see from Harvard's website, but hey, until we actually ask someone in charge, we don't really know. Precisely how do any core requirements for degree programs intersect with the wish to do both engineering and classics? At Maryland, he already has all or nearly all his core requirements knocked out through AP exams (this is, in a way, sort of analogous to the Advanced Standing program at Harvard) and at Hopkins, we've been told they have no core requirements, so even though their use of APs is very limited, it shouldn't be hard to re-purpose all those non-engineering courses you gotta take anyway to the second major field.
Some other questions for Harvard: My son can take courses at MIT. How many can he take? How close can he get to an SB in civil engineering (not a major offered by Harvard, but my son's first pick) while following the mechanical engineering program? How, precisely, does their bachelors/masters in engineering program work (Both Maryland and Hopkins have a pretty-well defined 5-year program, Harvard is sort of vague. Okay, not sort of vague - they only mention the existence of the program in passing.)?
sitetest
It’s more just experience speaking. I didn’t serve and I regret it. Also, I’ve seen kids go to college and spend 2 years with beer and pizza.
I'm a little bit surprised at the expressions of skepticism toward a double major (or degree, as the case may be). The only school to which my son applied that discouraged this was Princeton, which flat-out said it isn't permitted. My impression of Washington University in St. Louis was that they weren't keen on the idea, either, but nonetheless, they have formal structures in place to support double majors.
Conversely, we've received nothing but encouragement from the other schools to which my son applied, including Harvard, Yale (where he was rejected), Hopkins, Notre Dame, Maryland and UVA.
We have been to several open houses at Hopkins, and a large minority of the students there double-major, often with one humanities field and one science or technology. In fact, our guide at one open house was a junior double majoring in biomedical engineering and something else (but I've forgotten).
Notre Dame actually has an entire program devoted to supporting students who double major in both STEM and humanities fields.
Maryland also has formal support structures for double majors, and the folks there have communicated that they're pretty happy about his choices.
As I may have mentioned before, my son's admissions officer from Harvard wrote my son a personal note of congratulations, and specifically mentioned his intentions to double major in classics and engineering, and that the school welcomed that. We think perhaps his intention to double major played a small role in his acceptance.
All of these schools make use of the results of the AP exams to either grant credit toward the degree, or to exempt students from introductory-level courses, making it much easier to get the upper-level credits needed for two major fields.
"If he is really intent on pursuing both, I would suggest Maryland. While generally one gets a better education by being challenged by the best peers one can find,..."
You may be underestimating Maryland a little. Although the general population of the university isn't near that of Harvard, the median CR + M SAT of the Honors College is 1410. Many of the courses these students will take will be Honors College-only with maximum enrollment of 20 students per class. The program to which my son was accepted, which is a subset of the Honors College, has a median CR + M of 1500. These folks will live together and take part in activities together during their time at the school.
Not everyone admitted to Maryland is a top-flight student, but the school is large enough to be able to attract and enroll a critical mass of such kids.
As for catechetical/theological concerns, I don't really have any. We're a homeschooling family, and we're used to DIY learning about and practicing the faith. If we'd have depended on the local CCD programs or local Catholic schools, my kids would be much weaker Catholics. In fact, when they were younger, our pastor (who approved their homeschool religious curricula every year) would remark, “I wish I could get our CCD program to do this stuff you're doing with your sons.”
I have little trust, and place no reliance on outside resources in this area. They have failed us to date, and there is no reason to think they're going to be any different moving forward.
Maryland is said to have a very active and healthy Catholic community on campus. That being said, I don't think it's particularly oriented toward a deep exploration of the faith, intellectually. I've been told, including on this thread, that Harvard has a thriving “underground” Catholic community.
“I am guessing that your son’s competence is in the linguistic end of things—today very good Latin or a level of Greek that exists is one of the goals of such a program, while a century ago, it was an admissions requirement.”
He's good with the languages. He wrote one of his application essays to Notre Dame in Latin. They accepted him, so it must not have been too bad.
He's also actually read a fair bit of the important works and authors, both Latin and Greek. He's studied a lot of history, and has studied the cultures of the classical world, as well. But he has a facility for languages. A little bit of time with them, and he's able to parse out the grammatical structures pretty quickly, and then, it's just about adding vocabulary.
sitetest
That is not a bad start, if done right, but there is a lot of variation in homeschooling as well. I assume that you do not personally have direct experience with the benefits of facing the military service realities of being deprived of the home coddling environment. Like when you meet your first DI who is trying to help you learn to kill while staying alive. You don't begin to acquire that kind of needed toughness in home or public schooling, or college.
From my standpoint:
o I raised 4 children alone as a divorced man.
o I have 2 sons and 1 daughter with 19 grandchildren.
o I have observed their various experiences.
o Of these, one son has 10 children, well home-schooled.
o Yet under the best conditions, the lack of learning acclimation to external authority is deficient without further non-home training.
o Even with a full scholarship to Syracuse, I essentially flunked out through lack of maturity that the Army and the exigencies of marriage finally brought me.
o I went back later, and then was on the Dean's list every semester in engineering.
o I have seen literally hundreds and hundreds of foolish children who have irreversibly damaged their own futures by going off to university too early, while at the same time compromising or wrecking their own parents' financial and personal lives.
I could go on and on, but it's not something I will argue about. What I said stands, and is practical, recapitulating observations and personal experience over many years. I will not back off that stance. I have made my own mistakes.
Your thoughts are precious to you, but your theories are not very helpful to the late teenager or as-yet unfinished parent (this is what a grandparent is for). Spending 2 or so formative years under the personal attention and discipline of a demanding and regulated life outside the home before college will bring benefits one can not get under Mom and Dad's permissive and protective tolerance.
Unless you have this experience personally, let me suggest you temper your own opinions until they are thoroughly time-tested.
These kids have to have the protective wraps off and stand on their own in the school of hard knocks. Early. Extending their childhood by buying them an education they haven't yet earned will not do that. Not until, that is, that they have carried the obscene servitude to their school loan finally paid off, years later.
Ask the veterans that came back from WWII and Korea who entered college with firm determination to treat it very seriously, and built the nation that their children are squandering away.
With all due respect.
You are full of yourself.
And nobody is impressed.
Thanks, ma'am for your condescension and gratuitous advice. Her's the report on my children, raised and proven. They were not cosseted:
o Son 1 - No college degree; a self-taught CNC manufacturing engineer sought by Perkin-Elmer Corp, Norwalk Conn; much-liked and effective therew; died on CT highways in 1985.
o Son 2 - No college degree; Director of Management Information Services for a large Mitsubishi operation in the US, back and forth to Japan and Europe several times; 5 children; his daughter finished Regent U, now married to MK; his son studying mechanical engineering at Un. of Ill.
o Son 3 - Put himself through Illinois Institute of Technology in civil engineering; chosen to give the graduation address for his engineering class; B. S., M. S.; founded his own civil engineering company; 10 children; his oldest son representing IIT and the US for engineering competition in Poland this year. Home schooler.
o Daughter - Put herself, alone, through exclusive private college; V. P. of PNC Bank; many years as computer analyst, consultant, corporate merger teams, HR management; 4 children; widow due to cancer death of husband; daughter in Fine Arts degree.
Both living sons completed 5 years of service in on-the-road audio/visual technicians with Institute of Basic Life Principles Staff under Bill Gothard, a real education in personal discipline and responsibility -- no beer and pizza there. One needed to get cracking to serve him.
Daughter saw 4 years of hard work in food service for her degree, another exercise in "root, hog, or die" survival.
My wife jumped ship early, I wound up being both dad and ersatz mom to them, whilst a Member of Staff at GE's Semiconductor Products Department, Engineering Division.
And your credentials in raising children are -- ??
(Gave you some of mine, FWIW.)
My dear Miss metmom, I have heard from your "expertise" before in another area. You have no further need to demonstrate your accumulated wisdom in profound topics to me.
With all due respect for your stated opinion(s) -- by all means, do have and express them -- it's a free country. Hope your self-reliance works out for you. Hope your fullness is of yourself and not something else. Leaving the opportunity for you to have the last word.
At your service, ma'am.
Success to FRee Republic! Let Freedom Ring!
This post did it for me - Maryland - but not because it is free. The scholarship is the key and not just for your son. One missing ingredient for home schooled children is their ability to influence others for the best. What makes them so wonderful is that they’re partly isolated from a lot of junk education.
I’m involved in a small part of the AP program for US Government and US History. The AP targets the “best and brightest”. Every day I see teachers more ignorant and less smart than my own home schooled children try to teach government schooled kids. These teachers are both liberal and for the most part anti-American. I believe that “to educate a man in mind and not morals is to create a menace to society (TR)”.
The reason you should encourage your son to go to Maryland is the influence he’ll have on those “best and brightest” that he’ll be mingling with. How much of our nations present catastrophe is a direct result of ignorant, anti-American liberals filling the minds of our “best and brightest” with their load of drivel? Your son and other home schooled students just like him can, on a peer-to-peer basis, undo much of that damage.
America needs a strong, patriotic and wise Generation Y. Your son can both fulfill his grand ambition and serve his nation, perhaps in ways he’ll never know, by attending this program through Maryland.
That’s my two cents and a dollar. ;-]
Thank you for your thoughtful post. I've thought about these things myself, and not just about where my guys go to college, but school and life generally.
However, my primary intentions for my sons with regard to their education is to serve their needs, not the needs of others. We homeschooled because my wife and I believed that our sons would be ill-served by any alternative. We sent them to Catholic high school because we believed that was the next step appropriate to their education and formation as young men.
We were actually scolded by some others for not sending our sons to the local public schools - we were “robbing” others of the presence of our sons, the good that they could do, the good influence they could have.
We weren't willing to sacrifice our children to some nebulous greater good.
However, I'll grant that sending a six year-old out into the world to be a good influence is different from sending an 18 year-old, especially a mature one. A six year-old is yet to be more formed than to do any forming. A strong, mature, intelligent 18 year-old with a warrior's personality is something altogether.
“The reason you should encourage your son to go to Maryland is the influence he’ll have on those ‘best and brightest’ that he’ll be mingling with.”
I guess my question is, wouldn't this apply, a fortiori, at Hopkins or Harvard?
sitetest
I agree with everything you wrote and have experienced nearly the same issues with our home schooling. As for the above question, if I understood you correctly you're son will have a special scholarship at Maryland that will allow him to meet the top students at other schools including Hopkins and Harvard, etc. correct? If that's the case you get the actual dollar savings, plus the great education and an opportunity to still influence future American leaders. That's my reasoning.
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