senior scatter, v. 2011

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So the "Senior Scatter" came out this week. Everyone waits with bated breath for this list of the colleges to which kids from our local snoburbia high school are going this fall. It is our annual parental pat on the back for all those years of toil and tears and tutoring. Even if we don't have a senior. Or have one of the kids who toil.

Yes, it's a public school. And yes, I'm going to post this every year when it comes out, because, well, you private school parents can just suck it. Here are some of the schools the class of 2011 got into:

Harvard (3), Princeton, Columbia, Penn, University of Chicago (2), Haverford, Carnegie Mellon (3), UC Berkeley, Vassar, Hamilton, West Point, Tufts (2), Tulane (3), Emory (2), Pitzer, UVA (3), Cornell (2), Brown, Wake Forest (2), Barnard, UNC Chapel Hill (2), Edinburgh (3), Pratt Institute (2), William and Mary, University of Michigan (4), Carleton, NYU (3), Wellesley, Northwestern (2), Wesleyan, University of Maryland College Park (44), Oberlin, Georgia Tech, Eastman School of Music, Bard, Mount Holyoke, Kenyon, Denison, RISD, UMBC (8), Penn State (8), Dickinson, Macalester, St. Mary's of Maryland, and many others.

Plus: Marines (3),  Empire Beauty School (1), and CIA (um, seriously?).

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Comments

[nikki]

CIA, the Culinary Institute of America is pretty pretigious. I assume that is the CIA the snoburban student is attending....

[Julie]

The CIA mentioned by Nikki is actually really hard to get into. It's on the Hudson River near West Point. I've visited it and it's gorgeous, with a campus and five student-run restaurants. Its graduates are the culinary elite.

No Yale!

[Shani]

CIA is super-cool! I also noticed the lack of Yale.

[David Taylor, MD]

I had dinner at the American Bounty restaurant at the CIA on Wednesday this week -- we've been visiting the CIA's restaurants for nearly 35 years. Its graduates are wildly successful -- when my sister was a student there (graduated in the late 1970s), the school could comment that graduates of Johnson and Wales, their only real competition, got an average of 1.5 job offers per student. CIA grads were getting 12 job offers each. There's nothing wrong with the Culinary Institute...

[Doris]

Oh, I'm so sorry no one made it into Georgetown. Two of my daughters did, from a public non-W school! And one went on to get her J.D. at the Georgetown Law Center. No Duke either! Shameful!!!

[Terri]

I know a BCC grad that is going to Georgetown. Go, BCC! Go Terps!

[Karl]

The best is the assumption that getting into these "good schools" means "a good life."

It's easy to believe the only obstacle to success is Ivy Schooling, when you don't really know the true value (if any) of attending such a school.

My memory of the decade following my own graduation from a Monkey County HySkoo is that the people who went to "good schools" for college became insufferable assholes. I guess they told themselves they were better after going to such elite academies, and thereby comforted themselves in their Assholedom. Ivies gravitate to other Ivies and so there's no subtle assholedom when among assholes exclusively.

Full circle!

[Lydia]

Okay, so I was at the school today, and I happened to ask, and, yes, it's Culinary Institute of America. I am so relieved the other one is not allowing 18-year-olds to re-task satellites or target drones.

[Justafed]

And it is lists like this that really do capture exactly what our goal is here in Snoburbia: we want the best schools. And I guess the hope is that if you go to a school where this many kids get into Ivies, it raises the chance that your kid, too, will get into that Ivy.

And now the weird thing is there may be a tremor in neighborhood real estate values if enough people notice the unacceptably small Yale share...

[Mmmmmm. Brains.]

Best of luck to them -- they are going to need it. That's a lot of scratch, assuming that they aren't getting substantial scholarships. It can be rather a pyrrhic victory.

I didn't bother with a "name brand" university for undergrad, and saved my powder for name brand grad. It is a strategy more kids should seriously consider, I think. My father, no kidding, made me come up with a business plan for the costs of school and how I planned to recoup it in income. Wonder how many status conscious snoburban parents did that?

[Giselle]

Woo-hoo, I have to give a special cheer for my alma mater, West Point. Being military/gov't minded, I didn't even connect CIA with the culinary institute. That is pretty cool too. Best of luck to all of them.

[mistah charley, ph.d.]

The Langley CIA may not take high school graduates, but they do advertise spook jobs on the radio (WTOP).

[Queen of the Weezils]

Yay, University of Maryland! Seriously. Some may dismiss it, but it is a good, solid school and the savings you'll get from in-state tuition make it worth it, provided that it is a good school for your major. If it isn't, I'm sure some school in the Maryland network excels in it.

[Kelly]

I don't send my kids to private schools for the college admissions. I do it for the smaller school experience, the quality of the teachers and the education, the individual attention, to avoid having them taught to the test, etc.

[Magnus Mahony]

Most of us want the best for our children, to the point that we pamper them not just with their wants and needs but also with high quality education. Some think this is all we can hand over to our children. But aside from this, they also need some counseling from us on how to choose their own path. We should therefore have a strong communication relationship with them to properly guide them.

[Elizabeth]

I agree with Kelly. The snide "you go suck it" comment was as elitist as it gets. I choose private school for faith reasons. Some public school parents look down their noses at private schools as if they are "roughing it" it in MoCo at WJ or BCC or Churchill. Please.

[Doris]

I was telling my son-in-law about this post on Father's Day because he's on the staff at a local university. He was sad that none of the students at this school made it into his alma mater (Fordham) or the one where he works (I won't mention which, although it's obviously not UMd).

[Jay]

Kelly you don't fool me. Despite all of your double-talk the real reason that you sent your kids to private school is that they would not have to associate with blacks or Latinos.

[kelly]

Jay, my local W school is less diverse than my kids' private schools, in the way to which you refer.