>>>PS -- Did you go to Penn State by any chance? I have a reason for asking.
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>>>Briefly....I went to several schools...
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>>My reason for asking was I read a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about academic rankings. Penn State was the school that came through it very well. By the traditional rankings, which were the tower Gladwell was out to tumble (and did pretty well IMO), Penn State is in the mid 40s among U.S. universities. Gladwell says those traditional rankings, based on things like endowments and SAT scores, undersell some great universities like Penn State. He calls the traditional rankings such as the one in U.S. News and World Report, which doesn't even publish any more but still holds sway as a college ranker, nothing more than a way for the same 20 private schools to be ranked the top 20 in perpetuity.
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>>One of his grounds of complaint is that the traditional rankings pay little or no attention to cost. More interestingly, he maintains that the quality of education, which he calls efficacy, is undervalued compared to reputation in the college rankings in USN&WR and elsewhere. One area he delves into is how well students do relative to their pre-college expectations based on family income and that kind of thing. Passing it over to Gladwell (he did write it, after all, LOL) --
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>>"Of the top fifty national universities in the Best Colleges ranking, the least selective school is Penn State. Penn State sees its educational function as serving a wide range of students. That gives it the opportunity to excel at efficacy -- and it does so brilliantly. Penn State's freshmen have an expected graduation rate of 73% and actual graduation rate of 85%, for a score of plus 12: no other school in the U.S. News top 50 comes close."
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>>Here is something from near the end of the article that struck me enough to type it out in full.
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>>"'If you look at the top twenty schools every year, forever, they are all wealthy private universities', Graham Spanier, the president of Penn State, told me. 'Do you mean that even the most prestigious public universities in the United States, and you can take your pick of what you think they are -- Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, Illinois, Penn State, UNC -- do you mean to say that not one of those is in the top tier of institutions? It doesn't really make sense, until you drill down into the rankings, and what do you find? What I find more than anything else is a measure of wealth: institutional wealth, how big is your endowment (! - ed.)), what percentage of alumni are donating each year, what are your faculty salaries, how much are you spending per student. Penn State may very well be the most popular university in America -- we get a hundred and fifteen thousand applications a year for admission. We serve a lot of people. Nearly a third of them are the first people in their entire family network to come to college. We have 76% of our students receiving financial aid. There is no possibility that we could do anything here at this university to get ourselves into the top ten or twenty or thirty -- except if some donor gave us billions of dollars.'" (Hopeful university president).
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>>I've got college on the brain and am pleased to say we are in the home stretch. It's one of the things that has been keeping me awake nights. Emily applied to five schools. She was accepted by three and was turned down by two. Yale turned her down, as I expected they would. They are famously selective and this year admitted only 6%, a record low according to the NYT. I had some hope for Brown, because they have a great architecture program and saw a potentially good fit, but they said no, too. She was admitted by Marquette, UW-Madison, and U of I, so she is certainly not going to starve in terms of opportunity. Madison is her first choice. And it actually is her choice. It's my alma mater but I never tried to push it over other good choices. Besides, I know her well enough to know she will wall up if pressured or marketed. She has fallen in love with Mad Town on her own, as people tend to. Unless there is some unexpectedly wild disparity in financial aid packages, she will be a Badger four months from now.
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>>http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_gladwell
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>Looks nice Mike (Madison) nice lake. Does your daughter like sailing. I assume they have some sort of sailing club etc


They do. My girlfriend (still seems strange to be saying that) has lived in Madison her whole life and has encouraged Emily to explore both the sailing club and the crew. Emily is strong and determined, two key ingredients. We'll see. My main message to her now is that she has the greatest period of her life coming up. At no other time do we have our health, so much freedom, and so little responsibility.