Argument With Chay

Last night - while enjoying a cold beverage - I was having a conversation with my friend Eric Chase (Aliases: Uncle Oogie, The Unc, Uncle, Chay, Chay-money), and I mentioned that I thought it was annoying that so many people held this unfounded assumption that going to a private school instead of a public one is necessarily an advantage in terms of college admission. It turned out that Chay felt this way as well, and an intense argument insued in which I mercilessly destroyed the Unc. I thought it would be a good idea to recap the argument here. (No offense to you if you went to private school - like probably 80% of my BC friends - I just want to argue that it doesn't make it easier for you to get into colleges.)

Chay's argument: I know a lot more kids in my class at school (Penn State) from Scranton Prep than from Scraton High School.

OK, granted. Thats a fact, sure, and lets also admit that Scranton is significantly larger than prep, too, so there should be a bigger pool of eligible applicants, but for some reason there's not. BUT the question you really have to ask is this: are those 10 (or whatever #) kids from Prep at PSU - compared to Scranton's 4 - because they went to private high school?

I say definitely not. First, the disparity can obviously be attributed to economic factors: probably at least twice as many Prep students apply to Penn State in any given year than Scranton students, but I would say that is largely because a huge percentage of our school, and even a large percentage of qualified students at Scranton (Honors Track, Sports, Clubs, Suck-ups, Dorks etc.), don't even apply to Penn State on the basis that they won't be able to afford it even if they did get in. Having more people accepted to a school means nothing if you have a large number of qualified students from Scranton who didn't apply. The difference here is economic, not educational.

Secondly, I can see that maybe there's a good case for Catholic school students having an easier time getting into Catholic schools, but I see this as a very specific, limited advantage. That means that maybe a marginal Prep applicant will get the edge over a marginal Scranton at a Jesuit school, especially the University of Scranton, but I would argue that that has nothing to do with the quality of the education at the high school, but rather the fact that the Jesuit community tends to be rather tight knit and a recomendation from a Jesuit goes a long way at those schools. Still, this has nothing to do with getting into 95% of the good colleges out there, of which only a handful are Jesuit, and certainly nothing to do with getting into a huge Public institution like Penn State.

Consider: why would a PSU admissions officer favor a private school applicant over a public? He certainly feels no particular allegiance to the old established network of private education. And, lets be honest, we're not talking about Choate or Hotchkiss here. At schools of that nature you're talking about an appreciable difference in educational quality, one has to admit, so its a different story all together. Andover applicants don't have an easier time getting into colleges because Andover is a private school, but because admissions counselors - and everyone else - knows that Andover is a bad ass school and that kid has been academically challenged since he was 13. Unfortunately Scranton does not possess a high school of national name recognition to speak of, unless perhaps you're a member of the Jesuit Community.

Another thing thats important to remember is that we are talking about whether or not equally qualified applicants have a disparity based on a public private divide. That means you take the same kid (hypothetically) and have him apply from a public school standing and then from a private school standing and see if there is a difference in result. I would dare say that for a number of the best Universities in the US, the public school applicant is actually at an advantage in the US. Today at traditionally liberal Northeastern institutions like the Ivy League schools one sometimes gets the sense that there is almost an institutional bias against the old establishment. For a lot of schools its all about having a diverse demographic for politically correct marketing purposes.

I think the prevalence of the "private" means "better" attitude is a symptom of a general feeling of social malaise in this country, in which a loss of faith in broad minded public policy and in public life itself has engendered a desire to insulate: private schools, private communities, private clubs, private beaches, privitize social institutions etc. If this is at all interesting to you I recomend checking out this book, called "For Common Things" by the unfortunately named Jedediah Purdy. This guy is actually not much older than us, and I think he wrote the book as a junior or senior at Harvard. Anyway, he is the man and the book is money.

OK, I could go on about this longer, but I am running short on the lunch hour here, so I'll have to save some for another post. I hope that this generates some comments though, I know out of the few sad individuals that actually read this there is probably a Private High School majority. Please, leave an argument and I would be happy to bring the pain so to speak.