Daewon and Minjok

The NY Times describes two high-intensity Korean prep schools in this article.  I was surprised that the article doesn't mention MIT at all.  I would be shocked if these hard-working Korean students dream of attending Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford -- but not MIT. 

I joke a lot that someday I want to send my kids to Stuyvesant (we might call it the "Minjok of New York City").  But it's definitely a joke.  I think I want my kids to go to a "normal" school (*).  Besides wanting them to have a relatively "normal" high school experience, I think there's an argument that they might do better in a less competitive high school environment in the long run.  I have observed a lot of the kids who went to extremely competitive high schools get "burnt out" by the time they got to college.

  (*) "normal" is in quotes, because I likely have in mind a school that sends ~5-10% of its students to Ivy League schools -- which, while far below Andover and Exeter, is still not the Ivy League yield for the average high school in America.  I guess it could be close to the average Ivy yield for high schools in my education-(predicted)income cell.

UPDATE: On further reflection (and in response to Patrick's comment below), I think a school that sends ~2-5% of its students to Ivy League schools is probably more realistic.  The high school I went to was like Patrick's (i.e. arguably one of the best public schools in the state) and it didn't quite hit 5%.  Josh Angrist is right: to a first-order approximation, nobody attends Ivy League schools.  This would probably also be a good time to point out that the probability a randomly-chosen high-schooler in inner-city Detroit graduates from high school is roughly 1-in-4.  17 of the largest 50 cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent.

Comments

[PLW]

"I think I want my kids to go to a "normal" school (*)."

"normal" is in quotes, because I likely have in mind a school that sends ~5-10% of its students to Ivy League schools "

I think you might want to put two asterisks on that, because you can reject normal at the 1-percent level, at least. I went to (arguably) the best high school in my state, and not quite get 5 percent of my class went to an ivy-league college.

[jlk]

"I would be shocked if these hard-working Korean students dream of attending Harvard . . . -- but not MIT. "

Four Words:

Love Story at Harvard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjjoANIbaNM

'Nuff said.