Guest post from EconLog reader Paul Fredenberg, reprinted with his permission.
Enj0y – and possibly profit!
Professor Caplan,
I read your post about your homeschooling experience. Sounds like you’ve raised some awesome kids. Congratulations to you and your wife (and your twins too)! I am in utter amazement of your curriculum.
I am a father of 10 (yes, I have your “Selfish Reasons” book on my shelf!), ages 4 to 22, and my wife and I have largely homeschooled our kids. My wife took it a step further when she declared one night years ago that we would move to a farm and raise our kids in a different kind of setting. Our oldest kids so far have opted for homeschool until about age 16 and then a transition to public high school (at smaller, rural schools outside of Ann Arbor, MI).
Although we consider ourselves reasonably well-educated (I have an MBA from Wharton), my wife and I don’t have the ability to run our homeschool the way you have. Our parental approach has been much more hands-off on the academics, but certainly very hands on regarding character, hard-work, project management, virtue, etc. We milk cows, bale hay, split wood, and all the other good farm stuff.
Our oldest 2 boys got perfect scores on the ACT and took as many AP classes as our country schools offered. They chose public schools to participate in the extra-curriculars and graduated at or near the top of their classes. But their transcripts were not perfect. There were a few “B’s” sprinkled in there.
When they applied to college I suggested they play the farm angle to their advantage. They wrote essays about burying stillborn calves, milking at 5am in the dead of winter, and baling hay in the 93-degree heat of summer.
The first got into MIT and is in his second year studying nuclear physics. The second was accepted Early Action at Harvard – he is currently serving a church mission in Italy and will start fall 2022. Our third is a senior (35 ACT) and wants to go to BYU, largely because he thinks the other schools are a waste of money (“Dad, I’m ROI-focused”), and because he is keen on the prettier girls and better pickleball courts out west.
My question for you: did we unwittingly discover a secret “backdoor” into these elite schools? The odds of a non-athlete kid from an upper-middle class, LDS/conservative, white, non-legacy family getting into Harvard early seem astonishing low. And he didn’t have perfect grades either. But I maintain there are probably like 3 kids in the world who both milk a cow every day and scored perfect on the ACT. The admissions folks must have noticed – they must have liked the “story.”
I wonder if the advice to anxious parents willing to do nearly anything for their kids to get a sniff of the Ivies – i.e. buy expensive homes in the very best school districts, pay a fortune in property taxes and/or private tuition, and spend years of their livelihood shuffling to whatever next activity might be a marginal help to future admissions possibilities – is actually much more attainable: buy a farm in a rural school district and put the kids to work.
READER COMMENTS
Patrick
Sep 21 2021 at 12:01pm
This is a very interesting take, although I’d throw a few caveats in. I’m 27, about to get married, and considering where my spouse and I would like to settle permanently. I grew up in rural New York State attending public school the entire time with decent grades and heavy participation in extracurriculars. My experiences in that setting have colored my view of rural school districts to be generally opposed to having my kids go there. That said I agree with the kid that thinks the Ivies are a poor ROI.
While hardly the worst schools in America, there is a cultural buy-in for rural schools that only seems to be growing in my opinion. As suffocating as the left leaning cities may be at times, there is at least to some degree of anonymity one can maintain if you choose to. This is largely not true in rural communities, particularly if you’re a successful individual. A good option if you’re someone who swings that way to begin with but hardly welcoming to dissent.
For example, rural school districts, even in left leaning states, still have basically the same approach to sex ed as they did 50 years ago as far as I know. That being abstinence only. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if, like me, you care about that sort of thing and are willing to speak out in support of it you can expect a fair amount backlash in most rural communities. That’s just an example. I’m sure any number of topics, books, etc. receive a similar treatment. Again possibly not a deal breaker for some people but something to consider.
roystgnr
Sep 21 2021 at 12:03pm
“one of the [Espenshade and Radford] study’s more remarkable findings:
while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission
to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in
organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers
of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or
unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline
against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or
“Red America.”” – Ross Douthat, NY Times
But that study’s more than a decade old, so perhaps the cellular automata of fashion have advanced since then and farming is “in” now? Perhaps elites took the Mormon opposition to Trump to heart and now being LDS places you among the good personality traits scorers?
My guess would be that there’s simply too much randomness and fluctuation in the process to make a judgement call from an N=2 sample that could have been luck.
It would be funny if the “cellular automata” theory was true, though. On another forum, I read a former admissions officer’s claim that, after seeing a hundred piano and violin players, a couple sax players were “a huge breath of fresh air” and a tuba player “a downright rebel”. Maybe everybody applying to the Ivies today is now assiduously scrubbing 4-H and FFA and such from their applications, so the people who didn’t get that memo now feel like a huge breath of fresh air? If so, I wouldn’t expect it to last. Admissions optimization in such a world must be like SEO: as soon as everybody figures out a trick, the selection heuristics have to get changed to penalize the trick.
Phil H
Sep 22 2021 at 5:01am
At a much lower level, this happened with us: one of the ways to get into a better school in our city is by competitive exam a (at age six!) for entrance to a music-oriented school. We did it, and strategically choosing the right instrument to minimise competition was a big part of the process. You’ve got no chance with piano and violin, so we now have two trumpeters in the family.
Monte
Sep 21 2021 at 12:24pm
I am a father of 10 (yes, I have your “Selfish Reasons” book on my shelf!), ages 4 to 22, and my wife and I have largely homeschooled our kids. My wife took it a step further when she declared one night years ago that we would move to a farm and raise our kids in a different kind of setting.
Now this (contra Biden’s Afghanistan exit strategy) is a “remarkable achievement!”
The first got into MIT and is in his second year studying nuclear physics. The second was accepted Early Action at Harvard – he is currently serving a church mission in Italy and will start fall 2022. Our third is a senior (35 ACT) and wants to go to BYU, largely because he thinks the other schools are a waste of money (“Dad, I’m ROI-focused”), …
We can’t say which of these young men is the smartest, but the third appears to be the more pragmatic. A business or engineering degree from BYU vs an Ivy League school is essentially the same minus the pretense (and a helluva lot cheaper!).
John hare
Sep 21 2021 at 12:36pm
Work ethic is a seriously missing element in too many that think college is a get out of work free card.
Kevin Jackson
Sep 21 2021 at 2:28pm
This sounds a lot like value investing advice. It’s not enough to find a great business to invest in, you need to find a great business that is out of favor in the eyes of the market. Likewise, good neighborhoods and private school and extracurriculars are great, but when everyone else is doing them it doesn’t give you an edge.
Alan Goldhammer
Sep 21 2021 at 5:50pm
Best way of getting into an Ivy or any university is to be a good athlete that can contribute to the team. Ice hockey players get preferential admission to a number of Ivies as do football and basketball players. Home schooled kids who are not athletes are at a disadvantage as Professor Caplan discovered.
Matt
Sep 22 2021 at 12:09pm
Excellent letter. It’s possible that this approach is, at present, an underexploited niche and that those who take this route will benefit from it, but that the more it’s exploited as a path to the Ivy League the less it will prove effective. It’s like entrepreneurs finding some new niche market from which they gain economic profits, which profits then attract competitors until all economic profits are zero and only accounting profits remain.
David Seltzer
Sep 23 2021 at 12:27pm
(“Dad, I’m ROI-focused”). I like it. Often, one can get an Ivy education just by looking at the Curriculum Vitae of a non Ivy college faculty. Georgia Gwinnett College boasts professors and instructors from Emory, Princeton, The University of Ohio and The University of Texas. The tuition is $5762 for in state residents and $16,744 for out of state. Harvard tuition for 2021 is $51,143. Room and board bring it to $74,528. GGC grads have done advanced degree work at such places as Chapel Hill, The University of Georgia and The University of Chicago. It seems the marginal benefit of schools like GGC, in many cases exceed the marginal cost of the Ivies. I Attended Indiana University Northwest in Gary Indiana 1965 to 1968. It was a fledgling extension of IU Bloomington. The tuition was bupkis and the student census small. I took courses in economics, philosophy, history and psychology all taught by University of Chicago trained instructors. As a math major I learned from instructors with degrees from Illinois tech, Duke and Kent State. Those courses and those instructors/professors prepared me well enough to be accepted at the University of Chicago Graduate school of Business.
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