Suggest what students can do to be in top 10% (Houston: house, neighborhoods)

[hendersj31]

My wife and I are in the demographic as well. But our son is just not that student so we don't have to worry about it..LOL.

Originally Posted by Texas Ag 93

Sorry, I am a big user of qualifiers when I post on here, LOL. You can interpret my "almost as if" as "there is" .

And you make some great points above. My husband and I are in the demographic that can easily fall into the traps you describe above. I hope we can keep our wits about us...

[hendersj31]

The endorsement chosen also may have a factor. My son and I were looking through the course catalog for MHS and saw (Distinguished Level of Achievement required for top 10% consideration).

I don't recall endorsements being a thing when I went to high school in Illinois.

[Texas Ag 93]

Originally Posted by hendersj31

My wife and I are in the demographic as well. But our son is just not that student so we don't have to worry about it..LOL.

I don't think my younger kid is "that student" either, but she might surprise us.

Originally Posted by hendersj31

I don't recall endorsements being a thing when I went to high school in Illinois.

Yes, this endorsement thing is a bit confusing to me. For that matter, having a course catalog at all is confusing to me. TBH, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the size and scale of High Schools and I have no personal frame of reference for it because I went to a magnet high school (DeBakey HS for Health Professions) in the 1980s. My school had 800 total students, virtually all college bound. There were no sports teams, no extracurriculars to speak of, and almost no elective options because we had to take health specific classes. I loved it, but it was not a traditional HS experience.

[Dopo]

Something else we do,
We make our kids take SAT/ACT from the time they are freshman/sophomore

My oldest got a 31 ACT (out of 36), previous time was 29 and that’s going to help big time with scholarships,
I always thought of 30 as the cutoff line for a lot of scholarships.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by Texas Ag 93

Of course everyone ideally wants to go to UT or A&M and pay in state tuition. That's ideal, right? Who would want to leave and go to another very solid (but not necessarily public Ivy caliber) school and pay the out of state rate? Apparently, a lot of people, because If I'm being honest, the same families who are sending kids to IU/Mizzou/OU/LSU did not seriously consider other Texas publics, even with scholarships offered. Then there's another subset (sometimes overlapping) of families, who, if grades and financial resources permit, are looking at Southern and Midwest elites like Duke, Wake Forest, Emory, Tulane and Wash U, or the highly desirable L.A. schools like USC and Pepperdine.

Some of these other states have crazy high tuition even for their own residents. We lived in Columbia (which I loved) for 5 years and both my spouse and I worked for Mizzou. Their in-state tuition for Medical School was over 30K a year and that was almost 20 years ago, when Texas rates were a fraction of that; though I know that's all irrelevant now and times have changed here as well.

And I'm much too early in this process to know what direction we might take with our kids.

ETA: One thing that I used to frown upon that I won't ever again is homeschooling. My husband's brother has 5 kids and they started home schooling them close to 10 years ago. Kid#1 (son) graduated from A&M a couple of years ago and Kid #2 (daughter) is about to start a graduate program in a STEM field back east which she chose from multiple scholarship offers. So, I mock no more....

Houston actually is tougher to get into than most of the big SEC schools. Its worth considering. If you are into tech and not interested in big athletic programs, UT-Dallas has slightly higher scores than Texas or A&M.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by WRM20

Lots of Houstonians think the Third Ward is a ghetto. They haven't been out much.

Uh, have you ever been in the 3rd Ward? Don't know what planet you two live on.

It is the definition of ghetto.

They've built some nice stuff around the fringe, but its still ghetto.

[Oskar_Z28]

Originally Posted by WRM20

Lots of Houstonians think the Third Ward is a ghetto. They haven't been out much.

Exactly. LSU is in the Ghetto. UH is going through gentrification.

[hbcu]

Originally Posted by bu2

Uh, have you ever been in the 3rd Ward? Don't know what planet you two live on.

It is the definition of ghetto.

They've built some nice stuff around the fringe, but its still ghetto.

Where did you grow up? That'll explain your faulty logic

West Philly? Baltimore? That's ghetto - lol

[WRM20]

Originally Posted by bu2

Uh, have you ever been in the 3rd Ward? Don't know what planet you two live on.

It is the definition of ghetto.

They've built some nice stuff around the fringe, but its still ghetto.

Yes, I've been in the 3rd Ward. Been going through there since the early 80's for one thing or another. Used to go to Sporting Goods, Inc at York and McKinney, and usually got there by going down Elgin to Scott. We lived in Midtown(technically in the 3rd Ward since we were East of Main) for a few years, and used to go through the 3rd Ward to visit my wife's aunt who lives over in Magnolia Park. I used to drive around looking at older houses, since some of them had some nice features. I did that in the 4th Ward as well. Nothing like being the white guy driving through there in the 80's before it all got torn down. I got some strange looks.

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by Oskar_Z28

Exactly. LSU is in the Ghetto. UH is going through gentrification.

The one thing that UH has for it, is the rail line
That's going to help BIG TIME for gentrification