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Hi admit2022, would like to know how what you end up choosing and how is the experience like so far at either of the school. We have a same dilemna to choose between H and GH and would appreciate some feedback to help us make the right decision.
We had this dilemma last year. Ultimately chose Hockaday. I don’t think you can go wrong with either. For us, we did any tour of both schools on the same day. You can see the difference in the school vibes more clearly and we just felt Hockaday was a better fit. They are very different culturally, even though both are great schools.
You can’t go wrong and a great situation to be in!
ETA - I hate it when quotes get garbled. My response is generally to TeamLynn.........
1. HMMM.....at the undergraduate levels none of the Ivies have offered merit based free rides in many years. Less well off qualifiers receive 100% need based aid on a diminishing scale as family incomes increase. Those above a certain income pay 100% list price.
2. Private school detractors mistakenly level the charge that because relatively few DFW private school kids attend prestige schools as evidence privates aren't worth it. I say nonsense. Strongly disproportionate numbers of private kids are playing a long game that involves graduate or professional school. Given that UG choice is about A. getting into grad or professional school B. arriving at grad or professional school with some resources left.
2.1. Our son was accepted into a bundled UG + medical school program at Brown. Leaving out some details for brevity....we were able to send our son and daughter to TX undergrad and medicals schools for less than it would have cost to send our son to Brown. And as a kicker both graduated better medical schools than Brown as well.
2.2. I can't post the link now but will later. Alan Krueger and Stacey Dale authored two studies exploring the value of prestige undergrad degrees. Hyper condensed.........with the possible exception of traditional educational minorities among top 1 - 3% kids the extra-value of say a Harvard/Stanford etc. degree over a degree from Texas A&M or Penn State or wherever equals zero.
2.3. Just an anecdote.........the DMN ran a story about a local family that sent their two boys to Cistercian and their daughter to Ursuline.....all three graduated from Navy.
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Further, today top students have better information than ever. The very motivated may follow favorite professors, departments or specific degree plans instead of overall school reputation.
Agree on everything pretty much.
1. Completely accurate
2. Agree and would expand on that by saying that the network at top privates is an added value that doesn’t often get taken into consideration. Going to school with mostly bright, hardworking kids does wonders for motivation.
Don’t have relevant stats to evaluate the claim but surprised to hear that strongly disproportionate numbers are financially concerned about long-term academic/prospects. I completely agree that most kids at elite privates have some sort of grad school in mind but would be surprised if a lot of kids from, e.g., ESD, SM, Hockaday are concerned at all about finances
Well, "relatively few" is kind of questionable. If we take St. Mark's, Hockaday, Greenhill, ESD, Cistercian, Ursuline and Jesuit together what's that, a total of 800 graduates each year? I'd bet you've got 100 out of that 800 that matriculate at universities that would be considered "highly selective" or "specialized". Ive League, Stanford, Rice, Caltech, etc; and then schools like UNT Miami or Indiana for music, A&M for veterinary medicine, Rochester for ceramic engineering, Chicago for English, even Sam Houston State for forestry. How does that compare to Woodrow Wilson that probably graduates 800 a year? Maybe 15 of them go to such schools? So "relatively few" has to be taken in context. I think "relatively few" is really "a hell of a lot".
Secondly, success at undergraduate is a hell of a lot more likely if you come in from a selective private school where much of your freshman year is a repeat-refresh of the last two years of HS, and you already know how to study, and you're already accustomed to an environment where you're NOT the smartest kid in the room. I watched in my freshman class 45 years ago, as kids who were valedictorians of their big public high schools crashed and burned the first semester - Math 101 quiz scores like 8/100 and D minus on every writing assignment, because they were used to coming in to class, occasionally cracking a book the night before the test, and slamming A+s over and over. Not gonna cut it.. Most of them pulled up their shorts and mastered REAL study and REAL work and did fine, but those first couple "sink or swim" semesters were real tough. So yes, if you're targeting a long term goal like med school, that private school foundation means you hit the undergrad ground running, already you've got 5-10 years practice at HARD academic work.
Thirdly, as I've said over and over, not everyone believes the goal of the private school education is to get into the most "prestigious" university you can. If you want to go into the oil and gas business in Texas, you might well choose to major in petroleum engineering at Texas Tech even if you could get into Stanford, for the connections and industry relationships. If you envision a career in law that leads to Texas politics, you're most likely going to choose UT over Harvard even if you can get into Harvard.
So the "private schools aren't worth it because many of their students don't go to the Ivy League" is a gross misunderstanding of WHY parents send their kids there. Sure, for many it IS a matter of the most-prestigious university possible - but for many it's not.
Good post.
My, "relatively few" comment is per the charge leveled from private school detractors. As you said such notions are silly, full of logical and contextual holes etc.
"............when we adjust for unobserved student ability by controlling for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to, our estimates of the return to college selectivity fall substantially and are generally indistinguishable from zero."
ETA - Outside educational minority groups. If we gathered 1,000 equally qualified top notch rising freshmen and sent half to Harvard, Stanford, Sara Lawrence, Duke, MIT and Harvey Mudd and the other half to Penn State, Texas A&M, Arizona State, Idaho, Ole Miss and OU there would be very close to no difference in success metrics between those who attended the prestige schools vs. the non-prestige schools over time......no difference in further educational attainment, no difference in career earnings etc.
Let's boil this down to the most reduced form of tasty sauce... your kiddo has been accepted to two of the best private schools in Dallas. They basically won a lottery ticket. You're obviously a parent who is deeply involved in your children's education. You almost certainly have what would practically be considered unlimited financial resources. There is nothing in the way of your child proceeding through the rest of their eduicational career having the ability to do absolutely whatever they want to.
So, with that said, ask your child where they would like to go. Sweetee? Greenhill or Hockaday? When they tell you the answer, say cool... and there you go.
There is literally no wrong answer here, and you literally are not going to get anything constructive from folks here on which one school is better than another other than a tremendous amount of parental bias and diving into the weeds.
When I also look at Niche ranking on private schools, Hockaday is one spot below GH not sure what criteria they use though.
Note that Niche rankings are literally a crap shoot of an algorithm that takes into account really arbitrary stuff, which also includes how much a school pays Niche. It has become a platform where schools now "cannot afford not to participate" paying to play.
You should look at Niche rankings as suspect as you would Yelp reviews
Source: I was the board chair of a very large "highly ranked" private school
Let's boil this down to the most reduced form of tasty sauce... your kiddo has been accepted to two of the best private schools in Dallas. They basically won a lottery ticket. You're obviously a parent who is deeply involved in your children's education. You almost certainly have what would practically be considered unlimited financial resources. There is nothing in the way of your child proceeding through the rest of their eduicational career having the ability to do absolutely whatever they want to.
So, with that said, ask your child where they would like to go. Sweetee? Greenhill or Hockaday? When they tell you the answer, say cool... and there you go.
There is literally no wrong answer here, and you literally are not going to get anything constructive from folks here on which one school is better than another other than a tremendous amount of parental bias and diving into the weeds.
I agree with everything you wrote, but there is one material difference between the schools: co-ed vs single-sex. There are social reasons for choosing one over another and quite a bit of research on the educational pros and cons of a single-sex education (especially for girls). I don’t have the wherewithal do dig into it now, but it’s there and it’s interesting for someone making this decision.
The value proposition of co-ed vs same sex should have already been completely covered for this family by the time they've reached the acceptance stage.
The parent here is now going through the decision process based on a ivy league acceptance rates analysis between the different schools. For a middle school girl. I'm sorry, that's wild. The crazy train has officially left the tracks.
I'll tell you right now that this parent will be someone who will hire this guy. I promise.
Here's another uncomfortable truth about college admissions that a lot of Texas private school parents don't take into consideration. If the ultimate goal is for your child to go to UT or Texas A&M, having your child at an extremely top tier private school in Texas can be detriment to their admissions at those schools.
If the senior class is an extremely strong one, your star kiddo still might be ranked in their class in the middle of the pack, which puts them at a HUGE disadvantage because all the sudden they aren't raking in the top #% of their class, and hey... everyone is good. They've already been pre-selected and filtered.
There is no harder job in top tier private school education than the college admissions counseling department. Period. Full stop. And I've been privy to some years where when acceptances don't quite measure up to the expectations of parents who just dropped 500K in tuition, the result is straight up revolt and mutiny in the school community. I've watched college admissions counselors get run out of town. I've watched some of those counselors throw in the towel, burn the bridge, and consider setting fire to the joint.
The OP proves my point. Imagine the expectations of this middle school parent marinating in the next few years of an absolute sprint to bulldoze anything in the path of their child, multiplied x50, and it's a straight up cut throat powder keg.
Here's another uncomfortable truth about college admissions that a lot of Texas private school parents don't take into consideration. If the ultimate goal is for your child to go to UT or Texas A&M, having your child at an extremely top tier private school in Texas can be detriment to their admissions at those schools.
If the senior class is an extremely strong one, your star kiddo still might be ranked in their class in the middle of the pack, which puts them at a HUGE disadvantage because all the sudden they aren't raking in the top #% of their class, and hey... everyone is good. They've already been pre-selected and filtered.
There is no harder job in top tier private school education than the college admissions counseling department. Period. Full stop. And I've been privy to some years where when acceptances don't quite measure up to the expectations of parents who just dropped 500K in tuition, the result is straight up revolt and mutiny in the school community. I've watched college admissions counselors get run out of town. I've watched some of those counselors throw in the towel, burn the bridge, and consider setting fire to the joint.
The OP proves my point. Imagine the expectations of this middle school parent marinating in the next few years of an absolute sprint to bulldoze anything in the path of their child, multiplied x50, and it's a straight up cut throat powder keg.
I think the majority of this post is accurate but disagree with bolded. There are plenty of spots outside of the auto-admit spots, and a lot of these go to “midde-of-the pack” kids from top privates. UT, A&M, SMU, and TCU are honestly bottom-tier outcomes from St. Mark’s and Hockaday
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