In article , Beeswing wrote:
I have an afterthought, a question for you. If going to good private
school didn't stop you from getting your four-year degree at some place
decent, if not prestigious...would you feel any different? This school
is graduating *all* their students two years ahead. I wonder when the
critical education years are...besides the early elementary years?

It depends a lot what you mean by "prestigious" and "decent".

There is a very nice article in a recent issue of Academe by Renny
Christopher
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Aca...a/03jachri.htm
claiming that working-class kids are getting short-changed in their
university education because of lower quality education in the
California State (CSU) schools contrasted to the University of
California (UC) system (she has taught in both). I think that for most
people, the CSU system is considered "decent" and UC is "prestigious".

The UC school system is roughly at the same level as University of
Washington, Seattle---I'm not familiar enough with the Washington
colleges to know what the equivalents are of the CSU system.

If your standards are higher (that almost any research university is
"decent" and Stanford or UC Berkeley is prestigious), the question
becomes quite a different one.

The "name-brand" of the university that you end up at matters more
than where you start. I went to a mediocre university for my
undergraduate program (Michigan State), but got a good education,
since it had a small number of very good students who got a lot of
faculty attention, and I was lucky enough to be in that group. I
might have done slightly better at a more prestigious school, but not
by much. For grad school, I went to Stanford, and that did make a
difference in what I learned, how much I enjoyed it, and what jobs I
could later get. It was exciting to be in a place where a lot of the
other people were as bright as me, and somewhat daunting that some
were much brighter (I never was able to grasp all of Tarjan's proof of
the asymptotic complexity of the union-find algorithm, and I could not
have come up with it myself).

If your choices are between (private school+CSU) and (public
school+UC), I'd say that the UC choice is probably the better one.
If the choice is between (private school+UC) and (public
school+Stanford), the advantages of the private school might be more
important. Of course, things are not always so clearcut---the
difference in education at the middle-school and high-school level will
affect the child's desire and ability to achieve at college, so
private school may open up greater possibilities educationally, while
draining financial resources.

I hope not to have to face this problem with my son---we've been
saving for college for him since he was born, and hope to be able to
afford to send him to whatever schools or colleges best fit his needs
and abilities.

For elementary school so far we have stuck with public schools (taking
full advantage of a strong bilingual program to get him intensive
education in Spanish). When the bilingual program ends after 3rd
grade, we may move him to a private school for a few years, since the
GATE program is practically non-existent in the public schools here.
For middle school and high school, we will probably try to get him
into a local charter school that has very high academic standards.
Unfortunately, there is a lottery to get into the charter school (only
room for 50 students per year), so luck may affect our choices.

--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.