Given Ammo's love of theater and music, deciding against the Academy makes sense. It's a very specialized environment, designed to turn out very specialized people.
I was reading something in an old New Yorker recently, about grade inflation in private colleges, that got me thinking about what college is for. The article claimed that the purpose of public college is, or used to be, to train students for jobs, while the purpose of private college is, or used to be, acting as a finishing school for students that don't have to worry much about jobs when they graduate, because they can go into the family business, or into businesses owned by friends of the family.
I think it was certainly like that when I was in college. In retrospect, having attended both public and private colleges, the main drawbacks to public college were large classrooms at the freshman level, and graduate students teaching labs, but Chris says he experienced that at the freshman level, even at Tulane. My own kids can jolly well go to public college unless they get scholarships. I hope they get into UVA, but if not, George Mason or Virginia Tech are good enough for undergraduate school. George Mason is only two miles away from our house.
In my case, I expect to still be assisting them when they go to graduate school. I can't afford fourteen years of private school (seven each). But you should realize that they both indicate an interest in computers, and engineering, and George Mason and Virginia Tech are very good on that.
Nihil will say that Stanford and MIT are better, and he's right, but they can do their graduate work there, or get scholarships. |
