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Top U.S. colleges give city a sniff

Few get in and tuition is US$62,000 a year

By: Nick Martin

Posted: 09/24/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

REPRESENTATIVES from six Ivy League schools and Stanford University rolled into Winnipeg last week, touting a prestigious undergraduate liberal arts education for US$62,000 a year in tuition.

The universities come to Winnipeg every three years, spreading the message that they're the best of the best. They get more applications than they have spaces and it's tough to get accepted.

"You have to ask the question: Is it worth it or not?" Peter Brass, universities adviser at St. John's-Ravenscourt School, said Friday.

These schools exist in an entirely different world than most universities, he said. Harvard receives 36,000 applications each year for 1,650 first-year spaces. "The more they reject, the higher they go on the U.S. News and World Report rankings," he said.

When the Ivy League schools first came to Winnipeg a few years ago, SJR hosted a huge crowd of students and parents to a widely promoted visit. There were maybe 150 in a meeting room Thursday at an airport hotel.

Students and staff from Kelvin High School only heard about it Wednesday. One student from Garden City Collegiate heard about it through a Free Press blog.

The Ivy League schools' attitude is that if students really want to go there, they'll be checking websites finding out where the admissions people will be visiting. "If people come out, they come out. If you don't know, you don't know," Brass said.

Ivy League schools have small undergraduate programs. Dartmouth, in New Hampshire, is barely bigger than Brandon University. Brown, based in Rhode Island, and Princeton, in New Jersey, have undergraduate programs that, combined, are marginally larger than the University of Winnipeg's.

The recruiters emphasized that despite the high tuition, they have enormous pots of financial aid.

"All of us are fully committed to meeting the financial needs of all the students we admit," said Kiyoe Hashimoto of Stanford, the evening's chairman. "We all have more amazingly qualified students than we can possibly admit."

Princeton's Chrissy Fulton said her school, and several others, guarantee students will have on-campus housing for all four years of their undergraduate studies.

Repeatedly, they hammered home that undergrads get a liberal arts education.

"None of our schools has a pre-med major, none has a pre-law major. Think of liberal arts as the ultimate pre-professional education -- they prepare you for jobs that don't yet exist," said Penn's Alice Cheung.

Brown's Annie Cappuccino noted Canadian students' letters of recommendation from teachers are far less hyperbolic than American applicants' letters of reference.

That's because the U.S. is a far more litigious society, said Brass; rejected American students may take legal action against the universities and against the teachers from whom they requested letters of reference.

Several dozen Canadian universities will be in the city Nov. 7 to 9 for their annual high school recruiting fair.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Lure of the Ivy League

Here's why some Winnipeg high school students attended the Ivy League and Stanford recruiting tour:

"I want to know how realistic it is to get into these Ivy League schools. They're liberal arts schools. If I take a liberal arts degree, is that going to adequately prepare me?"

-- Allen Liu, St. John's-Ravenscourt School

"I'm very interested in going to medical school."

-- Wendy Wang, Kelvin High School

"The challenge of it, the intrigue of trying to get in."

-- Elsie Tellier, Vincent Massey Collegiate

"I'm hoping to get some idea of what I want to do after high school. I'm thinking engineering, maybe Stanford."

-- Julia Athayde, Kelvin

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 24, 2012 B4

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