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<p>Humm, I am not sure that “something everyone does” has much to do with the obsession of attending Harvard or its peers. At best, that “something everyone does” applies to colleges in general.</p>
<p>In my upper middle class suburb in the late 60’s/early 70’s all the top students were applying to the Ivies, Seven Sisters and the elite uni’s and LACS that they kids are applying to today. The difference is that most of them who applied got in. </p>
<p>There are lots of communities (even in the torrid northeast) where kids cast a net in their region or state, pick one or three colleges that look like they can get in and are affordable and that’s that. You can’t look at Chappaqua or Scarsdale or Manhattan and extrapolate that things are insane and that every parent will do every single thing possible to get their kid into Harvard.</p>
<p>I am very interested in higher ed (duh, Captain obvious). I have neighbors- same houses, same tax bill, who couldn’t tell you the difference between Barnard and Baruch (nor do they care) or Wellesley vs. Wesleyan (and I’m in the Northeast… and we have kids from the neighborhood at all these schools). Their kids will either go to the state flagship, a branch of the state U system, or if the kid is really special- try for one of the service academies with the state flagship as the back up.</p>
<p>And guess what- that pretty much describes the place I grew up. I’m first generation American and my parents were much more invested in higher ed as a result than many (most?) of my friends parents.</p>
<p>For the most part, people who don’t think it matters consider the hype and the stress insane. And they think that parents who are heavily invested in learning about “Why Cornell” or the difference between being pre-med at JHU vs. Wash U is just crazy.</p>
<p>And the people who care- well, we think those parents are out of touch and don’t understand that it’s not like the old days where your kid woke up one day and hopped the greyhound bus to get to college with their little army-navy surplus trunk packed with an alarm clock and a typewriter.</p>
<p>But you aren’t going to convince one my neighbors that there’s a whit of difference between any of these colleges. And his D- who is in grad school to become a speech therapist- seems to have done fine for herself. Couple of teachers MAY have suggested that they are selling her short-- and that she could have benefited from a more rigorous college environment- but the local state college did the job (she graduated in four years, commuted from home, kept her job from HS to pay for incidentals) and the world keeps turning.</p>
<p>The insanity isn’t everywhere.</p>
<p>Look in the mirror, College Confidential!</p>
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<p>I can’t speak about other people but, my late 1970s high school experience foreshadowed today’s intense competition to get into the Ivies,and Harvard in particular. It wasn’t that my particular high school sent many people (2,3 a year out of 300 students to Harvard, but maybe 15-20 to the local Ivy, Penn). It was in an very affluent suburb. Students were very strategic about their classes (honors over regular), protecting their GPA, extracurriculars and sports (crew rated over football for Harvard). I knew enough to take the Biology Achievement Test (SAT II) after I took it in 9th grade, and take the Math Achievement after 10th grade, getting those tests out of the way early. Kids knew that Harvard and Yale required a special extra for admission. Students applied to the elite east coast schools - as emilybee said, the Seven Sisters, Ivy, and Williams, Amherst, MIT, Swarthmore, and such. </p>
<p>Was this pressure created by an influx of foreigners? Well, yes but isn’t that always the case? In my area, many parents of friends had fled Europe during WWII, settled and grew up in the US. These parents achieved the American dream - often they became doctors, lawyers and businessmen. They wanted the children to continue the dream by attending elite colleges.</p>
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<p>In my old neighborhood and according to older alums at my HS, perception of FSAs paralleled the state of feelings in area about the military and the then still recent Vietnam War. </p>
<p>When feelings were still strong into the early-mid-'80s, many parents…including some Vietnam vets and those of prior wars with negative feelings about the Vietnam War and its effects strongly discouraged their kids from considering the FSAs. </p>
<p>From what I gathered from older HS alums from the late '60s to early-mid '80s, the FSAs weren’t perceived very positively…especially by those in the top of their graduating classes*. </p>
<p>In contrast, my graduating class and those of older and younger classmates after Operating Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm, the FSAs were perceived just as positively and prestigious alongside the Ivy/elite colleges. A more positive perception of the military, fading memories/feelings about the Vietnam War, and a more right-leaning student body who were pulling Alex Keatons on their much more liberal/hippie parents as a way to rebel were some factors. </p>
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<li>I recalled reading an old dead tree article by a West Point alum about how some early '70s incoming classes had to accept nearly everyone who applied due to lack of applications as a consequence of widespread antipathy among many teens/young adults towards military institutions due to the Vietnam War and the change in policy towards an all-volunteer force so there was no longer an incentive by some to use the FSA as a way to postpone being drafted for 4 years.<br></li>
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<p>This is what we mean. Yet another topic that you supposedly discussed in depth with multiple people AND their parents. </p>
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<p>A large part of my post is based on what I observed growing up in my old NYC neighborhood and from seeing HS classmates pulling Alex Keatons on their more liberal/hippie parents who were part of the original '60s counterculture/anti-Vietnam War protests. </p>
<p>The Vietnam War ended in the early 70’s. I just can’t imagine why that is even included in a response here. Cobrat, were you even BORN then? </p>
<p>Please, could you discuss current events about which YOU have personal experience? </p>
<p>The Ivies are all co-ed now. They no longer do handshake admissions of men of a certain class. They now have a purposeful policy of admitting students with full financial aid who would have assumed, rightfully, that they were just not the right kind for colleges of that social class. Sure, there are legacy and developmental considerations but they are nowhere near what they were when, say, George W. Bush applied to Yale.</p>
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<p>cobrat, that’s just the problem. All your posts have “large parts.” They are all based on “what you observed” decades ago, but it really just seems like it was yesterday, doesn’t it? This is all so fresh in your mind that you are able to provide detailed accounts of conversations with HS classmates, cousins, coworkers, etc. that are relevant to EVERY TOPIC discussed on this site.</p>
<p>Do you see why people get frustrated with you? Do you see why your “observations” strain the limits of credibility?</p>
<p>“A large part of my post is based on what I observed growing up in my old NYC neighborhood and from seeing HS classmates pulling Alex Keatons on their more liberal/hippie parents who were part of the original '60s counterculture/anti-Vietnam War protests.”</p>
<p>This is why it’s unbelievable. How many other families would you have known well enough to know that the kids were Alex P Keaton types with liberal/hippie parents? Maybe you had one or two buddies for which this was the case, but you seem to take 1-2 instances and pretend that you have tons of these recollections. </p>
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<p>Same thing in New Canaan, CT in the same era. But Harvard was not usually the target, since we lived in Yale country. But actually, looking back, I think that most of those people would have gotten in even now. There definitely wasn’t the sense of resume-building that one would probably find there now, but kids still did some interesting things, just because they were interested in them. (The whole SAT-prep thing was unheard of, though.)</p>
<p>Same in the NYC suburbs in that time period. I recall the teacher going around the room in one of my language classes asking where everyone was going to college. The responses: “Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Tufts, Haverford, Brown, Vassar, Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, Harpur (now SUNY Binghamton) Pembroke (now Brown), Williams, Columbia, Cornell, Radcliffe (now Harvard), Dartmouth, Cal (Berkeley) U Rochester”, etc. It wasn’t about prestige mongering… it was just where classmates applied and went.</p>
<p>I think I am one of the older parents on this board, having begun college in the late sixties as an underage student and then having my own children later in life. By the time the Vietnam War ended, I had already graduated from college. </p>
<p>I do not see anything in cobrat’s comments that strikes me as historically inaccurate or implausible. (Iirc, cobrat’s undergrad education included quite a few history classes, if not a history major?) I would add that “liberal/hippie” attitudes aside, the lure of a free education was not as compelling back when tuition was better aligned with starting salaries and perceived opportunities for advancement. And, yes, I also know some former “hippies” whose kids turned around and became the Alex Keaton types.</p>
<p>I would also add that during the early years of protest against the Vietnam War, many organizers came from elite school backgrounds. My middle-class parents observed friends whose children went to elite schools (Swarthmore, anyone?) became involved in organizing earlier protests and were then blacklisted when they attempted to get jobs and their names came up in background checks. And, they themselves recalled peers who had been caught up in the McCarthy era of the fifties, which was still fresh in their memories. (Those whose parents were from elite or wealthy backgrounds had a safety net that middle-class or working-class folks did not; some things never seem to change.)</p>
<p>I am mentioning this because even though my “stats” were very good, my parents hesitated to send me to an elite school at least partly out of fear that I would be caught up in anti-war protests. (Alas, by spring 1970, these protests were just about everywhere.) By the time my younger siblings applied to college in the early/mid-seventies, LOTS had changed. </p>
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. Yes, but you didn’t read about it in a history book. When Family Ties aired, Cobrat was in elementary school.</p>
<p>frazzled2thecore, I am about your age I think. I went to a working-class suburban high school in a suburb of NYC where fewer than half of the kids went to college at all. The ones that did mostly went to local colleges (community colleges, colleges in what is now the CUNY system, and two or three private colleges in the area) and lived at home, with a few more (myself included) to SUNY schools, most of which were then historically teacher’s colleges. A tiny number of our graduating class of 1,000+ even considered Ivy-Seven Sister schools. I suspect my experence was much more typical of the times than those of you who went to high schools where a large proportion of the graduating class was headed to Ivies or other top schools.</p>
<p>frazzled, there’s a difference between you sharing your personal recollection of actual experiences that are relevant to the conversation and cobrat’s “memory” of literally hundreds of conversations and observations that miraculously apply to EVERY SINGLE THREAD on this site. It would be like me having an opinion on every world event that happened during my childhood in the 60s-70s based on “remembered” overheard conversations with the adults in my life. It just is not plausible at all. A more believable memory would be something like “after the first moon landing, my friends and I all wanted to be astronauts and so we ate Space Sticks and drank a lot of Tang.”</p>
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<p>True. It was one of the “guilty pleasure” shows many…including elementary school kids watched during that period. Keep in mind we had far less supervision in many areas…including TV watching than I’ve noticed with later generations. Remember, we were part of the “latchkey kid” generation. </p>
<p>Heh, it was to the point my elementary school classmates and I watched much more parent troubling movies/TV shows popular then like Terminator. Rambo series, etc. </p>
<p>Plus, even if one didn’t watch those TV shows/movies, a critical mass of folks who did around us along with their influence would have been more than enough to make one aware of them. For instance, I remembered seeing plenty of “Ronbo*” posters around my old neighborhood and other parts of NYC…including Chinatown back then.</p>
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<li>President Reagan’s face airbrushed into a picture of Rambo posing with a rocket launcher and placed on popculture posters.<br></li>
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<p><a href=“http://www.amarketplaceofideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/ronbo-equals-ronald-reagan-rambo.jpg”>http://www.amarketplaceofideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/ronbo-equals-ronald-reagan-rambo.jpg</a></p>
<p>“And, yes, I also know some former “hippies” whose kids turned around and became the Alex Keaton types.”</p>
<p>I can’t say I know any kids of “hippies” or liberal leaning parents who became Alex Keaton types but, imo, I think the end of the draft and becoming an all volunteer army went a long way in changing attitudes about the military - as the Vetnam era protesters no longer had to worry about their kids being drafted and kids didn’t need to worry about being drafted. </p>
<p>At my son’s prep school, which has a mandatory JROTC program, there are usually at least two students every year who go to one of the service academies and several who go to the Maritime schools. </p>
<p>" I went to a working-class suburban high school in a suburb of NYC where fewer than half of the kids went to college at all"</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to suggest with my comment about upper middle class town that all schools top students went to the schools that kid’s where I lived did. But, I think what I experienced was the norm in towns/suburbs like the one I lived in, in NY. It’s likely that it was also pretty much a NY/NE upper middle class thing. Also, since I was in upstate NY, Cornell was the big winner. Still is. The district I live in now (Albany area) typically sends around 25 kids to Cornell - some to the state part but also many to A&S and COE. Columbia is also a very popular choice. </p>