This is a sad and unfortunate truth for many circles. Those are circles I prefer to avoid, but if backed into a corner, enjoy goading/mocking just to torture them. As they say, you can’t change ignorance.
I have a Wonder Woman magnet on my car. I think that about sums it up. 
As long as the girls are happy, confident, well-adjusted, and doing what they want to be doing in life, that’s the metric we’ll use to consider ourselves successful parents.
I might be a little biased, though, my parents couldn’t afford to send me to a prestigious school, and my mother obsessed over it (to the point of opening my acceptance letter before I got home from school). I got in to a fairly prestigious school at her urging, and after 6 months they told me they weren’t paying for it anymore (because I guess the prestige factor had worn off for them along with not being able to afford it).
So I’m not a big fan of the whole fronting to the world at the expense of your kid thing.
You’re right Southern Hope. The community college kid or the kid at the state school may turn out to be the biggest success.
It doesn’t stop entirely when the kids graduate college. Who is going to which law school? Who has the Wall St or other great job? Who got into Med School? And who is waiting tables or working at the gym, trying to find themselves. Again, you don’t have to buy into it, but you are going to see the parents of your kids’ cohorts upon occasion and the questions will come up, since the kids are what you have in common.
Parents of the kids on the straight path often congratulate themselves for a job well done. And they should to some extent. As long as they recognize that it may have less to do with their parenting and more to do with a good genetic match.
Those with kids on a zig zag path, or who do not finish college, may get empathy to their face. Often, however, other parents walk away and either think they are lucky their kids didn’t do that or think that the parents of the drop out/waiter must have done something wrong in their parenting. The best (and maybe only good) thing about getting old, is that the judgement of others become much less important.
Nowadays, maybe.
However, 2+ decades ago, UCLA was noticeably easier to get into even as OOS though still difficult whereas UCSB and USC were not seriously considered by students aspiring to Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech or elite private colleges as they were viewed by many in that group as colleges for students more interested in partying than serious academics. There’s a reason why USC was known back then among Californians as “The University for Spoiled Children” or among some corners of the Chinese-American communities there, half-jokingly as “The University for Stupid Chinese”.
Heard the last one from a USC alum from a well-off Chinese-American family living in an upper-middle class So-Cal suburb who graduated from there sometime in the mid-'90s. A perception which has greatly changed within the last 15+ years as USC and UCSB…especially USC has increased admission standards and hired more topflight faculty.
Ironically, if the USC alum had attended and graduated from USC just a bit more than a decade later, his family and neighbors would have had a very different and much more positive reaction to him than what he actually experienced back in the early-mid '90s.
I’m also not disagreeing with you that part of it is parents bragging about having the financial means to afford OOS though that wasn’t always the case with all OOS publics 2 decades ago as there was much more FA/scholarship money floating around for out of staters at some of them back then.
However, there was some judgement in my California relatives’ neighborhoods about whether it was “worth going OOS” on basis of the OOS school’s academic reputation…especially if the children concerned gained admission to the desirable UCs. Especially considering the UCs have been considered the pinnacle of elite public colleges not only in California, but arguably nationwide with the possible exceptions of UVA, UNC, and UM. However, even that varied depending on one’s intended major.
For instance, none of the aspiring engineering/CS majors I knew seriously considered UNC-CH or to some extent, UVA. If their choice was limited to OOS publics, Berkeley, UM, and UCLA in that order. In fact, UIUC, UW-Seattle, and Georgia Tech* would often be considered more seriously than UCLA.
Incidentally, I was asked recently to give my input for a California relative’s young neighbor who is an aspiring engineering major after he received admission choices to a several private elite colleges and a full-ride scholarship(Drake) to Berkeley.
Considering the list of acceptances and financial/merit considerations and the neighbor’s not having a compelling desire for the luster or OOS experience of the private elite colleges, I told him he basically hit the admission jackpot considering Berkeley is at the very apex with schools like MIT, Caltech, CMU, Stanford for engineering/CS, especially considering he and his family won’t be paying a red cent to attend and even if he lost the scholarship by falling short of their academic requirements, the in-state price would still be better than what the OOS private colleges charge even with FA.
- With some reservations considering GTech's reputation for an exceedingly cutthroat weedout academic environment and higher than normal workload even for an engineering/STEM college.
This can vary depending on the value system of one’s peers and neighbors.
For instance, in some well-off suburban areas where some undergrad classmates originated, aspiring or taking a Wall Street or a biglaw/corporate law position would be considered a serious indictment of one’s personal character…and this was well before 2008. Among them, they’d regard the ones waiting tables or working at the gym finding themselves in a much better light as they not only see nothing wrong with spending time finding oneself, but also the feeling better that than to become or work on behalf of “greedy corporate/wall street fatcats” or “bourgeois capitalist tools”.
Yes, there’s much irony in their position considering their SES backgrounds.
Funny you mention law school considering the implosion of the legal industry after 2008-9.
I’m finding an increasing number of parents of current college and HS students are regarding aspirations for law school and becoming a lawyer about as appealing as if their child declared they wanted to go full-time into acting, music, or any other hypercompetitive career where the vast majority struggle to eke out a bare existence to survive in the hopes of “making it big”. This is furthered considering the amount of debt they may need to undertake not only for undergrad, but also 3 years of law school which is $200k+…and that’s before compounding interest which as of 2011…starts from the moment the loan is taken out.
This is also not idle statistics. I know several attorneys or law school grads with ginormous debt burdens. One has a combined 2 years worth of undergrad debt + 3 years of law school of around half-million now due to compounding interest and his graduating into the 2008 recession.
Despite being one of the few from his graduating class to have a legal job in a sea of folks having offers suddenly rescinded due to the recession, his position at a non-profit paid around $30k. Nowhere near enough to viably service the debt.
Critical review of Frank Bruni’s book (from which the op-ed in the Times was excerpted):
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121230/frank-brunis-where-you-go-not-who-youll-be-review
And a link referenced in the above that is interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/university_hiring_if_you_didn_t_get_your_ph_d_at_an_elite_university_good.html
Ironically, the odds of landing a tenure track position, much less making tenure even if one attends a top 10 school in one’s field is such some grad school friends have joked they may as well try their odds at making it big as actors in Hollywood.
I admit to having a bit of fun asking my Cal friends if they considered UCLA a peer.
“No, they are NOT a peer.”
“Wait, I thought that UCLA got the best students in SoCal because it’s close to home.”
“NO, definitely not. The best SoCal students come to Cal.”
Really? How could you possibly know?
I can definitely see that…especially among older Cal alums not only because in the past the gap between them in terms of perceived academic prestige was wider, but also because the campus cultures are so different.
Berkeley had a very radical hippie intellectual vibe which has been perceived as “ruined” by some older Cal alums and students when it became more pre-professional and mainstream in the '90s. One undergrad classmate transferred out of Cal into my LAC during the mid-'90s for precisely that reason.
UCLA on the other hand tends to have a stereotype among my California cousins and their neighbors as an academically strong UC with big state school sports and partying and more laid back regarding academics/intellectualism and political activism.
Incidentally, I’ve encountered some UCLA alums(mostly those from OC) who poke fun at Berkeley alums for being “hippie weirdos”, not preprofessional enough, and “too serious” about political activism matters.
Got to see glimpses of those perceptions firsthand when I toured both campuses during the '90s and early '00s.
Lots of parents in my public school district think this way, moreso than parents at kids private school. My sister lived in toney Westchester County town and they all thought that way ( yes, I’m exaggerating but not by much.) She sent her second kid to boarding school to get away from the competition.
That being said, when my S was getting his acceptances and had heard from about 5 she seemed kind of “meh” when I would tell her. I confronted her and she actually said, "you can’t expect me to be happy he got into A, B, C, D and E schools. " It was only after he got into F school (his 3rd choice) did she say “now I can be happy.”
Someone mentioned “attending college when they’re ready”:
- some kids aren’t ready until they are 20 or older, they need a few years to gain focus
- some kids are never ready, they should study a trade or work in an office
It seems that the guidance counselors NEVER consider that a child might not go to college in September after they graduate in June. And that if a child doesn’t, something is wrong with them.
Someone posted on another thread that their child was accepted for January admission. I am almost jealous, because I think a half year of working might help my son.
MIT takes a lot of students from California, by the way…
Hey, I went to Tailgate State!
Cobrat: interesting that you know folks who applaud kids who, after going to 4 years of college are now waiting tables. I probably live in an area where even the wealthier folks still have to work for a living and expect their kids to do the same. The only kids I know who are supported by their parents in that position are aspiring actors or musicians. Around here there are few that would question a kid going into finance or accounting.
in the midwest here; thankful we dont feel any college pressure at all. Sure, a few kids are going to ivies etc.; but there’s no parental competition in our circles. It might be different at one or two of the state’s top private prep schools though.
When we were all first having kids and figuring out if a parent was staying home or not, we did see a little parental tension with that.
At my school’s graduation, the booklet contains a list of any awards and scholarships earned by each of the 500 or so graduates.
Beyond immediate family, the vast majority of kids get polite applause from the crowd. Whether they’ve made the honors program at a state school, or are headed to an Ivy, or show only an “academic high school diploma” , there’s polite applause.
Except for the kids going to the Academies. Go to any of the service academies, and the crowd goes wild.
And I’m absolutely fine with that.
True. I call it elite worship 
There were a couple of kids at my kid’s HS graduated from MIT couldn’t get a job anywhere, moved back home and were helping out at a HS science lab.
And I know someone who got into MIT but her parents couldn’t come up with all that money. Wound up at a SUNY. We don’t even have a tailgate state in NY.
But these are ANECDOTES.
From their value system, working waiting tables is still honest work and considered more honorable and honest than working in corporate/biglaw firms or ibanking/finance which was perceived as less “socially responsible” because it was service on behalf of powerful and wealthy corporations and individuals to become more powerful and wealthy.
It’s a perspective I find odd and inconsistent considering their high SES background and the fact those families likely benefited from their services directly and indirectly.
There may be some aspects of classist snobbery as well as I’ve heard about similar behaviors from old-money families such as a former colleague of an early supervisor turned friend whose patriarch father insisted he attend Princeton* or risk being permanently cut off from the family and inheritance sometime in the late '60s. While the son complied with his father’s insistence to attend Princeton, the father wasn’t happy when his son chose to stand his ground by opting to major in engineering which his father regarded as “too blue-collar” for someone from their “high class” family.
- Family had sent sons to Princeton for generations.