<p>Question: As a parent, I was asked about my high school/college and what year I graduated. I would like to know if the parents’ level of education affects the student’s college acceptance. A parent’s educational background can sometimes help put an applicant’s information in perspective for admission officials. For example, if a student has very [...]</p>
<p>Based on Sally’s response, probably a good idea for us to keep our Ivy league grad degrees off our average “B” student’s application…</p>
<p>wish I knew that two years ago with my firstborn; good student but “I guess we didn’t expose her to enough intellectual conversations at the dinner table”…</p>
<p>FWIW, I agree that a first generation college student with good grades can get a “pass” from admissions, but how can admissions assume that the “accomplished” parent didn’t go to the Ivy on FA?..and since when did going to a top school “infer/assume” that kids would have the same interests/opportunities regardless of income levels…? lots of assumptions being made based on 25-30 years ago…</p>
<p>Admission officials rarely put a lot of stock in those answers beyond flushing out the “first-gen” applicants. They certainly don’t expect to create a clear picture of an applicant’s upbringing based on a parent’s erstwhile educational experiences. But there are times when the info can be helpful, as long as the admission folks realize that it provides just a tiny piece of a far bigger puzzle … and sometimes a nugget of red-herring information as well. Example: Among my fellow children of the Sixties, there were a number of young men and women who hailed from well-educated, affluent families but who attended college only briefly (or sometimes not at all) and then pursued a range of other activities … music, farming, arts, etc. So sometimes I encounter high school seniors who truthfully answer “None” to to the Parent College question and may appear to be first-generation, when, in fact, their grandparents or other older relatives hold Ivy pedigrees.</p>
<p>Granted, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s just one example of why admission committees take those responses with a few grains of salt.</p>
<p>What would it look like to admissions committee if one parent went to undergrad in another country, then did post-grad/research in the US, and the other parent went to undergrad in another country, and went to graduate school here?</p>
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<p>This is a very common scenario, especially at the more competitive colleges that draw applicants from across the country as well as from around the world. </p>
<p>So, typically, colleges regard these students the same way that they regard any child of educated parents, regardless of where the degrees were earned. </p>
<p>Occasionally, however, this scenario provides some added information for admission committees. Most commonly it’s when a student does not respond to the ethnicity question, but then the admission officials see that both parents have been educated in a particular country (usually India or China) which tends to suggest that the student is Asian.</p>
<p>The fact that my husband went to West Point triggered a conversation with an alumni interviewer. My daughter made the interviewer laugh when she told the story that her dad was teaching ROTC at the college where I was an admissions counselor and I thought he was a professor. It’s a joke. I did know that he was in the army, but it ususally gets a chuckle and certainly helped put my daughter at ease in the interview.</p>
<p>I think that it is a huge advantage to have parents who are college graduates. For example, a student at a community college who is first generation is often expected to work a full-time job. The parents see that the student is only in class 15 hours a week versus the 35 hours of high school and think that they should work those extra hours. I see this all the time.</p>