@TheGFG You are intertwining multiple different issues. One is top academically performing students (independent of Tiger Mom syndrome and without helicoptering parents). Another is competitive college admissions where it takes the “ANDs” to be admitted (even if the schools are public) and if the “ands” are achievable without extreme parenting. Plus another issue–school affordability.
If parents don’t have college savings plans and students don’t qualify for FA, then regardless of student merit, college choices are limited. It is not uncommon for lots of students, not just a handful of “not tippy top students” in some high schools. Top talent kids (even those whose achievements are strictly their own and not due to Tiger Mom syndrome or helicoptering parents) end up at high merit $$ schools all the time bc that is what their family can afford. Or they end up at their local public university filled with avg students. And, horrors, some even end up at the other CC (community colleges.).
I find the idea that attending Marist is tragic rather humorous.
People drop out of doctoral programs all the time, and an inability to successfully complete the program is only one reason. I’ve got relatives who got attractive (both financially AND professional/intellectually) offers from industry midway through their programs. The decision was- will XYZ program still be there a few years from now if/when I decide to go back? And the answer is- of course. But the opportunity to work on cutting edge problems- even without the doctorate, where they are paying you a fortune, where you’ll have unbelievable resources- that might not be there in a few years. So off they go. These are not failures IMHO- just people who recognize that if industry is interested in robotics or artificial intelligence or genetic sequencing using complex algorithms TODAY- that doesn’t mean that your particular skill or interest will have the same kind of currency once you are done with the degree.
Good decisions in my opinion. What grad student WOULDN’T want the opportunity to push pause on the dissertation and make a boatload of money- right now- especially if it meant working with world class peers with tons of resources???
It occurs to me that the very things that people might think are interfering with their child’s 800 SAT scores are the “ANDs” that the holistic college admission process is looking for (rather than another 2300 SAT score). That cake baking or dance or swimming at the YMCA or other interest is exactly the hook … for your child … and if you can keep it in the box of available parent time and money … let them go for it. Maybe trying to swim to county record speed isn’t in the cards … so why do you want to waste 20 hours a week on that. And yes, swimming has always started at age 5 with varsity swimmers swimming year round on school, YMCA and local teams, often 2 teams per season, it was never a walk-on varsity sport, even without asians or whoever.
Or how about taking one of the more esoteric but interesting AP courses or doing some online courses, taking a CC course for fun, studying for the SAT to go above the really dismal 1700 level that never was good enough for Rutgers, volunteer work or church projects or well, have your child look up local things going on in say a 10 mile radius of home and pick the one they want to do.
That 10,000 hour amount is extreme, unless you consider than many kids, even without tiger or pushy parents, are studying 2 or 3 hours a day + a bunch of ECs and we are talking about 12 years of effort.
I actually think the holistic admissions are begging for work life balance, as long as the EC is actually fun and engaging for the child and tolerable and in the box for the parent. And yes, you have to put in more … and not always step back and let them figure it out. You don’t order them to SAT class, but you can explain that it may help them get into a better school or even a school out of state, if that is their dream. You don’t order them to take AP statistics, but you tell them it will help their application, as will a good crafted essay (50 hours?).
You can use the HYPS suggestions to help your child shine and get into Rutgers and then succeed due to good prep …
Any reason that should happen to asian students in a greater proportion than to domestic students? I would think it’s the opposite; Domestic students will be more tempted, they are “shallower” and have more soft skills desirable for employment in general.
That’s their feeble attempt. It’s clearly failing if an admissions officer has to lament publically how their “choice” can’t handle basics in life. Apparently, that “and” is also manufacturable. Time to put theit brains together and come up with something better.
Another factor is some doctoral students matriculated with the intent not to finish to obtain a pedigreed “free consolation Masters” they could then use to get employment in industries/jobs where having a pedigreed degree is important or as a personal non-professional oriented goal. From my observation, while many international students do this, this seems to be more common with native-born US students.
QMP did not have any problem with being 17th cello! That was not her EC of “passion.” She liked the orchestra, though. Also, I like the cello!
If she had had a problem with it, it would have been too bad, and would have been due in part to my decision not to enroll her in Suzuki when she was 3. She was not involved in seat competition–she really could not have been. I think there may have been a bit of competition going on among several of the first 6 cellists, but not all of them. For a year or two, the 1st chair cellist was the daughter of a professional cellist, had a $30,000 cello that she brought to school for orchestra class, and played duets with her father. At least 4 in that group were going to strings intensives in the summers (starting in middle school), and playing multiple hours per day. The orchestra director suggested enrolling QMP in summer string intensives, starting in 7th grade, I did not go for that, either.
I don’t mind 17th chair cello being used as a generic example of things, but most of the points being made about it do not apply to us, and it was a rather specific example. Actually, my recollection might have been wrong, and QMP might have been 19th or 21st chair cello, still with a lot of cellists further back.
(I should add, lest you think this is starting to sound like a mega-band rather than an orchestra, that the high school had three orchestras, and QMP was in the middle one. The cellists who were seated further back were also in the second orchestra–I don’t have a count to offer from the third.)
We are out in the “middle of nowhere,” incidentally, if that makes a difference to how you read this.
Students leave PhD programs for a variety of reasons, only some having to do with ability to complete the program.I would agree with @igloo that there would likely be more temptation for domestic students who do not need employer sponsorship or a student visa to remain in this country, to leave a program voluntarily for employment.
I have heard of students coming here to attend a PhD program on a student visa and then leaving before completion to enroll in another academic program that they perceive to have better job prospects.
I had a few friends in Engineering doctoral programs at the Berkeley/CMU/MIT/Caltech/Stanford level schools who recounted stunned and angry Profs in their department when upon attending the end of spring semester commencement exercises found a sizable portion of their then current enrolled grad students were being called up to pick up MBAs from their university’s elite graduate business program. Most of them happened to be international students.
This incident caused them to implement departmental policies to strongly discourage this practice not only because one condition of entering a doctoral program is to put in 100%+ of your waking hours to its course/research requirements unless given the exceedingly rare waiver, but also because the senior engineering Profs had a serious personal beefs with their Business School counterparts. .
Helicopter parenting certainly can wreck a kid. When I was a child, I was kept where my parents could watch me. As in, every day I had to come directly home from school, and I had to stay home unless they let me walk to the library. On weekends I was to stay home all day. I literally wasn’t allowed to go hang out with other kids, or go out and do teenager stuff, or anything like that. There was also a lot of paranoid racism going around. So I turned 18 and had basically no life skills, no knowledge about how the world worked, no self confidence, and no social skills. So I ended up unemployed and living in the basement, because I didn’t understand how to handle a part time job interview, let alone how to start a life of my own. My parents response was that if I live in their house for free, I will be treated as a child with all the same rules as when I was a child, which was a drastic failure at getting me to go out and learn life skills and find a job, since I could only leave the house to go to the library. In the end, it took 15 months of Job Corps to start actually addressing my issues and then two years living with family other than my parents where I could go out and learn lessons before I could function as an adult around when I was 23, and it was more in spite of my parents than because of them.
I’m not really the biggest fan of helicopter parenting.
QM, Impressive number of cellists! The issue GFG is raising seems to be that you couldn’t get into the orchestra at all unless you are committed to it from birth. They were supposed to be hobbies, something you do on the side. All of sudden, they are not. All thanks to elite admissions rat race. Maybe it would be better if they just select by numbers only. Then they would be ruining only academics allowing the rest of us have fun with the rest.
Along with our D, we have a strategy for maximizing her potential and college options. I used personal examples because I can only speak truthfully about what I have seen and experienced regarding increased competition, not because I am helpless to deal with it and need your pity. We made reasonable adaptations long ago to the changing conditions in our town, and thankfully my older children were very successful with college admissions.
BUT that doesn’t mean it’s not tiring and frustrating! It doesn’t mean that the college game isn’t much harder to play than it used to be for students in my area. Indeed, our state schools are now wait-listing, tracking interest, and generally setting higher admission standards than was the case 5 or 10 years ago. It has also meant we have paid a price for adaptation: our family’s methods resemble tiger parenting and therefore are counter-cultural for our ethnicity, making it socially difficult to maintain. What is expected and accepted for immigrant groups is not accepted so kindly for us. We don’t always want to do it either. But we do the best we can, and sometimes our D does well. When culturally American parents and children didn’t put in the greater hard work and preparation now required to achieve good results in high school and their children fail to achieve what they had hoped, sometimes there is jealousy and resentment towards those who did prepare. That may at times include us. And, to the point of this thread, another common reaction I see in the unprepared is pushy and manipulative helicoptering. When there’s a real or perceived scarcity of resources, survival instinct kicks in and there is less civility and reason.
I’m sure it’s more difficult for students in your high school compared to a decade ago, that’s true for a lot of students. I’m sure there are families that would love to be in your school district. There is always a flip side. Try to stay positive and appreciate that there are some benefits to living where you live.
I take the dean’s point on the downsides of helicopter parenting, but the reality is that at a place like Stanford that’s admitting 5% of its applicants, a disproportionate share of those 5% are going to have parents who know how to work the system in their favor. So those are the kinds of kids and parents a Stanford dean is going to run across, more frequently than at a less selective institution.
A generation ago when 20% got in and therefore it didn’t take a perfect resume, highly involved parenting wasn’t as important in getting in these kinds of schools,and therefore deans probably saw fewer of these kinds of folks.
My thinking from hearing about the situation was those grad students somehow wrangled additional outside scholarship funding for supposed “miscellaneous” expenses for their engineering grad programs from outside scholarship sources which they then applied to the MBA program*.
Something which added further insult to injury for those senior engineering Profs as it meant they/their department not only missed out on those additional funds, but also the funds ended up going to their perceived hated rivals in the Business school.
Most intl grad students I knew back then(late '90s/early '00s)...especially the East Asian grad students didn't come from families with financial means to be full pay for US MBA programs...especially ones offered at schools like Stanford/Berkeley/MIT/CMU.
blue water’s point in #355 caused me to think that the subset of parents the Dean at Stanford sees are most likely to be the helicopter parents. And I think there are more of them than there used to be, so of course the Dean is going to see a few more . . .the main point being that the parents the Dean sees are not representative of the group of Stanford parents.
I doubt that this thread has converted any helicopter parents into hang-glider parents. But I hope that it shows that in some parts of the country, some of the situations are complex, and not resolvable by the immediate suggestions one might make.
When I read about the dad in Half Moon Bay complaining that his daughter, a top-student in middle school, had too much homework, my immediate reaction was that she was just not that talented academically, and should drop back a level. Little did I know! When QMP was in elementary school, and starting out in her primary EC, friends of mine who lived next door to a high-school participant in the same program remarked to me that when they went to bed at midnight, they could always see the light still burning in the room of the high-school student next door. I thought, “I would never permit QMP to stay up working past midnight!” Well . . .
@thegfg The process can be extremely frustrating, but only if you succumb to the mentality that it is the school that makes the student, and not the student who forges their own path and that school name does not have to limit their futures.
Fwiw, I think the increases in costs impact far more students than more competitive admissions. (But that is probably bc that is how our children are impacted. fwiw, I do find the process of trying to find affordable schools tiring! )
A part of this may also be one’s regional cultural reference points regarding “too much homework”. I’ve encountered parents who felt anything more than 2 hours/day in HS is too much regardless of level and on the flipside, encountered parents who felt anything less than 4-6 is “too little” and “fails to instill the proper work ethic”.
My parents and older relatives are in the latter camp…alongside many native-born lower-middle/working class Americans of the “tweener”* and depression/WWII generations I’ve met/grew up with. The parents I’ve met in the former camp tend to be overwhelmingly upper/upper-middle class White boomers from suburbia or posh NYC neighborhoods like the UES.
Personally, I found it odd to keep reading the average American undergrad spends only around 2-3 hours studying a week back in the '90s. Even granted the average is affected by folks like my party/beer double majoring older cousin who hardly cracked open his college books, that’s a shocker considering the vast majority of classmates I knew…including slackers like yours truly** put in far more time than that in our HS.
Generation born between around 1929-1945
** Despite studying/doing HW/readings till 1-2 am, it wasn’t unusual to end up with C/D or sometimes even F level grades/averages. That was my lived reality for the first year and half in HS.
and have more soft skills desirable for employment in general.