<p>I wish I could link it here but it's too old and pay only...but the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article about parents making incredible sacrifices to send their kids to Ivy feeder schools, with no guarantee of successful admission to an Ivy school. The subject of the article was a child of Korean immigrants who owned a dry cleaning store. They had made an incredible financial commitment to send him to Groton (I think--am cruising on memory here), where he had worked hard and done well. The problem was that he had not been admitted to an Ivy and his mother, in the WSJ, described her disappointment in him! He had been accepted and was going to attend Johns Hopkins and his parents viewed him as some kind of failure.</p>
<p>It was so sad--here was this great kid who had worked so hard to live up to his parents' expectations and they viewed him as some kind of failure even though he was going off to Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>So cut your dad some slack because he is viewing this from his perspective, and understand that at the time you need to decide he may need to let go of some of his dreams for you and that will be difficult for him.</p>