<p>So if my wife and I cumulatively spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on music, sports, and academic enrichment lessons for our children, in addition to buying an expensive house in an area with good schools, are our children guilty of “taking up more than their fair share of resources”? Perhaps they are if you hold the communist view that all resources belong to the state, but not if you think people have the right to keep most of what they earn and to use their earnings to benefit their children.</p>
The excitement of going where no man has gone before. What we are doing is cutting edge, so I think it is exciting for many students with curious minds. We also provide a lot of free food.</p>
<p>I was the one who suggested that those who don’t agree with the missions of the elites look elsewhere. I wasn’t necessarily talking about a top 20 school because the discussion at that point was focused on the top 2 or 3. Frankly, I have no idea what a top 20 school is. Try posting a list and watch the arguments fly as to what institutions should and should not be included.</p>
<p>That said, my point has been and continues to be that there are plenty of excellent alternatives to HYPSM. I’m not sure why there’s such a continued fixation on gaining admission to the uberelites and why there’s a continued belief that they hold some sort of otherworldly power over all of us. To the poster who suggested that I’m only trying to limit the competition for my own special snowflakes (love that phrase), maybe I’m better letting you all continue to believe that the system is a meritocracy where the truly best and brightest gain admission to Harvard and Yale and that a kid’s future is limited by attending, say, Tufts vs. Harvard. That way if I truly want an edge for my own darlings at schools like Tufts, your darlings will be lined up at Harvard’s door.</p>
<p>The way I see it, there are more and more wonderful, talented kids out there and they all can’t go to the schools that might have accommodated them a generation or two earlier. The schools that might not have attracted them in years past are now offering excellent alternatives and excellent peers with whom to study. Where our future leaders come from is anyone’s guess but I can almost guarantee that HYPSM won’t hold a monopoly on them. I’ve watched too many breathtakingly brilliant kids choose alternative paths.</p>
<p>"Are you a member of an affinity group (ethnic/SES/religious etc.) that wins big in the admissions derby? I think you are, or you would not have written over 13 thousand posts defending the status quo. "</p>
<p>Well, let’s see, hmmm. I’m a mixture of German, Irish and Polish. My father had a GED and then served in the army, my mother attended night school when I was young but didn’t go back to college in earnest til I myself was in college. I’m the first person in my family of origin to go to a traditional 4 year sleep-away college experience. What ethnic/racial/SES group are you thinking that I come from that “wins the lottery”?</p>
<p>“Quote:
What? Folks who don’t buy into the necessity of going to a top 20, must be hooked? She can’t legitimately buy out of the mania?
As PG has told us numerous times, her kids go top 20 schools AND got in EA or ED. I can’t quite remember which.”</p>
<p>Yes, they both do (one an LAC, the other a uni). Their second choices, to which they would have applied ED II if they hadn’t both gotten in ED, were both LACs that are somewhere in the mid twenties to mid thirties range, and I would have been equally as fine with those, because I’m not stupid enough to believe that there is magic dust that cuts off after the top 3, top 5, or top 20. Neither considered any Ivies, just not interested. Why is this relevant?</p>
<p>Your kids go to top 20 schools, so it isn’t completely clear that you didn’t buy into the mania. Yes, those are LF’s words not yours. Deliberately sending your kids to a state school is “not buying into the mania” imho. It doesn’t sound like LF sent her kid to a state school either. If I had the courage of my convictions, I might have insisted my own special snowflakes attend the state school where many generations of my family have gone, every generation till them. It is well below top 20. I have no idea how far down the list. I feel like it is pretty easy for you (and me, too!!!) to say these elite schools aren’t all that; tell other posters their kids will be fine wherever they go, when our own special snowflakes have had the opportunity and privilege of an elite education.</p>
<p>YES - I KNOW some state schools are top 20, 10, 5 whatever!!!</p>
<p>I never said the elite schools weren’t all that. I think they’re great places. I found your position interesting about “well, if these are the places that identify and select our future leaders, we need to stay on top of them.” These are places that yes, seek to identify future leaders (however one defines that) but as tk so ably explained in post 820, they don’t really have the POWER to make their graduates be our future leaders, so all the storm und drang about how they are the producers of the nation’s leaders is misplaced. The elite schools really don’t have all that much power in general. IMO. Or more accurately -they only have power if you ascribe it to them.</p>
<p>I’m thinking commenters pointing out how you’re sending your own kids to top 20 elite colleges is a reference to a vibe of “good for me, but not for thee” they’re getting from combining that fact with your “stop obsessing about the elites/Ivies” mantra. </p>
<p>Whether rightly or wrongly, it’s understandable due to the emphasis such elite/Ivies have among those concerned with elite college admissions and anxieties on whether they could enter/maintain their position in the upper/upper-middle classes. </p>
<p>It’s a similar reaction I observed some students of a cousin* invited to his wedding had when his HYP college graduate fiance/wife told them “Don’t obsess about going to the Ivies/elite universities, all colleges are the same”. Their eye-rolls to that comment gave it all away.</p>
<ul>
<li>At the time, he taught computer science and math at a Boston area public magnet.</li>
</ul>
<p>But only people who are clueless in the first place think that Ivy/similar elite status is necessary to join the ranks of the upper middle class. The vast, vast majority of the upper middle class didn’t have an elite education. This is common sense for anyone who bothers to, well, use common sense. Just like Ivy mania is more east coast than anywhere else, and there are plenty of ways to become upper middle class that don’t demand an elite education. I don’t suffer fools gladly, and people who can’t see the above are fools.</p>
<p>And more to the point, I despise the entitlement on here that some kids “deserve” admissions because of x, y or z. The only people who “deserve” admissions are those the colleges so desire to craft the interesting class they want. And the over-the-top “oh, the resources are soooo precious at H or MIT or wherever” is sickening. Really now? There aren’t tons of excellent colleges in this country? Give me a break.</p>
<p>“So if my wife and I cumulatively spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on music, sports, and academic enrichment lessons for our children, in addition to buying an expensive house in an area with good schools, are our children guilty of “taking up more than their fair share of resources”?”</p>
<p>More power to you, Beliavsky. I don’t begrudge you that at all. I think your let-them-eat-cake attitude towards lower SES classes is unbecoming, but I think you have every right to give your family whatever luxuries, academic or otherwise, you so desire.</p>
<p>For many of us, after graduation rank in the class system (lower, middle, upper) doesn’t even enter our minds when we decide how we want to educate our children. I have been running from my “class” as hard as I can for 40 years. However, I wanted my children to have the best education possible, just so they could have that opportunity and privilege - because I think education is a good in and of itself - regardless of whether it leads to employment. I didn’t get that at my bottom of the heap public university.</p>
<p>Little secret-- plenty of the progeny of the uber class in this country attends Denison, 'Bama, Lake Forest, Villanova, Fairfield U, etc. Fine schools all, but I don’t see anyone on CC killing themselves to get into these places, or hiring private counselors to tweak their applications.</p>
<p>Not quite sure why the pile-on on PG but academic rigor and mega-money don’t always go hand in hand, and the college counselors in Greenwich CT and Newport Beach CA and Winnetka IL are not steering all their kids to top 20 schools. The kids can’t get in- even if there’s a library at Harvard named for grandad, and not every scion of every rich family wants to work hard enough to stay even if he or she could get in. And academic achievement has ceased to be important in and of itself for many of these families.</p>
<p>So I’m not quite sure what you guys are talking about.</p>
<p>Blossom: I’m trying to talk about the Brewster letter that Periwinkle posted a few pages back. It is referenced currently (?) on the Yale admissions website. Paraphrasing, I hope correctly, the letter says Yale is trying to identify and enroll future leaders and those who have the ability to make the most of Yale resources. I can’t figure out how to copy from the PDF.</p>
<p>I apologize to PG if I am rude or piling on. It felt to me like I was just kind of defending myself ;)</p>
<p>PG: What do you think about the letter? Isn’t Yale saying they are looking for those who can best utilize their resources? I think the resources at Yale are pretty amazing. I think Blossom agrees with me at least on that.</p>
<p>I agree 100% that the resources at Yale are amazing. And the kids that I know who have attended Yale in the last 10 years are amazing. And my college friend who is now a faculty member at Yale is amazing- and says the kids are more amazing than the college kids we knew back when.</p>
<p>But this means what exactly? That the citizens of the US get to tell Yale who they should be admitting, and who they should NOT be admitting? Or that every kid we know who does not get into Yale is somehow being cheated out a birthright?</p>
<p>“Gender studies, African-American studies, Chicano studies etc. are as much left-wing political movements as they are academic disciplines”</p>
<p>Whereas a history or literature course taught as it would have been in 1950 carries no political angle. Showcasing the actions, experiences, and thoughts of straight white Christian males is just a politically neutral choice, and it doesn’t make any political statement about who belongs in the academy and who in the kitchen (and who doesn’t exist at all).</p>