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<p>Exactly.<br>
No one is arguing that rejection doesn’t hurt, and that it doesn’t hurt bad, or that you just have to say to your kid “buck up” once and the subject is closed. </p>
<p>We’re questioning what good is served and how healing is helped when there is focus on what OTHER people did, got, achieved, earned, or dumb-lucked their way into.</p>
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<p>I am interested in this, because I’m curious as to what transpired under “discussed.”</p>
<p>So for example - D’s best friend went to Notre Dame. I knew she wanted to go there, and she was a (generally) top student who interviews well, plays nice, had some good extracurriculars and it wouldn’t surprise me if she were National Merit (though I really wouldn’t have retained that info if she was). Then, I heard through my daughter that she got in. I said “good for her” and congratulated her the next time I saw her, and “liked” her mom’s facebook status to that effect. I don’t really know what more there would be to discuss. I don’t know how or why I’d actually know her specific scores or GPA, or why I’d retain anything more about her extracurriculars other than a general knowledge of what they were - she played piano, was on the soccer team, was in a church group, whatever. </p>
<p>My son’s friends, I would know even less about. They all wound up at U of Illinois. It’s a popular choice here, they seem to like it, they all seem happy when we see them at breaks, they kid my son about the NU / U of I rivalry, and I certainly can’t argue they aren’t going to go places from it. What else is there to know? Beats me what their parents’ finances are.</p>
<p>If a kid’s aspiration (if he even thinks about college before November of senior year) is to attend our mediocre flagship and have fun in high school, then he does not belong to the small cohort of kids who care a whole lot about personal admissions results and those of their fellow strivers. The latter are not part of the “everyone can get in somewhere” crowd. At our high school there are probably about 30 or so kids who have a shot at the elite schools, would like to attend, and are working extremely hard to make it. These kids suffer together doing hours upon hours of APUSH reading and difficult AP physics problems. Together they have invested lots of sweat and tears, and thus they care quite a bit about what happens come the end of March. The discussions are not a mean-spirited, gossipy, jealous sniping some of you are imagining, except possibly in a rare case of a universally disliked kid or truly surprising result. There were kids that were closer “competitors” than others for my S (applying to same schools, same interests, similar abilities), but he respected them and expected them to do well and they did.</p>
<p>GFG- this cohort of 30 kids is going to have this college admissions experience replicated 50 times over the next few decades. Your BFF gets into Yale Law School and you have to “settle” for Cornell. (Yale is the smallest of the top law schools, and although they have a very high bar for admissions, is notoriously “creative” in how they admit applicants, i.e. very unpredictable, even for kids with near perfect applications.) Your college roommate gets 5 interviews for med school and you get zero even though your MCAT score was higher. Someone in your econ section gets a callback from every global bank she interviewed with, and you are stuck sending out resumes to local credit unions and the like for an entry level job come graduation.</p>
<p>I fully agree and validate the fact that it is disappointing when something you wanted doesn’t happen- and moreover, you know someone who managed to get what you didn’t. I get that. What I’m trying to say- with limited success, I guess- is that this is not a senior year of HS phenomenon. This is not “my community knows who had what EC’s and yours doesn’t” type of thing.</p>
<p>This is adulthood. I went to college in the 1970’s, and as a product of that reasonably counter-culture time (and at a pretty hippy/dippy kind of place) you’d think my classmates and I would be immune. Well- we’ve got Pulitzer prize winners in our class- but probably hundreds more writers who have never come close to their success. We’ve got several Emmy winners, an Oscar winner, several Tony winners- but I’m sure dozens of classmates equally gifted (or more so) who are still slogging away, without the recognition that comes with these awards. We’ve got classmates who have started and sold companies and made their first gazillion dollars before turning 30, and other folks still tinkering in the garage with the big idea that coulda shoulda woulda hit it big.</p>
<p>Yes, give your kids a hug when they’ve invested lots of sweat and tears. But your parenting job doesn’t consist of pointing out all the ways that Joe and Tina gamed the system (if they happened to be that universally disliked kid you mentioned.) Parenting means helping your kid realize that they are doing the APUSH reading and the difficult AP Physics problem because they actually LIKE American History and actually WANT to learn physics. And if that gets them into Lehigh but not Penn, or Wesleyan but not Williams, their accomplishments will stand them in good stead regardless.</p>
<p>Being a striver doesn’t stop at age 18. Your kids will most likely want to enter pretty competitive fields- and the striving just accelerates after college. A kid who goes into a field because it’s what he or she is interested in… and to heck with everyone else, is going to have a much healthier response to all the disappointments that come along with being a striver- even a VERY successful one.</p>
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<p>Maybe it’s the “together” that is throwing me. My kids had their set of friends, but they didn’t feel part of any “uber-set” of kids for whom elite schools were on the horizon. They didn’t really “know” the kids who got into Stanford and Yale beyond - oh, yeah, she’s in my AP Whatever class, she seems nice and smart and friendly and we worked on a project together. Indeed, there were, I think, 2 other kids from the class who got into the same school S did. He knew one of them because they had a class together, and I don’t even think he knew the other kid at all. This is a pretty typical suburban high school size-wise, and we’ve lived here all their lives. </p>
<p>In fact, a related sort-of-funny - this summer H and I went walking around our town’s downtown for a car show festival. We know nobody, and that’s just fine with us, we were holding hands and chatting in the midst of the crowd. A couple comes up to us and the father says, “Hey! It’s the parents of the (PG) twins!” He then goes on to say, “How is your S doing at --? How is your D doing at --?” He then pushes forth his children, who were apparently twins in the same class as my kids, and we act like we know this guy and exchange pleasantries and boy-they-grow-up-fast and boy-isn’t-that-college-tuition-a-real-bummer-heh-heh - he walks away and H and I just look at one another dumbfounded. Who WAS this guy, HOW did he recognize us, and HOW did he know who our kids were and where they went to school? </p>
<p>We checked with our kids, and they recognized the (XYZ) twins who were another set of boy-girl twins from their class, but they weren’t friendly with them beyond Facebook. </p>
<p>So, I guess there is always someone who makes it a point to know something about everybody, but we truly had no idea how this guy could have ever picked us out of a crowd. There’s no professional / career linkage, either, and we live in a different part of town.</p>
<p>No one has mentioned how people lie. Examples:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Mom of son’s friend got into an HYP. She told everyone at work that he was so wanted, they gave him a full Merit scholarship. (I guess no one there on CC, as we all know it was financial aid.) He is a terrific kid and worked hard, and we were all happy for him.</p></li>
<li><p>Another parent SAId her son got into HYP to play football, but since his shoulder was injured, they didn’t want him to go there and further injure himself. (I know she was lying because he didn’t play FBall for 2 years, SATs way too low–and she probably inflated those-and these athletic recruits aren’t waiting until April to hear from a school.) I’ve caught her in many lies, but some people may have believed her.</p></li>
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<p>I dunno, PG. Info flows. Sometimes in my direction, sometimes I’m out of the loop. Some people you run into feel it’s ok (or even polite) to share their curiosity about your kids and have some reciprocal inquiry back. Sometimes we remember something, sometimes not. It’s just interaction and the proof in the pudding comes later, if one of these kids accomplishes something of note-- and that info happens to pass your way. </p>
<p>Your kids’ class was 500, ours less than a tenth of that. Sometimes, there’s only so much you can ignore another’s news or change the topic. Sometimes (and I think GFG is saying this,) you are happy for the kid. Other times, it goes in one ear and out the other. </p>
<p>No, we don;t want these somewhat artificial communities to dominate our thoughts. But sometimes this info passing is what does link folks. As long as we keep it in perspective.</p>
<p>blossom–Just so you know, my kids are perfectly healthy individuals who have appropriately weathered successes and failures. For example, D has stuck it out on her college team for 4 years while happily stinking all four. S can go to a job interview and later tell me that if it were him hiring, he would hire the other guy interviewing that day. I am merely shooting the breeze and commiserating with those in the thick of what can be a confusing and painful process. (BTW, S got into two Ivies and several top LAC’s, so he was not suffering any serious pangs of admissions jealousy. D had her pick of the bunch because she was a top athlete. Don’t want folks to assume sour grapes merely because S happened to think that the girl who got into a specialized program he didn’t, seemed il-suited to it…)</p>
<p>Our hs has a senior awards ceremony, and the program lists some of the student acceptances and “scholarship”. Based on my research of colleges, I could tell it’s a hodge podge mix of need-based aid merit scholarships. In some cases it misleadingly implied that one student was better qualified since a scholarship was listed.</p>
<p>The prevalence of lies and misleading information, both deliberate and purposeful, is absolutely another reason college results get discussed. Adults disseminate oodles of inaccurate advice to kids about college, and I know I started correcting that stuff for my kids early on. They knew the actual facts, but after hearing so many contrary stories from liars, braggarts, and idiots, they began to feel that there was the official, white-washed version propagated by Mom, but then there was the REAL story of what happens behind the scenes or the way it works for those street smart people unlike us.</p>
<p>D got told more times than I can count about this athlete or that one that got an athletic scholarship to X Ivy League school, and how she could too. When she’d say, “I thought the Ivies don’t give athletic scholarships,” they’d swear to it and tell her she was wrong, or else they’d whisper conspiratorially, “Trust me, they have ways.” And then she’d hear how this runner or that lacrosse player got free room and board plus book money as a secret sports scholarship.</p>
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Some people are interested in competitions in which total strangers attempt to knock a small white ball into a hole using various clubs. They actually watch a TV network devoted to this, and some of them pay good money to go and watch these individuals compete. I can’t understand this interest at all. I find it much more normal to be interested in kids that you’ve seen grow up in your community for years. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.</p>
<p>Perhaps it matters how transparent the college application process is at the high school your kids attend. At my kids’ school, the kids talked a lot about where they were applying, and they mostly shared where they got in and where they were rejected. You didn’t have to nosy to know these things–everybody knew them.</p>
<p>I should add, I don’t recall gnashing my teeth or wringing my hands over anything college-related, other than the tuition bill.</p>
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<p>But how many kids are you interested in? I care about my kids’ close friends, so maybe a handful of kids apiece. The rest of them? They’re just names to me. I might be acquainted with some of them because I was a room mother or Brownie leader way back when, but really, of the 500 kids in their class, 450 I wouldn’t know if I tripped over them and I care nothing about them except in the generic sense of wishing them all well, 30 I might know a little something about, and only about 20 would I really know something about more than superficially. How many kids do you all track??</p>
<p>Pizzagirl: My kids definitely had the GFG kids’ experience. They knew everyone at their school – and everyone at their old school – who had any chance at admission to a hyperselective college. The kids had multiple classes together for years, and talked about their applications all the time. </p>
<p>Sometimes it was extraordinarily, uncomfortably intimate. On the day Ivy League RD decisions came out in 2007, my son was at a conference out of town with two classmate/friends/former participants in an unrequited crush triangle. They had one laptop among the three, and looked over one another’s shoulders as they got their decisions from multiple colleges to which two or all of them had applied.</p>
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Wait, let me check my spreadsheets…seriously, we didn’t “track” anybody. My kids were in an IB program that had (if I recall correctly) about 100 kids in each class. We were familiar with a lot of them, because we were involved–went to a lot of school events and met a lot of the kids. So there were, I don’t know, 40 or 50 kids that we knew enough about to be interested in their college results. And we were generally interested in the college results of the IB program as a whole, so we’d be interested to hear if even a kid we didn’t know well got into a top school. And I just find the whole topic of college admissions interesting, so it was interesting to observe kids I knew navigate the process. I just happen to prefer Naviance scattergrams to baseball box scores.</p>
<p>In many cases it is not possible to know why one student was selected for a very selective college and the other was not. Application essays as well as letters of recommendation are not public knowledge. The latest test scores and super scores are generally not well known. For two students who do not like each other one would expect the transfer of information would be even more limited. In the Georgetown case the “socially awkward” student probably selected different teachers from theGFG son to write letters of recommendations and one teacher may have wrote a much more effective letter.</p>
<p>There may be many, many good reasons the kid our family didn’t like got into a top school, and some of those may be reasons we know nothing about. That doesn’t necessarily change our evaluation of his character based on what we do know. Often, the things we don’t like may not matter to colleges at all (like our feeling that somebody is obnoxious–might even be a plus at Harvard)–in other cases, like cheating, they would matter, but we can’t complain too much if we didn’t report the person.</p>
<p>Our family talks a lot, and we share opinions and judgments about lots of things. I think that’s pretty normal, but perhaps not all families do this so much.</p>
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<p>We share opinions and judgments about lots of things, don’t you worry :-)</p>
<p>And you know what? I think it’s nasty if someone in town is making snide comments about my socially awkward kid who shouldn’t have gotten into where he got into. Maybe the AP History teacher who ran a popularity contest in class didn’t write his college recommendation- maybe he had the Not Honors Spanish teacher write it, and maybe she wrote that for a kid who clearly had no brain for language, and wasn’t part of the “in group” in HS, he showed more work ethic and determination than anyone she’d ever taught. Or whatever.</p>
<p>It’s just so “high school” for a parent to contribute to the discussion of why the unpopular or not liked kid got in where and why. That’s what irks me. Go ahead and pile on about the head cheerleader, but to be taking pot-shots at the kids with no social skills and how the heck could they become a diplomat or a litigator or a dermatologist?</p>
<p>Jeez.</p>
<p>It should be noted, also, how much internet use and information has expanded since some of our older kids were applying to college. I did not learn about CC until my oldest was done applying. There was no Naviance at our high school back then (or online grade portals etc.), and when D was applying Naviance had only been in use at her school for a year. The data was therefore limited, and for privacy reasons they left out student stats for schools where only one or two had been admitted. Therefore, it was useless for the elite colleges and universities. Back then conversation served as informal Naivance for the kids:</p>
<p>Student 1: I thought you had to be pretty smart to get into ABC College.
Student 2: You do. Josh Baker is there, and so is Sam Jones. They were both in all AP classes with my older brother.
Student 1: Well, Jenna Brown just told me she got into ABC.<br>
Student 2: No way! How did that happen?</p>
<p>Blossom, now you’re being ridiculous. This is an anonymous message board in which we are not hurting anyone, even the head cheerleader. S’s comment was made in the privacy of our home and nowhere else (and after having received a series of rejections and deferrals.) I am the parent of an awkward child and people talk about her. Parents make comments too. Everyone, especially, kids who are growing up, are just trying to figure out life–how it works and what makes people tick. And part of that includes why one kid got in to a certain school when another didn’t, and why one teacher loves you and another doesn’t. If the admissions system weren’t so holistic and unpredictable, there would be no such need to puzzle it out.</p>