Maybe because the situations aren’t parallel?
Skill in a sport involves a much narrower band of proficiencies than skill across academics.
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At “elite” schools there is often segregation of the kids that are serious and the kids that are non-serious. Never the twain shall meet :-). Those are non-intersecting worlds. Both parties are happy.
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I thought your comment was interesting. My kids are still in high school, but I see a similar pattern going on. S23 had no trouble finding lots of interesting and awesome friends, and he liked all his teachers. D26 feels that the kids at the school are lackluster, and she doesn’t like any of her teachers. My kids go to the same large public high school. Some of their teachers are even the same.
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Haha. Kids are different.
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There are kids that are skilled at a high level in a broad spectrum of academics and genuinely interesting. Anyway, anyone who has narrow interests are also interesting, as long as their interests are not confined to partying 3 nights a week. Which my younger son complains of at his state flagship. The strongest signal that he means what he says is that he comes home every weekend. Unbidden. I am sad that he is coming home every weekend, even if I am happy to see him.
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Once you start getting really into your major, you don’t intersect with a lot of kids outside that general field. But I’m not sure it’s such a great thing to never interact in college with students who aren’t pretty much like you in terms of ambition and interests.
I had a parent conference today for a kid who is truly intellectually gifted. He turns it in when he wants but his grades are lackluster. He may end up being the smartest kid at the community college, but if you actually talk to him he’s brilliant, funny, interesting, and knows a lot about things most people don’t even know to think about.
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And if you take out the “consider a T20 school” then this statement is even more true. There are so many kids who are amazing…amazingly kind, loyal, brave, generous, or amazingly perceptive about various things, amazingly good listeners, entertainers, etc. Some of those kid may have a 1590 SAT and others might have a 990 SAT and a 2.8 GPA. And I am sure there are kids 1590/4.0 kids who have lots of growth areas in terms of being a good human and people with a 990/2.8 that excel in terms of being a good human, even if their academics have their own growth areas.
It can be very triggering when people are praised to the skies for things that will matter very little more than 5 years down the road (if that), while people who have qualities that are the important lifetime qualities who are seen as “less than.”
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I think in small liberal artsy places, where the older kid is at, there is some reasonable interaction outside the major. It is not like being at Georgia Tech or MIT. I would say maybe 75-25 stem (broadly defined – actually he doesn’t know that many CS kids which is his official major) - non stem friends. Still it is not usual to go too far out of the way, I admit.
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And many of these kids were privileged to begin with. No resentment, but it’s easier to become intellectually curious and develop talents and interests when you come from an upper income home with college educated parents. Kids whose families have the means to pay for expensive extra curricular activities, have someone able to drive them everywhere to nurture these interests, explore the world through travel….it’s just an undeniable advantage.
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A lot of high school culture is to appreciate the sports talent at a school and not to appreciate the academic talent at the school quite as much, or even not at all. I never understood why that is the case. Some how the narrative is that the academic kid is not kind and all the other good qualities. Surely this doesn’t even enter the conversation when talking about the sports superstars.
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Oh, I’m right there with you in terms of people treating elite athletes as though they walk on water and treating others as though they’re less than. Frankly, I just think we should value everyone, regardless of whether they have a niche talent. And frankly, if we’re going to praise anyone to the skies, let’s praise the kind people.
I am sad for you and for him, particularly since his brother has been enjoying his own college experience so much. Keeping my fingers crossed that his experience turns around soon.
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I completely agree with you on this. This is separate from saying that the kid wants to go to a strong school. The kid also should treat all human beings kindly, and most of the time most kids do. We come down heavily on them if we feel they are looking down on some one. All work has to be equally respected – whether you like to do it or not. Indeed the kids are more humble than we as parents are about them.
Those are independent things and don’t need to be conflated.
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I hope things turn around for your son. S22 is at our flagship and isn’t a partier either (occasionally, but not multiple times a week) - he has had some challenges finding his people. His saving grace is that he is on the ultimate frisbee team which has provided a good outlet. Socially things are improving but it has been an up and down transition. Sending positive vibes your son’s way. It’s tough as a parent when they aren’t thriving.
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My point was that there are differences both between colleges and between kids and that even really smart kids don’t all want the same thing in terms of a career and lifestyle. I noted above that it’s probably a bad idea for an aspiring high school teacher to go to Columbia. But on the flip side I can see there will be cases at some schools where a highly driven, ambitious student might not find many friends with similar aspirations even in a highly selective cohort group.
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Thank you.
In a way, I agree. In another, no. It’s true that this is a way of saying some kids are better at something than others are. I own that.
But if a kid needs to have people who have a specific skill around them in order to complete their degree, that’s different than saying the students aren’t smart enough for mine to hang with.
For example, if my bilingual kid was a Spanish major, I would not send him to a school where the Spanish level among other students was 101. He literally would not be able to do his major without people at his skill level.
I’m sorry he feels like coming home so often (what a weird thing for a parent to say!) I hope that he finds some people who feel the same way he does. This may sound dumb, but is he in any clubs, or does he like anything that he can dive into with other students? My (sensitive) kid found some of his people in high school through going to the climbing gym.
:-). These kids are kindred spirits. When the latest GPT-4 was released a small group was on a west coast trip visiting places that do work in AI. The night before they visited open AI they all (15 of them) read the dense paper that was released two days prior so as not to sound dumb when they were visiting the openAI folks. I can’t explain this to you. This environment is hard to find at our local flagship. That first of all you can find 15 kids that are capable of reading the dense paper in 2 hours and understand what is happening, and discuss it, and show up at 9am the next day morning …
I don’t want to belabor this point. You are right. Everything can be done in any place.
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I think I didn’t communicate my point well.
Sports skills are very specific: Can you throw a ball in a particular way? Can you run at a particular speed? Can you move in particular ways? And even then there are debates, both across skillsets (was Walter Johnson or Ted Williams the better baseball player?) and within them (is Alexander Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby the better hockey player?), but arguing across sports (was Carl Lewis or Wilt Chamberlain the better sprinter?) is, I think we can all agree, silly, because the answers are usually obvious.
The problem is that it’s obvious that this is the case for sports, but for some reason when people say that some population or another is better or worse at academics, suddenly that nuance goes out the window. But: The best person at math ever and the best jazz pianist ever can both pursue those at college; which would be the better academically? For that matter, would the most brilliant person ever at number theory or at combinatorics be better academically? And so on.
We are completely comfortable recognizing that the Duke has a perennially great men’s basketball team but is usually laughable in football while Maryland has a history of fabulous men’s and women’s lacrosse teams but not so much for softball—but we have this weird myth that you can boil all of academics down to a single rank ordering.
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We asked him to enroll in clubs. There is a video game club that meets once a week on a different part of the campus. The bus takes 30 minutes to get there due to wait time etc. He didn’t want to bother. We told him to get an uber. He said that’s too expensive. I said I don’t care – just go. He didn’t bother. Seemed like too much trouble to him to go to a video game club meeting. Maybe by next year he’ll resign himself to it after (if) finding out this year that a transfer is not going to happen.