<p>I’m not sure why it matters that random people in my kids’ high school, my neighborhood or my community think that my kids got into the schools they got into because they were just lucky-ducks who pulled the right lottery number or because they were brainiacs who worked their butts off and were fully deserving. I don’t even understand in what context these people would even express their opinions in the first place. I think you need a good dose of the ability to say “screw them.” </p>
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<p>Are you serious? I see that all the time. I can look at the local business papers here and while there’s a lot of NU and U of Chicago in there (and U of Illinois), they aren’t the only places where the movers and shakers went.</p>
<p>Wow, I suspect these are psychologically damaged individuals who are grasping at what could have been if they had only followed their “hearts”. Truth is, well adjusted people live for the present and the future and do not dwell on the mistakes of their past. We’ve all made them, and in these cases, I suspect these are perfectly successful nobodies, like the vast majority of us, who believe they could have been somebodies if only . . .if only. Truth is of course that tons of nobodies come out of the elite schools just like tons of nobodies come out of the non-elite schools.</p>
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<p>Wow, you don’t live in the world I live in. In my world, competence and integrity trumps virtually everything else. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares where you went to school after you have been out in the working world for a while, and i happen to work in a very prestige conscious profession. You also don’t seem to realize that cream will always rise to the top. It is the brilliance of people that make them leaders and stand out in society, not where they went to school. Brilliant people of course tend to go to elite schools, but so do a lot of non brilliant people who will never make it big, no matter what their pedigree.</p>
<p>For what its worth, the most successful guy from my highly ranked high school did not go to an elite school, although he did go to a very good school, and this past year the company he founded paid him 10,000,000. in Salary. He is one of the go to guys in his area of business. Not that it matters in the least of course. He happens to be a very nice guy with a very nice wife. A success by all parameters. But there are of course lots of elite graduates who are failures by almost all parameters no matter what their professional successes.</p>
<p>I think it’s only aggravating if you pay a lot of attention to the “noise” that comes from other people’s mouths in your community. That in and of itself is a choice to listen and participate in. I care very much what certain people in my life think, but not my neighbors or my kids’ high school classmates’ parents, whom I have no real interest in interacting with anyway beyond general friendliness and pleasantries. Maybe this is an introvert / extravert thing, I don’t know. I’m not shy, but I am introverted and that makes it easier to base my decisions on what I (and husband, kids, etc.) want rather than feeling that the pulse of the neighborhood needs to be taken.</p>
<p>Doesn’t have to have anything to do with laziness, more likely priorities. Some brilliant kids just don’t think its important to go to elite schools and don’t think the be all and end all of High School requires that they get top grades. If they are smart and ambitious, they will make their way in the world and do just as well as their psychologically damaged classmates who think that failing to get into an elite school is a failure in life.</p>
<p>What is your point, Hunt? There is no question that kids who are pushed to meet extreme expectations and made to feel guilty about wanting normal childhood experiences such as having sleepovers or going to the mall or watching TV with friends are, in a lot of cases, going to have issues. I honestly believe that that is probably at the heart of the defensiveness coming from the people who should be ecstatic that their kids reached the pinnacle of high school success–admission into our nation’s most prestigious colleges. I think at some level these parents have second thoughts about whether pressuring their kids to take every advanced class, excel at ECs, and even found charities (for God’s sake) at the expense of a “regular-kid life” was worth it. Their kids can’t have a do-over on high school and be the laid-back, social, balanced students some here call “lazy.” Meanwhile, if the premise of this thread is true, all the smart slackers and stoners and shopaholics DO get a do-over, because if they work hard at whatever college they attend—and do exceedingly well—they might end up at a top program for their terminal degree. In fact, they could do BETTER than the kids who sacrificed their childhoods for some lofty measure of success.</p>
<p>What if it is your close relatives (SIL, BIL) saying rude things about the elite colleges your kids go to? Would that bother you? Because it happens and it bothers me. It creates a rift (albeit small) in the family. I know they are just jealous, but it does bug me that they cannot just be supportive about their own family members.</p>
<p>Why do we care who said what and what they feel? It is really thier business, they enjoy making voice sounds, let them. It is their life they are free. Some people do not want to be supportive, it is their right. We can only care about things that are leaving our own mouth. I guess, if you find it entertaining to perform analysis of other’s statements, then go ahead and have more fun in your life. However, people here generally talking about being annoyed by other’s comments. you are annoyed only if you let yourself to be annoyed, it is a choice, I mean we are adults here, not 15 y o’s, we do have control over how we feel, we do have a goal of enjoying our lives and not paying attention to some stupidity of others, correct?</p>
<p>How many ideas, especially contradictory ones, can I hold in my head at the same time?
hmm - Sometimes a highly competitive school is a better choice, sometimes not. Some students will be disadvantaged by not attending School X, because of a particular course of instruction that School X offers that appeals to a particular student who has the potential to excel in that particular field in that academic environment. No student is ever disadvantaged by any academic environment because the cream always rises. Anyone who complains their child didn’t get admitted to certain schools should get over it (quickly -on this board we will give you 36 hours to fuss- maybe) because other schools are just as good, except at a certain level maybe there does start to be a difference, but probably top 20 is all the same. In all fields. All the time. Top 20 as posted by US News and World Reports. Not by our own sense of what our own children want and need. Students accepted to extremely competitive colleges were only successful because of parental involvement. Students accepted to highly competitive colleges are entirely self-motivated. Superscoring the SAT matters. Or not. Some graduates of the most competitive schools succeed and some crash and burn. Ditto the least competitive schools. Some drop outs are Bill Gates and some drop outs are living in their parents’ basements. The most interesting thing I’ve learned about admissions, on this board, the last few months is that it really is a lot less competitive to get into science graduate programs, including MD/PhD programs than I thought. I think it is much more competitive for most humanities PhD programs. At least in certain humanities PhD programs at certain schools it is really competitive. Probably some places it is open admission.</p>
<p>PG, your rhetoric on all these threads seems to be aimed at obscuring the point. It isn’t that I or anyone else is unnecessarily bothered by what others think about elite schools (or are we psychologically damaged?), while YOU are strong, grounded and sensible enough not to be bothered. The point is that there are falsehoods and stereotypes about college topics being propagated rather frequently, which should be countered–if not always IRL, at least on a forum purporting to offer advice and information about colleges. The values of truth and fairness are worth defending, regardless of who is concerned about it or not, and certainly regardless of whether you believe the concern is silly or not. </p>
<p>Around here, people like to put down Princeton. For years my D had heard how snobby Princeton students are, and was not sure she even wanted to visit. But visit she did–3 times in fact. She really liked all the girls on the team and didn’t think any of them were pretentious or stuck-up. While she was not a fan of the eating club system and did consider that elitist, she certainly still could have attended and been happy there. And quite possibly if she hadn’t been prepped to look for that negative quality on campus, she may not have noticed as much.</p>
<p>Of course, the world won’t end if some student doesn’t want to apply to Princeton based on a false stereotype. But why shouldn’t we try to present as balanced a view as possible? It seems to me that the Ivies and their students are targeted for stereotyping more than any other group of schools and students. Even the public school stereotypes admit more exceptions.</p>
<p>As for the laziness thing, I think it’s problematic any time adults minimize the importance of hard work in front of children. Precious few people succeed without a lot of hard work. The heroes our past were people like Edison who plodded very long hours and hours day in and day out, trying a multitude of ideas using a plethora of materials imported from around the world. Yes the world is different, and some whiz kids may have become really rich founding and selling start-ups in a matter of years, but for most of us mortals hard work is going to be a more reliable ticket. Confounding the issue of the great benefit of academic diligence in high school with too much mumbo jumbo about differing “priorities” and touchy feely concepts of what a “normal” childhood should be, does not help our kids make it in tough times.</p>
<p>Oh my goodness. That just means your close relatives are rude. That’s it. There’s no reflection on you or your children. If your kids go to an elite school, you can afford it, then kudos to you. </p>
<p>FWIW, between DH and me, our family members range from one extreme to the other in terms of socio-economic levels, education attainment, politics, religion. We do things some in-laws can only dream about and we have in-laws who are so much better off than we are. We have nephews and nieces who are in the elite colleges and others who eschewed college. I can’t say I support all their decisions. So I don’t expect they all support my decisions. That’s not realistic.</p>
<p>I just thought I’d take a moment to re-enter the fray, since many of my favorite posters are here.</p>
<p>I’ve heard “You can always go to X for grad school in two contexts.” One, where it is extremely likely to be true–in the case of a student who is over the top academically, but who has foolishly neglected to include international competition in rutabaga curling (to my extreme amazement, this actually exists!), filming documentaries while cliff diving and then dubbing the film in Old Frisian, driving clown cars, and completing a postmodernist analysis of heteronormativity in Manga, among his/her EC’s. The other, where the student’s intended field isn’t strong (or in some cases, even offered) at X [at the graduate level, I mean].</p>
<p>In neither case is the remark helpful. Other instances where it is not helpful have also been mentioned. I won’t be saying it in the future. But then, I haven’t said it in the past either. </p>
<p>With regard to coureur’s post #138, I turned down MIT and Some Ivy to go to a state school–admittedly, a large public university with a substantial research presence, as opposed [in some cases] to a “local state school.” However, I do not bitterly regret it–not by a longshot. In fact, having recently read Eileen Pollack’s essay in the New York Times Magazine a week or so ago, I think I might have been better off where I was.</p>
<p>I am not saying that the very top places are over-rated; in fact, QMP went to one. But for many strong students, they are actually not the best choice. The continuum of universities, where the undergraduate experiences are comparable, stretches fairly far down on the typical CC scale.</p>
<p>^^I assume you are not using those ECs as examples in an application to a school where the student planned to study a directly or indirectly related field? Because certain of those ECs, in a certain context, look pretty good to me. Especially the Manga analysis. The cliff diving just makes me nervous. If that student gets into HYP, the whole next class at the school all starts cliff diving… :eek:</p>
<p>Here we go again with the implication that top students have been deprived of a happy, healthy childhood. My kids and their peers worked very, very hard, but they still had time for fun and “normal” teen activities. What they sacrificed were things like hours playing video games, hours watching reality TV, hours writing posts on Facebook, hours lounging in bed on Saturday mornings, hours hanging out, and hours drinking and doing drugs. They don’t feel they missed anything.</p>
<p>For some students a happy, healthy, childhood is primarily focused on juvenile efforts at postmodernist analysis of heteronormativity in Manga, a field in which they will persevere and eventually publish extremely important works of scholarship which greatly impress the whole wide world interested in the field. Other kids don’t even like Manga.</p>
<p>QM: On a more serious note, the Pollack article really unsettled me. I would be very interested if you had time to write about your reactions to it? Do you feel like you have run up against the old boys club very often, if at all, during your career?</p>
<p>Wrong yet again. My girls watched TV, had lots of sleep-overs, and hung out at the mall with the best of them. The only normal teen time-waster they didn’t have was video games. Video games weren’t forbidden to them. I just never got around to buying a game console. And I know they spent plenty of time playing video games their friends’ houses. </p>
<p>But they also happened to be bright, self-motivated kids who did well in challenging classes and enjoyed learning and playing their musical instruments. They both ended up at high-end colleges and are very glad they did. They both consider choosing their respective schools to be among the best decisions they ever made. And along the way they didn’t have to contend with me discouraging them and pushing them to choose a lesser school and telling them they could “always” go to their dream school for grad school.</p>
<p>Right, alh, I was just using those EC’s as examples where they are supposed to be completely unrelated to the applicant’s course of study.</p>
<p>Thanks for the endorsement of the Manga analysis! I have to admit, I am still bowled over by the fact that rutabaga curling (apparently) actually exists. Even if it’s actually fictional, the web info on it pre-dated my mention of it the first time, when I thought I was making it up.</p>
The cliff diving just makes me nervous. If that student gets into HYP, the whole next class at the school all starts cliff diving… :eek:</p>