<p>Actually, I was referring to a general style throughout one’s life, not to the drive to get into an Ivy or some highly selective uni, etc. etc.</p>
<p>I do feel that the kids who can not and/or will not pursue things aggressively may be at a significant disadvantage compared to the way it was in our younger days.</p>
<p>The newer pressures:
to keep current in ones field at ALL times
to network and build contacts constantly
to move on if one is not moving up- changing jobs very often takes a huge amount of energy
to reinvent oneself if one’s skills become obsolete, likely to happen at least once in one’s lifetime
to have to move around all over the world to stay employed
…what else? I am sure I am missing some things!</p>
<p>To me, this is much more than hard work, smarts, creativity, loyalty.
It really requires a huge amount of energy, confidence, aggressiveness, in addition to good luck!</p>
<p>Why is it necessarily troubling that many people are less concerned about going to a top 20-30 school than about going to a school where they can get a solid education in the desired area of study (which usually expands to list of possible schools to far more than the top 20-30 schools)?</p>
<p>What is troubling may be the low overall performance in US high schools, leaving many graduates poorly prepared for post-secondary education (including not just college, but also skilled trades and the like).</p>
<p>I must’ve not made myself care. I never meant to say that it was bad that they didn’t care about going to an elite school. I wanted to say that it was bad that they didn’t care, period. Most kids these days simply have no ambitions about their academics, and simply want to do the bare minimum to get by. Even at my very affluent suburbian high school, I’d say that this would apply to at least half of the students there. A lot of them don’t want to study to pass a test, much less get an A on it. I think it’s this sort of attitude which is putting America so far behind on international education rankings.</p>
<p>What is wrong with just throwing a few shrimp on the barbie and enjoying life? Not everyone is ambitious. </p>
<p>Our local Princeton boy (20 years old) is running for the local school board in my town California. We are about 3000 miles away from Princeton, where he is a junior. He is highly driven, probably plans a political career, but thinks he can do his school board duties by email if elected. I kind of admire his moxie, but I also quiver at his blind ambition. He is one of those “super people”, but his motives seem self-serving.</p>
<p>Gee, why bother with school at all? If getting a good education isn’t that important, maybe we need to stop trying to invest so much in it. Also, we should all settle for low expectations. That should do it.</p>
<p>There is ambition and there is ambition. I’m a 52 year old software developer, which is at least 20 years too old to write code in most places. I don’t care about management, or super-advancement, or any such things. I spent 14 years in college because I wanted to learn interesting stuff, not because it would make me look good on paper.</p>
<p>A decade ago we collaborated with Microsoft on a project and I got to see first hand their ‘super-achievers’. Smart kids, granted, but with the business sense of chipmunks. Great ideas, but Best Buy does not sell ideas, they sell product. And, for every smart kid that came up with a great idea, there’s a geezer or three in the peanut gallery that can pick the idea to shreds. Yesterday I got to listen to yet another presentation by yet another pair of high achievers in a startup. Gee, people, don’t you do your homework? Going thru the obligatory PowerPoint presentation of their business plan, one could easily see the destination (“and then we get bought out by Google”). </p>
<p>Smarts and vision are great - but eventually, you need hundreds of minions from Directional State University that will make the vision a reality.</p>
<p>Chaosakita–How is not wanting to compete and be ambitious mean one doesn’t care about education? My H is a very well educated high school teacher (decided the whole medical profession was just too wearing, so he quit it.) I enjoyed getting my two degrees and enjoy teaching freshman comp part time, never finished the PhD, but I adore reading great and difficult literature, and talking about it and occasionally writing. My D graduated from a great LAC and works for an environmental group that doesn’t require her degree. My S works for the same group, dropped out of an Ivy in senior year (don’t ask), but reads Moby Dick and quantum mechanics for fun.</p>
<p>Liking education and being ambitious are not at all synonymous.</p>
<p>While I am aware I live in a driven part of the country and that colors my view, I’d have to say that I agree with performersmom that the educational stakes are higher. In the town where I grew up, if you were a regular kind of kid with limited ambitions or limited intellectual capacity, there were still plenty of good-paying jobs available to you upon graduation from high school. There were various manufacturing facilities and retail businesses where one could earn a living wage. Today the factories are largely gone, and in my state you can’t live on what you’d make working at a store in the mall.</p>
<p>OK, so now kids have to go to college. What’s the problem? Well, since almost everyone else their age goes to college, kids often need higher degrees just to get hired for that first job. A college degree guarantees nothing. This is a change from the past. Add to that a poor economy, and the competition gets even more fierce. And those who already have good jobs are not immune to educational pressure, either. My sister has been doing a particular job extremely well for years–high performance reviews, regular promotions to positions of greater responsibility, etc.–yet recently she was told it was a problem that she didn’t have a PhD. Apparently, that “problem” just developed. So she questioned her supervisor regarding what duties of her job she had been unable to perform, or unable to perform up to par, as a result of a lack of education. The supervisor couldn’t give her an answer. But the fact is that a PhD is now the standard for that position when it wasn’t before. So at age 46 she’s supposed to go to grad school to keep the position she already has–mind you, this is not to get a better one! </p>
<p>Even for the average kid, studying is not enough. He needs at least a few EC’s he’s pretty involved in, or he looks like a lazy bum. Ping pong club probably won’t cut it anymore, even for the local state school. </p>
<p>Our society has made busy-ness and productivity a high virtue. Stopping and smelling the flowers isn’t. It’s all well and good to say doing the latter is just fine, but is that mediocre dreamer, who enjoys having free time to relax and BBQ, going to find a job that can support him/her and possibly a family to boot? I don’t know, but so far my friends’ kids who are the average types are unemployed a year or so out of college.</p>
<p>I never said people need to be ambitious. I just think the average student needs higher expectation for themselves. Sure, it’d be great if they all liked to learn, but most of them would rather watch MTV instead of read a book. But in any rate, I feel that if they spent 30 minutes studying instead of watching MTV or the like, most people’s grades (including mine) could be a lot better, and thus, they could save them and their parents a lot of money when it came time for college. Instead, most people fail to give any effort, and in the end, a lot of them give up. It’s great that your kids could be such special snowflakes and be intellectual and high-achieving (compared to the American population as a whole). What I would like to see instead that students in general spend a little bit more effort and don’t whine when it comes time for a math test because they didn’t bother to read the book and their teacher’s teaching style was less than perfect.</p>
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<p>You’re dead wrong. Just because your kid’s guidance counselor has been spewing you propaganda about extracirriculars doesn’t mean that it’s true. Even for the top 70 schools or so (and I’m being generous), I doubt that anyone with decent grades and scores will be rejected.</p>
<p>I think you guys are all out of touch. Just because your kids are all high-achieving doesn’t mean that’s reflective of the reality for most kids. Sure, a lot of them, maybe even too many, are overworked. But the rest are spending most of their time watching television and playing video games and getting wasted on the weekends. (Maybe your kids are getting wasted on the weekends too. Who knows?) Most of them are also not graduating college, and most of them probably won’t be too upset about that either.</p>
<p>^And the ones that don’t graduate will be unemployed, along with a lot of the mediocre college graduates who thought that hanging out at the beach or working at ShopRite during their summer break was good enough. The well-paying jobs will go to the ambitious kids who managed to land some internships in their field while in college.</p>
<p>I knew when I threw out that “shrimp on the barbie” line I would be opening a big ol’ can of whoop ass. I spent enough time in Australia to know the pleasure of bbq’ing at the beach along with a Foster’s and a kookaburra swooping down to steal your hot dog off the grill, and not giving a darn about HPYSM. The Aussies are laughing at us right now economically and politically. </p>
<p>Because it’s all about money in this country. Hence the number of threads on this site from Superkids who want to know if they have to go to an Ivy-league school in order to earn six figures. Some wish to become like their idols- hedge fund managers and investment bankers who have done (and are still doing) a great job of enriching themselves during this economic disaster. Meanwhile, there are some people who prefer to make their living making goat cheese or furniture, or teaching surfing, or just working in a cubicle. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Less competition for your Superkid! </p>
<p>Yes, there are mediocre slackers who work at ShopRite. And I see a lot of people in this great land that frankly look unemployable in any economy. But they are human beings nevertheless and just because they didn’t go to an elite university or do anything spectacular with their lives doesn’t mean they aren’t deserving of respect. The person I respect the most in my life, my sister, didn’t get her education finished until she was almost 50 (at a no-name college) because she was a teen mom. Some of you would have looked at her then and thought she was a mediocre loser, because she didn’t go to college right out of high school, and held low-wage jobs. And she has become the most generous, loving, self-sacrificing person I know, a physical therapy assistant who works with seniors in nursing homes. To me, that is a Superperson.</p>
<p>“Ping pong club probably won’t cut it anymore, even for the local state school.”</p>
<p>This isn’t even true of a lot of flagships, and certainly isn’t true for most directional schools. The right grades and scores can usually get an in-state kid into the #1 or #2 public school even with zero activities. Numerous states, not just Texas, have mathematical formulas that guarantee admission to a 4-year public or even the flagship.</p>
<p>tptshorty, for some, it is NOT all about the money. I mentioned upthread that I have two very driven kids but they are not driven to make oodles of money. One of my kids is done with her education and is expected to support herself and has done so since she graduated college. She is not in a high paying field. But she is indeed working in her field of passion (performing arts) and for her, it is not about the money (other than being able to pay her basic living expenses because she has to) but about achieving things in her field that she is very passionate about. Money is not the driving goal.</p>
<p>You are confused about the theme of the thread. It’s not that high-achievers are super people. It’s that nowadays, one has to be near super-human to get admitted to a top school. In the author’s opinion, this matters because getting in a top school is viewed as a tried and true path to social mobility or social status maintenance in this uncertain economy. There is an increasing gap between the haves and have-nots in the US, and as such there seems to be less opportunity for the merely average, middle-of-the-pack person than there was in the past.</p>
<p>By definition, most of us are average and most of us have average children. We are not looking down on people like tptshorty’s sister, but rather lamenting the fact current competitive conditions might be shutting them out of a decent standard of living.</p>
<p>“…mediocre college graduates who thought that hanging out at the beach or working at ShopRite during their summer break was good enough. The well-paying jobs will go to the ambitious kids who managed to land some internships in their field while in college.”</p>
<p>Note the wording “well-paying jobs”. </p>
<p>I know it’s not about the money for all ambitious kids. My point is just that I find it kind of insulting to assume that a college kid who works during the summer at a minimum-wage job is mediocre. My daughter worked last summer at her minimum-wage retail job rather than take an unpaid internship. I am proud of her for being able to hold a job for over a year, get a small promotion and a small wage, and even start contributing to a 401K.</p>
<p>I never said everyone had to be ambitious. I just don’t see what’s wrong with more people trying their hardest at school. By the way, despite there being a couple of overachivers here in America, Australia’s high school education system is a lot ahead of ours. Maybe those people should learn how to chill out down South.</p>
<p>And too bad I’m so materialistic. It’s such a shame that I don’t want to live on a tent on the beach like all the cool kids.</p>
<p>The local non-flagship state school probably admits mostly by GPA (or class rank in Texas) and test score formula; extracurriculars and stuff like that might come into play for the few at the borderline, if it matters at all.</p>
<p>The extracurriculars’ importance may become exaggerated when applying to schools where the number of “near-maximum” GPA and test score applicants is greater than the number to be admitted; with that many basically indistinguishable-by-GPA-and-test-score applicants, other factors end up being more important than they are at less selective schools which can differentiate applicants effectively by GPA and test scores.</p>
<p>tptshorty–by “well-paying” I am not applying some overly-materialistic standard. I mean “paying enough to live on without help from the government.” Sorry to say, but a minimum wage job at ShopRite is only do-able if you’re living at home with mom and dad or have a spouse/partner earning more. Try paying rent, gas, car insurance, and the grocery bill on that paycheck in the NE.</p>
<p>“rather lamenting the fact current competitive conditions might be shutting them out of a decent standard of living.”</p>
<p>That’s a totally legitimate concern. I just think whether your kid ends up at superhuman Princeton/Duke/etc. or a few notches down at Maryland/Tulane/etc. doesn’t affect that legitimate concern very much, if at all. </p>
<p>Yes, in a terrible economy, you want to have every little advantage you can get your hands on. But it’s a little advantage indeed. If Harvard grads are doing measurably better than Tulane grads nowadays, I certainly can’t tell. Harvard vs. Southeast Podunk State, well, that might be another story. But none of the CC kids are going to SEPS.</p>
<p>I would be interested in hearing what you’ve all seen regarding recent college grads finding jobs. Based on my S’s friends, it seems that the kids with ambitious personalities who couldn’t find a job in their fields decided to go on to grad school in the hope that higher degree would help. The less ambitious are under-employed. Two we know are serving coffee at Starbucks, one is a personal trainer, and another a security guard. Very, very few found “good” jobs after graduation. Maybe you have seen better results where you live?</p>