@PurpleTitan great article! The more I think about it, the more I see references to elite colleges in media everywhere. A few more off the top of my head - Big Bang Theory (Princeton and Cal Tech) The office (Cornell). Monk (Berkley)
The big shock is when the have to get a job to pay the bills, especially their college debt, and it’s not their"dream" job.
There has been no shortage of movies in the past several decades that focus on kids’ obsessions with attending certain [actual] elite colleges. Orange County (Stanford) , Rudy (ND), The Girl Next Door (Georgetown), Risky Bisiness (Princeton), Stealing Harvard, Oxford Blues, Soul Man (Harvard), etc.
These are movies in which the college isn’t just the setting of the movie (as in Love Story, Good Will Hunting, Legally Blond, or A Beautiful Mind). Getting into or paying for a certain elite college is a major part of the plot. And as the characters resort to crimes and dishonesty to get in or get
$, everybody around endorses their obsession. When Cruise laments that he’s going to have to settle for UIUC, nobody says “Don’t worry, they have a top 20 biz school.” And none of the kindly priests pull Rudy aside to tell him, “Quit being a schmuck, kid. Fordham is just as good.”
Sure, movies and tv mention colleges often but these shows aren’t being watched by your typical 8 and 9 year olds.
@gallentjill <<where do="" these="" ideas="" come="" from?="" how="" does="" a="" kid="" start="" to="" dream="">> when fathers or mothers make memories with their kids at young age, when they live and breathe their college alma mater, sing their college fight song at bedtime, wear their alma mater clothing, buy them for their kids and display college memorabilia and paraphernalia in their homes every day. Watching and cheering for the team throughout the year when they are on television, which can be quite offen. And also when other extended family members (grandparents, aunts and uncles) do the same. To give you an example, I know several Michigan alumni friends who took their young kids from OOS to visit Michigan for a weekend and attend a football game—buying them colorful Maize and Blue tee shirts, jerseys, caps, mugs, posters, and other Michigan stuff, walking around campus and taking in sites of the vibrant Ann Arbor town, going out to eat, going to tailgate parties before the game, cheering for the football game doing “hail to the victor” chants and with 100,000 rabid fans, going out to eat and party after the game—those kids have a ball and associate fun and positive memories of the college and they become hooked on Michigan at a young age—it’s their “dream” school. This is just one example. Substitute another college alma mater with all of the above and you get the same result. I have a friend who is an alum of Fordham University. He took his kids at a young age to visit Fordham, did a lot of the above and bam—his kids were fixated on getting into Fordham. ‘Nuff said! 
Another common dream is becoming a physician.
Of course the reality is the aggressive weeding and (for those who do pass all of the weeding but without wealthy parents who will help them with the educational costs) heavy debt load to pay off when one starts practice after medical school and residency.
But they don’t tell the kids Legally Blonde was actually shot at UCLA, USC, Caltech, and at locations all around Pasadena and LA. @twoin18 ah, The Paper Chase - good one, haven’t thought about that in a long time.
Zoey 101 shot at Pepperdine (“Pacific Coast Academy”) was awfully pretty. Even if just a boarding school, I think it made a lot of Midwest kids want to go there!
A couple of years ago I was teaching a Sunday School class of I think 3rd-6th graders. It was the beginning of the year and we were all asking each other ‘getting to know you’ questions. One of the kids asked the other kids where they wanted to go to college. The answers were interesting… one kid said, “Yale, because my dad went to Yale and it’s a great school.” Another kid said, “Oregon, because they are the Ducks.” Another kid said, “Stanford, because they are one of the best schools” (we live in the Bay Area). And then my son… who had just lived through his sister’s college search process, said, “I don’t know… it depends on how good my grades are in college. I’ll apply a bunch of places and see where I get in and which of them I like the best.” LOL.
Anyway, fast forward 2 or 3 years. One of the girls in that story is now in 5th grade. The other day she was telling me about a kid on YouTube who got into all 8 Ivy League schools. I’m just thinking, ‘you are in 5th grade! If you are already thinking that that’s going to be your measure of success, you are going to be really stressed out for the next 7 years.’
I chose my college in 4th grade the because the administration building looked like a castle.
When you are a kid, it’s hard to wear a t-shirt or sweatshirt from a college & not have it have an effect on you. The advent of the internet has made getting college apparel a LOT easier. I recall that in the mid-1960s, wearing college gear became kind of cool, but you pretty much had to go to the college or college town to get it.
Movies in the pre-1960s decades seemed to shy away from actual colleges. In the Petrified Forest, Bogart scoffed at an ex-jock who attended Bolby Tech (“Never heard of it,” Bogy drawled). There was the Gary Conservatory in The Music Man, & the Sheboygan Conservatory in Some Like it Hot. I seem to recall a ficticious “Midwestern University” in several movies…none more memorable than the one standing in for Ohio State in The Male Animal. The Midwestern U. people spent half the movie singing “We don’t give a damn about the whole state of Michigan”
I blame my father for my kid’s obsession with Yale. I distinctly remember picking the kid up from a weekend with the grandparents sometime in middle school, maybe 8th grade? We had Sunday dinner together, and kiddo started telling me some of the stories Grandpa shared about college life and the shenanigans they had gotten up to at Yale, in the '50s. Some stories that I had never heard. Grandpa looked insufferably smug. I now suspect he may have been prepping the kid since a young age. I knew I would be paying for that free babysitting somehow.
None of my sisters or me went to Yale. I think he may have been feeling the lack of legacy?
Anyhow, I’ve been trying to share college shenanigans stories from other colleges with the kiddo since then, to prove that you can find pranksters at any college campus and get kid to widen his favorites list. He has other schools he is prepared to be happy at, but it is hard to overcome that first ‘dream school’ impression.
Sports in some areas can be a huge impact too. The OH-IO cheer happens at every game, pro, college, high school and the Michigan-OSU rivalry is something people have house parties for yearly, fly flags, etc… And this isn’t just in Columbus, but all over the state.
99% of the time it’s parents.
Sports definitely have a huge influence, especially on boys. When my kid got into Duke she wanted to wear a Duke shirt the next day as is the tradition at her HS. She owned none ( she was way too superstitious to buy one beforehand). I was talking that night to some friends who had boys between the ages of 7-12 and everyone of them said " oh we have tons of Duke gear, she can borrow, it’s sons dream school). Good thing boys clothes are oversized, a ten year olds t shirt was a perfect fit!
But with the Ivy’s the entertainment industry has a big influence. I remember when my little cousin wanted to go to Princeton because Brooke Shields went there. And Legasly Blonde which pretty young kids watch made one of my daughters friends obsessed with Harvard. Risky business. ( and btw his ivy obsession is consistent with the wealthy town in which that movies takes place)
Today’s tv shows with their going to college episodes often focus on the Ivy’s and top schools. Not surprising because an ivy degree is now almost required for a behind the scenes job in Hollywood. My nephew works on a network show. His coworkers are all HYPS with a few USC grad. Even in front of the camera. The show Grimm’s cast bios read like a CC brag post. Harvard, Brown, Northwestern. Heck the on air staff on TMZ Live includes Harvard, Yale and U of C alums.
Parents influence their kids on a lot of things. It’s part of what parenting is - for better or for worse. I’m not really sure why you are so worked up about this and feeling so offended. Kids have dream schools, dream cars, dream vacations, dream homes, dream jobs, etc. I don’t see anything wrong with dreaming as long as there is a healthy dose of reality provided. I actually like schools that talk about college and make sure to tell students that there are different ways to get there. Some kids don’t try because they don’t have the support at home and they don’t feel like college will ever be a reality for them. That’s where a teacher, principal or counselor can step in and help them get excited to design their own path.
You can hate this, but I think it’s great. The kids ultimately all know they can go to college …
Getting kids excited for the idea of college is a wonderful thing. I worry about the kids who have been dreaming of Princeton since 3rd grade because that’s like dreaming of winning the lottery. Its too easy to be crushed. Of course, disappointment is not fatal to a 17 year old but it can be problematic. I’m not so worried about the high stat kids who don’t get into a top 10 school and go to the honors college at some great state school. They will recover from that disappointment. I worry more for the Freshman who gets a C and two B’s on their report card and decides that Princeton is now off the table and so there is no reason to try anymore. That kind of destructive thinking can really derail a kids confidence and future options. We all know that kids with a less then perfect GPA can do just fine in college, but the kids end up with all or nothing mentalities.
By the way, my 1st grader has already decided that she doesn’t need to tour any colleges because she is just going to go where her big sister goes. We all keep trying to tell her that there lots of options out there and she should keep an open mind.
Kids are more resilient than many think. I know lots of kids that didn’t get into their dream schools, but they went other places and are thriving. You have to remind them that it isn’t an all or nothing situation, and that there are literally thousands of options out there if your dream school doesn’t pan out. We are talking about kids - they are young and emotionally immature so it’s our job as parents to remind them that a C is not a life crisis. Kids watch parents reactions. If you shake it off, they will too. They just want reassurances and they want to know that they aren’t letting you down.
Sometimes it’s just from the kid. I knew about colleges from a very early age. My parents highly stressed the importance of education (but did not emphasize Ivies or anything.) neither of them went to selective schools. In kindergarten or so, I told my mom I wanted to go to the best college in America, she she told me about the Ivy League. Always one to challenge myself, that became my goal. I’m a homeschooler, so there wasn’t peer pressure to go to elite school either (most of my public schooled or homeschooled are going to local smaller schools.) While my parents encouraged me, they emphasized affordability and small class sizes in other schools.
Sometimes siblings. My daughter’s dream school is the school her brother is going to now. I constantly remind her that I am fine if she only goes to the local community college.