<p>Many immigrant parents (not just those coming from Asia) come from societies where the university that you graduate from determines the job you will be able to get, and the job you will get on graduation will determine the quality of your life and of your family’s life for the rest of your life. Consequently, as described by Greybeard, they are very conscious of the ranking of schools.</p>
<p>However, in the US we have a lot more social mobility. Compared to those other countries, it is unbelievably easy to change careers in the US. We can re-start our lives as many times as we want to. We can change majors in college. We can transfer credits from one college to another. If we don’t “get it right” the first, or second, or third, or whatever-number-it-is time, we can start over again.</p>
<p>This is essentially what these immigrant parents came to the US for - a chance to re-start. However, they are working with their original tool set. Like the HS principal who told my college roommate “That school must be no good, I’ve never heard of it.”, these parents have a limited list of schools that they’ve heard of, and that their friends and family back home would recognize the names of. If a place isn’t on that list (and how many foreign universities have you heard of?), at least if it is on someone’s list (like in the USNWR rankings) well then it must be “good”.</p>
<p>Changing cultures is not a trivial act. There is so much that we just don’t get, and that we never will really truly get, about life in that new environment. That these parents get as much about life in the US as they do is a credit to them. What is unfortunate, is that too many of them don’t get just a bit more. Happydad is an immigrant. He went to grad school in the US so his understanding of the system here is decent, but we do have almost daily conversations about how things work here as opposed to how they work there and just exactly why his approach is not gonna work here. When neither parent understands the system (this is equally true for immigrant parents and for US parents who have never gone to college), things will be difficult for the child who is getting ready to think about a career and preparing to apply to college.</p>