> “We celebrate the accomplishment of students who get into all eight Ivies,” said Brandon Kosatka, TJ’s director of student services. “That’s the bar, and our kids are shooting for that. They don’t like to be the second-best. If that’s the bar, then, yes, that creates anxiety for them.”
Jesus. That's borderline child abuse. These people understand their children can only go to one of those eight schools at a time, right?
Funny - I came to the comments with this exact same quote in my clipboard. I don't think it's child abuse, though, as both the parents and children are part of this world view which uses socially accepted norms for success as their primary metrics of worth. It's an extreme form of absolute submission to external motivation.
I think this comes from a culture of insecurity, addiction to simple success metrics, and maybe even a little intellectual laziness. Doing well in school isn't worthless, but it's perpendicular to learning to decide for yourself what your values are and in what direction you want to pull the world as you interact with it. At least in my experience, the latter is a lot more intellectually difficult (and satisfying) than learning a particular set of skills to solve a particular set of problems.
As far as I'm concerned, it's not borderline. All five members of my immediate family attended various so-called tier 1 schools. Never once was I made to feel that an Ivy League admission was a required or expected achievement.
As for my time at such a school, I will say this. There are certainly more opportunities, but the average university is so brimming with amazing opportunities that the limiting factor is motivation, not quality of the institution. I suppose the old maxim, "You get out what you put in," applies here.
You're correct on the last part, but let's be honest for a second - for the HN crowd, I don't think the average school has the opportunities "we" want.
My point was primarily that there isn't a huge gulf between an applicant's #1 school and #5 school. What I can find at Harvard/Yale/Princeton can mostly be found at UCLA or even major state schools.
This pressuring your kids with these expectations is crazy, because for even the best students, the Ivy admissions process is a crapshoot. And perhaps alleviating some of the pressure could even lead to increased performance due to lower stress levels.
> Jesus. That's borderline child abuse. These people understand their children can only go to one of those eight schools at a time, right?
It's precisely the opposite. It's an acknowledgement that the Ivy League admissions process is completely broken, and it is a proper, rational response.
If I assume that my probability of admission is randomly 25% (probably not unreasonable), then I have a 10% probability of not being admitted to any of the 8 schools even if I am qualified.
As an admission process requires money and time, it's yet one more way that the poor are disadvantaged.
Broken implies "should be fixed." I'm not sure how you fix an inherently competitive admissions process whether it's getting into Harvard or getting a job offer from $HOT_TECH_CO. You're always going to have an element of randomness unless you purely/primarily go the testing route, e.g. the civil service examination system of imperial China. Which has its own set of problems.
(BTW, to be clear, expectations that one must attend one of these schools or one's life is ruined are certainly misplaced. But given such expectations, I'm not sure what reasonable admissions system is going to do away with randomness. I think it's a good thing that admissions aren't purely based on SAT scores.)
Jesus. That's borderline child abuse. These people understand their children can only go to one of those eight schools at a time, right?