@morrismm Thanks for your honest post. To me, it sure sounds like your kids are off to a good start - all 3 gainfully employed and pursuing different interest.
As far as D1 is concerned, anybody who stereotypes all of Wall Street in one broad stroke is naive and, frankly, clueless. Anyone who would personally drop your daughter as a friend on facebook purely because of her career path isn’t deserving of her friendship.
When my daughter was about two we were visiting my grandmother one day during our annual summer trip to the states. My father was one of her ten children, and at that point in time she had 30 grandchildren and about 17 great grand children. While we visited I asked her what it was like to be personally responsible for almost 60 people’s existence in the world. She said she was very proud, that everyone of her kids, grand kids, and the oldest great grand kids who wanted a job had one and that no one was in jail. Those were her measures of success, and in that mix of decedent’s was every level of education and education from a variety of schools from no prestige to very high prestige. The outcomes had little to do with the particular schools and everything to do with the people.
Okay, my finger can’t be the only one hurting from clicking “like” on most of the posts on this thread.
Okay, you have to do what the rest of us sinners do and read the most offending letters aloud with a sarcastic tone!
I had an employee once that was a Baylor grad. He is now working as a teller in a bank.
Not the worst of jobs, but given the cost and relative prestige of a Baylor education (especially here in Texas) it always surprises me that he has not done more with what he was given.
I am guessing we all know people like that. I know a St.Olaf grad three years out of school working in a coffee shop (and not just to support other dreams like writing or music or acting). I know it is frustrating to her mom, who paid for the education.
Haven’t read the whole thread because there are such varying opinions on what constitutes “not living up to a school” . Those who choose non profit work, or work in a library, or education, or a SAH parent, or what have you. Now as for my lovely brother, he went to an Ivy, couldnt get into a US med school so ended up attending one in another country. He ended up being able to get back into the US medical training system for residency/internship, so by that criteria he probably “lived up to his school”. But he is a miserable, mean human being. In that regard I do not consider him a success.
I purposely left the title and purpose kind of open to see what people would think was success, and how they felt about this topic. It is multifaceted and complicated, that is for sure. 
For many with that mentality, it’s a mix of ambition and fear that if they don’t choose a well-defined career path with perceived prestige that their chances of maintaining or in the case of immigrant/first generation kids…vaulting themselves into the upper-middle class with limited/no social capital…they will fall/never make it into the upper-middle class. Regardless of whether this is reality or not…that’s a common perception among many HS/college aged students.
And the skyrocketing tuitions combined with severely reduced Federal/State/Local FA grants compared with past generations including mine…and that fear is understandably magnified.
This is a very common attitude among Oberlin classmates during my undergrad years in the mid-late '90s. Back then, it was mainly perceptions that classmates who pursued such career paths or even majors which fed into them like Econ were aspiring to be “Capitalist tools” in the words of many college classmates or the words of one post-college Boston area acquaintance* “money sucking scum”.
Referencing the topic…to most Oberlin classmates during my undergrad years…their attitudes on this is such they’d regard a classmate who has gone into wall street/finance/ibanking as the epitome of “not living up to our college’s ideals” as it is a form of selling those ideals down the river for personal profit/ambition in their estimation.
Funny part is that attitude has softened quite a bit after I left judging by what I’ve heard from younger college alums and our college administration encouraging more students to go into wall street/finance/ibanking careers despite some grumblings from older alums of my generation and older.
The anti-Wall Street/finance/ibanking attitude became more widespread after the 2008 recession which many blame on Wall-Street/finance/ibanking sectors and the behaviors/attitudes of those working there.
Some folks have such strong feelings about those occupational sectors due to the 2008 recession and its prominent association with the corporate establishment that in their view, working for Wall Street/finance/banking is the equivalent of “working for/aspiring to become the oppressor”.
Speaking from experience as someone who understands where they are coming from, has been a recipient of some negativity from undergrad classmates due to working for financially related tech startups/firms, and has attended a college with a campus culture where “who is more leftier/more radical than thou” is a favorite student pastime.
@morrismm, I have an “issue” issue similar to yours. My S1 will likely not do great, at least right away. He is at a pretty good school, and we paid A LOT for him to go there, but I don’t feel like he’s taken advantage of the opportunities the school could have given him. He didn’t do research, didn’t build bonds with professors, and didn’t seek internships, for example. He also let his GPA tank one semester, and has been digging himself out of a hole.
On the positive side, he has become a much more well rounded person, and I’m sure his environment has influenced that. So, I don’t feel like he’s “lived up to his school” in any financial sense, and I think he could have done much better academically. But hopefully at the end of the day he will be a happy, self supporting, contributing member of society. (Please, please please let this be true).
At some point it’s all on him and you can step away knowing you did all you could to provide him the opportunity to succeed. It’s all we can do for our kids along with love and support.
@intparent would you recommend the Frank Bruni book? I’ve been curious about the book but I really dislike Bruni. Mean bitter guy.
Higher education is a privilege not a right although this current “entitled” generation may see differently. Doors can be unlocked with the education but the person actually has to figure out which door to enter through to meet their own individual goal of success whatever that looks like for them while contributing in a positive way to society and supporting themselves.
I thought it was okay. Heavily anectodal.
^^I’m bogged down in the middle of it.
I started skimming in the middle… didn’t feel bad, since I mostly agree with his basic premise.
Maybe this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/one-man-proves-how-easy-it-is-to-fake-a-perfect-life-on-facebook/
I think the real answer is what does living up to the school mean? If I had to sum it up, it would be something my dad said when the local HS principal was bragging about how well the kids in the school did, how many went on to ‘good’ colleges, SAT scores and so forth. My dad asked him, point blank, that given the product he was given, what did he really do? A character in one of my favorite books said it another way, making an omelet with eggs is easy, making it without eggs is the feat.
So given the level of student the elite colleges are attracting, what are they producing? Are they producing people who come out and create new things, people who come out looking at the world and say wow, or are they putting out a lot of kids who go with the flow and may end up well off and even powerful, but otherwise don’t achieve much? Elite tech and science schools put out people who end up changing large swaths of things (and this obviously includes those who go to places like Stanford, the Ivies, etc, who go into Science or tech), is this what the Elite schools are putting out, people who create things, change things? I am a lot more impressed by Bill Gates love of learning, the kind of things that in his own time he did, or what he is doing with his money now, than what he did with Microsoft (though he created something new, and screwed IBM in the process, not a bad thing:)…but does that mean the head of Goldman Sachs or some other corporate giant, who simply worked his/her way up the ranks, does credit to the school? Is a hedge fund guy who creates a new kind of financial junk (CDO’s anyone?) relally creating something useful, or are they just enhancing their own wealth? I am a lot more impressed with the guy who founded the start up I worked for or the guy who founded the company that bought the start up, then I am with the guy who went to an elite school and works the system in corporate American to become an executive at a big corporation.
I don’t have a problem with the elite schools, they have turned out some wonderful thinkers and dreamers and doers, but what I would ask is if, as the author of “Intelligent Sheep” claims, that 60% of those going to the elite schools are majoring in economics or finance, with the idea of playing the corporate elite school road to success, is that really living up to the school, the ideals? Or is it the person who comes out caring about learning, caring about a wide range of things, and wants to make a difference? Is the guy who graduates from Harvard and Harvard Med and works for Doctors without Borders a failure but the guy who goes into plastic surgery making 7 figures isn’t? I think the real problem is that the schools are attracting and turning out mostly people who see the school as the road to the brass ring, rather than being the road to finding their own brass ring or finding the brass ring that benefits all, that the name is becoming all, rather than what it really represents and should represent, a school full of really bright kids being taught to use their minds. In a sense, it is turning the Elite schools into a gold plated vocational school, rather than a university. I can’t blame the schools themselves for that, but I think they could do a better job of trying to balance their admissions and find kids who are more curious about the origins of the universe than getting hired by Goldman Sachs or whatnot.