LOL, love it QuantMech. If I had a competitive bone in my body about college admissions I’d be a heck of alot more focused on what the kids do AFTER college rather than WHERE they go. That would be a much “funner” sport for sure for me. I’m much more secretly smug about my kids right now than I was when they were 18 for sure. Any kid that gets into a selective college is an accomplishment worthy of applause and graduating is even more fabulous and if they find a job and launch successfully you’ve won the race.
“OP, the problem is that we are not allowed to brag about our HYP children outside of this one “bragging thread” in the Parent Cafe.”
Right. My parents had other college stickers on the car, but refused an HYP sticker when the chance came along.
I think subtle window stickers are fine. My nephew’s car had a window sticker with a blue “Y” and a bulldog on it. Most people would have no idea what it is, but those who attended Yale would.
This is very YMMV depending on area and what parents. I’ve observed plenty of parents in a variety of venues bragging about their kids’ HYP or peer elites or not having any hesitation to stick the HYP/peer elite college stickers on their cars/homes.
And this isn’t limited to the frequently stereotyped immigrant/ethnic groups on CC and elsewhere…but includes plenty of multi-generationed legacy/developmental WASP families such as some neighbors of older relatives in the urban NE/West Coast* areas.
One particularly obnoxious neighbor who was himself a multi-generation legacy/developmental alum of Dartmouth make it a point to have every one of us remember how special the alma mater to himself and his forebearers.
- IME, there are plenty of upper/upper-middle class suburbanite(SF Bay/LA areas) families bragging about HYP/elite East Coast colleges along with prominent west coast peers like Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, etc.
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If my kid was at HYP or any other college, you are darn right I would put a sticker on my car. And in fact, I have a college sticker on my car. Brag away, I say. I salute any kid in college, be it Podunk U or MIT, and parents have a right to be proud. Bumper sticker political correctness is a step too far, IMO.
A few friends and yours truly felt wearing collegewear or sticking one’s college sticker on one’s home/car while one/one’s student in college would be jinxing it too much considering the large numbers of our respective neighbors/relatives’ neighbors who ended up not finishing at their first college for academic or other reasons.
As a result, we’ve made it a point to wait until we graduated with degree in hand before starting to wear our respective alma mater’s college wear.
Ah well, @cobrat , I am not very superstitious. We had D’s first college sticker on the car when she was accepted to the college she goes to now. The stickers come off easily enough. 
This thread is not set up to deprive non-HYP parents of their chance to brag but rather an opportunity for us all to see HYP students through the eyes of their parents. Nowhere else can we find that information. HYP was picked due to common interest here on CC. I personally know some kids who went/go to HYP and some got accepted there but matriculated elsewhere. I don’t see how different they are, as @thumper1 put it:
Then, we are NOT their parents and we don’t know what we don’t know. I once asked a mother if she could tell her twins apart and she listed so many differences. If a parent says she has x# kids, y# went to HYP and z# didn’t, and she can’t tell the difference between them, I’d be surprised. It’s another thing if she says the rest of us can’t. That’s why we’d like to see what the parents see/say.
Parents sure can show pride. You earned it! But I won’t. I like to keep my car clean and the only stickers I put on were for school levy.
One admittedly anecdotal case.
I knew one set of identical twins during my HS years. One who attended my HS and the other attended an academically reputable neighborhood HS(Forest Hills HS) who frequently hung out with us.
Despite the fact the latter was admitted and accepted admission to HYP and the former opted to attend an off-beat NE LAC(Hampshire), their parents regarded the Hampshire admit brother/HS classmate as the smartest one of the two and the HYP admit twin looked up to his twin as an academic model.
I don’t have any issue with parents who are of the mindset that it is Ivy or bust. It’s not my reality or my social group’s reality despite multi-generational degrees from said league of colleges amongst the group. And “this” is a good place to do so for parents because outside of only a few social groups is it important…and probably tilts highly northeast…which is where those colleges are located. It’s all good.
My Rutgers graduate is academically the smartest kid in the family but the HYP kid definitely has other strengths.
Like the driver mentioned upthread I drive a beaten and slightly rusty 13 yo Toyota minivan. Originally I did not plan for a sticker believing that it would cast a dark shadow over the prestigious academic institution. However, my kid felt offended that I seemingly did not want to celebrate her accomplishment so I put a modest sticker on the read door. This car will eventually go to the junk yard with this sticker - it has a high-quality glue and cannot be removed.
@eiholi what do you want to hear? Do you want to hear from HYP parents whomthonkmtheir kids are a cut above everyone else? Do you want to hear from HYP parents who think their kids are really like other kids who just happened to get accepted to HYP?
Why are you even asking the question in your OP?
And re: post 28 @cobrat i would appreciate it if you would make it clear that the two paragraphs in your grey box were written by two DIFFERENT posters. By putting them together in that box, it looks like one poster wrote both. Not the case. They were written by TWO different people with TWO different perspectives.
I still say…students at HYP are normal kids who would not stand out in a crowd. They are regular people. Their status as HYP students is a great achievement…but really, it doesn’t make them any better…or worse…than students in other colleges.
They can be wonderful young people…but there are tons of wonderful young people in this world who have never stepped on the HYP campuses…and never will.
Yes there are, and the country is very big. I guarantee you kids in Michigan get more excited about getting into UofM than any other college…it’s gotten THAT difficult. I’ve been in the local country club with friends in Decembers past when the acceptances come out on those Fridays and you could hear the whoops and hollers of joy from the parents - who for the most part can afford to send their kids anywhere and who have “great” kids. Again, I’m happy for parents who think it is important to join the Ivy League of schools but I’m just as happy for parents whose kids get accepted to the Big 10 or really, anywhere they want to go. Yes there are tons of wonderful, bright young people thank goodness…
We know a lot about student population at a particular school but we know nothing about their parents’ evaluation of them. In a summary of a few words, what a parent knows about her kid since birth may tell a ton about the student. And this simply is new information in another dimension. As test scores and other metrics can’t separate students from different schools, whatever parents say about their students at school A can’t put them a cut above students in school B. If we visualize a student population as a bell curve, the curve only shifts slightly sideways from one school to another. No one thinks one curve is completely separated from the next. We can start looking at a curve somewhere, why not HYP if many are interested? This is NOT a way to say they are better than the rest. Not at all.
What words do I expect to see their parents say or imply? Not a clue. Maybe someone can look back at this thread years later and analyze the frequencies of key words or something to draw some inferences.
@momofthreeboys Over a decade or so two of our best students went there. I stepped on multiple Big 10 campuses millions of steps. Great schools. Here we are not comparing schools, and I could’ve started the thread with “Big 10 …”.
I went to Yale. My kid goes to Yale. I went to an inner city public high school in the 70’s. My kid went to a top tier independent school not so long ago. I don’t think there is anything more special or different about us than anyone else. I really do think that once you hit the 30,000 application mark, with few exceptions for athletes and that one in a million violinist they need for the orchestra, everyone else is basically a crapshoot. I really am a big proponent of the theory that the essay is the deal breaker in many instances since the stats / recommendations of most applicants look basically the same. But I can be wrong.
I would be disappointed if my kid chose Harvard over Michigan. Just sayin’
Sample of two. Elder relative and son are both Yale grads. The elder clearly says that neither would likely get accepted if they applied today.
Both are incredibly successful and great people.
My kid is at Yale.
He studied just enough to get 'A’s in high school. He looks at his school as his second family. He chose Yale because of the residential colleges. It feels comfortable to him.
Academics come easily to him, so it looks like he’s got an easy load.
He attended public St Louis High School. He chose to transfer from the suburban system and do something different.
He was accepted by several HYP schools. Chose Yale because it was his dream school.
@Tperry1982 I don’t agree that admissions to HYP is basically a crapshoot. I have met approximately 150 of these students. We have had two of them stay at our house over different breaks. Over Xmas break a third one is coming for a couple of weeks. There is usually a reason why they are there. I personally think the essay is of little or no value. It is the whole picture. HYP look for what they believe will be future leaders. That can take many different forms.
Ok. You asked me a question. I have quite a bit of experience with Yale, having graduated in 1982, been doing alumni interviews for 30 years and having just gone through the experience with my own kid. But, you asked for my opinion and I gave it. If you’re looking for a magic formula, it does not exist. How do you think they figure out “future leaders” from the stacks of applications of straight A, 2400 SAT score students? Again, since I work with the Admissions folk, I know that a good essay can make a person stand out - of course if all else is equal. My D’s high school sends 4 to 5 kids to Yale each year, the same number to Harvard, UPENN, and Brown. This is from a class of 125 students. It’s a top school and many of the kids are legacies. Maybe that is the formula.
However, it goes, I wish you the best of luck.