What happened to hoping our kids are happy in their lives? Seems a damn simple rule for parenting, isn’t it? When I read lines like “society’s winners”, I cringe and convulse. Why does there have to be society losers?
And people wonder why kids are going through mental health challenges in far greater numbers than ever before.
So many parents who force feed “science and math” because “arts” doesn’t pay. I’ve seen a very worrisome trend in parents passing down their perceived failings and regrets onto their children. We all get one kick at the can, raise happy and empathetic children. PLEASE!
Never claimed that a better outcome in whatever field will automatically fall to the “Harvard grad”. You are setting up a strawman argument. I merely stated that there is a difference in resources available and opportunities presented. Whether a student takes advantage of these resources or opportunities is up to them.
Consistent with some of the discussion above, I think the “litmus” test can often be what the REST of the list looks like.
Like, if the kid has some specific academic interests that led them to Harvard (perfectly plausible), it should be easy enough to put together a reasonable list of Likelies and Targets which are also very good choices for someone with those academic interests. But some of those choices may not be among the most famous few colleges.
If instead the list is made up primarily of just other famous colleges which are not all particularly good fits for those interests, plus maybe one or two generic “Safeties” . . . well, that is not necessarily indicative of those interests really playing the main role in getting to an interest in Harvard.
That said, I am also sympathetic to the point of view that HS kids should not have to know what they want to study yet, and so another good reason to like these highly-resourced “liberal arts and sciences tradition” colleges is they are usually encouraging of exploration and will end up pretty good no matter where those explorations take you.
But even so, there are going to be less famous Likelies and Targets like that as well.
So personally, I think it is often pretty easy to tell if a kid is looking at Harvard and the like for those substantial reasons–which is perfectly understandable–or really just going for the name.
As a final thought–to me among the many reasons not to treat mere admission to a highly selective college as a peer competition prize is that is very likely not going to lead to any sort of lasting fulfillment. Because pretty soon you are going to be at Harvard, and those will become your peers, and guess what? They all got admitted to Harvard!
And I saw this at my own fancy college. Some people were there for the actual education and experience, and although it didn’t always work out, most of the time I think they were pretty satisfied. But some people were there for the ego boost, and pretty quickly it wasn’t enough for them anymore. So it was on to the next prize–top law school or med school admissions, a job with a certain set of employers, or so on. And then at my fancy law school, I saw it all repeat again. Now you need to get a top clerkship, or a job with a top firm. And so on.
Peer competition is really not a game you can ever permanently win. Whatever you think you can win at one step in truth quickly fades as it just leads to a new competition at the next step.
So while I think there are some forms of competition that can be healthy and valuable, this sort of peer competition? I think it does much more harm than good, sometimes right through a person’s entire life.
Fascinating study done by Harvard’s alumni office (I’m thinking it’s at least 15 years old, but I’m willing to bet the findings still stand) which showed that for a majority of alums (Radcliffe included… so the survey went WAY back) the most significant thing they’d ever done was attend Harvard. And most of that majority said that it was the best decision they’d ever made.
The purpose of the study was to help the development office (and administration) understand the “stickiness” of the Harvard experience, answer questions like “why are giving rates for Harvard College alums significantly higher than for the professional schools- even though we know that HBS, HLS and Med school grads likely out earn undergrad alums by a significant margin”.
I bring this up because while I agree with some of what you say, I think a more nuanced position might likely represent what you actually believe. There are thousands of Harvard College (and the Radcliffe retirees… may they live long and prosper) working as librarians and 8th grade language arts teachers and social workers etc. and this particular study did NOT find what you might expect- i.e. a level of envy? anger? road not taken? that somehow being at Harvard “cheated” them out of a better college experience. And in fact- Harvard’s giving rate from these relatively modest (or normal) earners seems to outstrip that of the hedge fund dudes and the M&A law partners, etc.
So perhaps for a not insignificant number of its alums, attending Harvard DID make all of their dreams come true. My 12th grade English teacher- Radcliffe alumna, class of 1951 or thereabouts- was considered the best teacher in the school. Not the best English teacher, the best teacher. My 11th grade History teacher- Harvard College alumnus, a different era (a younger, idealistic guy so maybe class of 1970 or so?) was NOT considered the best teacher in the school. He had a lot of classroom management type stuff to learn. But he was inspirational for the kids that wanted to learn history, or loved history and wanted to geek out reading primary sources instead of the textbooks that the other teachers assigned.
Is that a bad outcome for a Harvard kid? That almost 50 years later a student remembers almost every word of his class on “why we remember Gettysburg”?
It’s pretty easy to exaggerate the importance of getting into Harvard or some other fancy Ivy+ university. It can become a kind of madness inflicted by parents on kids and kids on themselves and each other.
But it’s no good seeking to correct this by going to an opposite extreme, by saying you have to be crazy to want to go to one of these schools, or that these schools turn students into bad, bad people, or that there’s no benefit to going to them at all, etc.
Let’s try not to make the Harvard or Stanford (etc.) admits, or their parents, feel too bad about it!
My own kids got into a fancy school this cycle—not Harvard, perish the thought, that cesspool of hypocrisy and narcissism!. But a fancy one.
They’re happy kids, they like school, they’re intellectuals, they like doing interesting things and meeting other interesting kids.
Did we tell them “get into a fancy school or you will forever be an abject little worm in our eyes”? I don’t recall ever saying or implying that.
Their lists consisted of a lot of places where they thought they could be happy. They got in ED to a fancy one. I bet they will be happy there.
I also predict they will not have careers that will make them rich.
I believe so. A goal is a serious achievement, and I think that it is extremely sad if the top achievement of a person’s life is “I am a Harvard Alumnus!” Do YOU know who the “top athletes” in France were in 1950? In the USSR?
All billionaires gained their billions at the expense of other people, usually in the worst possible way. I do not see billionaires as people who positively affect the lives of other people except a small set of also very wealthy people. The presidents who attended Harvard were all the scions of the wealthy and powerful, and their path to the presidency was paved by wealth and connections, just like their path to Harvard. The presidents who came from the middle or lower class attended other colleges. As for the Fields Medal - only three of the people who received the medal were undergrads at Harvard, versus five who were undergrads at Moscow State University while six Fields Medal winners attended École Normale Supérieure for their undergraduate degrees.
What has made the USA so successful is, first of all immigration, second of all immigration, and third of all, having an an enormous amount of natural resources and having the people who had prior claim to those resources being sparser and having far less advanced weaponry. Immigrants have, historically had more opportunities than they ever had back in their home countries.
However, Harvard and similar colleges have always been the antithesis of these opportunities. They have always been the bastions of the wealthy people who were born in the USA and who think of themselves as the rightful owners of the country. Even today, their admission system is rigged in favor of those who have already succeeded.
Harvard and similar colleges never have been and are still not drivers of social change or places where kids can realize The American Dream. They are places where the kids of parents who are already successful can further solidify and affirm their SES. They are changing somewhat because they have realized that this isn’t the best investment. Low income kids who are very successful after attending Harvard will likely donate more and are far better advertisements for the Harvard brand in the 21st century than the Reginald William Smyth-Jones the 3rd, fourth generation Harvard Man.
Back to the Fields Medal - the people who won the Fields Medals never thought “I want to beat everybody in my class!”, they didn’t think “I need to work hard to get into a college that Dad thinks is prestigious!”. They thought “I want to solve mathematical problems, and I will follow any trajectory and go to any college where they will help me do so”.
I will repeat - Harvard is an excellent colleges for many kids in many fields. For a kid from a low income family it’s hitting the jackpot - they can attend a great college for free. There is just a tendency to treat it like it is far more than it is, and to deny the multiple issues that these colleges have. Harvard is the oldest and wealthiest of these colleges and so often has these issues in a far worse way (but not always and not all of the issues).
As somebody who has taught colleges students, I always find the idea of a college turning a kid into a Bad Person to be highly amusing. Professors are barely able to turn a small proportion of their students into educated persons, and that is what professors are trained to do.
That’s a broad brush that’s seriously disconnected from reality.
I happen to know three billionaires, and am still in touch with two of them. Two of them founded a company I once worked for, and one more attended the same grad school I did. They became billionaires because they created companies from scratch that eventually employed thousands of people, and in turn made a large fraction of those employees into millionaires or multi-millionaires. Afterwards, one of them gave away a very large fraction of his wealth, and one more one (still young) has signed the Giving Pledge, with the intent of giving away over 90% of his wealth.
Amazing how you have such keen insight into the mind of Fields Medal winners and presume they are all alike. Here’s an excerpt from the most famous book about the life of a professional mathematician, GH Hardy:
I will end with a summary of my conclusions, but putting them in a more personal way. I said at the beginning that anyone who defends his subject will find that he is defending himself; and my justification of the life of a professional mathematician is bound to be, at bottom, a justification of my own. Thus this concluding section will be in its substance a fragment of autobiography.
I cannot remember ever having wanted to be anything but a mathematician. I suppose that it was always clear that my specific abilities lay that way, and it never occurred to me to question the verdict of my elders. I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.
I was about fifteen when (in a rather odd way) my ambitions took a sharper turn. There is a book by ‘Alan St Aubyn’ called A Fellow of Trinity, one of a series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life. I suppose that it is a worse book than most of Marie Corelli’s; but a book can hardly be entirely bad if it fires a clever boy’s imagination. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficult in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers’s thought stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room.
Now Flowers was a decent enough fellow (so far as ‘Alan St Aubyn’ could draw one), but even my unsophisticated mind refused to accept him as clever. If he could do these things, why not I? In particular, the final scene in Combination Room fascinated me completely, and from that time, until I obtained one, mathematics meant to me primarily a Fellowship at Trinity.
I found at once, when I came to Cambridge, that a Fellowship implied ‘original work’, but it was a long time before I formed any definite idea of research. I had of course found at school, as every future mathematician does, that I could often do things much better than my teachers; and even at Cambridge, I found, though naturally much less frequently, that I could sometimes do things better than the College lecturers. But I was really quite ignorant, even when I took the Tripos, of the subjects on which I have spent the rest of my life; and I still thought of mathematics as essentially a ‘competitive’ subject. My eyes were first opened by Professor Love, who taught me for a few terms and gave me my first serious conception of analysis. But the great debt which I owe to him—he was, after all, primarily an applied mathematician—was his advice to read Jordan’s famous Cours d’analyse; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant. From that time onwards, I was in my way a real mathematician, with sound mathematical ambitions and a genuine passion for mathematics.
I wrote a great deal during the next ten years, but very little of any importance; there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction. The real crisis of my career came ten or twelve years later, in 1911, when I began my long collaboration with Littlewood, and in 1913, when I discovered Ramanujan. All my best work since then has been bound up with theirs, and it is obvious that my association with them was the decisive event of my life. I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, ‘Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.’
The biggest issue is kids who get into and graduate from those schools commend superiority over peers. It has become an ugly “I am better than you” badge. In reality many of these kids are legacy and sports and have no higher intelligence that kids ending up at Georgia Tech or U Michigan. In fact the dumbest kid from out high school will soon be attending the number 1 ranked school (athlete). And he will graduate and as a result of his degree most likely be offered opportunities more academically deserving kids wouldn’t. “I am better than you because Harvard accepted me” is what is so toxic. Somethings you might be but often you aren’t. But hoarding opportunities on Wall Street for those who attended those schools because there is a presumption that they are smarter is just disgusting when so many of these graduates are there because of their connections.
The days where Uncle Charles could get his nephew hired at a top investment bank are over. Yes…he can get the nephew a nice courtesy interview if he passes one of the prescreens. But that’s it. Nobody is going to risk their job by getting an unqualified hire through the door. Too many eyes on the process nowadays.
My insight is based on the mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists who I have known, though none are Field Medalists so far. SInce my wife got to CS through math (including a year at Leningrad State University before immigrating), so I have insights from her as well (she has since even left theoretical CS), which is also how I got to know so many mathematicians.
I am, however, not certain what you are trying to prove with your quote.
What eyes? Nepotism hires are not illegal in private companies. In any case, a foot in the door plus inside knowledge regarding what the companies wants to hear in interviews is not a minor advantage. It is rarely about an unqualified connected hire, it’s about choosing a qualified connected applicant over an equally or more qualified applicant who does not have the same connections. It’s also about the tendency of many people to prefer hiring people like them. They also prefer promoting people like them.
Often, the main advantage of connections in employment is simply the connected applicant knowing that the job opening exists and/or the employer (through the connected existing employee) knowing that the applicant exists. The connected applicant then may be competing against a much smaller number of other applicants than an applicant applying to a publicly posted job listing that gets 1,000 applicants, of which 100 may appear well qualified at first glance.
It’s no doubt true that some students would not be admitted without some hook, such as legacy, URM, or athletics. While most of the students my kids know are unhooked, we know two children from the same family that were Harvard legacies, and serve as a counterpoint to your statement. One was my child’s friend from 2nd grade onwards, and he was so strong in math that he was of the top 100 math kids in the country by high school. After his sophomore year at Harvard he was offered a job by an extremely selective company after a summer internship, and it was because of his talent, not because of his name or his parents modest wealth. He was so strong they actually didn’t care if he finished his degree (his parents insisted he finish). His sister was admitted to NYU medical school after Harvard, which is now the most selective medical school because it is free.
Now you can make a very good point that these kids did not need a legacy boost, and I agree. My point is that you cannot assume just because a student is legacy that they are a weak student.
If it is your contention that the kid who doesn’t get into Harvard but has to “settle” for CMU or Michigan or JHU or U Conn or Villanova or Fairfield… and therefore doesn’t get a job at Goldman Sachs but has to “settle” for Suntrust or BNP or Barclays… you will be playing the world’s smallest violin. Two years of hitting the ball out of the park, and all of these folks will end up sitting side by side at HBS or Wharton (if they decide they want an MBA) and will end up sitting side by side at whichever PE they decide to join.
I have yet to see a kid who doesn’t get into Harvard but has to “settle” for somewhere else get locked out of every financial institution just because they didn’t get in to Harvard. And the “woe is me, all the good jobs go to Harvard grads” is insane logic.
I am not sure that I understand the connection between the subject (tiger parenting) and legacy admissions. I think the through line might be the suggestion that tiger parenting methods provide a “boost” similar to that of being a legacy applicant at certain schools?
As I understand it, the basic flow is we are assuming tiger parenting means really wanting your kid to get admitted to Harvard even if that is at a high cost to other things some parents highly value in a childhood.
But the issue with using that as a tiger parenting litmus test is that at least some parents here think admission to Harvard can be a worthy goal for a child to strive toward, and they do not think that supporting such a goal automatically makes them tiger parents.
So as I see it, we are discussing various conceptions of Harvard and what they would imply about various possible parental attitudes toward Harvard as an admissions goal. And so to the extent there are a lot of legacies at Harvard, or other students where family status played a role in admissions, what that implies about Harvard in substance is relevant to which conceptions of Harvard are more accurate.
Like, if the presence of legacies and other hooked students meant Harvard was a notably less intellectual college than some alternatives, then it would undermine the credibility of parents who suggest Harvard is a worthy goal because it full of the best and brightest minds.
And I personally think there is some truth to that, that it is a mistake to think of Harvard students as all being identified as the brightest kids who applied to college in their cycle. I also agree at this point legacy is an increasingly weak source of that effect. But more generally, Harvard has never admitted solely for intellectual merit, it is always balancing competing institutional priorities such that it will admit quite a few people it did not score the highest academically even on its own terms.
But to me, the complication is that Harvard is certainly AMONG the colleges where a lot of very bright kids end up attending because of various intellectual interests. Not all the kids who go to Harvard are like that, and definitely not all the kids like that go to Harvard. But some do.
So again for me, it is not a good tiger parenting litmus test to see if the kid applies to Harvard at all. But if the rest of the list indicates the kid is focusing on things like institutional fame and not some kid-specific fit criteria, then that might start becoming a litmus test.
Edit: Oh, and all this focus on tiger parenting litmus tests is to me a logical approach to trying to answer the overarching question of the thread. To know if tiger parenting is becoming the norm among UMC parents, we need some way of identifying cases of tiger parenting. And I will say my two cents is that in my own circles, most of the parents I know are “passing” the Harvard test, meaning they are not evidencing an attitude toward Harvard that is plausibly indicative of tiger parenting.
Like, I know both anecdotally, and also can infer from SCOIR, that a lot of our highly competitive kids do not apply to Harvard even when applying to some highly selective colleges. Some did, but not all.
Like, only about half the Yale applicants also apply to Harvard, and vice versa for Harvard applicants applying to Yale.
If you look at, say, Brown applicants, then under 40% apply to Yale, under 30% to Harvard. WUSTL, under 30% Yale, under 12% Harvard.
But Brown and WUSTL are sorta on the same branch of the family tree as Yale. Columbia, say, is about half Harvard, only about 1/3rd Yale.
But anyway, I think all this is inconsistent with many families in our HS seeing Harvard as the pinnacle of admissions achievement, as opposed to just a possible option for kids who actually like Harvard for specific reasons.
Perhaps the implication is that Harvard etc. is more competitive than numbers may indicate for non-hooked applicants due to space consumed by hooked admits, so some parents push their non-hooked kids even harder due to the level of competition?