That’s up to you to decide!
Just know that if you are an immigrant to the US, your grandkids are simply going to be Americans. Whether you like it or not.
And in fact if your kids are born in the US, or even just young when you moved, very likely they’ll end up quite far in that direction too.
I think we’re well past the four or five mark…
You might just be a tiger parent:
If you always ask why your child didn’t do better if they earned less than 100% (@bearcatfan)
If you think your child attending a school like Wake Forest with a 22% admissions rate means they will end up as failures (@NiceUnparticularMan)
If you only want your child to attend a “top” college (@NiceUnparticularMan & @AustenNut).
If you think that a college list with 19 reaches and 1 safety is a good list. (@NiceUnparticularMan)
If you decide on a kid’s major and not the kid. (@ucbalumnus)
If you think it’s reasonable to consider whether your kid with a top 1% standardized test score should do a retake in the hopes of raising the score (@AustenNut)
If you’re willing to sacrifice everything, including outward demonstrations of parental affection, for your kid to achieve a vision (@circuitrider)
If you’re trying to “package” a kid who is not off-the-charts academically (@Blossom)
If you’re curating a resume instead of encouraging a childhood. (@GKUnion)
If you think your child getting top grades in the hardest courses is more important than their mental health. (@NiceUnparticularMan)
I like this.
Korea is much worse than the US.
“Authorities are taking aim at the country’s hagwons , or “cram schools”—for-profit tutoring institutions attended by some 80% of Korean students.”
“Some individuals may feel that there is no point in graduating from other universities. This is what society believes,” Ty Choi, a professor at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies who researches the impacts of private tutoring, tells TIME.
“This is highly associated with what success means in Korea. You want to have a stable life. Stable life means getting employed in a chaebol company,” he adds, a reference to the large, often family-run, conglomerates that dominate the South Korean economy. These companies hire [almost exclusively from the country’s top three universities and for most of South Korea’s brightest students, it’s [chaebol or bust]"
While, as I wrote above, what people here consider “upper middle class” is actually “wealthy”, truly upper middle class have a point. In the Chetty article, kids whose parents were low income to middle class (income up to the 60th percentile), ended up in the upper middle class (70th-80th percentiles).
These parents, whose entry to the upper middle class was, at least to them, the result of their attending an “elite” college may actually push their kids to get them into an “elite” college from fear of their kids ending back in the lower income brackets.
However
That population is only about 10%-15% of the graduates of “elite” colleges, and elite college graduates are only around 7% of all college graduates.
So “upper middle class parents who were born in the bottom 60% who attended elite colleges” are, overall, may 0.5% of all college graduates. Among the parents of college applicants today, most are Gen X. Among Gen-X, only 32.4% are college graduates.
That means that this group of “upper middle class parents who went to T20s and don’t want their kids to be downwards mobile” make up less than 0.2% of all parents whose kids are applying to colleges.
Around 20% of the parents with kids applying to college are from upper middle class. At most, 1% of these belong to “upper middle class parents who went to T20s and don’t want their kids to be downwards mobile”.
Now, that fewer than 0.2% are, essentially, ALL parents of college-seeking students who come from the bottom 60% by income and attended an “elite” college. Some did not make it to th eupper middle class, while even more made into the wealthy classes (top 20% by income).
So if we’re looking at “upper middle class and wealthy parents from lower income families who went to T20s and don’t want their kids to be downwards mobile”, they are, essentially less than 1% of all of that group.
So parents who are tiger parents for that reason are a tiny little minority of parents, maybe 1% of the upper middle class and wealthy kids have such parents. That means that any parent here would likely have known no more than one or two such families.
I’m not sure the strand of argument that says simply “'Twas ever thus”—times have always been tough in different ways, and resourceful people from whatever social stratum have always figured it out—quite responds to what is happening.
Sociology that documents the shrinkage of the US middle class since the postwar boom is not far to seek. Where do those formerly middle-class people go?
Well, some have ascended to the level of the rich. And many drop to the level of economic hardship. A sense of precarity ensues from contemplating the widening gulf between rich and poor.
Maybe the erosion of the idea of “you’ll be fine” stems in part from the erosion of the place in the class structure where people will be fine in, the middle class.
Blame it on whatever—deindustrialization, globalizing the labor market, the shrinkage of unions—people at all class levels contemplating the widening class divide in the US are presented with a stark choice: column A (rich) or column B (struggling).
I didn’t say that those non-college attending parents from lower class backgrounds are necessarily wealthy (especially when I was talking about first gen families). There are plenty of poor tiger parents, particularly in immigrant communities.
You seem to be talking about the grandchildren in those families, ie kids whose parents grew up poor (with the non-college attending grandparents) but went to T20s and now are upper middle class. That’s somewhat different.
However I think it is a stretch to suggest that “any [UMC] parent here would likely have known no more than one or two such families”. Particularly in places like Silicon Valley there’s a surfeit of parents who grew up relatively (or even very) poor in first gen families, whether in the US or overseas, went to decent colleges, and made a lot of money in the tech boom.
Couple of thoughts:
1- Are the folks in Atherton and Scarsdale and Winnetka and Montecito-- truly Tiger Parenting Ground Zero-- really worried about their kids “dropping to the level of economic hardship”? I find that hard to believe. Even if the kid gets a community college certificate and becomes a phlebotomist, these parents know that the “economic transfer” as the sociologists describe what happens when these folks die is going to keep their kid from hardship. Pretty much forever if invested conservatively. So I’m pushing back. I think your theory makes sense if we’re in JD Vance/Appalachian economic disaster territory where the manufacturing and mining industries have left and wiped out entire regions of productive activity… but upper middle class/affluent/wealthy suburbs? Which is where much of the Tigering takes place? I don’t buy it. These folks are keeping an entire industry of private wealth managers and estate attorneys in business. No, they aren’t billionaires. And in most cases, they did not inherit wealth at all (probably paid dad’s nursing home bills and paid mom’s home health attendant). But they look at their 5, 10, 15 million dollar “nest egg” and rationally understand that their kid won’t be eating in a soup kitchen if they don’t get into Dartmouth. That house that’s too expensive for a young family to afford right now? That’s a nest egg for the next generation if the kids don’t get greedy and buy a Porsche right after the funeral.
2-You and many others seem to be describing a coastal phenomenon (California, some pockets of the East Coast but not all) and a few affluent suburbs in the midwest and South. But there are an awful lot of middle class folks in Tulsa and Wichita and Columbus OH and Duluth and St. Louis who are managing just fine as actual middle class people. They aren’t conjuring up some scary scarcity/precarity mentality because that’s not their reality. Mom’s a speech therapist, dad is principal of a high school-- you can buy a house in Cincinnati and have a nice life and not go to bed fearful that your kid’s future is over because he didn’t make it into the Youth Symphony or isn’t doing original research on the structure of liver cancer.
3- The affluent folks I know don’t spend much time (if any) “contemplating the widening gulf between rich and poor”. I applaud you for the charitable and philosophical impulse. But I don’t think that actually describes anyone outside of Brookings, The New Republic, or the faculty of our universities. The affluent folks I know are spending time Tigering (as mentioned), trying to achieve “greater worklife balance” so they’ll have time for yoga AND golf AND relaxing at the club, AND transitioning from decades of tennis to pickleball.
You know folks who have made it into a gated community who are worried about the gulf between rich and poor? They write their check to the United Way because their boss solicited them; they donate their old clothes to Dress for Success or similar (and insist on a tax receipt); they will give $5 or $10 to a homeless person on the street as long as they don’t look “menacing” or high.
I think we’d see an outpouring of philanthropy like no society on earth if-- in fact- affluent people were worried about the widening gap.
What the upper middle and upper classes consider to be “economic hardship” is probably a lot different from what is actual “economic hardship”. Someone with upper class spending habits may see living on a middle income to be “economic hardship”, even though huge numbers of people in the US live on that (or less).
Examples on these forums are all of the parents who claim to be “middle class”, will not get financial aid from any college for their kids, and complain about not being able to save up for their kids’ college due to the “high cost of living”.
And require high levels of curbside appeal from every college they visit which means the colleges have to pass on the costs in the form of higher tuition which just keeps the cycle spinning further out of control.
Interesting thoughts (and interesting thread in general), I agree with much of this!
But I would push back a bit on the idea that anyone who’s “made it” into the gated community is either not worrying about wealth inequality or, if they are concerned, giving $ in a perfunctory or self-serving way.
In these same coastal and affluent pockets mentioned above, I think there’s a hint of a shift taking place among some UMC+ folks who are more than equipped to “play the game” but are choosing not to for reasons of conscience and concern for their kids.
I live in an area that is home to a handful of the Varsity Blues defendants. Believe it or not, I think that whole scandal actually sobered up the parent community around here and held up a mirror that showed some wildly unflattering things.
So while there’s still plenty of the typical tigerish stuff going on, there’s also a growing number of T20-educated parents who have dropped all expectation or interest in having their kids do the same. More parents with plenty of $ choosing to forego the private college counselors. More of their kids are going to CC so they can transfer to UCs, or have SDSU or cal poly as their dream schools (which would have been unheard of back in the 80s/90s). A rising concern around teen mental health is also fueling this.
(And to your point, there are people like MacKenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates who are plenty concerned and are in fact pouring an unprecedented amount of philanthropic $$ towards wealth inequality and education among other issues.)
People have different views on middle class, upper middle class or upper class.
Some people might think that you’re wealthy if you’re income is in the top 15% of Americans (around $150k). Percentage wise, that’s accurate compared to other Americans.
However, I highly doubt people who make $150k consider themselves wealthy or rich. Once you take out local, state, federal, and FICA taxes and subtract basic necessities like food, health insurance etc, a family of four is living comfortably but not where they can fly business class or pay $80k a year for college. These people are still clipping coupons, cant afford new cars or a major roof leak.
Those are a very different group of parents than parents who attended an “elite” colleges and are demanding that their kids also attend an elite colleges in order to stay in the higher income range. I know a large number of parents who attended excellent colleges like Stony Brook, UMN, Rutgers, etc for engineering back in the 1990s before everybody and their younger cousin decided that engineering is the only major that is possible (back then it was pre-med and business).
An immigrant or a child of immigrants who is earning a 6 figure salary with a degree that they got at Penn State or OSU is unlikely to be telling their kid that attending any other college but an Ivy+ or “T-20” college is not an acceptable result. So they likely won’t be pushing their kid to spend 15 hours a day in school work and “the Right ECs”.
I know a whole bunch of these parents, including a large number of Asian-Americans and East Europeans, and they support their kids, and they like finding intellectual activities for their kids, but if their kid wants to be a writer or a historian, the parents will find the best activities for kids with those interests. They want their kid to do well at school, but will not demand that the kid bring home an A in every subject “or else”. Like many parents here, they hope that their kid will attend a more “prestigious” college, but not at the expense of the kid’s health and wellbeing.
They are supportive and involved parents, but far from being “tiger parents”, though some demonstrate a few flashes of “tigerishness” here and there.
I think this website is most useful when people relate first-account experience and not paint sweeping generalizations. I grew up in another country in a solid middle-class family of two engineers. By all US standards, my family would have been considered low middle class. We lived in an apartment in a biggish city as most other people. My parents never owned a car which was also typical. Everybody had access to excellent healthcare and education, though. So, I am thrifty and don’t have expensive tastes, and neither do my children. Due to being in the right place at the right time, my family is now UMC. I don’t think that my children will go homeless. Am I sure that they will be able to raise a family here? No, even though this is their home where they have roots, family, friends. I think it will take hard work and some luck. Have I pushed them to be disciplined and work to their potential? Yes. Did I come to College Confidential 8-9 years ago to get some wisdom on the college admission process? Yes, and I have helped them prepare better and very successful college applications. No paid consultants for either kid (as I said, I am thrifty and like to research things myself). If I knew that they would have been successful anyway, I would not have bothered spending all this time on this process.
As the topic is on tiger parenting, and this all started with Amy Chua’s book, there is another trait of this parenting style that she described. Tiger parents are very involved and actively helped their kids succeed. They do not demand an “A”. They sit down in the trenches and put the work to help their kid understand the material.
My husband and I also got in the trenches and helped with AP Physics when the long term teacher retired and they hired somebody from middle school to teach Physics C (she was clueless). If this makes me a tiger parent, I am proud to be one.
$80k per year for college would be difficult on that level of income, but they may get financial aid.
But wouldn’t the $150k per year income family be able to save substantial amounts of money by spending like a $100k per year income family? (median family income in the US is about $93k per year, while median household income in the US is about $75k per year)
Are y’all really seeing a lot of tiger parenting in your areas?
I live in an area with one of the highest rates of
advanced degrees (particularly PhDs) in the US if you go by those WalletHub reports.
There are a lot of kids who take a lot of AP classes in our area but I don’t think that is due to parental pressure so much as a competitive atmosphere from peers in the schools. Hard to say for sure, but I have overheard kids talking.
My kids went to a charter school instead because the oldest has generalized anxiety disorder and needed a smaller atmosphere but I know a lot of parents in the local public school system.
I’m trying to think of kids I know who went to the public schools and where they ended up going to college. A fair number of kids go to our local flagship in our town (one of the top 10 publics and a good financial value for in state students).
Ok, just went through some of my Facebook friends to remind myself where their kids went.
6 flagship
6 - no college
4 - 3rd or 4th best state school
1 - other state school
Also 1 each to:
Pratt
Scad
NYU
Cal Poly SLO
Community college → UCSB
UTK
Penn State
UVA
UConn
Berry
Tampa
Duke
I am frequently running into parents and when I ask how their kids are doing they tell me they are working or doing AmeriCorps or something else rather than going to college.
After taxes? No way. $150k x 7.65%. FICA taxes alone are $11, 475.
Once you subtract out Federal, state (if applicable) etc, after tax income is around $115k- ish depending on local taxes.
If you spend $100k, you may be able to save $15k. If you spend $80k, you can probably max out your 401k but save little/to nothing beyond that.
One or two big expenses (ie replacing a HVAC system, roof, medical issue) can wipe out the majority of your yearly savings.
Using Federal Income Tax Calculator (2023-2024) , a $150k income family of 4 in California would have $113k take-home. With $100k income, they would have $81k take-home.
So if the $150k income family spent no more than the $81k that a $100k income family could spend, then they would have $32k per year of savings.
Would you consider living on $80k a year in California as comfortable or “wealthy”?
Can you even afford a mortgage and property taxes in California on that type of take home pay?