Can someone direct me to posts with this sense of ivy entitlement? I think it would offend me also, but I don’t recall having seen them. Asking sincerely.
How about threads in the chance section, such as this?
You don’t have to read for too long in the Admissions forum to see the daily posts from kids with excellent but not outstanding profiles who imagine themselves bound for the most selective schools in the nation. In one post a few hours ago, one of those “Oh no I got a ‘B’” posts, the student is angry over a B because they imagine themselves at MIT or Duke.
I don’t see those threads as the product of “entitlement “, I see them as the product of anxiety and pressure. Is a B going to hurt your chances at the top schools? Absolutely, and I think that some people use the aspiration of getting into those schools as motivation. I think that is sad, not healthy etc but not reflecting entitlement. Maybe I’m just reading them wrong.
Is it “entitlement” we’re discussing or “expectation”? I see here on CC more of latter and hardly ever former.
OK so I perused that thread as much as I could bear, and I agree with wchatar2 above. The OP was certainly uninformed, definitely desperate, and possibly troubled, although I am not qualified to diagnose the last.
He got some brutal responses, including “Get A Life” (and some bad information including the old not independent events argument).
I feel bad for the kid. He’s got a hard road ahead.
I guess I took the definition of “entitled” to be more like “How could these idiots reject me”?
I have another thought about the thread but I will post it there. Thanks for the link.
Note, however, that it was that poster’s second thread with a similar theme. Here is the previous one:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/2033819-what-are-my-chances-for-mit-stanford-caltech-and-berkeley-eecs-and-how-can-i-improve-them.html
@TiggerDad you bring up a good semantic distinction. My original post is noticing a disconnect between level of achievement and reasonable expectation. Maybe “entitlement” is too loaded of a term for some. Though for some kids it is apt.
@lookingforward:
“So to say, if you want to run with the big boys, you’d better know the race. Otherwise, you may be the one throwing darts blindfolded.”
And this is a big reason for the anti-US antipathy that you see on this thread. In no other country with an elite tier of institutions of higher education are the parameters of “the race” so opaque and difficult to discern as in the US. Pretty much everywhere else, admission to the elites for most comes down to marks on tests (sometimes grades, as in Canada), or at least largely academic achievement and potential so it’s pretty easy to tell where you stand.
In the US, the average person is completely clueless and even those who spend a lot of time figuring it out could be off by a long ways.
Purple, I disagree (and I usually agree with you).
It’s only opaque at an individual level and ONLY if a kid/family is so fixated on one or three or nine institutions that they can’t see past it.
It is not a national tragedy if a high stats, highly motivated kid ends up at CMU instead of Princeton (and depending on the discipline, that school might be the better choice). It is not a “bug” in the system when the Val of your HS ends up at the Honors program at your flagship U- that’s what the taxpayers are paying for and hoping for- create an intellectual environment which keeps talented young people in-state. And it’s not “opaque” if a kid who loves Swarthmore or Amherst (tiny schools with very small student bodies) has to also apply to Bates, Middlebury and Franklin and Marshall which have many of the same qualities as Swat or Amherst but which are slightly easier statistical admits.
The parameters of the race are actually easy to discern. Show me a kid with tippy top scores and grades but low on EC’s and I’ll show you Vanderbilt and Brandeis. Show me a kid who wants MIT or Cal Tech and has the goods to get in-- and I can virtually promise you that by adding Case, WPI, RPI and Missouri S&T to the list the kid is guaranteed to get the kind of technical and scientific rigor that he or she is looking for.
Etc. The average person is only clueless because they convince themselves that if they can’t afford NYU their life is over, or if they end up at Holy Cross instead of Georgetown they’ll spend their lives in abject poverty and miserable.
It’s not too tough. No other country in the world where you can identify the drivers of what you want in a college education and then find a wide range of options that deliver on that.
“In the US, the average person is completely clueless and even those who spend a lot of time figuring it out could be off by a long ways.”
This. I think I’ve spent quite a lot of time figuring things out but its come as a shock to realize that the school you go to can count for a lot. If your school has a good relationship with a particular college (in our case Berkeley) then many of the top kids will get in. If it doesn’t and there are many other schools around with a similar demographic mix and better reputation that do (in our case the Ivies), then you are likely to be out of luck, however good the kids’ scores/grades/ECs. So it feels like a lot of kids have been wasting their time and getting their hopes up for no reason.
Of course our school has no reason to mention this situation as it would put people off going there. Its one reason I’m trying to persuade them that encouraging applications to UK schools (which don’t care at all about the reputation of our school) is an option they should highlight more widely to top students.
Wasting their time? Either there is value in becoming an educated adult who knows trigonometry and has read Jane Austen or there isn’t. And if you’ve got kids who are under the impression that the only reason to finish HS is to get into Berkeley than that’s the problem- not the one you cite.
@makemesmart & @Twoin18 :
I actually find it fascinating that Americans are actually more cynical and accepting of corruption in college admissions than people from countries that tend to rate worse on a corruption index. I spoke with an American co-worker once who had trouble believing that there are some other countries where the very powerful/rich can’t finagle their kids in to the best Unis (like they can in the US).
Yet that really is the case. Back when Taiwan was a totalitarian dictatorship, the son of the President (who literally held life/death power over everyone in the country a that time) was appointed to a military academy because he did not do well enough on the university entrance exam to get in to the top unis in Taiwan. The sanctity of the perceived meritocracy of the entrance system was such that the President wasn’t willing to touch it.
@blossom Wasting their time on writing all those essays, visiting those colleges and paying the application fees. Not to mention the mental stress of getting your hopes up and then having them dashed.
They are stressed enough already about the future and what they will end up doing eventually. This just adds to it, its nothing to do with becoming an educated adult. Fortunately I’m more annoyed about it than my kids, they are quite level headed about things and for them its “what will be will be”. My annoyance is because I wanted to try and figure things out (since its a completely unfamiliar system to me) to take some of the pressure off in a difficult year.
@TiggerDad: Well, winning a Nobel prize requires a setup and environment for genius to shine as well.
The 4 ethnic Han Chinese Nobel laureates of the 20th century all underwent a traditional Chinese-style education in college and before (though one of them actually didn’t have to take the college entrance exam as his talent was so evident that he was automatically admitted to NTU without having to take the entrance exam). So a test-based education did not quash their potential for genius. But they could make the breakthroughs they did only after coming to the US.
@Twoin18: Yes, in short, the (private) American elites try to find kids who will contribute to campus life and become leaders in all walks of life. The top British unis try to find kids who will become experts in specific academic fields.
Two- you can post your kids stats here and the wise crowd can create a list of 30+ schools where your kids are virtually auto-admits (assuming that some teacher doesn’t write that your kid is a violent sociopath). After that, if your kids want to try to get admitted to 2-3 of the Uber competitive schools-- then go for it. But that’s 3 essays which are likely to be 99% recycled. And you don’t need to visit until you get accepted. And the fees for 2-3 colleges, yes that’s annoying and expensive. But you don’t need to apply to a reach school.
If you are setting yourselves up for applying to 12 or 15 mega competitive colleges then yes- you are in for a very stressful year. But that has nothing to do with the HS your kid attends, or how it’s viewed by adcom’s. Any kid applying to that many mega competitive schools is going to be stressed.
It is really OK to apply to 6 colleges where you know your kid is likely to be admitted and then a few reaches.
It’s really ok.
Don’t want to digress but…“The 4 ethnic Han Chinese Nobel laureates of the (entire) 20th century” as opposed to over 330 Nobel laureates from the U.S. is to support MY argument or yours? 
@blossom, I agree with you that no other country offers the wealth of higher education options that the US does.
But what you are saying is “it’s not opaque at all if only you knew that there are 30 other tech schools that could potentially give you the rigor (though not the alumni or cachet) of MIT (and in what fields) or if you only knew the strengths and weaknesses of various honors colleges or if you only knew about the academics of some 50 different LACs (which, honestly, the vast majority of Americans have not heard of)”. I mean, who doesn’t know all that by age 15!
And after all that . . . it’s still opaque, because a ton of “ordinary amazing” kids still wouldn’t know if they will end up at an Ivy/equivalent, near-Ivy, in-state option (albeit one that may have an honors college) or somewhere in between.
Perhaps because here, in comparison to some countries where if you don’t get into the top 3 you’re toast, it is not such a huge deal which uni you attend.
@TiggerDad: It supports mine because for pretty much the entire 20th (and 19th) century, China did not have anything close to the academic infrastructure (or the economic or technological or political infrastructure) that would allow potential geniuses to make Nobel-earning discoveries. Heck. Vast numbers of the population were illiterate and malnourished. I am positive that there were literally hundreds if not thousands of Chinese born in the 20th century who, if they had been born in the US, would have gone on to earn a Nobel Prize.