Managing student workload to Ivy AI

Ohiodad51
Mon, 16 Jul 2018 16:16:58 +0000

Quite honestly, I would not adjust your son’s academic load going into his junior year of high school on the if come that he might or might not be recruited by an Ivy school in a couple of years. First, and this is just my opinion, but unless your son is planning on a professional career, academics should never take a back seat to athletics. I think I agree that telling a driven kid who wants to learn to back off rings false. I would tend to trust my instincts on that point honestly.
Second, and speaking as a parent of a football playing STEM major at Princeton whose best friend came in as an engineer, if your son is worrying about work load now, whoa nellie, things are going to get much harder from here, both academically and athletically. So if things are getting on top of him now, I would think long and hard about whether playing Ivy football and getting an engineering degree is the right move. No offense, but there were a number of kids in my son’s recruiting class who came in as STEM majors/engineers. At this point, heading into senior year, there are only a handful who have remained in those majors, and very, very few are engineers. Third, you are building this all on two “if comes”, that your son is or will be recruitable in the Ivy and that a single C will somehow change that. I don’t know your son’s skill set, but I will say that the talent level in the Ivy is pretty high, and I don’t think that academics is as much of a leveler as people think. Even the fourth band kids are going to be very, very good athletes. Additionally, I doubt that a C on a transcript, especially with a rigorous course load, is going to make any difference at all. A D or F probably a much bigger deal. But a C in an AP class where the kid is taking several such classes a year? I can’t believe that matters.