Parents: Our Son Could Go To Ivy But Refuses. Advice?

Parents Forum
21

Agreed.

Also, somehow I has the same feeling as Xiggi after I read the original post again.

Xiggi posted:

“Neither you or your son seems to have a good grasp of the reality of today’s colleges.”

If the career goal of OP’s S is to eventually go back to his parents’ country as some kind of one of the leaders, attending one of HYPSM may give him some “edge”, I think. For example, quite a many med school students at a “brand named” med school really may have a goal beyond being a front-line doctor in their life. They may eventually want to be a leader in, say, a medical community or even in another field not in his/her training – He may even not want to use his degree in this country at all. Another example, the wife of one of my previous colleagues was a graduate from a top nursing school (maybe Duke?) Being a nurse has never been her career goal. Being a manager in some nursing facility is her career goal. If she just wants to be a nurse, she would likely not spend so much $$$ to go there. It is the same for SOME med school students who have the similar kind of goal. Whether or the pedigree of the school’s “name” is useful or not depends on the career goal, maybe not the career goal when you are young but the career goal when you are middle aged. The country where you want to develop your career goal also matters. Farther away from Ameica, the “brand name” of the school may matter more (whether it is shallow or not for a society to accept this is completely another matter.)

22

I like your son. He has figured out that prestige is not factor for him in choosing his undergraduate school. He is wisely eschewing that route. Very smart kid.

Why the prestige push now? Why those particular schools? They are pretty different. He’s right about universities - if he has the stats, he can get an excellent education for close to free at some very good schools. If he’s aiming for medical/law school, that’s definitely the wise choice.

Have you seen the cost of Harvard Medical School (let’s say he’s aiming for a prestigious medical school)?! Tuition and fees alone top $60,000. Add in another $20,000 for room and board and other indirect costs. That’s for this academic year. It will only go up, so it will be over $90,000 by the time your son graduates from college; the question is “will it break into six figures” by the time your son applies. Save your money for medical or law school.

23

It is true that the annual COA at full freight is indeed about $80’000 at HMS. (The third year is even higher, I think.)

It is however one of less than a dozen of med schools that have the need-and-unit-loan-based (NOT merit-based) scholarship FA policy. It is not as “juicy” as the FA policy at its undergraduate counterpart. But for a financially challenged family (OP’s family seems to be one of them which may benefit by this policy), this med school is actually worth it (its FA policy could be better than, say, hopkins med school) for the financially challenged.

But just like Harvard College, you need to get in first. (For such a family, attending Harvard College actually could make sense – especially if the student is not very sure about his career goal.)

24

Is your son an only child?

25

A very good question for OP.
For many somewhat financially challenged families with multiple kids, the strategy could be different. It is cruel to “favor” one kid at the expense of all other kids, when considering the allocation of financial resources for each of the kids.

26

“Whether or the pedigree of the school’s “name” is useful or not depends on the career goal, maybe not the career goal when you are young but the career goal when you are middle aged. The country where you want to develop your career goal also matters. Farther away from Ameica, the “brand name” of the school may matter more (whether it is shallow or not for a society to accept this is completely another matter.)”

Well, of course it’s shallow. Or maybe a better word is uninformed.

But we haven’t heard that going back to the home country to serve as a leader is the son’s desired path. All we know that the poster has a vague “dream” of his kid attending those 3 schools. Well, there are 30,000 other oarents who have that “dream” too but HYPSM don’t care, not should they.

27

I don’t get the feeling that this kid intends to “return to the motherland”…or did I miss something.

The student has likely looked ahead as to what the possibilities are if he goes onto law, med or grad school. If it’s med school, then he knows he has many, many years ahead of him. He likely doesn’t want to be a long term financial burden to his family, so he wants to “lighten the load,” a bit.

Having a child in med school is expensive. At least thru our son’s residency, we’ll probably still be covering his car expenses, car insurance, health insurance, cell phone, clothing, and various other expenses. He’s 23 now, by that time he’ll be around 30 years old. Most parents don’t really think that they’ll be paying for such things when their child is that old. Maybe this student has been thinking about all these things? He’d be young to be that thoughtful, but he’s already shown that he’s a thinker and planner.

The OP’s child is likely more Americanized than his parents. If so, he’s become more aware that there are many roads to success.

28

I suspect the OP is longer gone than Elvis at this point, but pour encourager les autres, allow me to question the premise. There were approximately 14.7 million students enrolled in American high schools last fall. Even with significant drop out rates in this country, it’s likely that there are around 3 million high school seniors. Both the SAT and the ACT now report more than 1.6 million test takers annually. These numbers have been growing.

In contrast, HYPSM bring in entering classes each fall that – combined – total perhaps 10,000 students, of which 10% or more tend to be internationals these days. Now, I’m going to guarantee you there are more than 9,000 tiger parents in this country, each of whom believes their kid has been “pushed . . . to become an ideal HYPSM applicant,” and more frighteningly for those of us living on suburban privilege farms, there are thousands upon thousands of other kids out there who are either just so damned smart they don’t need to be pushed to look brilliant or diamonds in the rough (e.g. first-gens) that admissions officers crave after three straight months of reviewing tiger apps

So, OP, what you really need to ask yourself is whether, given all that, you are truly confident that your special snowflake really is one of the top 20,000 or so students in the United States (after factoring in the great students who – perish the thought – go to non-HYPSM schools). Because the overwhelming probability is that you are wrong.

Or, for the TL;DR crowd, we’ll simply sum up in the words of the late, lamented Admissions Problems Tumblr: “No, your kid isn’t special at all, actually.” But, in the OP’s case, the kid seems a hell of a lot more realistic than the parents, and I tip my hat to him for that.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/education/edlife/more-students-are-taking-both-the-act-and-sat.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

29

I agree with everyone else. Your son is SO smart! get the undergrad, top of class, with Honors and awards, and THEN go to harvard if he wants. Don’t forget, IF he goes to Ivy now, and has to go to grad school, you are talking not $250,000 but more like $500,000 for total education. Let him apply everywhere he wants, and then have him apply to a couple of Ivies, he may not even get in. So wait and see.

30

Please explain why you, the parent, feels it’s Ivy or bust? Your son has done an excellent job of explaining his reasoning. So…what is yours?

HYPSM are all terrific universities. But so are hundreds of others. You say that finances will enter into the picture AND that your son anticipates professional (law or medical school) in his future. That being the case…he needs to have as little debt…none if possible…for undergrad and the best undergrad GPA possible.

You know…you can be a very successful engineer without attending a top 10 university. You can have a very successful career as well. And this might come as a news flash…but you can also be a doctor, lawyer, or anything else without ever attending a top 10, or even top 50 school.

And lastly, please let this be your son’s college search, not yours. You say you have "pushed him. Maybe he doesn’t want to be pushed through this as well. Let him do his own college application list…then politely ask him to do ONE “parent pick”…ONE. This can be one of YOUR dream schools.

31

Yes, but name recognition in foreign countries and academic ranking within the United States don’t exactly match.

Some state universities with excellent research programs seem to have a very high level of name recognition in other parts of the world, and these might be good options for a student of HYPSM caliber who prefers the advantages (and comfort) of being near the top of the class.

32

I am sorry but I beg to differ with the trend. I believe if our children are capable we should always push them to excellence. Settling for mediocrity will become his norm in life if he starts off this way. If you, his parents are willing to cover the cost, then he should grasp the opportunity. I suggest that he applies to all the schools, including the Ivy league unis…then think long and hard before he turns it down, should he get in to an Ivy League. Consider this, if he is a brilliant mind, shouldn’t he be learning and mixing with other brilliant minds, rather than wanting to float at the top of a mediocre pack?

33

If he is a brilliant mind, isn’t it likely he would have a good sense of what the proper path might be?

34

The kid has been admitted to exactly zero colleges.

OP- in my opinion, this is not a debate worth having right now. Your kid could be a potential Putnam/Nobel winner, but like everyone else, he still needs to apply, get admitted, and attend.

So like everyone else, he needs to cast a wide net for college. Create a list which includes Yale or Columbia or Stanford or whatever lottery ticket type colleges might interest him; the list will also include CMU or JHU or Northwestern or Vanderbilt (i.e. private U’s with slightly better admissions odds) plus some public U’s including both where he is an auto-admit based on his stats, plus a few others- maybe a few merit award colleges?

Make sure there is at least one (and maybe two) college on the list where he is sure to get admitted AND which you can afford without loans just in case your financial situation changes by the time he has to attend college- stock market retreats, health emergency, etc.

And then stop arguing. It is beyond pointless to debate medical school admissions (or whether it’s “worth” attending law school beyond the top 14) with a kid in HS.

Parent- you have no idea how your son will perform in either a very competitive environment, or a more relaxed one. You can’t wake him up every morning to get to an 8 am lab, and you can’t make him turn out the lights at midnight after double checking his homework. There are thousands of high potential kids at top universities who flame out every year due to partying, lack of focus, inability to recreate the infrastructure that Mom and Dad put into place at home. So you have no idea if being at a very competitive U is the right place for him.

So stop arguing, make sure he explores a wide range of colleges, and stop painting yourselves into a corner this early in the game. In a few weeks you are about to see CC explode with kids who have stats similar to (or better than) your son complaining that they didn’t get into Penn/Yale/Dartmouth/MIT (whichever school they thought they were getting into) even though someone in their class with “worse” statistics did get in. Or that even though they are ranked number 1 in their HS class, the kid who was ranked number 8 got into Brown, and that kid took one less AP course! The horror!

So dial it back. Admissions is not a function of a big linear graph which says that statistics of X yield Y results. Cast a wide net, make sure you’ve got a financial safety or two in case of economic havoc on your planning, and then go enjoy the last year and a half of having your son at home.

35

Poor kid. I have a kid who had very high stats who chose to apply to no Ivies. She found them pretentious for the most part, and wanted a school where the focus was deeply intellectual. She got in everyplace she applied, including Swarthmore, U of Chicago, and Harvey Mudd. I fully supported her choices, and she is now a happy sophomore at a non-ivy with good research experience and getting interviews for great summer internships. Let your kid be, or you will wonder why he moves far away and never calls as soon as he can.

36

Yes, I’m sure you can find a happy medium somewhere between Ivy & equivalents and Podunk State U.

37

So anything less than HYPSM is “mediocrity”? Oh, please.

38

OP here. A big “Thank You” to everybody for the input and the lively discussion.

To clarify a few of the points that have been raised:

  1. My son has neither applied nor been admitted to any Ivy schools. The discussion I posted here is in response to our plans to take a college visit trip during spring break next month. We are trying to make an agenda of schools to visit, which is the result of our wanting him to see schools where we think he will be happy and do well. This discussion on CC is the result of diverging views of where we should be looking. He is refusing to APPLY to Ivy schools for the reasons he gave in the original post.
  2. He is not an only child, but our younger daughter will not be in college at the same time. We will provide for her exactly as we have done for him.
  3. He says he is feeling a bit burned out--but we figure that this is typical teenage behavior and attitude. We expect that when he is older, he will thank us for pushing him and will have been glad for all the opportunities that come his way as a result of being an excellent student in an excellent college.
  4. He is reading CC, and now we do too. We know that even perfect applicants get rejected from top schools all the time and for reasons that will never be understood, except that there are too many great applicants and not enough seats to accommodate them all. He feels that if he is "lucky" enough to get into an Ivy, he will be incurring a great amount of debt and likely be middle of the pack or even in the bottom half of the class! He says he wants to have some fun in college and does not want to live in the library, as he expects the most outstanding scholars at Ivy schools must do.
  5. His career plans are mostly unknown, although he is gravitating to sciences. Not sure whether he will end up as an engineer, a physician, a researcher or something else. Even law has been mentioned as a possibility He's keeping an open mind, but it seems clear that unless he were to want a job where educational pedigree is important, paying for that (undergraduate) pedigree might truly not translate into more opportunities or better ones.
  6. To the poster @xiggi, yes, we realize that we don't know everything, and we are disagreeing with our son. He is a very clever boy and this discussion comes from the belief in much of our immigrant South Asian community that there are maybe five schools in the world worth attending and every other one represents more and more of a compromise. Don't know if @xiggi is an immigrant, but in our immigrant way of thinking, heaven is located in Cambridge Mass, or in Palo Alto, or in New Haven. What we are learning here on CC is that maybe our thinking needs to evolve. Maybe our son is ahead of us in his evolution and we need to catch up.

Thanks to ALL!

39

This was my question. OP’s second post makes me a little less suspicious.

Here’s my opinion: taking on a lot of debt isn’t a good idea, and the son’s view on that makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I don’t think the GPA and “middle of the pack” argument is a very good one, except (maybe) when it comes to Princeton, where there is less grade inflation.

There are some people who temperamentally prefer being a big fish in a small pond, and they should be allowed to do so.

40

I thought Berkeley was one of the five – or at least in the top ten. You live so close that it would be a shame not to use that as one of your “baseline” visits to get a sense for what a world-class state university is like from the pitfalls (larger size, less personal instruction, etc.) to the glories (reserved parking spaces for Nobel laureates!). And several of the other UCs would be the envy of my home state. You’re very fortunate there.

It sounds like you’ve got the time, space, and opening mind to help your son come up with a great list of schools. You can nudge him to take a shot at a couple of reaches – and teach him that it’s okay to try and not get in (which, I would guess, worries him a lot) – but you also can work with his preferences about less “brand name” but still excellent universities.