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

Parents Forum
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If you are just planning the first college exploration road trip, some suggestions:

  1. Avoid the big names for now. They are too complicated for a first road trip, the names themselves overwhelm the experience.

  2. You don’t need names now, you need a sense of TYPE. Visit a convenient LAC, a state flagship, a big research university, maybe a school known for engineering. See how your son reacts. What size school does he like; a city, suburb or more remote? Big or small class size? Is diversity important? You are basically trying to find a type of place where he feels comfortable and can succeed. You should at least be able to cross out a few categories after visiting various types of schools.

  3. Run net price calculations and see if good need based aid will help you at well endowed private schools. If not, it helps to know ahead of application time that you will likely pay full freight at top privates (60K a year plus personal expenses and enrichment trips at many)

  4. Also look into the big well known early scholarship/merit programs thru Robertson, Duke, and others. Those applications will be due very early senior year, including essays and letters. For a supportive, involved family and willing student, these programs are great opportunities with very high status if awards are received (they are time consuming to apply to though, with lots of little details to track down).

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I taught at a number of schools over a 20-year univ teaching career: USC, UCLA, etc.
There are more than a few issues with this discussion.
It’s assumed that you mean “could have a competitive chance of gaining acceptance”.
The discussion of GPA is pretty far off base. You almost always go to the best school where you can be accepted, subject to location, financial, and interest constraints and preferences.
If you have a chance to go to Harvard or Stanford, it’s hard to imagine not going. That experience and education establishes a foundation for successful careers in almost anything you choose. One of the reasons is that they’re expert in identifying the best and brightest students in the world. If they want you, go.
Part of the issue for your son is that he’s choosing now for himself later and ho will,likely see things differently.
Good,luck. He sounds to he firmly imbedded in his mis perception of reality. He’s certainly allowed to have preferences, but when they’re based on spurious notions about grades, etc., it’s unlikely you’ll be able to change his mind. Life, after all, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Good luck!

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@SanjayinSanJose, once your son gets accepted in various schools, I’d encourage you to ask this question in the specific schools’ forums.

If you ask people who didn’t go to Ivies if your son should go to an Ivy or elsewhere, of course they’re going to say that you’ll be fine without an Ivy degree.’’

If you ask Ivy students/parents/alumni where to go, it’s more likely that they’ll recommend the Ivy.

Having gone to an Ivy for one degree and a non-Ivy for another, I’d say that, “perhaps an Ivy will help, and a non-Ivy isn’t necessarily going to result in high grades, but before turning down the best-ranked school where your son applies, consider it carefully, and you should refuse to pay for tuition at a school you don’t approve of, if you’re sure that it will really hurt him to go there.”

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Are you using the word Ivy to refer to those very specific 8 schools, or are you using the word Ivy as shorthand for really excellent school? Because very few parents on these boards who actually attended Ivies think that their kids should “only” go to Ivies, but they are fans of really excellent schools - 8 of which just so happen to be Ivies.

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Your son sounds like a VERY smart kid who has thought things through. My personal bent is that liberal arts colleges are the best choice for undergraduate education and that the universities (including the Ivies and Stanford) are great places to go to graduate or professional school. I would definitely check out what the liberal arts schools (Pomona, CMC, Harvey Mudd, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, etc.) have to offer if I were you. I would also look at schools like Rice. My Indian friends tease me because I’m always so enthusiastic about their older (and more brilliant) son going to Williams whereas they are more excited about their younger son going to Duke. We’ll see in the end who got the better education and experience. Best of luck to you.

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“We do not think it is worth our dimes to visit any school before our child got in. (And we were full pay parents for the first two years!)” - Every family needs to make a judgement on this.

For us the spread of college costs were over 40K/year. College choices was a BIG family decision. It was worth some investment to do early research. (Usually it was combined with vacations or trips to see family)

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@Pizzagirl‌ I am using ivy as a shorthand for excellent schools

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I don’t know how much my parents make or how much they have saved because they haven’t told me and if they did tell me I wouldn’t believe them because traditionally they haven’t been completely honest with us about money. But if they told me tomorrow that I could apply to an Ivy League school the first thing I’d do is figure out how much it cost and the second thing I’d do is not trust them.

I plan on going to an in-state Public University and I’m still terrified it will break the bank and ruin my family. My parents keep telling me everything will be alright but that’s what they said when grandpa was sick and the last time they took the dog to the vet and the time my mom lost her job and the time my dad’s company merged with another company. And nothing was ever alright.

How honest have you been with your kid about money, not just recently but overall over the years? Like I said, I don’t trust my parents about money because they’re not honest about money and i’m deeply concerned that the public universities I’m looking at will cost too much. So be honest with him and (just as importantly) back up your honesty with paperwork.

If my parents told me I could attend any school I wanted tomorrow they’d have to back it up with bank statements and investment data or else I wouldn’t believe them.

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Yes, but there are plenty of reasons to do it, too. Neither of my kids ended up attending the highest ranked school they were admitted to, and both thrived in the schools they chose. At least one of them probably could have been admitted to even high ranked schools had she wanted to apply. I don’t think either would choose the higher ranked schools if they went back, either. Now… they didn’t pick a school ranked in the 500s, either. So they didn’t jump off a cliff to a place that wasn’t academically up to par. But there are plenty of reasons not to pick the highest ranked school – fit, relative academic strengths, and cost are among them. The HYPS/Ivy or bust mentality is idiotic.

@EntranceExamGuy, you might want to start your own thread…

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Have not read the entire thread, but do we have any hard data (GPA, test scores, EC’s etc) or is this just a hypothetical exercise?

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No hard data…and also no info on the son’s choices…which could be just fine.

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Maybe @miamidap has some advice for @sanjayinsanjose from the perspective of an immigrant parent with a med school child.

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Responding to the thread title. There is no “could attend an Ivy” until the son actually receives an acceptance.

Right now, this is all speculation.

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Your son is right. Listen to him.

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Injecting a dose of reality here: “American society” most definitely bows down to the Ivy Leagues, as do academics around the world. And for good reason: the Ivy League schools possess the greatest concentration of the best minds in the country. There is no use denying that truth and only in our participation-trophy-loving society would people keep insisting that Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Stanford (yes, Ivy League West) are no different than your local wonderful public university or your local wonderful private university. The Ivy League schools are quite different in so many ways. It is perfectly rational for the OP and members of his community to aspire, on behalf of their kids, for the Ivy League. Those schools still represent the best and, despite some deviations from time to time (usually in the form of moronic public servants who graduated from the Ivy League and have no common sense, inflicting their idiocy on the rest of us), world-changing things come out of those universities. Who would not want the best of the best?

And the condescension towards him and his community for feeling this way is quite astounding. I have many Indian friends from the time I lived in the Silicon Valley, and have Indian friends here in Florida, and all I know is that their desire to provide for a great education for their kids, and their willingness to make a lot of sacrifices in order to accomplish this, is to be admired, and more American parents could learn from their examples. The children I know, with whom my kids are friends, are delightful, well-adjusted, involved in the community, friendly, hard-working, and I could go on but I won’t. If that is what one gets from encouraging excellence in one’s children, what’s the problem?

There is a difference between encouraging excellence in one’s children and living vicariously through them, forcing one’s own aspirations on them. I know plenty of American parents who are the worst when it comes to this vicarious living.

Sure, are there plenty of Americans who understand that one does not have to go to an Ivy League in order to have a happy life? Well, of course, particularly since the great majority of Americans have never attended an Ivy League, and a significant majority of those Americans would never have received offers to attend the Ivy League. Yes, there are plenty of opportunities for people who attend non-Ivy-League schools. And there are plenty of students, who, while as brilliant as any Ivy League student, did not pursue an Ivy League education for many reasons.

To the OP, I think it is great that you are listening to your son and you are working to understand where he is coming from and it sounds like you are willing to come to a point where you would support your son’s decisions, as you should. It is his life afterall. Your son is very blessed. Just keep listening to him. Your name indicates that you live in San Jose, as in the San Jose smack dab in Silicon Valley, I presume. Well, having lived there myself for over a decade, I know what kind of atmosphere exists. Silicon Valley is exciting, but a very unusual place compared to other parts of the country. Talk about a concentration of some of the smartest, most energetic, most entrepreneurial, not to mention the richest people in the country. There are just some built-in conformist assumptions held by many that certain schools, certain extracurriculars, certain professions are the “best.” The more exclusive a part of the Silicon Valley one lives in, the more pressure to hold on to that conformist thinking. At the same time, there are so many rule-breakers and out of the box thinkers. These two ways of thinking butt up against each other all the time.

Sounds like you have helped your son lay a solid foundation for his life. He has loving parents who listen to him and respect him. He has excelled with his education. He is an independent thinker (major kudos to you for encouraging that.) He is going to do just fine wherever he goes. Just keep listening to him. Maybe he just loves the Bay Area. I don’t blame him, and there are plenty of great schools there (and, no, Stanford is not the only good choice! though I admit it’s gorgeous - save it for grad school.) Help him express his fears, if he has them, about the level of competition, or perhaps he fears disappointing you. He’s not the first kid to fear carrying the burden of his parents’ hopes and dreams on his shoulders.

I can’t speak for the heaven-like qualities of Cambridge, but I am plenty familiar with Palo Alto, and I am so thankful that Palo Alto is not heaven on earth. I have found plenty of heavens on earth since leaving my home state, and they all came free of the burdensome taxes, the absurd housing prices, and the life-sucking traffic :slight_smile:

Best of luck to you, your family, and, most especially, your son.

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@SanjayinSanJose‌, I saw some pretty mean responses in this thread. Some folks think they are helpful that way…

I posted something similar because my daughter couldn’t decide between GaTech (170k), which is the number 1 school in Industrial Engineering in the US and I believe #7 in the world, and a full tuition scholarship at Ohio State University. She has almost the same arguments as your son. My sisters and I are all pushing for GaTech, but in the end I asked everyone to back off, me included. I do not want to be blamed if things don’t work out well for her in college. So I’m waiting, giving guidance, doing the research about other schools that have accepted her like UIUC -Urbana Champaign (ranked #1 in Civil Engineering). Just trying to be a supportive mom.

We always want the best for our children - to have the opportunities we didn’t have, to attain the dreams we could not reach, but sometimes our dreams are not theirs.

Hope ths helps :smile: Cheers!

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If your son plans to return to India, then getting a degree from prestigious undergraduate is important. But U.S is more generous and puts higher value on students’ graduate degree. I recommend you asking your son whether he would want to get a job in America or to return to his country and work there. But I bet your son has talents and passion to contribute himself no matter where he gets the job.

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There’s no condescension, Chesterton. No one is denying that the ivies are great schools. Its that the OP’s son DOESNT want to go! He sounds like he has a good head on his shoulders and knows whats good for him stress wise. Sounds like the kid wants to be the top of the middle, not the middle off the top. I applaud his self awareness.

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@Pizzagirl‌
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America is different. That’s why you’re here and not there.


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Best point!!!

=D>

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Not really. There are a lot of Ivy parents here who are doing the “don’t do what I did with my kid, do what I say”.

To the OP, have your son apply to a wide range of schools including some ivies, then decide when you have choices in hand. Kids change their minds all of the time especially from Dec. to April of their senior year.