I note I think this is part of the practical wisdom behind encouraging kids NOT to go to one of the hyper-popular and hyper-expensive coastal metros for college. At least see that a full life is in fact possible outside of those areas.
I’ll never forget a family trip from where we grew up in the Upper Midwest to California to see my mother’s relatives (she grew up in the Bay Area). My cousins asked us questions like whether we had microwaves yet where we lived. They were not bad kids, they just had this peer-reinforced impression of “flyover” country that was wildly inaccurate.
But of course the parents/kids open to that concept are not really in the Hunger Games mentality to begin with. I mean, my goodness, some of these supposedly excellent colleges and universities have a 30% acceptance rate! Even higher! How good could they possibly be . . . .
I have a friend who now bemoans her adult child’s “situation” because the two granddaughter share a bedroom (it’s apparently a situation? Are the psychiatric wards of our country filled with adults who had to share a bedroom as a child?). I try to be sympathetic. But this thread is helping me- it is APPARENTLY a phenomenon that it’s not enough to raise and educate a kid to become a productive adult… the goalposts of parental success (a house that’s nicer or bigger than the one they were raised in) have moved-- I guess while I was busy being proud of my kids for their volunteerism, being good community members, political activism, etc. in addition to their “day jobs” of earning a living at something they find interesting and isn’t morally questionable, and paying taxes.
Got it.
But a tree doesn’t grow to the sky, people. Look around at the scions of the “founding families” or the great-grandchildren of the robber barons or the names on the social register to see how many generations it takes for the “upwardly mobile” to become the decadent rich and then the merely middle class!
It is not required for you to agree with the pessimism of most Americans about their kids’ future to be able to understand it, or understand how that can result in a more competitive society.
I think your observations are also underscoring the peer competition in question is not always just happening between the kids, but also sometimes between parents and their peers, with the battleground being their kids.
Of course being proud of your kids is fine. But as you are suggesting, what you focus on being proud about is a significant choice. And again I think parental choices on that subject are often very clear to kids, obviously when explicitly stated, but even when left unsaid.
Immigrant here, and have moved countless times for job advancement. D26 has lived in 4 different states in her short life. Staying in her “hometown” is totally foreign to her as well.
A lot of this has to do with today’s Internet hyper-connectivity - the ease with which one can apply to 20-30 colleges with one application or send out 400 resumes with a single click. The system is flooded with applications, not applicants.
Agree with you- 100%. And as I pointed out upthread- since I grew up in a town which used to be filled with “regular” people and is no longer affordable to “regular” people- I get it.
But there are systemic things which make a society more competitive (the scramble for clean water, air, other natural resources) and things which people CHOOSE to make competitive. If you’re in sub-Saharan Africa, the scarcity could literally be life or death. The choice that someone makes to settle in the Bay Area vs. Tulsa OK, or to WANT to live in Montclair NJ vs. forty miles south where houses are cheaper-- to me, that’s fueling the competitive fervor and then bemoaning that same fervor.
To go back to my bad example-- you can ONLY be happy teaching French in ONE HS in a hyper expensive place called Greenwich CT and you need to either decide to “trade down” and live in a close-by downscale town (Portchester for example- next door to Greenwich-- hey, they share a border!) or you have a long commute out to New Haven county where you can afford to live? What about the choice to just NOT focus on how happy you’ll be in Greenwich and decide to be happy in one of the pretty and leafy suburbs of Hartford, up the interstate an hour and a half away? Or be really radical and move to an even more affordable town further away from the NYC metro?
I understand what fuels the competition. I just don’t buy into the scarcity argument here. We are mostly talking about college educated professionals who could work in many places-- if they want a lower cost of living. And to decide “Bay Area or bust” or “NYC or my life isn’t worth living” or “If I can’t afford a close-in suburb of Boston my life is a waste and I’ve defied the entire American Dream” seems like a cop-out to me.
There are many things that otherwise happy and successful people understand they can’t afford. I have trouble grasping that buying a house in the Bay Area is somehow different from all these other things that many people understand are not in their budget. And the fact that THIS is driving people’s pessimism? Not climate change, rising sea levels, reduced bio-diversity, geo-politics, our system of voting and due process-- no, we are pessimistic about our kids and their suburban split level, nobody shares a bedroom and all bathrooms are en suite? This is the tipping point for the American Dream???
As an immigrant married to an immigrant, competition has been ingrained in us. We were competing with those with trust funds, family connections, and had to figure out how to compete with less than a full deck. We went to state schools for undergrad because they were affordable. I went to a private grad school because I had saved a long time to afford. it.
My spouse is a physician in an extremely competitive specialty. Not only did he have to get into med school, then there was residency match, fellowship match and then competing for the coveted academic job. Then competing for promotion. Grants. Tenure. Invitation to chair a conference. Lead author on a journal article.
We unwittingly modeled this for D26. She sees the world as a competition, and while she resents it, it’s the only life she’s known. She’s seen our rejections and failures firsthand. I’m not sure if she views rejection as synonymous with pessimism, but just a way of life.
I worry about how she will adjust to college after growing up with participation trophies so readily doled out and rampant grade inflation. The reality check might be harsh.
“Several of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a superselective college, the rat race would be over. On the contrary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
To me this quote suggests that many people, including some young students and their parents, might not understand what highly ranked and highly selective universities are about. They are not about “sit back and relax and watch while you get an excellent education”. They are more about tough classes and homework and competition. If you are attending a university where every student was in the top 5% of their high school, and half of the students were either #1 or #2 in the high school, there is going to be competition.
There is an old saying that attending MIT is like drinking water from a fire hose. This is what you should expect if you attend a “top 10” university. It is not supposed to be easy.
Perhaps this is an issue with rankings. Rankings make it look like #1 is better than #2, which is in turn better than #3, and so on. Reality is a lot more complex than that.
Exactly.
Perhaps I have two main reactions.
One is that it was probably always like this, at least to some extent, but the Internet and other media make it easier for us to understand this and talk about it. There were plenty of young people who experienced rejection after rejection 30 or 50 or 80 years ago. Today we get to talk about it.
My other reaction is that we can each do what little we can to try to give a more realistic view of what it is like to attend a highly ranked university. I had the perhaps slightly unusual experience of attending one highly ranked university that was probably not a good fit for me just because I wasn’t ready yet for such an intense experience. Then after graduating and working for a couple of years I attended a different highly ranked university that was a good fit for me (and loved it). A very large part of why this second school was a good fit was that I knew what I was getting into and was ready for it and I wanted to do it.
To the extent that students are reading our posts, perhaps we can point out what it is like to attend a highly ranked and highly competitive and stressful school, and let students decide for themselves whether or not they want to do it.
100%. I went to college overseas, but it was one of these. You have a class full of people used to being at the top of their class, and suddenly most of them are middle of the pack, and some of them are at the bottom. I get that in one sense it’s first world problems, but it can be a hard adjustment for a teenager. And let’s not forget that these are teens that we are talking about, still finding their way in the world.
To me, there is nothing wrong with being competitive, ambitious and striving to be the best. It is important though where you pick your shots and defining realistic goals. We have always told our kids, as long as you gave it your best shot and are better for the effort, that is success. I think the problem lies with people confusing certification with achievement (and I think a lot of this has to do with participation trophies).
Same thing with elite college education. Yes, you are now no longer the smartest kid in the room, and maybe you have no shot graduating summa, but I guarantee you that if you treat your classmates as resources to better understand the subject matter of your classes and to see how others approach and solve problems, you will come out of that college better prepared for any career/life than going to a school where you are still the smartest kid in the room.
Which brings to mind the Michael Dell quote:
”Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room.”
More random thoughts on the topic of rejection & college students:
the hyper-focus of some on “elite college/university or bust”, in my opinion, creates this perception of scarcity. That there are fewer college spots available across the US. The opposite is actually true. There’s a lot of opportunity out there if you’re willing to just think outside the box and see beyond 20-25 institutions.
just like in recent years in the computer science/engineering tech job sector, college grads often hyper-focused on an elite small list of employers. And the attitude was “I will only be happy at Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/etc. and I can only be happy live in the SF Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Seattle, or Chicago.” In other words, all high cost of living areas.
AND there’s often been a hyper-focus amongst some people of “I can only be happy living in CA or NYC,” regardless of whether they’re in the tech job sector or not.
BUT…those are all choices. Nobody is forcing these people to only live in CA or NYC. There are other less expensive choices available. Consider banking/financial services industry, for example: Charlotte, NC, Des Moines, IA, Phoenix metro area in AZ are all options with a good amount of Big Bank jobs.
You want a fancy job in finance somewhere? There’s a boatload of really excellent public universities that have really good track records of their graduates landing full time jobs in finance at graduation. It isn’t just Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, etc.
You want to go to med school? Great. So does practically every other bio major in the US. Going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, etc. isn’t going to guarantee you get accepted. You could do pre-med at other places. Like my work colleague’s future daughter-in-law…she starts med school later this year and she graduated from ASU.
It’s sort of like my sister’s friend has said…people often build their own cages around themselves. Like somebody we know who lives in the San Diego area. Lives in a house she inherited from her deceased parent. Works at a job that pays ~$60-65k/yr. Her spouse earns ~$75k/yr. The marriage is bad enough that she’s considered divorce, but she stays in the relationship because she feels she has no other choice but to stay because she can’t afford to support even herself (not including their 2 kids) on her salary. She could get a job in another state and NOT have to struggle to make ends meet if she’d consider moving. But leaving San Diego is out of the question for her because “I couldn’t live anywhere else unless the weather was just like it is here.” Well, ok, then. That’s a choice. She built this imaginary cage around herself.
I feel bad for college students at these elite institutions who feel the way the students in this article do. Regular every day existence must be intensely stressful. Always feeling like you can’t ever relax, how you always have to be hustling, improving, doing something better than everybody else because you have it in your head that success & happiness = this very very narrow definition.
It is not just about the upper middle class kids who want to move up to the upper class.
Reduced opportunity and increased competition also affects the families whose where middle income parents (in precarious jobs in declining industries) in economically declining locations have kids who are desperately trying to avoid falling into the poor. Of course, it may not manifest itself in elite college admissions, elite college clubs, elite finance employment, etc.. But it is unlikely that those kids are being picky about location, but are more limited by lack of resources (parents unable to help with college or other job training that is increasingly expected to be done at the applicant’s own expense, and unable to help with relocation).
My experience has been so different from most posters. After arriving in the United States, the immigrants on both sides of my family have prioritized staying close to home over moving across country in search of better job opportunities. It would be unthinkable to prioritize a higher paid job over raising your kids near their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Family members might not have stayed in the same town as they grew up, but most stayed in a 10-30 mile radius and the rest stayed in the same region of the country.
Also, while I don’t particularly feel sorry for kids at elite schools, based on my kids’ experience, the competitive culture of those schools really has ramped up in recent generations. I went to one of the HYPMS universities. My two oldest are also both at different HYPMS universities. I’m not particularly surprised that it was (likely) harder for my kids to get into those schools than it was for me decades ago --that makes sense because it is just a numbers game with more applicants, admissions rates have plummeted. However, I’ve been shocked by my daughters’ descriptions of the competitive social and extracurricular culture at their colleges. I didn’t experience anything like that sort of competition to participate in extracurricular opportunities as an undergraduate. At the same time, I don’t get the sense that my kids are finding their classroom experience particularly cutthroat. They’ve had friendly, collaborative classmates, and they’ve found it easy to join study groups. So their academic experience inside the classroom has been quite similar to what mine was. It is the social/extracurricular stuff that seems needlessly stressful and competitive for no reason that I can understand. Anyway, I don’t know that my kids regret their college choices, but it has been quite eye opening and a culture shock after their K-12 schooling. They both attended k-12 schools that actively discouraged competition. There were no participation trophies or honors because nobody got a trophy for anything!
I’m not sure the average immigrant experience involves having the entire extended family (as you describe it) around you close to (your new) home. Certainly ours doesn’t, and neither do most of those I know. So that’s not a trade-off many of us even need to think about.
I grew up in a blue collar town, and I moved to a more affluent suburb in high school. I was always top of my class, but I didn’t have parents or teachers telling me I needed to do this or that (volunteering, leadership activities, etc). I got into a competitive school and got my butt kicked academically freshman year. I had to figure out how to study, how to ask my profs or classmates for help understanding things … and believe me, my parents weren’t there helicoptering for me (they had no clue I was struggling because they didn’t ask & I didn’t tell). My choices were to figure it out or flunk out. I worked incredibly hard to figure it out.
I didn’t extend the lessons I learned to my kids. Oh, I did somewhat. But in retrospect, I should have allowed them to struggle more than I did before swooping in to help. It took them a bit longer than it took me to figure things out on their own, but they did. All I care about is that they can take care of themselves financially … what they do in life is their business. I do not and will not brag about what they do or what they “have.” However, I have a number of acquaintances who do that. I hope that their kids don’t feel like they have to live up to their parents’ standards to consider themselves successful in their lives.
With apologies to those whose children will always require their assistance .., that’s different. I have family members who will be involved in their children’s lives for the long haul because they must.
But maybe most parents are. I mean, are we assuming that these attitudes are coming primarily from the parents? Or are they coming from the students themselves? Your friend aside, maybe its more the students’ own expectations, rather than something being imposed on them by their parents?
I dunno. It’s hard to make generalizations. I was a blue-collar mama’s boy and it would have been a hardship for me to move away from New York City for the sake of a job. I often wonder if it was my ivy league law degree that allowed me to stay close by. None of my friends from high school came back home after college. And, somewhat perversely, every single one of my close friends today were born somewhere else.
I think this is a profound point-- and goes back to the suggestion (made by me, so apologies that I am quoting myself) that so much of this rejection angst is self-imposed.
If the academics are collaborative; the student body is friendly; study groups are open and welcoming… classroom experience is not cuthroat… then we are NOT talking about institutional type competitive fever, are we? We’re talking about kids CHOOSING the competitive playing field and then feeling rejection and disappointment if they aren’t at the top of the heap!
So choose differently! Don’t try to get into the a cappella group which tours Europe on Spring Break because they have an international following and which is uber competitive. Love to sing? Join the less competitive group (and yes, all colleges have the “if you love music we love you” types of groups). Don’t shoot your shot at the consulting club, the finance club, the social club/eating club where the beautiful people join. And before you tell me that it’s necessary to join these pre-professional clubs in order to get a job-- no. I’ve hired for a top three global consulting firm AND in finance, and ZERO times has a Managing Director or Managing Partner said 'Oh, we have to hire Joanne, look, she was in the consulting club!"
Students have created their own hierarchy of anxiety with these competitive opportunities. And I guess only students can stop it. This isn’t actual scarcity- this is manufactured “OMG, when the music stops I won’t have a place to sit” musical chairs.