4 ms·

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like: Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand sc

by m_fayer 11y ago

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like: Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand school on your CV. Barring that, hope your kid will be driven/creative/wily enough to make do without that stamp of approval. Or, take the "safe" route and go full helicopter-parent, and give your children the best possible guarantee of success in the world as it currently stands. That's a brutal decision to have to make.

fsloth 11y ago
I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively. Maybe it's a US thing? We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.
  - bwilliams18 11y ago
    So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.
    - m_fayer 11y ago
      Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.
  - morgante 11y ago
    It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult. If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.
    - plonh 11y ago
      There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.
      - morgante 11y ago
        > There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.

by m_fayer 11y ago

fsloth 11y ago

I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively. Maybe it's a US thing? We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.

umanwizard 11y ago
Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.
- bwilliams18 11y ago
  So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.
  - m_fayer 11y ago
    Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.
- morgante 11y ago
  It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult. If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.
  - plonh 11y ago
    There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.
    - morgante 11y ago
      > There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.