Of course, they don't say things like, "I am smarter than you" on them. They just list the school or the program and most of them have bright and colorful designs on them.
I'd guess that most people don't know that summer programs for 7th graders who score at certain levels on the SAT/ACT exist. Our schools certainly don't publicize them. So if your child shows up wearing a CTY t-shirt it may make little impression. I'm aware of CTY, of course, and have written about the SAT being largely an IQ test, so to me, a child wearing a CTY t-shirt DOES make a statement about smarts. (Younger students will have taken another test such as SCAT or Explore, but they are all g-loaded.) I don't have a problem with that.
People wear clothing and attach bumper stickers with university logos, which is similar to going around with a gifted program t-shirt. I suspect that if parents were somehow forbidden to ever mention where their children were going to college, applications to HYPS would fall by a decent fraction
. Advertising that one attended a gifted program does not seem better or worse to me than advertising the attendance of a prestigious university.
