Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
High achievement, I'm all for. There are some young people in this area who are remarkable athletes, scholars, and musicians. ...

The lower SES but high ability kids, now they are the ones that most need the individual scholarships and such in order to garner reasonably good educational opportunities. But they sure don't get them with these kinds of shenanigans going on.

... But I do think that I'm not crazy to think this is way wrong.

I've been ruminating about this problem and I think that basically, the entire system is a caricature of a disaster. Getting into the right kindergarten, shelling out thousands for professional college counselors, and trips to Italy designed primarily as fodder for application essays are all evidence of this assertion.

People can analyze the details of this situation, but I suspect that individual problems merely morph as people focus attention on them and force the colleges to "address" them.

The way I see it, it's kind of like the way that big food works. BigFoodCo, Inc. removes fat from processed product X when people are wound up about fat, but substitutes in sugar and salt as replacements. Then it makes "health" claims about the new product. It's not like the food is suddenly good for you. It's still bad for you, only now it has a label proclaiming FAT FREE!* and *a note about fat and heart disease. In five years, the fat will be back and the label will say REDUCED SUGAR!* and *the note will refer to diabetes. It's all about the problem of the moment. The underlying broken process doesn't change.

IMO, it's the same with the US education system. So long as admissions are subjective, the colleges will continue to find ways to make admissions harder or easier for the problem groups of the moment. The groups in question will change, but the underlying broken approach will remain. The problem is that people allow the colleges to be subjective and then accept their arguments about well-roundedness without really asking "Wait. What does that really mean? Helicopter/Tiger parenting produces the opposite of a well-rounded person, IMO. But as HK pointed out in an earlier post, it's what's on paper that matters, and no one can tell if Mummy or Daddy wrote the essay (or the homework or even the Ph.D. thesis, and yes, I've seen examples of all three).











Last edited by Val; 05/11/13 07:03 PM. Reason: Clarity