Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Do you list DYS on a college application?

Yes, that is it exactly. I was trying and failing to get at this idea. I've seen the damage this kind of conditioning can do: good friends have spent ten years or more and gone through a lot of pain getting over it as best they can.

The worst part is that people in these situations often think that they're the only ones who aren't happy. Everyone around them is so thrilled with being the way we are --- it must be me, right? There's something wrong with me because I'm so unhappy, and it's all my fault and I don't dare talk about it. (Wrong; many or most of the people around you are acting, too).

I think it is causation. While there is no explicit filter, there is simply a strong bias towards candidates with brand name degrees.

There are simply too many highly intelligent people that did not attend a premier college for numerous reasons. Some were late bloomers, and others had poor parental advice. The smartest person I have ever known was almost pushed into a community college by his average IQ parents. And the technology field, where I worked for some time, is full of highly intelligent and successful people. I worked with a person from the University of Rhode Island who created and sold four successful companies (each one actually built and sold product, not just vaporware).

What a fun philosophical spiral... the sweet breath of anti-conformity... introspection is a particular gift of the gifted that can be nurtured to stave off but barring that and mixed in with a lack of awareness in parents of the need for it you get societies that scream for innovation from the sock puppet on one hand and while beating down and turning away the divergent, creative individuals from colleges and jobs with the other.

In order to get into a good school these days you have to spent all of your time doing things you have no interest in doing and you have to do them very well. Whether they mean anything to the student is completely irrelevant. If you can't win through your own effort, you have to cheat because victory here is critical to archive any kind of meaningful future.

Ideally, you have your parents fully supporting you and fully invested in making sure that no errors are committed because any deviation from the ideal will result in catastrophic failure (e.g. not getting into Harvard). You cannot be allowed to make mistakes or spend any time engaged in activities that are not relevant for the task at hand. If there are "holes" in your performance, you must be enabled by your parents, even if it means your parents are the ones actually completing the task and doing the work. Whether you learn anything or achieve anything using your own skill is not relevant. It's too competitive of an environment to make any mistakes at all. If you do make mistakes, they have to be covered up.

It is "all about you" because you have to prove that you *are* better than everyone else within the specific confines of what the college admissions people are looking for. You simply don't have time for anything other than activities whose sole purpose is to create the ideal college application.

You then repeat this same set of activities for graduate school.

Did I get this right?

Am I missing anything?

Nope. That seems to cover it.

Which means, of course, that those of us who don't play the game via deliberately "opting out" yet still have kids that LOOK like those other kids...

wind up with kids that feel that they are probably just about "average" in every way.

That's an unfortunate thing. But in my mind, it's nowhere near as unfortunate as that kind of enmeshed, nitro-fueled hyper-parenting and the kind of anxiety and ennui that I see it producing in kids.

So if that means that choosing NOT to Tiger-parent means that my kid looks like every other Ivy applicant, rather than her "personal best" under this bizarre new system, I still think that I'm going to choose to allow her a real childhood. She puts plenty of pressure on herself without much help from us in this respect.

She also chooses to do certain kinds of community service all on her own. You know, because it makes her feel good to HELP OTHERS? (Unusual concept these days, I know...)

Yeah, I make her practice the piano. Thirty minutes a day, I mean. I also don't choose what she plays. She likes some pretty odd stuff, honestly. Right now she's into variations-- extemporaneously-- on Billy Joel and Elton John, with Gershwin and Grieg thrown in. That's fine. It's personal expression and it's really who she is.


That's me. Sometimes we doubt ourselves. After all, neither of us has an Ivy league pedigree. What if it really does matter as much as "The Machine" seems to want us to think??

Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about that one.

When you actually look hard at admission rates at elite colleges, they aren't THAT low, either. A lot of them admit fully 20-40% of applicants. It isn't as competitive as parents are sometimes being led to believe. I think a lot of this is parents being whipped into a competitive frenzy.

(As Jon has so brilliantly and playfully noted above.)

I think you summed it up pretty well.

I would also add, "And then after that, you wonder why you're so unhappy."

This looks like a book about this particular problem.

"The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids"

http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Privilege-Generation-Disconnected/dp/0060595841

I guess it really depends on what the college is hoping to achieve isn't it? If all that is important to the college is to turn out the most academically advanced students then using only exams for admissions is fine, however, I think that's not the ultimate goal of most colleges.

I think most colleges are looking to turn out successful individuals who are productive, happy, and strong in mind, body, and spirit. That is more likely to happen when the prospective student has already demonstrated they can achieve that criteria prior to college with college being an expansion and continuation rather than the start of everything but academic success.

Basing college admissions on exam results would certainly be an option, however, then look what we've forced students into doing for college admissions....doing nothing but study to the test in order to be competitive. Is that what we really want? Narrowing it completely down to how well you've studied / ability to meet the demands of one test? Do you think that makes for a well rounded and happy individual? Do we want students to wait until their in college to explore anything else but academics? I certainly don't.

Even if your goals are strictly academic, basing admissions only on exam results is suboptimal, because studies have always found that the best predictor of college grades is a COMBINATION of standardized test scores and high school grades, NOT test scores alone. Based on her previous messages I think Val envisions exams that are different from the SAT or ACT (they would be primarily essay exams), but I don't think these results would change.

Both high school grades and test scores load on intelligence. Grades have a higher loading on persistence and diligence than test scores do, and these qualities certainly matter for college success.

Somehow emotional maturity and stability needs to be taken into account, too.

I had high test scores and high grades, however I completely collapsed in college because of a failure to adapt to the social and academic environment. Essentially, I had no ability or knowledge how to self-regulate.

In hindsight, there was no sense whatsoever in wasting a perfectly good engineering scholarship on me.