I think Val is right-- COLLEGES have to step up. Because UM is also right-- as long as there is a gold ring, parents are going to keep eyeing that prize.
I worry that limits to keep things sane will only make some parents that much crazier to push on stuff they still control, though.
It's interesting, the number of people in my DD's "elite" group of highly credentialed high school classmates (she didn't go to the local-local high school, by the way, but an online one)-- only one of them in her year in the top 10 wound up GOING to an Ivy or Elite college. Only two in the year before her. (Vassar and Princeton). These were her cohort-- all of them highly capable, btw, as one of them is apparently already going after a Rhodes now. ALL of them got into elite schools. ALL of them.
My point is that MOST of those students opted to choose the solid, but less flashy, route through college-- public universities with pretty elite honors programs, private schools which are less well-known, that sort of thing. Many of them got full merit scholarships at those institutions, and are thriving there.
I personally am now convinced that as hard as it is, the real solution lies in more parents waking up and smelling the coffee in this way-- saying, hey wait-a-minute, this is NUTS. There is a great college just an hour away, you don't have to live your life doing a high-wire act for ten years when you should be enjoying your youth, and you'll be able to find your people there and in grad school, and it won't saddle you with half a lifetime of debt servitude, either. Enjoy {activity-that-has-no-resume-value}, kiddo.
I knew that things were very, very warped when DD somehow gathered the notion in fifth grade that she needed, at just 8 years old, to know "what she planned to do with her life," and worried that adding a second musical instrument might "not look as good as the focus on {primary instrument}." Yowza. This is stuff that she was picking up on from her friends' families, who very much follow that grabbing-at-the-ring approach. I knew that we needed to reevaluate when we began thinking of missing activities as a trade off between parenting and discipline, and making her miss things that had resume potential. (Yeah-- ouch. No, we eventually chose that missing the line item was the right thing if she needed to be disciplined.)
Those are the kinds of things that parents really do think in places like this, though. The judgment from others is HARSH. Acceleration, even, is seen as push-parenting (possible abuse) by some, and as a coveted prize (how did you get them to do that? Who made the decision? What's the secret??) by others.
It isn't about gifted programming. That's merely one of the many tools in the over-zealous parenting arsenal. If the level of busy-work involved in my DD's high school classes was any indication, there are simply a lot of kids being PUSHED to do things that they are utterly unsuited for. She sees them in college, too. They live with continuous shame and guilt that they aren't living up to their parents' expectations of them. It's incredibly sad.
