I know I am coming into this thread fairly late (and nice to see an active thread). But I am wondering if a better way to think of the Harvard-Westlake situation is as both an implicit contract and an explicit contract.
The explicit contract at elite private schools is that they provide a rigorous education in a highly supportive environment. Kids can excel in both their academics and their activities, and their classmates are for the most part also intelligent and ambitious. Most graduates of elite private schools seem to love their school.
The implicit contract is that they provide a leg up on elite college admissions, and that school curriculum will be essentially the same as when they signed up for them. The parents grew up with an education that emphasized western civilization, and they want that for their kids as well.
Personally, I think that the "leg up on elite college admissions" part is highly overrated. It's true that a large percentage of students from a place like Harvard-Westlake go onto one of the 12 Ivy Plus colleges (Ivy League plus Duke, MIT, Stanford and UChicago). But a major reason why is that a large percentage of the students benefits from one of the preference categories at these schools (legacy, major donor, athlete in sports they like such as fencing, etc.).
After you take out these preferences, I doubt the admit rate is much better than at the elite public schools around the country. Some of these are exam schools such as Stuyvesant in New York or Boston Latin. There are also open-admission schools with fantastic reputations such as Lexington High School in Massachusetts or Palo Alto High School. My kids attended a similar public school. But these schools tend to have highly competitive environments with lots of tiger parenting. Kids endure them, not enjoy them.
Therefore I suspect that much of the aggravation comes from realizing that little Johnny or Jane is not guaranteed to get into Stanford just due to attending Harvard-Westlake, and in fact they could have just gone to Palo Alto High School or the LA equivalent instead. So at that point, they were just paying expensive tuition for a supportive environment.
Now, that supportive environment no longer exists in their mind. Rather than be told that little Johnny or Jane are entitled to become masters of the universe, they are instead told that they could be responsible for correcting past wrongs that neither they nor their parents likely had anything to do with.
If I were paying expensive tuition for that, I too would be upset.
Last edited by mithawk; 03/13/21 07:36 AM.
