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

I have to agree with Val. We also didn't attend Ivies, and we've done quite well for ourselves and our child.

I also strongly suspect that at some point, being both extremely bright and NOT having gone to a very high-priced college/uni is going to start looking more promising than having a prestigious (high $$) pedigree. Why? Because it shows pragmatism that pretty much can't be bought at any price.

I also agree with her horror at turning 11 and 12 yo kids into workaholics by applying the lash. It's fine if it is truly the kids doing it. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with a 10yo that wants to homeschool to make time for an INTEL project or some other passion.

Where I begin to have a problem with this kind of thing is when it becomes an arms race-- and it has.

My family has spent a lot of time thinking about this-- and we've decided to opt out. As a family, I mean. It's not healthy, and the levels to which we have to push our kids to achieve are frankly horrifying in the current climate. Race to Nowhere. Truly; while that level of achievement used to be reserved for kids who were DYS material, now the PG kids have to differentiate themselves by winning national titles and demonstrating prodigy at ever-younger ages. All in an effort to distinguish themselves from the pack of hothoused/groomed kids that are not actually PG in the first place but have parents that want to make them LOOK like they are. Parents spend thousands of dollars to find an evaluator that will give them the right bits of paper 'certifying' their kids.

Acutally, colleges could care less as long as those kids are paying tuition $$ and not flunking out in droves. That's why even elite colleges are more than happy to provide remedial work for (otherwise bright-enough) kids who have been rushed through material that they had no hope of mastering at that pace.

Our PG kids are getting lost in that shuffle. But the only way to make them stand out against it is to rob them of what childhood they can still have.

We're living this right now with our 13yo DD. We have chosen to step off the fast lane when she chooses to, and let her succeed on HER terms, not those defined by the masses. Is she Ivy League material? You bet she is. But we don't care, and we see little evidence to suggest that it will matter to her, either.

More important to us is the long term development of DD as a whole, mature person with the capacity for contentment and happiness. That isn't to say that the parents of prodigies and Ivy-bound kiddos aren't doing that, as well-- just that kids who are PG and well-rounded, or just more even in their cognitive development, sometimes aren't suited for those kinds of "stand-out" activities on their vitae.

My DD enjoys chess, for example, and she loves science and literature. She's not a kid who is going to win trophies for any of that. Some of that is about disability, and some of it is about deliberately avoiding situations which make the disability's limitations more painful to face. This precludes even most cross-country travel, by the way. She'd rather play D&D (or whatever they're calling it now) than work on an INTEL project that would lead to honors (and national competition/awards) that she could only be bitter about not participating in. We are okay with that, because... she's 13. We want her to have some experiences that are normative, because that is the basis for so much lifelong social interaction.

She's just a top 5% kid in her grade range in many of those kinds of activities. In other words, she does a lot of things very, very well when compared with even high-achieving/GT students 3-4 years her senior-- but not always "extraordinarily" well compared with them.

Would she seem that extraordinary if we hadn't done the multiple accelerations? Probably, at least in a few areas. But there's no way that she'd have come out of that intact while being forced to work so far below ability day after day, so it's a moot point.

Bleh.

Back to the original question here-- would I list DYS (or anything else, for that matter)?

If it seemed truly relevent to something else, or included particular activities. What does it tell the admissions office about the student's suitability for the institution, after all?

Will we list DD's radical accelerations? No, probably not per se; it's obvious in a de facto sense to start with, and that will have to be enough. "I was only 14 when I graduated at the top of my class" isn't going to be there on the application, even if both of those pieces of information are there for someone to see if they look.

This isn't about WHAT a student is or is not. It's about who that student is as a prospective student, and what s/he is likely to do as a student. Note that this is far different than "capacity" for doing well.

DYS is, when you get right down to it, about WHAT a student is (capacity), not about that other stuff. So no, I wouldn't. I agree that either the grades and other accomplishments already say it, or they don't, and if it's the latter, then DYS says "underachiever" to anyone that is in the know.

Not sure about the Ivy League stuff... But having been to Carnegie-Mellon and a state university, there is something to be said for the acceleration and being surrounded by peers, or being a research assistant with someone doing leading edge research. Compared to sitting in a class with people asking "Is that going to be on the test?" Been a few decades, maybe it's changed.

But to the topic: asking the question is playing the game. If the kid filling it out feels it helps define them then include it. Tell your story, not the story you think they want to hear. I can smell it on a resume; I can't imagine it's any different on a college application (barring that whole negative paycheck thing.)

The way things are going, I think it's more likely that being bright and not having gone to a status university will mean that the student in question didn't know enough to attend the "right" university, which shows a lack of social acumen.

That's just my perception.

I didn't attend an Ivy League and I'm not about to dump all of my retirement savings into my kids so that they can attend an Ivy League.

It's probably worse now.

I agree completely with what you've said, but there's another possibility as far as the students are concerned (leading edge researchers can be found at all the big state Unis).

It's this: how many of those hyper-prepped kids at the Ivies behave in essentially the same way (though perhaps they'll phrase the question less crassly)? How many are there to get a Prestige Certification (tm) and care little about the actual education? And what about the sense of entitlement that comes along with all this? From what I've observed around here and read, the current cutthroat system (and their parents in some cases) have conditioned kids to think this way.

Honestly, I even see some of these ideas sneaking in here: Humanities degrees like English or history are relatively unimportant because jobs in those fields aren't as plentiful as jobs in engineering or science. I don't use at work, and therefore it seems less important to study it.. This allows us as a society to ignore critically important ideas that help us make informed decisions, and we do this at our own risk.

FTR, IME academic jobs at top universities are about the least likely places to filter on what university an applicant went to. (There are more effective things to filter on!) There are plenty of big companies in the UK that recruit only from a few universities, though (and not only in the finance industry - many engineering firms do the same, though it isn't necessarily the same universities they target).

Come to think of it, probably the employers most likely to do this are the ones that are very popular but *don't* need much in the way of rare attributes in their employees: they are the ones who might most likely wonder why they should incur the expense of recruiting from a wide range of universities, when they can go to a few good ones and get enough good-enough people.

Winning!

Things that are interesting to study/think about/fun (humanities) don't pay and since they don't pay are provided a lower value, while things that are technical/dry/boring/make you want to gnaw your arm off (engineering) create money so they are provided a higher value.

YES!

Interestingly, my observation has been the exact opposite. Take a look at Harvard Law School's faculty. It seems to consist almost exclusively of Harvard Law and Yale Law grads. A notable exception is "Native American" Elizabeth Warren, who is a Rutgers University grad.

Silly, that's only LawWorld.

In LawWorld, your LawValue is determined primary on the LawSchoolYouAttended.

If you go to HarvardYaleStanford, you get an infinite number of LawPrestigePoints that you can exchange for a legal professorial position at any school of your choosing.

However,if you went to a LesserButStillValuable school like ColumbiaMichiganNYUPennDukeCornellBerkely, then you get a few LawPrestigePoints that you can exchange for a legal professorial position at a LawSchoolWithoutPrestige.

If you went to a LawSchoolWithoutPrestige and you want to become a law professor, then, sorry, you went to the wrong school.

(Yes, the legal profession is this status-obsessed. It also lacks an objective criteria of quality. When you combine these two and couple it with infinite student loans, you get the awesome spectacle of the modern legal academy.)