Some people still believe success is obtained through merit, as defined by those metrics.
It’s one of the founding lies of America.
Easily disproved any time it’s tested scientifically.
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Sure but if they ever paused the rat race to think about it, the whole idea of a meritocracy disintegrates when “winning with merit” depends on access to schools that cost $50,000 per year. It’s the antithesis of meritocracy.
Also it stresses kids out and messes them up. They start thinking they’re worthless unless they’re the best student, they get into Harvard, etc. way better for mom and dad to invest the money for them and teach them that constantly achieving shit is not a recipe for happiness.
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I don’t want to look at life as a balance sheet unless I can make Elon Musk into a footstool.
What if Mom and Dad haven’t fully internalized this yet?
Asking for a friend.
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You should read The Self-Driven Child.
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Shatner in space is cool but I doubt the benefit of sending rich old white guys trickles down to the rest of us anytime soon. Not worth the damage to the ozone layer.
https://twitter.com/sickeningjar/status/1447894767061409796?t=Wt1p9cQMXcKSjto6wi5oKw&s=19
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I actually think about this a lot. If I just VTSAXed away what I’ve got earmarked for higher education, the kids would be doing great financially in their 30s if I just gave it to them. But I don’t plan to do that. I actually think there is value to the education and the whole associated life experience.
The competition is a double edged sword. I do think a bit of competition is healthy for kids (at least for someone wired like me which is where I’m coming from), but obviously too much isn’t great, especially for the wrong kid.
Your point about the parent competition is not wrong. That happens a lot. I personally try to avoid it. Is it there subconsciously? Maybe. But realizing it is half the battle, and I’ve at least got that part covered.
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Maybe my perspective is skewed because I grew up in a hyper competitive environment and checked all the success boxes before crashing and burning in my 20s. I do recognize it is the height of privilege to harbor resentment about it.
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I think there’s a misalignment between the skills it takes to have a successful upper-middle-class career and the ones it takes to be a great parent. Like, neuroticism and a borderline anxiety disorder are a great recipe to be a partner at BigLaw, but they’re disastrous for parents.
Also, raw misogyny is a big deal here. People feel very, very comfortable judging mothers for just about anything.
I would be remiss not to note that Emily Oster has done a lot of really amazing work to help parents understand what matters and what doesn’t from an evidence-based perspective.
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The amount of stress we place on teenagers to get into the “right schools” is so abusive and dumb. We act like a quality education is some extremely rare good that can only be given to the kids who can jump through the hoops and win high-stakes horse races. It’s all such bullshit; your kids will be fine if they don’t make it into the Ivy League. They’re already under enough stress as it is being a teenager, they don’t need to worry about all this hypercompetitive test prep and GPA bullshit.
The internet should have completely revolutionized how higher education works. We can distribute world-class lectures and teaching materials to anyone in the world at a negligible cost; the potential to democratize high-quality education is crazy if you really think about it. Of course that didn’t happen because the whole system is fundamentally about status, exclusion, and enforcing class boundaries rather than actually teaching people things.
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You’re not wrong. But any kid who is able to do this independently and motivate himself will get in to a great college anyway. Most kids can’t. At least at not at that age.
Also true. Most parents hope for their kids to be more than “fine”, though. Depending on how one defines “fine”, I don’t think it’s that terrible a goal.
This is the part I’m having a hard time relating to with my own kids. For the longest time I just didn’t get it. And I kind of still don’t. I never really felt any pressure from that sort of stuff. It was really kind of fun in a way. It’s too early to tell, but I think I’ve got one wired that way and one who clearly is not.
This problem is driven from the top, imo, at least in large part. If employers didn’t screen for this kind of stuff and just looked at whether you could do X or understand Y, the system of education would be very different from what we’ve got.
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But the point is, getting into a “great college” ought to be an absurdist notion in 2021. It’s like fussing about getting into a “great” elementary school. All of this shit should have been standardized and democratized a generation ago. A high-quality education isn’t a precious resource that only the highly-motivated students are worthy of. It has nothing to do with actual learning and everything to do with status and prestige. The guy who took Calc 101 at Yale isn’t actually going to be able to solve math problems all that much better than the guy who took it at your community college, but we treat them like they came from different planets.
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If you want to git gud at the complex task of playing Fortnite well, there are all kinds of free YouTube tutorials, subreddts, forums, etc. World-class experts in the field are accessible easily to anyone. Imagine asking people to pass an aptitude test before letting them watch a Fortnite tutorial, that would be madness. It’s not a limited resource that needs to be doled out.
And yet we act like a quality liberal arts education is some precious resource only to be given to the 0.001% most worthy. Just imagine if English composition or music theory or physics was taught using the Fortnite model; anyone interested can get a firehose of top-quality information for free. If actually educating people was the goal, the internet should have completely disrupted the system. Of course it didn’t because the entire system is fundamentally based on gatekeeping and exclusion.
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This is a really solid point.
Hell, when I was in med school, I only used my med school resources to study for what our professors focused on for their tests, with the exception of anatomy which used cadavers. The vast majority of my study material were online resources created by third parties. I could get you a solid first two years of med school education for about 2k
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i actually think the value of college turned out not to be tied to any specific or general courses that the students take for grades, but their exposure to a large number of other people and resources, in new and largely free from failure environments.
and in the case of top colleges, access to exclusive connections. youtube can’t give you that.