It seems my take away from the article was a lot different from most of you.
What I read was a discussion of how coddling is crippling. That the parents who were financially capable of insulating their children from pretty much any sort of failure were actually setting their children up for failure when it matters most.
It is reasonable to contrast that attitude with the failure-embracing aspect of startup culture. That here there is no stigma associated with a startup failing, it is seen as a learning experience. The idea that falling down is part of the process of learning to run is completely at odds with the attitude of the parents in the article.
>What I read was a discussion of how coddling is crippling. That the parents who were financially capable of insulating their children from pretty much any sort of failure were actually setting their children up for failure when it matters most.
With the money and businesses some of those parents got, they aint gonna need success anyway.
Some might even become Presidents, like their fathers, despite being idiots.
Startup culture also irrationally glorifies failure, to the extent that in places like Silicon Valley failure is viewed as a noble thing and in fact a requirement for success.
So yes, coddling may be bad, but so is being left completely to your own devices. There are a lot of parents who manage to hit the middle ground by exposing their children to failure while providing them with a safety net that society refuses to provide.
I'm thinking this article is a little exaggerated. I applied to, and got into an Ivy, but had no sort of preparation at all. I was suspended over 20 times throughout my schooling, had 0 hours of community service, didn't find out that the SATs existed until my senior year, and my reference letters were from no-name teachers. Yes, some of the things described (working at a neuroscience lab) were true, but they were entirely my initiatives.
More importantly, even at school, I never saw anyone (limited scope, I'm sure) with this kind of description. All my friends seemed passionate about what they were interested in, and the majority were from middle-upper class families.
While I'm sure there are distinct cases of this sort of coddling, I would caution that this is likely more the exception than the rule.
Many people at elite schools get phony doctor's notes for unlimited time on the tests. Colleges are notified when a student had unlimited time, but since the US News report college rankings don't take it negatively, neither do they (if they even legally could).
"At the elite Wayland High school outside Boston, the number of students receiving special accommodations is more than 12 percent, more than six times the estimated national average of high school students with learning disabilities.
Wayland guidance counselor Norma Greenberg said that it's not that difficult for wealthy, well-connected students to get the diagnoses they want."
"Most of these students' diagnoses are presumably genuine. But in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent"
I never really go the appeal of unlimited time on tests, unless you actually have a diagnosis that requires it. I saw it around me when I was in university but I am unconvinced that it actually helped any 'normal' student.
I mean, what are you going to do with unlimited time anyway? Sure, some tests are designed to be too long for the allotted time, but most aren't. If you need more time on a test that is designed for the normal amount of time, what is going on? Are you deriving formulas that you neglected to memorize? Possible I suppose, but how many students are clever enough to do that correctly on a test when needed but don't just know the material in the first place?
Extra test time as an unfair advantage makes even less sense to me in subjects other than mathematics and physics. What are you going to do, derive an answer to "Who were Dizzy Gillespie's primary influences?"?
If it wasn't mathematics or physics, I was always fucked if I didn't know the answer within half a minute or so of reading the question. Even with mathematics or physics, if I was spending much time at all deriving things, it was generally a sure sign that I had failed to prepare and was fucked regardless.
Here is my hypothesis: Much of the elevated diagnosis rates at upper-class schools reflects the fact that people with more money are more likely to acquire diagnosis for non-life threatening ailments their children have. The rest of the elevated diagnosis rates is probably just rich people throwing money at the wall and seeing what sticks. I doubt it gives them an advantage, but they have the money so it can't hurt to try.
With unlimited time, you have the opportunity to take little breaks here and there, even if it just means doodling for a few minutes, and this is a huge advantage if you leverage it well.
I run into this daily with my work life now as well...bang your head against a problem for an hour straight, go to the bathroom, come back, and the solution pops into your head like magic.
Edit: Also, the more time you have between answering a question and rechecking it, the more objectively you see things, and notice mistakes that you would miss if you were rushed.
You and lmkg both allude to stress, which is something I hadn't considered. Still, if reduced time-based stress is creating accounting for a significant difference, I am almost inclined to say that perhaps that is a legitimate thing to diagnose and accommodate. I think that is pretty close to the intended use of 'infinite test time'.
I never had much success with checking my answers before turning in a test, though I suppose other people very likely do.
My brother has had some accommodations, such as being allowed to type answers on a computer, or being able to take the SAT over multiple days, that I think should just be available to everybody. These exams are supposed to test knowledge, not handwriting/the ability to write for long periods of time without getting achy, or the ability to stay focused on a boring test for over 4 hours; nor do those seem all that onerous on schools. Test time falls more into "onerous", and being able to solve math problems or write quickly can be important, but if a student does significantly better in general without a time limit due to stress, it seems somewhat unfortunate to me that they need to go to a doctor to be accommodated, something which largely depends on their parents and has something of a stigma...
I actually didn't mean to implicate stress, although it is of course also a factor for some people. But even in non-stressful situations, frequent breaks from cognitive load are simply a necessity for me. I think it's because my brain is more like a sprinter than a long distance runner, and the latter is probably better suited to typical tests. I can start getting real sloppy after even 15 minutes of intense mental focus, even if I know the material well. But of course sprinting has its benefits in other situations, so it all balances out.
The biggest impact is probably test stress. So, a psychological edge more than a "real" one, but nonetheless one that results in significant performance gains for some students.
Irrespective of whether extra time actually confers significant advantage, the data is adequately explained by the hypothesis that rich parents believe it does.
Oh, I certainly understand that many rich parents think it does. I just don't think it is quite as pervasive as some claim, and I doubt that it provides enough of an advantage to really worry about.
There are probably bigger problems to tackle, like the wage gap in legitimate diagnosis rates.
Some people smart and fast, while others are also smart, but, well...slow. Meaning that both would get the right answer to a tough question eventually, but the fast one would get it faster. Some would argue that this makes the fast one "smarter," including, one could guess, the designers of timed tests, such as the SAT.
It is a huge advantage for open book exams. An acquaintece of mine in the 90's got a learning disability diagnosis from a doc in the box (trivial, the drug companies gave you a script) and leveraged that to get unlimited time.
I'm more like you -- I don't have te patience to benefit.
I think you're right, but with two caveats. First, students with shockingly blue blood tend to keep company with other upper-crusters, frequently in exclusive fraternities or sororities that seek to carve out new depths of exclusivity in an already exclusive environment. This makes them less obviously evident than people expect. Second, I would caution that you, too, are more likely the exception to the rule. The unfortunate fact is that most kids who get into prestigious schools have had the benefit of extensive preparation while the students who lack this preparation have very poor chances. Sometimes you can outwit the test with a massive intellect or a knack for test-taking, but those sometimes are seldom. I salute your seldomness, although a bit sadly. :)
> First, students with shockingly blue blood tend to keep company with other upper-crusters, frequently in exclusive fraternities or sororities that seek to carve out new depths of exclusivity
From what I have seen: true. (Dartmouth alum here.) Much of the benefit of going to an Ivy League school is the chance to socialize with and develop interpersonal relationships with "other upper-custers." (Not something I did.)
Having attended both a private high school as well as an Ivy League college (would rather not say which one) one of the things you gain is also exposure to people from families that are tremendously committed to education and were raised with certain values. Not that that doesn't exist in other schools but the difference in attitude is striking at those types of schools at least when I attended and from my observation.
Even the kids at the private high school that were on scholarship and came from poor families were not the same as the kids from poor families at the public high school (once again, as a group individual kids of course could vary).
> Having attended both a private high school as well as an Ivy League college
Me too.
> exposure to people from families that are tremendously committed to education and were raised with certain values.
That's to be had. You can also meet lots of cynical elitists who see themselves as superior human beings and exempt from certain moral codes regarding the treatment of their perceived inferiors. Of course, this is true at just about any school.
Don't confuse her sample with your sample. Your sample are the students at an elite school. Her sample are the children of wealthy Manhattan parents trying to get into an elite school.
More than 1% of the kids at Ivys are from the 1%, or at least that's what conventional wisdom is, and that may or may not make sense. The posted article is attempting to explain that it's through a fault in the system where those with money can use that money as a substitute for intellect or drive to distinguish their children.
I have no clue if it's right, but it's more valuable to daily life of those applying to Ivys than Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore would be.
There are G*dlike smart people of every skin color, and in every state.
But if you're Asian applying from Saratoga, CA, or Jewish from NY, NY, getting in to an elite school is a WHOLE lot harder (based on equivalent grades and scores) than if you are an "underrepresented minority," or you're applying from Wyoming or Alaska or someplace like that.
BTW, your question draws a conclusion which does not logically follow from my previous post.
I didn't get the impression that the author was implying this was the norm; rather, that it was prevalent among rich (vs. middle-upper class) helicopter parents.
This is about the very wealthy types (members of the buller) whos kids are genuinely puzzled that you dont have a castle in Ireland or a summer home in the Hamptons.
Yes, though it's a low 30s %. (The school in my neighborhood was low teens %) The 20% is kids passing the 97th percentile of past test takers. And this is very much an exam that is taught to. That's the real point - that there's a lot of test prep, and look what happens when you don't prep for it.
These are different types of questions that require you to think more than the tests that I took in 5th to 8th grade. IMO, the biggest issue here is that its a hard test. Tests have been very easy for the last couple of decades.
When I was in high school in the 90s, our teachers in 10th grade gave us a 1969 nys regents exam for math 2 and earth science as a practice exercise. They were an order of magnitude more difficult that the actual exams given in 1994/1995.
The biggest problem here is that they are making everyone take the tests. Back in ye olden days, the college prep kids took the hard stuff only. You're not going to get a lot of good results in tests that require abstract thinking in poor districts -- the parents are idiots and let the kids stay out too late, don't enforce homework rules, etc.
I'd really like to hear about this story from a college admissions officer's point of view.
While I'm sure that they can tell the difference between an application from one of these tutors and a "genuine" one like yours, I'm not quite sure I understand why they put up with it in that case.
In Pushkin's "The Captain's Daughter" there is a very nice piece in the very beginning:
"Матушка была еще мною брюхата, как уже я был записан в Семеновский полк сержантом, по милости майора гвардии князя В., близкого нашего родственника."
"My mother was still pregnant with me, when I was enrolled as a sergeant in a Semenovsky Regiment, by the grace of Guards Major Prince V., our close relative."
I have a friend whose company charges up to $1000/hour [sic] for SAT and other tutoring. And parents in NYC and SF pay it. And succeed in getting their kids into Stanford, Harvard, etc.
I have another friend, an accomplished author, who says "I paid for my house writing term papers" for rich, lazy college students. Not sure which schools.
If you're just trying to make it on your own, it's tough to compete against all this. Without SAT tutoring or parental money, I earned degrees from two elite schools, but these days - who knows whether I'd even have got in.
If you can handle craziness, try to sell and cater to super wealthy. Sometimes the more you charge the more "elite" and "special" it seems. It then becomes more about your attire, language, non-verbals, your office how it is marketed and so on. It has to be exclusive, special and reserved for the best of the best. 1000/hr tutoring is like wine. You can sell $1000 bottled wine to some people. It could even be the same $50 wine from regular stores. It just matter how it is marketed.
Except that it's not. You can only ask $1000 for SAT tutoring if you have the name and track record to back it up. People pay $1000/h because their child getting into some school is worth it to them. This is not at all like $1000 bottled whine. It is much harder to measure fine wine vs measuring wether your kid makes it to the college or not.
Ofcourse, you can go for the short term and bluff that your tutoring is worth it by asking the price without actually having that record, but that might not last.
In the article it mentioned that the tutor in question had a greater than 90% success rate.
What's the control group success rate? 95%? 85%?
If I start an SAT tutoring group and manage to limit myself (let's say, through pricing) to a group that is already quite likely to succeed, than I have effectively priced myself into a track record.
As long as the stats already look impressive, it should be relatively easy to ignore that part of the question, as long as I am not actively harming the chances of my students.
After that, it becomes a question of the intangibles mentioned in the grandparent post: look, dress, body language, etc.
I agree, however, that it's not like faking wine, but for the opposite reason. I would bet that it's much easier to uncover the wine fraud, since there will be some sort of paper trail, whereas there will never be a control group study between your SAT tutoring and no intervention at all.
The problem is, will tutoring that costs $1000/hour be noticeably better than one costing $100/hour. I kind of doubt it. After that it is about presentation, marketing, ways to build trust.
There a gray area maybe between scam artists and this. Some are offering these lessons some homeopathy treatments, blessed magnetic bracelets. Sometimes wealthy and rational don't always go together. And industry is always there ready to help those people part with their money.
Yes, not any Joe Shmo (like me for example) can start selling $1000 bottles of wine or tutoring lessons for $10k/week.
I don't know when you went to school, but most people who went to the best school (ish) they got into wouldn't be able to get in again today. Especially since the elite schools essentially became free for middle-class folks (it happened sometime in the mid-2000's I think), competition has gotten fierce. In 1985, Harvard's admission rate was 16%, versus 6% last year. Penn's was 35-50% until the 1990's, and is 12% today.
Harvard's entering freshman class in 1976 was about 1,600: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/3/5/harvard-to-accept.... It's target class size this year is ~1,650. In that time frame, the number of people taking the SAT or ACT has increased from roughly 2 million to 3.3 million (65%). The real difference at Harvard, etc, is bigger than that, because in the 1970's, qualified kids whose parents couldn't afford the tuition probably wouldn't have even considered Harvard.
Even leaving aside the increased competition from test preparation, no matter how you slice it there are a lot more people for the same number of spots.
It is worthwhile to note that as data from ACT/SAT board of the last 2 decades indicates, the pool of candidates who are qualified enough to get into Ivy leagues are considerably richer than ones who are not[1].
I graduated from an inner city school in the midwest, no-one in my class was admitted to a top tier school (or even a second tier school, now that I think about it). But there were actually quite a few many who actually applied to Harvard or Princeton and such. I wasn't able to appreciate until recently that activities like band afterschool, cross country, and 4's on AP tests aren't good enough to land a spot in any big-name university. Presumably the number of dead-in-the-bucket applicants like this have gone up, so I'm less inclined to interpret the drop of acceptance rate as some indication that it's suddenly much more difficult for rich kids to get accepted than it used to be a decade ago.
This is a little like saying that the guys who played in the NFL in the 1960s wouldn't cut it there today. In some cases, perhaps not. But the guy who played center at 220 lb. in 1967 didn't have the weight training the 300 lb. center of 2013 will have had since high school. The child of the SAT taker of 1975 who took the Iowa tests three times from 1st grade on and the PSATs in 11th now has the opportunity for drill baby drill.
Also, when we consider the admission rates, remember that kids apply to a hell of a lot more schools nowadays. A dozen seems to be routine; one kid I know of from the high school class of 2005 applied to 18 schools.
(High school class of 1973 here: I applied to one school, which in hindsight wasn't necessarily the best method, but it's a bit late to ask for a do-over.)
When you use "[sic]" like that it means the exact opposite of what you think it means. It means that you're quoting something with any errors or nonstandard presentation preserved.
That caused me to do a double take when I read that wondering whether it was actually $1000/hr or whether you were reproducing some misquotation of that number.
Usually people resolve the matter by writing something like this instead: "[...] charges up to $1000/hour (yes, one thousand dollars per hour!) [...]".
sic is "Spelling in Context". (It's actually latin, but that's the mnemonic for the definition). So unless you're quoting something, it really shouldn't be used.
Actually, it's Latin for "thus so", derived from sic erat scriptem, or "thus was it written". Used by a quoter to assure the reader that errors or irregulaties in the quote are indeed the fault of the quotee.
Shared with me by a Facebook friend who thought a lot about the college admission process, and then went into industry before finishing his college degree. Although I enjoyed reading this article, I didn't submit it here because I usually like Hacker News submissions that tell us more about the reality of the external world. This article, as smooth-reading as it is, tells us mostly that the author is in the business of college admission counseling (serving as advertising for the author's business), and buttresses factual claims with inherently unverifiable anecdotes. I agree heartily that children ought to grow up to pursue their own passions rather than gratifying their parents' egos, but I've seen other submissions here that make that point even better.
P.S. The article should be submitted with its original title, by the HN guidelines.
Perhaps. But this doesn’t feel like news or commentary. This feels like allegory.
It’s a bedtime story about following your dreams, and the independence of children, and people in general.
And it’s good. It reads well. Better than anything in the Post has a right to be. (But I suspect that I think that as I don't read the Post enough to find these fairy-tales.) Well worth the 3 minutes.
I would never read the Atlantic since they started pandering to the reddit/HN/internet populist crowd (well, they're banned from reddit). Their hugely successful "digital-first strategy" to maximize web ad revenue is covered well by n+1: http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation-issue-15
That article did indeed "cover" their digital-first strategy, but it was thickly laden with sarcasm, their heavy-handed ideal of gender politics, and plain old lack of clarity. I didn't "cover" The Atlantic's strategy in the sense that a journalist covers a story, but in the sense that mud covers my boots.
Edit: In the name of fairness I looked for more nuanced/clear criticism of The Atlantic's digital-first strategy and was unable to find any. Almost all the pieces were fawning over its basically unrivaled success among the old guard. The Church of Scientology events were quite troubling, though: http://www.emediavitals.com/content/lessons-atlantics-sponso...
Hasty translation into simple english, at the cost of all snark and subtlety: “An article in the New York Post on the subject of rich people is likely to be of low quality."
Oh quite some time I would expect. The current system actually suits the wealthy quite nicely - on the surface it seems like it's a fair system allowing for admissions to be done based on merit. But as the article indicates, in reality the wealthy can buy a ticket for their children. So the proles are happy because they think the system is fair, and the rich are happy because a) they know it's not, b) they know the proles think it is, which gives them social cover.
Yet the article also indicates that even the supposed 'golden tickets' into the highest tier schools don't guarantee success. Sure, if your family built the library, they'll probably let you in with mediocre scores, but for the >99% of students to whom that does not apply, the admissions system works exactly as advertised. Who really cares that Theodore Legacy IV gets in when those people comprise <1% of the students? Someone's family needs to subsidize everyone else's tuition...
1) "Wealthy" doesn't mean "trust fund" money. Lots of people in the part of the 1% that isn't in the 0.1% don't have enough money where their kids could maintain their standard of living without being professionally successful themselves.
2) "Wealthy" people in the U.S. tend to be the "working wealthy" not "umpteenth generation wealthy." Among respectable rich people, there is a strong desire for the kids to follow daddy's footsteps at Princeton, etc. Look at the Frist family. The grandpa founded Hospital Corp of America (a $33 billion/year company). He went to Princeton then Harvard Medical School. Then he still donated a ton of money to Princeton to get in Bill Frist Jr.
College admissions processes generally do a great job of selecting the type of people I hope my children will turn out like (source: I attend Stanford).
How can we get the parents who are paying for services like these understanding that a much surer chance of seeing their child attend the university of their (the parents..) dreams involves something much deeper than paying people to paint a better picture?
I believe that admissions counseling actually has the potential to have a really positive impact on many kids, if they are given the freedom by parents to allow these kids to become the type of applicant that colleges actually desire to admit.
If you are an admissions consultant of the caliber described in this article, shoot me an email - username@stanford.edu, I'd love to chat about turning this industry into something that turns candidates into the right people (starting early enough - age 14 or so), rather than just painting them as such.
I was on the border line for the college I got into (subpar grades, mediocre test scores) and I can say that being good at a sport is what got me in. Whats funny about it is that the school I went to put almost zero spotlight/emphasis on sport and the sport I was playing was tennis not football. So all the time not studying for the SAT, and playing tennis, payed off in my opinion.
Makes me happy that I wasn't a rich kid coddled my entire life. I wasn't accepted to the college of my choice. I've come to enjoy hard work and realizing the pay off, even as I attempt to push myself harder every year at my own pace.
I was more interested in it as a potential failure of our "meritocractic" educational system to promote those with true potential instead of the right family connections. Sort of the other end of the spectrum from being born a black male in Oakland and, pretty much regardless of one's potential, being consigned to a lower-middle-class life at best. I want the kids who will invent the next Internet to succeed, regardless of background.
What I read was a discussion of how coddling is crippling. That the parents who were financially capable of insulating their children from pretty much any sort of failure were actually setting their children up for failure when it matters most.
It is reasonable to contrast that attitude with the failure-embracing aspect of startup culture. That here there is no stigma associated with a startup failing, it is seen as a learning experience. The idea that falling down is part of the process of learning to run is completely at odds with the attitude of the parents in the article.