90% of the decisions people make are based on the environments they are in. Today's environment is extremely competitive and the margin for error is lower. Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"
The margin for error is enormous, compared to previous generations. The probability that a mistake in life will lead you to die of starvation or cold is smaller than ever.
What I think is happening is that global communication is leading to increased status neurosis. Before, you could compare your kids to the neighbors'. Now you can compare them with everyone's kids, filtered through the lens of social media.
A thousand times this. There is also a growing body of research[0] that shows that social media make you feel worse cause you are exposed to a selection of what's good in other people's life. I suspect the same often applies to TV.
[0] which I have not read further than the news reports, so might be total bullshit, caveat emptor, but I am inclined to believe it based on my anecdotal experience.
In my scenario I was implicitly alluding to the real planet Earth.
How many billionaires has Stanford generated versus the entire state of Ohio in the past 20 years?
If the only thing that matters in life is how much money you make, this might be relevant.
Otherwise, working for those billionaires as a college grad isn't that bad.
Nothing wrong with having no ambition, but step to the right so better people can pass you by.
Getting the top 10 schools for creating billionaires, it accounts for 206 total. (Though this number also includes Cambridge, and I'm not sure if the 11 billionaire alumni from there are part of the same 500ish US billionaires)
Out of the 500ish billionaires in the US, nearly 100 of them have no degree at all.
So, these top schools produce about double the amount of billionaires that zero degrees do, and roughly the same number as the rest of the schools combined.
This is such a relatively small sample size and there are so many factors in play here that it would be silly to draw any sort of strong conclusion from this, but even going with shoddy science on this and playing fast and loose, we can see that while, yes, you do gain an advantage in the 'become a billionaire' game, it's still a ridiculously insignificant chance, and the population of billionaires without a degree or with a degree from a school not known for producing billionaires is still higher.
All of this to say: There ain't no easy path to billionairehood besides being born one, and getting in to Stanford or any other school does not increase your chances of becoming one to a statistically significant number.
Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted.
You can ask the same of NYC. How many supreme court justices are from NYC versus Idaho? Location matters. Location changes you. Peers change you.
relatively small sample size
Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.
Really? There's obviously a few well known cases of this, but I doubt you're looking at any hard data when you make this claim.
>Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.
Sure you can. When you're comparing 500 billionaires, they're no longer the outliers in the data set. They're the norm for the data set.
This is also a big factor in the "impossible beauty standards" syndrome.
Being the prettiest girl in the village was tough but humanly possible. Competing against photoshopped versions of the most attractive women on the planet is not.
I say this from experience, coming from a family where ivy league tier educations are normal--and so is depression.
Similar background and I have always suspected they are correlated.
Obviously some people overdo it, but superior life outcomes and being a functional adult seem to go with heavily involved parenting.
What a terribly insulting thing to say. Arrogance at its peak.
Once upon a time, you could be on your own when you were as young as 12 (yes, I mean ancient times). Not too long ago you needed only high school education to get a good job, so you're staying with your parents until 16-18. Now you need college.
This is a very American problem and the cause my (20's) generation's unhappiness.
No one is happy with just being a stable person.
Being a stable person is a great goal. Most people aren't.
We have lost half a generation to Starbucks jobs, and people know that they are lost. It's ruining their mental health, and not building any kind of economic health. I don't blame the helicopter parents for this, though.
Now, besides having a shitty day, knowing that my pay and lifestyle is in danger if I give the client a less than perfect experience would do nothing good to my mental stability.
I would much rather send healthy kids to a state school or liberal arts college than unhealthy kids to Stanford.
What's your point? That being an enormous outlier is sometimes a great thing?
Ofcourse it's not a stark choice between getting into a Stanford and serving coffee at Starbucks but still . And I can't digest the snobbery in saying that a Starbucks worker is devoid of any dignity . But the comment still somehow resonates with me.
Perhaps it's a reflection of my own inferiority complex of not being able to study at an elite institution. It's a little hard to get over such feelings.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/550/t...
Seriously, it took me years but I now realize how much self-control and discipline it took them to stick to their philosophy and let me explore things on my own.
I come from a very middle class background, but I had the chance to experience a lot of things. Some I regret, some I don't. But the important is that I know how it feels, and I know what I don't to be. That's also the very way I found my calling in Computer science, and what drives in life.
They have trust me, when empirical evidence was screaming them not to. That's, I believe, the most beautiful proof of love they have ever gave me.
When my turns come, I hope I will be as good as a parent, as they were to me.
I specially disliked the part about having the rest of their life to "fail". That's tautological of course, but it takes on a whole new dimension if the "rest" is measured in months instead of decades.
The failing that you do when you are 6 is very different from the one you do when you are 16 or 26, they all accumulate and you can't redo your childhood.
The things you learn when you are 6 and 16 are closer to the competition you are in when you are out of Stanford. Getting in to stanford is nothing compared to making it through life in one piece and with success.
Honestly, we don't know. And while your choice of university matters for the first few jobs out of university, it quickly gets pushed to the back of the bus in favor of experience. Mental stability and the framework to deal with real life, though, matters much longer.
Of course, you still have a network of connections... but again in my experience those do not translate well if you want to do top of the line work. If you eventually want to get an MBA and boss nerds around, ivy league is the way to go... but if you are committed to be a lifelong technologist, is matter little if at all.
here's an important question to ask yourself: if you had to choose, would you rather your children be kind, or smart?
I've seen smart, but unkind people learn to be kind over time. I doubt a kind halfwit can learn to be smart. That's presumably the case because smartness defines your general ability to learn, change and adapt.
If this happens being kind may indeed make you more employable than being smart.
(Caveat: as I argued in another post, smart person still has an advantage: she can generally learn other skills including being kind easier than a not-so-smart person)
Surely you are joking.
"Do everything for them during THE developmental phase of their life, then throw them to the wolves once your have produced a helpless little Stanford graduate" is your vision of good parenting?
The whole of life before the age of 21 is irrelevant to you because it is just a means to getting into Stanford? Have you thought about the implications of your viewpoint?
A parent's relationship with a child is determined by the place where the child works?
Words fail.
Is getting kids into Stanford the end goal? If it is, that's pretty short sighted. Congratulations! You got into Stanford. Now what?
Going to a top tier school is not the end. You don't win the moment you get accepted. College is the start of your adult life (or usually - based on this article perhaps some of the students are still in the childhood phase...), and where huge amounts of your actions and decisions start to have real and lasting consequences.
> Nobody wants to be the parent of the most mentally stable Starbucks Barista... Get them into Stanford, then they have the rest of their life to "fail"
I would take a well adjust, mentally stable, happy kid working a non-prestigious job than one that is unstable, depressed, etc. with a good one. Because, you know what? When you fail to raise an adult, even if they get to Stanford, a lot of them are not going to be good at jobs that require responsibility and personal judgment.
This sort of short sighted idea that getting a kid to a good school is winning and anything less means you're relegated to baristahood is ridiculous. Even ignoring the fact that a college degree is not a requirement for success in life, there are multitudes of schools that will give you the proper education needed to succeed in a field that does require college without the insane demands of Stanford, et al.
Only a name-brand school will actually deliver career benefits commensurate with the cost of attending. If you can't get in to a Harvard or Stanford, one might do better to learn a technical trade independently than go into debt to attend a UCSD, Washington State, or god forbid a second-tier private college.
Second tier schools are not worth the money they're asking in the present environment.
* In all honesty, the only thing I can think of OTOH is if you want to go directly from undergrad into investment banking or elite law, where the vast majority of new hires still come from Ivy League (plus a few others: Duke, Georgetown, Stanford, ...) pipelines.
And personally, I'd be proud to be the parent of the world's most mentally stable barista because life is about more than status.
> What makes you think one can make up for freedom lost during childhood? Our brains become rather rigid as we get older.
If this was true in a practical sense, we'd have the government raising up kids, because parents pose too much a risk of producing a suboptimal generation.
> And personally, I'd be proud to be the parent of the world's most mentally stable barista because life is about more than status.
That's what those of us who didn't get to the top spots like to tell ourselves so that we may sleep better at night. Life may not be about status and money, but having the two makes it an order of magnitude better. Trying to tell yourself something else is denial, really.
Don't get me wrong - I definitely don't encourage turning kids into zombies and making them jump arbitrary stupid hoops that one needs to get to a top-tier university or otherwise gain status. But that's the world we live in - rewarding bullshit instead of actual value. There is no point in pretending otherwise, and seeing things for what they are is (almost) always helpful.
Correlation/causation fail.
The worst part of parents functioning this way is that they assume they are dictating results.
I see her complaints as more sinister. She comes from a privileged background, and she's concerned that people from her social class are getting pushed out of her university by kids whose parents made them work hard.
What a terribly unfortunate conception of "failure" and "success" this mindset represents. One that is all to common, but certainly not the only option.
So, for these "vintage" parents who are just getting their kids into Stanford, I applaud them. But because it's getting more and more competitive, I pity parents who don't start their helicoptering before the child before it is in the womb!
At the same time, the range of available jobs is huge. The idea that it's "Stanford or Starbucks" is not reality.
The number of poor in the world is steadily declining. To fuck up ones life in a western country basically requires a mental or health problem. I am left wondering what one is competing about.