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Comment by wfo | Hacker News Reader

Dean complains about helicopter parents at Stanford and yet admissions essentially requires incoming students have helicopter parents. To get into a school like this you need to be exclusively focused on exactly the arbitrary criteria that will get you accepted into a school like this -- grades in the "right" classes, enough sports to talk about it in an essay but not too much, extracurricular and volunteer work at the "right" organizations, tutoring for the standardized exams. No teenager has a passion for SAT prep. If you stop pushing them and let them be human beings there are plenty of other children of helicopter parents who will be happy to take their place in the incoming Stanford class.

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This. It is like that old adage, "Behind every great man, there is a great woman." For the modern era, it should perhaps now be, "behind every top-tier university student, there is a helicopter parent".

It takes so much to get into one of these schools now that it seems impossible for any child without extensive support.

Perhaps, following sentiments of Peter Thiel and others, it's not necessary to get into an elite school today, in order to succeed. If it was, then good education and success would still be scarce in today's world, as most people can't afford to go to Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Now we have MOOCs an schools can become centers for socializing, tutoring and testing. A great teacher can educate more than 300 people a year this way.

This is nonsense. Getting into elite schools opens up doors that are otherwise completely shut. At law firms, at prestigious graduate schools, in academia, in medical schools and good positions at top corporations. Every year information is collected on the various success rates for students coming out of America's universities and students from elite school make up the highest paying and most successful members of our society. This is as true now as it was twenty years ago.

All areas that are going to be increasingly disrupted by technology and digitalization. So sure for now but this will change.

Signalling and networking and group association and stereotypes are inherently human and have remained the same for the past 6000 years of human history no matter the changes in technology. You can't just throw out contentless buzzword bingo like "disruption" and "technology" and seriously expect anyone to believe it's going to change.

Thats not the point.

I am talking about when technology makes it obsolete to even have most doctors and lawyers.

If that happens, then social status shifts to other fields, and you're back to square one.

Social status will always exist. Life will always be unfair.

You just have to signal the right way to show other people that you're the right type of person. Hard to explain but if you experiment you can find that this will get you a huge amount of the way.

Signaling will become worth more at the very top (top 20 schools) and less below that tier, which ironically will increase competition for the top 20, but probably reduce stress on the majority of kids who were always looking locally or regionally to begin with.

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like:

Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand school on your CV. Barring that, hope your kid will be driven/creative/wily enough to make do without that stamp of approval.

Or, take the "safe" route and go full helicopter-parent, and give your children the best possible guarantee of success in the world as it currently stands.

That's a brutal decision to have to make.

I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively.

Maybe it's a US thing?

We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.

Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.

It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult.

If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.

There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.

> There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them.

Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.

So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.

Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.

It's never been necessary to go to an elite school to be successful; it's simply much easier to get your foot in the door with employers if you have the words "MIT" or "Stanford" on your resume as opposed to "Coursera" or some random college. Moreover, employers COME TO YOU if you are at these institutions, you don't need to go out and beg for face time.

Depends on the major. I would say in many majors it's work experience that matters. I agree that the first job is easier to get when you're from Stanford, but that's it.

Yes, I agree. I should have specified that I meant the first job.

The only problem with MOOCS is you can't be an engineer or a medical doctor by only doing the courses you're "interested in".

IT is one of the few "fields" where people can get away with a half assed academic background and the end product shows it.

What does the end product show? Doctors kill plenty of patients.

If you want a good education then an elite school isn't necessary. If you want access to people and an unparalleled network, then your best option is an elite school.

This is a serious misconception. I did the same mistake and never earned a degree. Now despite being successful and earning well most countries will not allow me to immigrate on my own.

And that's just one loss. Complete system is rigged in favor of credentialism than talent.

There is a difference between being a demanding parent and being a helicopter parent. A demanding parent sets high expectations and offers support, but the kid must bring their own motivation and effort. A helicopter parent not only sets high expectations but does the work for the student to make sure they are met.

The classic example is the parent who goes into the school and harangues the teacher when their student gets a bad grade on an assignment. A demanding parent communicates their disappointment with their kid, not the teacher. A demanding parent lets their kid fail and then delivers consequences. Overcoming failure is how people develop motivation and mental toughness.

Stanford (and Harvard, MIT, CalTech, etc.) have been hard to get into for many decades, and students got into them. Helicopter parents justify their coptering with the sentiment above, but that doesn't mean it's true. You don't need to helicopter to have a high performing kid.

And not every kid is going to perform at the top level, and IMO a good parent needs to be ok with that. I think when the parental expectations don't meet reality, that's when helicoptering can start.

There is a thin line between a 'demanding parent' and a 'micromanaging' parent, which seems to be just another form of a helicopter parent.

> A demanding parent communicates their disappointment with their kid, not the teacher. A demanding parent lets their kid fail and then delivers consequences.

What makes parent a problem is how high the demands he/she sets and how severe are the consequences.

I don't agree that helicopter parenting is anywhere near a prerequisite.

In fact, amongst my peers it seems to have been the reverse. The kids with over-involved parents were the ones who ended up seeming too "cookie-cutter" and ended up going to "second-tier" universities.

The hypothesis of helicopter parenting being a prerequisite for elite admissions also seems to be undermined by the consistent success of boarding schools in college admissions. It's a lot harder to be a helicopter parent when your kids are hundreds-thousands of miles away.

That actually supports my argument: boarding schools are just helicopter parenting by proxy and even more extreme. Parents send their children away to professional helicopter parents to socialize only with the other helicopter parented-children.

I don't think you have a good idea of what most boarding schools are like.

At least in my experience, we were afforded an enormous amount of freedom. Certainly there are not enough staff to provide each student with anything like the amount of helicoptering that many students receive at home. It's much more like college than normal high school, with nobody checking monitoring your every moment.

Remember, helicopter parenting and privilege are not the same thing (though they are related). You can have very wealthy and disengaged parents and you can have overly involved poor parents.

How do you think it would even be possible for staff to constantly helicopter children at the level that parents typically do?

No teenager has a passion for SAT prep.

I grew up in the generation when no one in my region of the country (the Midwest) had heard of test prep. The students who did best on standardized tests (my friends and I) simply enjoyed reading for fun. Really, it's that simple. Read books and articles that are not assigned by school and that you choose for your own reading pleasure. Students who score high today on standardized tests are still avid readers. Nothing has changed about that at all. This even works for the math section of the tests.

To learn how to score well on a standardized test reading section, the number one piece of advice is READ, READ, READ, and READ. Read about what you like to know more about. Read things that are fun for you. Find books and magazines about interesting topics and read them. Turn off the TV and read. Put away the video game controller and read. Read hard things, and read easy things. Read a lot.

For years, I wondered why it came so readily to mind to write "READ, READ, READ" in all capital letters like that when I give advice on this subject, as I have frequent occasion to do. Recently, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). Yes, that works for Chinese, and it works for English too. By practicing reading, you gain reading comprehension and reading speed, and speedy reading with good comprehension gives you time to complete standardized test sections with time to spare. That reduces the pressure and lets you relax and think while you take the test. Try it. You may like it, and anyway reading is fun.

I did just fine because I liked to read too, but I talk to younger students and that is something that has fundamentally and seriously changed. Things are MUCH more competitive now than they have ever been, and everybody is studying the system and learning how to game it. People who focus on the things the metrics are supposed to be measuring (like reading) will lose to the people who game the metrics themselves, every time. Putting a college education up on this pedestal like we've done as "the thing you MUST HAVE to succeed" or "the key to any future besides gas-pumping" is like throwing a chunk of meat into a pit of rabid hyenas.

Your knowledge is out of date, I'm afraid. Simply being a geek is no longer sufficient. Teenagers today are competing in a much larger pool of increasingly sophisticated candidates; there's an entire class of businesses dedicated to getting students into colleges.

That's not true.

I just went through the college admissions process a few years ago and being a smart and geeky teenager without obsessive parents is still a valid strategy.

What college did you get into?

Many. Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, etc.

Not to be a dick, but none of these are top ten schools, and you don't get the same connections or the same signalling power of being in the top 0.5% of the bell curve by going there.

Yes, they do have some prestige, but for good or bad, when an HR rep has to choose between the average Stanford/MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton grad and the average Dartmouth/Brown/Williams grad, you know the outcome.

Wow, way to be an asshole. First of all, I didn't apply to larger universities but I'm pretty sure I would have gotten in.

Secondly, Williams is literally the #1 liberal arts college. LACs are ranked separately from large universities. [0]

Thirdly, if you think acceptance rate is the most important indicator (which I'd argue it is for this thread), Brown is #7 and Dartmouth is #12. [1] I'm not really sure why you think they're somehow second-tier. Do you really think the 80 basis point difference in the acceptance rates of MIT and Brown (for example) means that MIT requires intensive prep but Brown will just accept anyone? Give me a break.

> when an HR rep has to choose between the average Stanford/MIT/Harvard/Yale/Princeton grad and the average Dartmouth/Brown/Williams grad, you know the outcome.

No, I really don't. They're pretty much equally competitive and are recruited to the same prestigious companies.

[0] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

[1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

You don't need to get into a top-10 school to succeed at life--and succeed wildly by any measure.

This is part and parcel of the helicopter parent mentality: that if my kid doesn't get into a top-10 school, they are a failure. It's just not true.

To name just one example: http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top...

I agree that competitive college admissions are a driver of "helicopter parenting". However, from what I've seen, that behavior doesn't work nearly as well as you imply.

I'm lucky to have great parents. Not "helicopter" by any stretch. I was just a nerd in high school: I took nine APs, went to science fairs, did an engineering internship, & was on the math team. I never took test prep classes, took the SAT and ACT only once, and I wrote & edited the application by myself. It worked. I went to Stanford, class of 2012.

What I did have were some really excellent HS teachers esp in STEM subjects & supportive parents who gave me a lot of freedom. I had some peers whose parents kept pushing them & who burned out.

By contrast, I had fun & felt free both in high school and at Stanford.

Aggressive parent involvement may help some people get into a good college, but it's certainly not necessary & is often harmful.

Your last sentence is especially wrong. Micromanaging your near-adult children and refusing to "let them be human beings" is bad advice. Your children should be driven by their own ambition, not yours.

>supportive parents who gave me a lot of freedom

This is the difference between successful students and students who crumble when they get a B. Parents insist on getting their children in the very best universities, when cheaper options like state universities or local colleges are viable alternatives. They push students who are not intrinsically motivated, and when these students leave their parents and go to college, they are completely lost.

Unfortunately, his position as a Dean prevents him from getting "too real" in this article, because what he should be telling these over-stressed and over-worked parents (and kids) is that you don't need to go to Harvard, or Stanford, or any Ivy League school really, to get a good education.

Her. It's literally the first line of the article. And also she's the former dean.

This is in the article that the rest of us read:

"She urges families to think more broadly about what makes for a “good” college. There are excellent educational experiences to be had at schools that aren’t among U.S. News and World Report’s top 20, she says, and there are schools that will accept students who don’t have a perfect resume."

Also, if that were true about how to get into Stanford, we would likely be heading for a crash in such schools' reputations as places that churn out top quality graduates because they are selecting for the wrong attributes. I don't actually think Stanford is going to let that happen.

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