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Comment by otakucode | Hacker News Reader

As college morphs into High School+, and society extends their definition of 'childhood' to cover up to age 25, steps will be taken to destroy the autonomy and personality of these 'children.' Children are entitled no rights, no difference of opinion from them is respected, and any degree of control over them, no matter how extreme, is always seen as warranted.

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My sentiment has been that this high school-level authoritarianism seems to be in vogue on a larger cultural level than just educational settings. Largely, status quo maintenance is seen as a positive, so don't rock the boat, don't get out of line. In another era, I would have referred to this as "conservatism" but the silly political posturing makes this term less useful (since this authoritarianism has no political boundaries it seems).

Even now, I'm hesitant to discuss this here (or most places) because, despite the best intentions in arguing a position (even out of pure rhetoric), I face the high probability of being punished for going against "the collective's" thoughts. Because disagreement means punishment is in order. You're wrong, I know it, fuck you, downvote, whatever. And, if the collective severely disagrees with you, it is, apparently, acceptable to let it be known to your employer, spouse, parents, local pizza shop, etc.

I think you're getting it backwards. Real life isn't taking notes from high school authoritarianism. High-school authoritarianism is modeled after real-life authoritarianism. It's teaching kids how to "behave" as members of society.

Don't do what we say? Go to "time-out". Slowly have your freedoms taken away from you until you're compliant.

See these officers? They are here to make sure you listen to every one of our ridiculous requirements.

Better tuck in that shirt and only wear a brown or black belt! Want to dye your hair? Individuality is distracting and will not be tolerated!

You forgot: if you pay money you get away with bending the rules, as seen here (it's a fundraiser for a sister school washed away by Hurricane Harvey):

Students may wear sweaters or hats for a donation

Oh yeah, that one too. I grew up dirt poor and never really was able to take advantage of that aspect. My biggest takeaway from high school was to get as tight as possible with the authoritative figures who have direct control over you in order to have the highest degree of freedom. To appeal to their intellectual side. I went to several different high schools and this strategy kept me out of a lot of trouble and provided many opportunities.

Make a few friends at the very top or a lot of friends at the very bottom.

Administrators can get you permission to use the cool new AV equipment to record the demo for some project thing you're doing.

Janitors work just as well in a pinch though.

At 18, a "child" can enlist in the military without parental consent.

There are fighter pilots younger than 25 who are entrusted to fly SOLO in a $180m F-22 Raptor with live missiles.

How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.

> How do these so called High school administrators justify protecting "children" from every theoretically possible harm? While forgetting that in less than 2 years these same students might be going into combat as a member of the armed forces.

Helicopter parents [1] and freely available student loans subsidized/backed by the federal government. The child/parent are the consumers of the service, but the negative externalities are dumped onto society.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_parent

This is tangentially related to why Elon Musk[0] likes to ask potential interns and employees how "they" solved a particularly difficult problem[1]. If they personally solved the problem, they are going to know the details of the solution. A student who relies on a "helicopter parent" is significantly less likely to understand the details of how to solve difficult problems.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2017/06/19/th...

[0.1] (archive/no adblock) http://archive.is/RxqQg

[0.2] (archive/no adblock) http://archive.is/uJmoD

[1] https://www.inc.com/anna-hensel/the-1-incredibly-detailed-jo...

That argument makes sense as they mailed the kids parents; when universities are all about recognizing the students as adults.

That's one thing that really struck me as weird in this article. I'm not living in America but just like I would expect my boss to only contact my parents in an emergency, I would expect my University to only contact my parents in an emergency (and graduation).

Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.

I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.

That's very generous of you. When my parents got married, my grandparents paid for their honeymoon. Had the resort where they were staying reported to their parents what they did there, they would have been outraged. Would something like this also be accepted in America?

I don't know what he's doing, I know what grades he got a few times a year.

He asked for money. One of the terms for my giving him money was to know whether or not my money is having the desired outcome. If he didn't like that he could get money elsewhere on far worse terms. Welcome to adulthood!

Of course not, but it's hardly the same.

For the sake of argument, take the university at their word: that they believed there was an unsafe environment fostered in this dorm, and that the students were markedly underperforming their peers. As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents, and they are trying to remediate it.

That sounds quite reasonable to me.

However, are they infantilizing the students and preventing them from growing in maturity and judgement in the process?

Yep, they sure are.

The problem US universities are finding themselves in, is when parents are ponying up small fortunes, they are not interested in preserving 'freedom to fail' which is necessary for growth.

This is a University that would rather someone die than they have to admit they did something wrong. Nobody is giving them the benefit of the doubt.

> As such the University is selling a defective good to the parents

The university is selling a possibly "defective" good to the student. The parents are gifting money to the student to pay for that service.

Actually it's not a gift. If it was a gift, it would exceed the amount of money I can give him and would trigger taxes for him, and I'd need to give him _more_ money to pay those taxes.

I don't know how this works legally, but I do know (because I asked) that this isn't considered a gift according to the IRS.

I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.

He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.

I agree. If you finance something, you are allowed to exercise some degree of control over it.

You are. The control you're allowed is the right to decide to stop paying.

He told the school to disclose grades to you. Not his personal conduct. Most parent's accept that their kids are going to drink, and have sex, and maybe do some drugs in college. They probably aren't happy about it but they know it's going to happen to some degree or another. That is a huge difference from having your only communication with the school be basically a PSA that your kid is living in some sort of college sponsored hippie, drug den that's going to cause them to fail out. That's what people are taking issues with.

Maybe they were right to contact parents. I've never been to Senior House and don't know the ins and outs what went on there. But as someone who has worked in ResLife and been responsible for kids, I can say without a doubt MIT took the nuclear option. At most colleges, you can be put on academic probation, and even kicked out without the university notifying your parents directly.

As I said above, I don't endorse MIT's behavior. However, there is a spectrum here. It sounds like you think it's ok for him and I to make an agreement that the school will disclose his grades to me in return for getting a free (to him) education.

If I'd taken this further, and asked him to disclose his personal conduct, and he agreed, would you have a problem?

Keep in mind I actually don't care about his personal conduct. I care whether or not he's taking school seriously, and I am using grades as a proxy for that. I take the money seriously, and if he's not going to take the benefits the money is purchasing seriously, then I have the option to stop paying for it.

The problem I see is that this is a slippery slope. Suppose your kid gets into two schools -- say a cheap(er) in-state school and MIT. Either way you're paying for it, and you know the kid will get a perfectly good CS education at either school. However, having MIT on their resume will be worth something, as will the relationships they make. Perhaps it's even worth the huge additional expense, assuming they take full advantage of it. At what point does the additional value beyond the curriculum, which the school is happy to charge for, give me some interest (both intellectual and legal) in how all of that is going?

I ask not to argue that MIT is correct here, but to try and illustrate some of the complexity. I am not an ethicist but it seems like an interesting question to me.

Ok, that's a bit different than how I read your earlier post, I thought you were saying that parents/relatives should be entitled to that info solely on the basis of footing the bill.

Then you should expect the school to tell you these things because the student asked them to, not because you're paying for it. The first and second halves of your first sentence are unrelated to each other.

It's not a choice. In Canada at least you are disqualified from financial aid (including loans) based on your parents' tax returns. The law expects you to pay for your kids' school if you earn a middle class income or more.

Ok, I can see it from that perspective -- we have similar financial aid limits in the U.S. I still think it's a choice, even if it's one that's structurally difficult for many people to make.

However, this is mostly orthogonal to the issue that most university students are adults, and the university has no business sharing their personal information on their behalf (without their explicit consent of course).

Same in the US; I had a friend who was estranged from her parents, and so they refused to sign a FAFSA form, which made her unable to qualify for pretty much all financial aid. The college president had to step in to have an exception made for her, since all need-based scholarships provided by that college (and most others) are based upon FAFSA.

You should ask your nephew how it is going. As an adult.

I ask him about birth control and whether or not he's using it as an adult. When I have to pay the school thousands of dollars a month (averaged out), I asked for the ability to find out directly from the school how it's going, and thankfully there was a way to make that happen. Seems like my request was not considered out of the ordinary...

If you can't trust your nephew to give you honest answers to your questions and discussions, how can you trust him to utilize your gift to its fullest extent? Or at least come out of it in a good way?

I was dirt poor, and similarly had a family member help with my college when, even after a full tuition scholarship and some government grants there was still a lot of bills left to pay. It wasn't a large sum that he paid, but he never grilled me about my status. His position on it was "You are a smart kid and you've earned this opportunity"

Meanwhile, years earlier my sister squandered large amounts of money partying at a supremely expensive private school. We couldn't exactly afford it in the first place, and attempting to exert influence over long distances caused huge amounts of stress on our family.

Do be careful. To some people, the worry of disappointing or angering the one funding the opportunity can be overwhelming. Having positive and supportive, yet frank discussions with your nephew would really help him, especially if/when he fails. But being overbearing could in fact make his college experience less positive and beneficial.

Hope I wasn't too condescending with my overly long rant

That's not how it works, assuming your nephew is an adult. You, as an adult, are making a decision to give another adult a lot of money. That gift creates zero obligations on any third party, and should not even create any obligations by your nephew unless you explicitly arranged for this in advance.

From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance with the attitude that they deserve to know because they're paying for it. They inevitably get shot down, because not only is giving out this information to paying parents not what's expected, but it's explicitly illegal to do so under federal law without the student's written permission.

I'm giving the money to the school, not to him to give to the school. The mechanics of this are perhaps irrelevant, except that the school offers this option for me to get his grades sent to me by them, similar to how I give the money to them.

My "attitude" is that I told him I would pay for his school if I got to see his grades. Pretty simple. I'd be happy not to pay and not see his grades -- I'm not his parent, and for my own kids (while this is further into the future), if they can pay for school without my help then I don't think I should know anything they don't want to tell me.

The school doesn't care that you're paying, nor should they. If you made this a condition of paying, then that's fine, but that's between you and your nephew. The school's involvement is limited to accepting his written permission to give you his information.

Your attitude about this is reasonable, but you're extrapolating to a position that is harder to defend.

Your agreement with your nephew is defensible and enforceable. You fund his education, he provides you with his grades. That makes sense.

But that agreement is between you and your nephew, not you and your nephew's school. So much is that the case that at some state schools (I know it's at least true at Illinois, where we just sent our son), they won't allow students to sign FERPA consent forms for release of grades on days when parents are likely to be present.

> Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going.

Why? If you're paying your spouses' medical bills, do you expect to be included on personal, private conversations between the spouse and his or her doctor? (Spoiler: you need the spouse's consent for that!)

No one is forcing parents (or you) to pay for someone else's college, but as adults, the university should manage the students' autonomy by not sending "nastygrams" home.

Why do you think you're entitled to invading your nephew's privacy simply because you gave him some money?

I guess he invaded his own privacy, by agreeing that he would arrange for his grades to be sent to me by the school.

Also, while your straw man was amusing, it's also mostly wrong. The rules regarding PHI disclosure from covered entities to spouses is fairly complex -- not to mention non-spouses. You might be interested in this link:

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/488/does-hip...

I don't think that my University in Austria even had my parent's contact data. Why would they?

I went to univ. in the USA. My father paid most of my term bills, and not once asked me to talk about how school was going. I screwed up my first semester, realized I was wasting a bunch of money, and straightened myself out. My state university never contacted them even though I was clearly on the path of failing. HUGE life lesson, maybe one I'd avoid if I had a parent that was more involved with my schooling, but I certainly learned a lot about why it's important to apply yourself.

So, at least in the 2000s, it wasn't established at my particular State University to contact parents.

Isn't America the place where in some states it is a criminal offence for 21 year olds who serve in the military to consume alcohol?

18 for military, 21 for alcohol. It's ridiculous, yes.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/26/1398179/-18-year-ol...

For what it is worth the British Army takes recruits from 16 and the legal age where you can buy alcohol in the UK is 18 - so its not that weird.

Why the downvotes, I meant 18 not 21?

And technically a person is in their 21st year of life in the year leading up to their 21st birthday.

What boggles my mind is how this morphing continues 16 years after 9/11.

WHile college freshmen get babied like this, others the same goddamn age are going into combat. Large numbers of them.

"Extended" ? If I look back 20 years, there was certainly a component of university life that was ... a bit less than adult.

Remembering some Latin texts from in high school, I get the distinct impression the same could be said of Grammar schools in ancient Rome. Having (quite a bit of) wine with colleagues and even with the teachers on occasion was pretty normal. Living together was a necessity in many places, even for the rich.

Biggest difference with High School being that having good grades was pretty much rewarded, even socially. Not everywhere, but more than a bit.

Originally society saw everyone as fundamentally the same with age not being a factor so much as experience and learning. Children were seen as tiny adults that simply hadn't been trained yet. Then as things advanced, children were seen as fundamentally different from adults, with children seen as barely trainable animals that had to be beaten into shape. Things persisted like that for awhile. Then the Industrial Revolution came, and the class of 'adolescent' was invented because factory owners did not want to pay inexperienced workers enough to raise a family on. Prior to that, adolescents became adults at 12 or 13, went to work as apprentices and could usually take care of whatever children they sired.

For reasons that I've not figured out despite decades of study, even though all of the socioeconomic pressures which inspired the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution have gone away, we preserve their practices. And appear to want to extend and expand them, further removing the young from society, etc. The thing that worries me is that there are critical periods of brain development. And brain development occurs exclusively as a result of experience. Remove experience, and brain development halts. And miss the critical period, and that development can never occur regardless of attempts to force it to occur.

Without knowing it, we may have passed a critical period. This is just a personal guess. But it seems 2 or 3 generations ago, parents who were really not entirely mature began raising their own children. As raising children is a very challenging task, demanding a great deal of maturity from a person (refusing to let your personal desire to have the child depend upon you and need you override your duty to turn the child into an adult as early as possible), this results in them over-sheltering their child, depriving the following generation of necessary experiences for brain development, and it continues.

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