He works at AWS? Is that considered particularly impressive to be envious over? Sure he went to Hopkins but that's not atypical in the Princeton area.
I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS, they're probably all ML Engineers at FB or Google or Two Sigma, etc.
I went to school at about the same time at the other high school in town (technically 2 towns, 1 combined school district), my family mostly still lives there. A job across the country in a well known tech company is reasonably top 25% of the class or so. Not standout, but nothing to be embarrassed about, and that's where plenty of us ended up.
What did the top 1% do? What did your valedictorian(s) do?
I wasn't answering the question of "what will their parents think", I was just pointing out the reaction of our peers because I grew up in the same community. Parental reaction is typically much more about them as people than any other particular factor.