Tutor reveals the Ivy-admissions madness of rich penthouse parents
nypost.com
nypost.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=1787712&page=1
"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."
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
"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 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.
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.
I never had much success with checking my answers before turning in a test, though I suppose other people very likely do.
There are probably bigger problems to tackle, like the wage gap in legitimate diagnosis rates.
I'm more like you -- I don't have te patience to benefit.
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.)
(networking with smart people is of perhaps maximal importance).
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).
Add: I came from a middle class family.
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.
It's as relevant to daily life as Honey Boo Boo or Jersey Shore.
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.
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.
In NYC there are: - Pre-school admissions counselors for 2 year olds. (This is one of many -> http://www.privateschooladvisors.com/)
- $500 dollar an hour services that can find tutors who got an A with the specific teacher and specific class that your child is struggling in.
- 20+% of the kids qualify at 97th percentile for public gifted and talented, yet only a third pass state exams. http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/schoolbook/2013/aug/07/fewer-one-t...
This contributes to very fragile rich kids who get shell shocked in college. Of course there are services for that too. (http://fulshearranchacademy.com/blog/college-for-emotionally...)
It also means kids very prepped for entrance exams but little else.
http://www.engageny.org/resource/new-york-state-common-core-...
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
Not understanding the use of [sic] here.
Sort of unusual use since they're not quoting anything.
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!) [...]".
It just means that the application process is in a financial arms raise that (in many cases) squeezes out the talented in favor of the well-heeled.
Which ultimately does not lead to the best outcomes for society.
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.
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.
[1]: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and-...
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.)
P.S. The article should be submitted with its original title, by the HN guidelines.
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.
http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation-issue-15
Edit: your URL is missing http://, for whatever that is worth.
Every time a plane flies over New York, we think, “Oh my God — is it another Atlantic think piece?” We mean, “an Atlantic think piece about women.”
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...
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.
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.
aaaaaaaaand your daughter's a stripper.