Cunning American parents

by Rishi Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:15 pm

A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning that comes into this frenzy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/bruni-our-crazy-college-crossroads.html?_r=0

by Marathadi-Saamiyaar Wed Apr 02, 2014 3:24 pm

Rishi wrote:A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning that comes into this frenzy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/bruni-our-crazy-college-crossroads.html?_r=0

That is a real game that most class toppers do, and the parents who know the "system" push them to. Adcoms know that but try to decipher the ones that are really applicant initiated and the ones applicants are just a proxy.

The same crap goes with many desi parents whose kids end up in Intel and Google competitions. Notice the desi and chinku finalists have a "connection" to the sophisticated labs and professors - through parents, many of whom are PhD themselves and work in well established universities and/or companies.

by MaxEntropy_Man Wed Apr 02, 2014 4:06 pm

we know that couple. they fly their kid in the family plane to "volunteer" at the orphanage. the rat race, and the magnitude it assumes in kids' minds is ridiculous. the process itself assumes an importance it does not deserve, actual learning and values be damned.

by Propagandhi711 Wed Apr 02, 2014 5:38 pm

somebody should clue in that insufferable douchebag artist formerly known as virile1 urf phlegmy urf michele1 urf swapna on this particular comment on the article:

[size=13.600000381469727]As I have noted before, parents and students don't obsess over Ivy League schools because they feel they will get a better education there. They obsess over them because that's where they know students can make the connections that will smooth their path though life by initiating them into an ingrained favour trading network that makes a priority of propelling one's offspring and the offspring of key business partners and potential benefactors along. The fact the actual degrees are relatively "useless" is not news. They always were. The problem is these days almost everybody has them so they can no longer serve to put a fig leaf of respectability on hiring decisions that were never really about what people knew but rather who they knew. And in a declining economy with fewer opportunities the reality of the process only becomes more clear. That said ours is a mixed nepotism cronyism meritocratic economy. There is still opportunity for the extremely bright who can do things -- even the one percent and their kids realise somebody's got to do the work. One last thing Yale's concept of a "well rounded" student was once explained to me by an admissions officer as "someone who could roll all the way from New Haven to Wall Street." Surely apocryphal![/size]

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