"The majority of your children are average. And so are you."
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Anonymous
thats a bunch of nonsense to scare people. american children can compete with anyone. But they can't compete with desperation from a nation with millions available to work for peanuts. all the h1b indians are desperate to come here and make 60K a year doing software testing. they drive their children insanely to get in TJ. need to stop the h1b program and stop selling out the middle class with desperate people. |
Anonymous
so because you shat your child out in the US gives it a security blanket from competition? 
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Anonymous
| I thought the article was flawed. As mentioned in a Washingtonian article a few years ago, the Admissions Directors from Georgetown and UVA said they would admit kids from TJ but that since TJ sifted off the smartest kids, they wouldn't admit many from other VA publics. The the top kids were already sifted off and don't go to McLean. The dumb mom in the article was trying to pretend her kid wasn't just average and that's why the poor thing went to JMU |
Anonymous
So you read the entire article and missed the point completely? Good for you. |
Anonymous
You are a dumb ass. The US issues 65,000 H1B visas per year. Our total population is 314 million. H1B visas are a drop in the bucket for the US middle class. |
Anonymous
I remember that article, and thought it was just the Georgetown admissions director who made that comment. It just made him look pretentious - the way that you come across when you call Wilma Bowers a "dumb mom" just "trying to pretend her kid wasn't average." Ironically, if you know TJ students, you'd know that Princeton is really the private university of choice for TJ grads, not Georgetown. McLean HS typically sends 1-3 students to Georgetown every year. I don't know if that's because Georgetown turns down McLean kids or because McLean kids whose parents can afford a Georgetown tuition would prefer to venture further afield. On the other hand, many McLean students get into U. Va. every year. A Patch article about 2011 graduates reported that 50 McLean seniors got into U. Va. and an article last fall in Arlington Magazine reported that 47 seniors from the class of 2013 were admitted. http://mclean.patch.com/groups/schools/p/mclean-langley-graduates-excel-in-college-acceptances |
Anonymous
| I didn't say that TJ kids preferred G'town. I'm just saying if McLean kids aren't even acceptable to the G'town admissions director...they'll never even get looked at by any Ivies. |
Anonymous
Anyway. I went to a top business school and while most people were bright, some of them weren't all that bright. What matters more for business success is aggressiveness and the willingness to take risks. But maybe we need to step back and clarify some things. First, there's confusion here about the definition of "success" and some are defining it is your income. Indeed, for a business student, success is making $1 million (or maybe $5 million these days) before you're 30. But for a STEM type, success is working in a top lab or teaching at a top research university. For some people, success is a good work-life balance. What I'm saying is, success isn't only the business-school definition that's limited to your income. Another clarification. HHI does correlate with intelligence. I work in research in social sciences areas, and there's ample evidence of this. |
Anonymous
Bull. Maybe the smart kids stayed in McLean (and other base schools) because they were not that interested in STEM. |
Anonymous
+1 Tons of "smart kids" aren't "STEM" kids. They excel in the humanities and don't even desire to attend TJ. Plenty of these kids attend all the Northern VA schools. It's a fallacy that all the "top" kids go to TJ. Perhaps if they're STEM kids, but that doesn't encompass so many others who excel in different areas (history, English, languages, etc.). |
Anonymous
You can say whatever you want, but a suggestion by a (former?) Georgetown admissions director years ago that Georgetown only wants FCPS kids from TJ doesn't mean kids from McLean and other FCPS high schools don't get into Ivies. Kids from McLean got into Brown, Cornell, Columbia, and Penn last year, and McLean grads from the class of both 2011 and 2012 went to Princeton. Grads from other schools like Langley, Madison and Marshall also head off to Ivies. Doesn't mean it's the norm or that all parents in the area should expect that of their kids, but it's not isolated, either. |
Anonymous
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Sure many of the kids in FCPS are above average, more so in the more upscale areas. But you have to be way way above average to make it into the top private and public universities many people have in mind. So from that perspective - our above average kids are closer to average than we would like to think.
Look at the numbers. A 1200 SAT (math / verbal) is around 80th percentile. That is way above average. But a 1200 SAT is not going to get you into a top tier college and I would guess many in Great Falls / McLean would have to mask their disappointment at a 1200 SAT. A 1300 SAT is around 90th percentile and from northern Virginia that may get you into Virginia Tech and some out of state public flagships - not the top ones though. So you are talking 90th percentile before you start getting into the lower end of schools many of us are aspiring for our kids. And you have to pair that with mostly A's through a difficult class schedule. That is a tall order and most of our kids will fall short. We are setting them up by expecting too much. And what happens to their emotional balance in the process. |
Anonymous
I think this is an exaggeration on every score - both the difficulty of gaining admission to various schools and the psychic toll the admissions process takes on local kids. It's some parents who seem to be most wound up. |
Anonymous
There are three annual allocations of new H-1B visas (while not limiting renewals of visas already issued). There are to be 65,000 new visas for industry at the college-graduate level of skills, there are to be 20,000 more for high-tech workers with U.S. graduate degrees, and there are to be no limits at all for H-1B workers toiling at university addresses. Almost 700,000 H1Bs are in US at any one point in time. Most are clustered in large cities like DC/Silicon Valley, not scatter across the US. IN 2011, based on figures from the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and Current Population Survey data, they estimate that 160,755 foreign workers were given H-1B or other work visas for IT jobs in 2011, out of 483,692 jobs that went to candidates with a bachelor's or master's degree. In fairfax county, about 1M people, about 60,000 IT jobs and about 25,000 H1Bs. H1Bs have significantly, negatively, affected the middle class IT workers in fairfax county. |
Anonymous
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Recent increase in competition for colleges and schools in Fairfax county is due to the large Asian invasion from H1Bs in IT since 1990. It should be shutdown and focus our energies on training our own children in college. Our children are average but it doesn't mean we need to sponsor children from the other side of the world for "success".
The Indian firms commit frauds to send h1bs to US. Infosys is just one example. The federal investigation was conducted jointly by the Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service and Immigration and Custom Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations. The immigration agents found an 84% error rate in the company's I-9s, work-authorization forms that employers complete for each employee, according to an official close to the investigation. Infosys distributed a "Do's and Don'ts" memorandum to foreign nationals to help them appear that they qualified for a B-1 visa, according to the complaint. For example, they were instructed to "not mention activities like implementation design and testing consulting etc., which sound like work." They were told to avoid using terms like "work" and to "not mention anything about contract rates." Infosys directed employees to inform customs and border protection officers at airports that their destinations were those listed on a "labor condition application" to avoid additional paperwork and scrutiny, according to the complaint. For example, on or about Oct. 28, 2009, Infosys allegedly directed an individual cited as VG to tell U.S. authorities that he was destined for Seattle when his destination was in fact Bentonville, Ark. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579167490918208338 At TJ, 2012’s admitted freshman class has 317 students of Asian heritage, or about 66 percent of the class, and 123 white students, about 25 percent. The five black students represent 1 percent of the admitted class of 2017. The class composition is significantly different than it was in 2009. |