Reply to What if your child, who was qualified for their "reach" or "stretch" school, chose not to apply?

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Reply to "What if your child, who was qualified for their "reach" or "stretch" school, chose not to apply?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of my kids went to Yale and the other visited and said he wouldn't apply.  When I asked him to articulate why he said he did not like the Gothic architecture and he did not like the fact that in a lecture hall of a 150 desks not one was for lefties.  Maybe those sound like stupid reasons to you, but they made sense to him as indicators of why he didn't want to be there.  He ended up somewhere else and was very happy.  It's the kid's decision, and whether the kid can fully articulate the reasons or not, they are there.

And then we could discuss the fact that Harvard undergrads are mostly taught by TAs...[/quote]

NP here again.  But see, PP, you [i]had[/i] one child who [i]did apply [/i]Yale, and decided to attend.  What if that child, clearly one of the best and brightest of her or his generation, and with the intellectual gifts and the additional talents to go anywhere she or he wanted, had refused to apply to Yale out of hand?  [b]She or he would have given up an opportunity which they loved. [/b] Understandably your other child did not want to attend Yale, but perhaps less because of Gothic architecture and rightie desks, and more likely because of the pressure of sibling rivalry with a "brilliant' older brother or sister.  I assume that you are being modest about your younger son, and --given that he had the potential for Yale -- that the "somewhere else" he attended was Princeton, or Stanford, or Harvard?  In any case, hearing from parents whose exceptional children applied to and attended the very top schools that OP should "relax" and let her own top student forego a similar opportunity, is hardly reassuring.[/quote]

But you talk like this is a zero sum game. It's not. If Yale child did not go to Yale, she would have gone somewhere else and likely loved that instead. You also talk like everyone who goes to Yale loves it. But that's not true either. (In fact, I know half a dozen Harvard grads and *none* of them loved it.)

This HYP fetishism is just ridiculous.[/quote]

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