Reply to How are students supposed to build good extracurriculars when everything is impossible to join?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "How are students supposed to build good extracurriculars when everything is impossible to join?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t know how people get national championships in anything or [b]get internships in NASA[/b]. Everything is impossible to join in the high schools here. You can’t make the high school JV swim team if you haven’t swam since 6. Band, model un, and robotics are all very selective too. I don’t know how people are easily able to get straight As and easily achieve in all the extracurriculars here.

It’s frustrating because colleges know NOVA is a wealthy region, so they have high expectations. But they don’t care about how hard it is to get anything here. The people who are varsity sports captains and also somehow started clubs or did research just seem like Jesus to me. [/quote]

Anecdotally based on the one student I know who got this, they were scary smart and driven, even as a freshman. Plus they had a relative who worked there.

[b]Some of these things are easier in private/Catholic schools or the not-so-wealthy public high schools, so the smaller environments that are acquired either by virtue of having a lot of money or none at all. [/b][/quote]

The bolded is one of the reasons a lot of middle class parents feel so defeated these days. You will work hard to be able to afford to live in a "good" public school district, and you will struggle to save money for college while also paying for a house in said school district and saving for your own retirement, which for many middle class families means forgoing a lot of other stuff. And then your kid will wind up in a total rat race in HS, competing against both all the other middle class kids and the cohort of truly wealthy kids at the school for sports, ECs, internships, APs, teacher recs, etc, with the wealthy kids having massive advantages because their parents got them a private lacrosse trainer in middle school and they've been doing French immersion since they were 4 or whatever. Then when it's time for college, these middle class kids are mostly not accomplished or "pointy" enough for top college admissions even if you've spent years trying to help your kid become as accomplished as possible, and their options will be state schools or small, lesser known SLACs, both of which will expect you to be full pay because you are not poor enough to qualify for any kind of aid except loans. And even those state schools and lesser known SLACS have sometimes been competitive in recent years because there are also plenty of full pay rich kids who don't want the striver culture of top schools and wind up aiming for these as well.

It's frustrating to people because they feel like they've done precisely what they were "supposed" to do and it will only bite them in the a$$. Their kids are stressed and disappointed and have often been deprived of having a more normal, rewarding adolescence building friendships and exploring what they might actually want to do with their lives, while they were striving, striving, striving for a more upper class lifestyle. And far from feeling closer to financial security for their kids, they feel farther from it, having sunk so much money and energy into winning prizes that will remain out of reach. It's not worth it but a lot of families don't realize this until their kid is a junior in high school.

I don't know if this is a thing outside the DC area. Probably? But I think it's particularly bad here because there are so many people in this area who were the smart, ambitious middle class kids in their high school class, and got into top schools based entirely on just being smart and reasonably hard working, and maybe playing one or two sports that did not require them to play a decade of travel sports in order to make varsity. But that's not a thing any more, the entire landscape changed.[/quote]

You realize I pay $35k/ year for my son’s and $45k/ years for my daughter’s private Catholic HS. You have a misconception about sticker price and who attends. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics