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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I absolutely understand and empathize.

Why so much hate from people on this board.  OP hasn't said anything about the way he raises his kids or that these feelings are the dominant feelings he has about his kids.  Any parent who has achieved a lot of academic and career success will, at least at some level, wish their kids to have academic success--among other talents.  Doesn't everyone want the best for their kids?

The challenge is really how to sort through these wishes and feelings among a complex set of other feelings & wishes.  I'm sure that OP's first and foremost feeling & wish is that the kids are loved, healthy and happy.

That being said--we can all talk about F500 execs or entrepreneurs who were late bloomers or didn't go to top schools, etc. but let's be realistic:

Top school alums make up a high proportion of very highly financially successful people...not a majority but a very high proportion.  If you count ivy, stanford, mit, duke, uchicago, northwestern, amherst, williams, swarthmore, ucberkley, ucla, michigan, etc and look at both undergrad and/or grad students it's a very high percentage.

[/quote]

I don't really know that that is true. I am the PP who talked about my non-nerdy colleagues who all make a lot of money (many $500K-$1M+, often by age 35). I pasted an excerpt of Frank Bruni's book on the college madness below. Most fortune 500 CEO's didn't go to college. Sure people who went to Harvard are unlikely to end up making very little (unless they choose a low-paying career by choice). But I know a lot of people who went to Harvard and aren't particularly successful today. if you want to be something like a Supreme Court judge, going to an Ivy will help. But if you want to start your own company, or make bank in sales, as a trader or as a lobbyist, no one will care if you went to an Ivy and being overly academically smart may actually hurt you if you get too caught up in the weeds. And I say this as a double Ivy grad. There are so many ways to be successful - some come from book smarts, but some come from other kids of smarts. OP, you may want to check out the book "Strengths Based Parenting" for ways to cultivate your child's innate strengths. https://www.amazon.com/Strengths-Based-Parenting-Developing-Childrens/dp/1595621008

“There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.” [/quote]

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