If it's anything like real ivy, it grows like a weed, and nothing you do can get rid of it.

I turned down Harvard for community college. I felt being around axle grease was my calling. Now I can grease a monkey in 10 seconds flat.

This is why MIT stopped race-blind admissions in the 80's. They were seeing 92% Asian classes, which, they figured, I think correctly, is just as undesirable as all-white.

It really is an INTERnational obsession these days with middle class parents all over, and it leads to tremendously burnt out kids. The grease monkey did the right thing. America needs auto mechanics and air conditioning technicians. They don't need more ivy league grads.

Full disclosure: I have a master's from Harvard, and I can't change my own oil. sigh.

This is a great idea. Why should the US and Canada have the only university trained McD's staff?

You would think that with a scumbag like bush, the Yale & Harvard tool, that would be advertising enough for what psychotic trash those schools are capable of churning out.

They had a great line in one episode of the first season of Superman (1951.)

Clark Kent and Perry White were investigating the disappearance of the latter's sister in Haiti. At one point they were interviewing a heavily French accented, black Haittian official, while loud drumming was going on outside their hotel. Perry White was asking about the voodoo drums, and the official was assuring them that voodoo was no longer practiced in Haiti, except perhaps in secret. These were talking drums. So Clark Kent asks him, "Do you know what the talking drums are saying?"

His answer, "I'm afraid that wasn't included in my course of studies at Harvard monsieur."

I'm currently in, and have been around, many graduate programs in the US. In my department only about 3 of the 30 of us were born, or raised, in America. The rest are mostly Chinese and Indian.

And, judging from the undergraduates we TA, I doubt too many more Americans will be winning those coveted graduate positions in the future.

Pick any discipline, and pick and school, and then go to their website and look up the Ph.D. program. Increasingly, you will see fewer and fewer American citizens as students. The US really has to step up its game if it wants to compete in the world.

When I went to an information session for prospective students in an information technology certificate program, one Chinese mother attended. Her son (the prospective student) wasn't there. Her only question was how much money her son could expect to make as an IT worker.

I went there and graduated 1964. At that time the parents were the same

Of course the culture of childrearing varies widely from society to society. But this technique could be a double-mind-fuck for the kids raised that way when they suddenly find themselves--HERE. What skills are the parents of such kids engendering in their offspring aside from academic ones? Are they learning to be self-accepting loving humans or duty-bound academic automatons? When the kid gets here, she's going to encounter a dramatically different perspective on what constitutes success, academic and otherwise, what may be legitimate choices for any person (even one coming from Asian societies) and even what constitutes a person.

I welcome anybody from anywhere who wants to and can come to study (or do whatever else they want to do to achieve their dreams) in the United States. It has been thrilling to see the number of Asian people who've come here to live in the last 15-20 years. There is no questions that we're immeasurably richer for it, just as we are for the immigrants who come from other cultures for other reasons. I hope to God that kids whose parents are driven single-mindedly by material considerations are able to glean a more whole concept of their humanity from the more liberal social and academic culture of the United States. And I doubly hope that the passing of the Bush "era" will make it possible for this country, once again, to make itself hospitable to something and someone besides the robber-baron elite whom Bush proudly called his "base." Base. Good term for it.

There's another part to the definition of "helicopter parent" not covered in this article & that shouldn't get lost. They don't want to see their kids fail at anything, and they hastily swoop in when they think their kids are being harmed. In educational institutions, the parents keep a vigil over their kids' assignments and grades, contacting the professors and stepping in to complain about grades the kids earn. A professor's judgment of the helicoptered kid's work is taken as an indictment of the parents; the parenting ego feels wounded.

It's hard to deny that the Ivy pedigree gives someone an advantage. Let's hope that talent and hard work will always win out, though. According to MSNBC, of Obama's cabinet picks, 7 people are Ivy Leaguers: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/1...

Most likely the worst decision I made. I thought that $13.00 an hour to start was a great way to sock away some cash for the future. I was sort of right. After two years at my job, I dislocated my knee, tore the cartilage and snapped my ACL. After two weeks, it was obvious there was something seriously wrong, I was told nothing was wrong, "just a strain get back to work". Needless to say, I couldn't stand for an hour much less work at my former job. When a suitable job for which I was qualified and experienced in opened up at the employer, I applied only to be overlooked repeatedly for the shovel leaner types..... for two more years. I finally got a proper diagnosis and surgery, which was botched (I found out after the statute of limitations for a malpractice lawsuit ran out), than had that fixed as best as possible (leaving a permanent degenerative injury). This whole medical debacle took six years and got me an other manual labor job. A short time at this job left me with a "clay shoveler's fracture", a compressed disc and massive muscle spasm and strain. The fracture healed, but the disc and muscle injuries are permanent and recurring. Again I tried to apply for positions in the company which I was qualified and experienced. No luck, again the young inexperienced temporary college students, who needed to be trained and never really did the job correctly were hired.
I was lucky, so I thought, because I was referred by NYS to VESID, a vocational rehabilitation program for the disabled. They did a battery of tests and concluded that I was a prime candidate for a college education.... which I believed, or rather they made me believe.... They offered to help me financially with my studies, by offering enough money to buy a couple of text books. It was the hardest thing I set out to do. In order to do this, I worked 30 plus hours a week 50 miles away from the state colleges I attended full time and pulled a mediocre average with a wide variance in my grades; ie. C- in calc 2 and an A in calc 4), primarily because of the extra pressure of maintaining a job, long drives and the persistent medical problems. To top it all off, in my second senior semester just before the mid terms, I was injured at my job herniating 3 discs. A couple of my professors refused to allow me to take my mid term at a later date, effectively giving me an F for the semester (automatically failed for not attending the mid term), while others allowed me to make up exams and work from home, very successfully I might add. Because the university was not offering one course ever again and the other would not be offered for another year...... which made me turn down a job with IBM that was offered to me pending my graduation.... So I finally graduated with no prospects, and $35,000.00 in debt as loans were the only way to afford it.
The education has not served me as it was described to me by the school and the government. By the time I graduated in 1998, IBM had laid off some 15,000 people at once locally, the entry level jobs were being shipped overseas and everyone was looking for "experienced" engineers and technicians with no real training in place to get American grads that basic training.
What is my point?
Well...
If you go to college, do it early. Why?
Age discrimination is very real;
The move from our classic American economic model to the world economy has flushed our country of many entry level jobs (especially technology and manufacturing);
In general, the college playing field is stacked against any one low income and especially the disabled with a low income.

I question the whole current economic system, I have found little suitable work, while still being called "lazy" because of the limits from my disabilities.
Among the work I have found in the past ten years, some highlights:
two years at a small internet broadcast start up; 1999-2000.
Another two years working at an ivy league school in the nuclear physics department taking data and doing maintenance on a sub atomic particle accelerator looking for Bosons; 2002-2004 (funding for further projects was diverted to Laurence Livermore for mini nuke research).
Yep, that's right 4 full time suitable years of work out of ten....

There are cultures, and parents, all over the world who push their kids to excel. Some do it better than others, for more altruistic reasons. Forcing a kid to hold ice cubes until her hands ache, jump rope to win a school contest, withhold toys, and use what some of us would classify as Guantanamo-esque torture by music may well give you a child driven to excel at all costs. It will also give you a child who grows up psychologically impaired, contantly striving for an unattainable perfection to satisfy unrelenting parental goals. I'd be interested in seeing what the suicide rate will be in about, oh, say, fifteen, twenty years.

There is nothing wrong with encouraging one's child to succeed in life... if you actually have a concept of what 'success' is. Some years ago, I had the great pleasure of staying up all night talking to Dr. Clifford Stoll in a hotel room in Munich while at a book festival, a fascinating man, author of Silicon Snake Oil and High-Tech Heretic. What he said then is true now - if everyone became a computer programmer, then you'd end up with the elite being plumbers, because all the IT expertise in the world isn't going to unstop shit from clogged sewer pipes.

And if you have a glut of IT experts competing for a finite number of jobs, a massive downturn in the economy, and a cheaper workforce elsewhere, then all the Ivy League diplomas in the world will make nice wallpaper, but that's about it.

I'm currently studying for my PhD as well, so I feel slightly hypocritical about this. But my goal is pretty pragmatic - I need a doctorate to make a living at teaching undergrads how not to be able to make a living doing what I really do with my life, writing fiction. Believe me, there's no shortage of people chasing dreams. In China. In New Zealand. In the US. Let's just try to encourage as many varied dreams as possible, or we'll just 'successfully' educate ourselves into a termite army of unhappy drones.

The idea of the ivy league is an overblown myth in the minds of America and increasingly the world. This was brought home to me by two experiences: 1) spending a summer at yale as a research assistant during my phd and being decidedly underwhelmed by the students (I expected them all to be brilliant) and 2) learning that the average IQ (a useful but flawed concept) at Harvard as measured by a researcher there is 128, and realizing how many people I've known with scores higher than that.

n/t