I think this is really smart.

The problem is that it is SO hard to overcome one's desire to "protect" children from pressure.

I just feel like the world is a much bigger place than that elite-school mentality believes it to be. You can go to an ordinary state school, excel at everything and blow your teachers away, and find the job of your dreams in almost any locale, (unless your dream is really tied to geography.)

Happiness is almost an uncorrelated variable, however.

Is this the Hirshman argument? Stick with it, girls, don't bail because you're unhappy, and there will be rewards down the line?

"all smart women under forty are unhappy."

Is the converse also true? Can we expect Bitch to lighten up a little when she turns the big 4-0?

Agree with both the post and HG. The problem with the "cut-throat" world view is that it isn't a very accurate description of the world. People take weirdly circuitous paths; we ought not be telling people otherwise. In fact, I think one of the strange advantages of cultural capital is the knowledge that you're never quite out of a game, if not the specific one toward which you pointed yourself initially.

Uh-oh. I've got a bad feeling about where this thread is going.

In fact, I think one of the strange advantages of cultural capital is the knowledge that you're never quite out of a game, if not the specific one toward which you pointed yourself initially.

This is very clever -- I have to think about it some.

Let's ignore the Hirshman reference.

I think that's right - having gone to a fairly rubbish school before University, I'm actually dying of jealousy from the fact that some people get to go to schools with so much *support* and intellectual stimulation. There is pressure wherever you go, so the message that it's okay to do well and enjoy it seems really important.

I think that it is easier for boys to find what they are good at and stick to that one thing. If you are an All State swimmer, that is enough. Everyone knows you train everyday for sixteen hours, and so schoolwork, eh not so much. I got the sense that for the girls it is not enough, the have to be smart and pretty and an a jock and not ever sweat. Yay feminism, you can have it all. Men get to choose what they want to do, women must do it all (even the housework).

It also occurs to me that this is a very good reason for fathers to be more involved with child-rearing. Historically, at least, most high-achieving women have had extremely supportive dads. Whereas I really think that women--i.e., me--have a much more ambivalent relationship to success, which surely means we're going to have a harder time encouraging kids, daughters especially, to really pursue it.

most high-achieving women have had extremely supportive dads

Great point--as far as I'm remembering, all the women I was thinking of when I wrote this had involved, supportive fathers. But I'm less sure about their level of "involvement."

"all smart women under forty are unhappy."

Almost every single woman under 40 that I know has spent at least some time on anti-depressants. I'm not sure which of the many possible explanations is most responsible, but good lord is it striking.

12: So I can blame my father, instead of myself, for feeling like a failure? Awesome.

I didn't say they didn't feel like failures, B.

", the guys seem much less buffeted and it seems mainly due to a less pronounced tendency to beat themselves up"
and also they have incentives to hide it, instead of to broadcast it?

re: 13

While I don't know many men my age who admit to having sought medical help, seen a therapist, or gone on anti-depressants; a signficant percentage of the guys I know within that same age group have, at some time or other, probably been on the edge of (or fallen all the way into) a drink or drug problem. Which I suspect is a different approach to dealing with a similar problem.

13: It's because we feel so isolated, what with no one being willing to call themselves feminist and all.

11: I recall reading somewhere that successful female scientists are far more likely to have had strong relationships with their fathers, but I can't find it anymore.

There is also data pointing the other direction, though. IIRC, much of the information coming out of the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network says that fathers don't have an impact on child development at all, no matter how involved we are. (Although we still manage to have an impact on mother sanity.)

Almost every single woman under 40 that I know has spent at least some time on anti-depressants.

Sample bias.

I read the article with a great deal of shock. How is it possible that these girls, with their Honors theses on existential philosophy, aren't getting into the colleges of their choice? Seriously, how many girls like this can there be? I was bright, but not this bright, as a 17yo, and I got into all 9 of the "highly competitive" schools I applied to. The Times seems to be suggesting something has changed.

I wonder why they exclusively focused on girls in high-achieving super-fancy schools in wealthy areas. As far as I can tell (and as Ogged suggests), these girls have always had this much pressure on them. Maybe the problem with admissions comes when it's not just the rich girls, but also the public-school girls, all taking college-level classes and getting super-high SATs. There's a critical mass of totally interesting women, but only if it extends beyond the wealthy.

I read the article with a great deal of shock. How is it possible that these girls, with their Honors theses on existential philosophy, aren't getting into the colleges of their choice? Seriously, how many girls like this can there be? I was bright, but not this bright, as a 17yo, and I got into all 9 of the "highly competitive" schools I applied to. The Times seems to be suggesting something has changed.

I wonder why they exclusively focused on girls in high-achieving super-fancy schools in wealthy areas. As far as I can tell (and as Ogged suggests), these girls have always had this much pressure on them. Maybe the problem with admissions comes when it's not just the rich girls, but also the public-school girls, all taking college-level classes and getting super-high SATs. There's a critical mass of totally interesting women, but only if it extends beyond the wealthy.

I want my daughters to be like the girls in that article. My sons too. I'm not picky.

19: I think that the "impact on child development" thing is about *early* childhood, rather than longer-term issues like confidence, etc. I'm willing to believe that, by and large, nurturing mothers are better at the early stuff, and fathers who are less worried about whether something *feels* bad than they are about sticking to one's guns are better once kids start to become young adults.

Can't argue with 17.

AWB, when you apply to college out of one of these high schools, you're not competing against the national pool, but against your own classmates and a few dozen other schools, and the elite colleges will each take only so many from each high school, so even though Esther Mobley is fantastic and would do just fine, there are probably three girls in her grade who took more APs and did a few more extracurriculars, so she gets passed over. If she were doing what she's doing at Noname High in Podunk, she'd get in with no problem.

13: It has been well established that most mental illnesses (depression, PTSD) overwhelmingly strike women more than men. The standard explanation is that women are more likely to seek help than men, who prefer all the self destructive behaviors that are talked about on this thread and the Austin thread below.

Another factor may be that women simply have a rougher time in our society. There is already evidence that racism contributes to high blood pressure in African Americans. What does the patriarchy do?

The other thing re. elite liberal arts colleges is that applicants who *aren't* coming from the major high-achiever schools *will* get into them. I did.

The problem is that applicants like me don't end up going to those same liberal arts colleges, because we're not astute enough to know what doing so is worth. And maybe because our ambivalent mothers have spent all their time telling us that it "doesn't matter" if we pursue the hard stuff because "we're smart enough to make it anyway."

Oh right. I forgot about that. I think it did factor into most of my acceptances that all the people in my GPA-range at school were applying just to MIT and Kansas State.

Almost every single woman

I didn't mean "single" as the opposite of "married" there, but like "every last woman". Not that it really matters.

21, 22: I went to Duke a handful of years ago and do admissions interviews now. The resumes these kids have just amaze me - while they don't seem particularly more talented or hard-working than my high school peer group, they have more enumerable opportunities than we did. We read or built things or wrote bad plays in our basements; they take a ton of AP classes.

I also think that either the stories are untrue, or things have changed significantly in the last twenty years. I got into Brown and MIT with great scores, but mediocre grades (A- average) and no extracurriculars of any note at all from a high-pressure school -- by what looks to be the current standard, I should have been at a community college someplace.

No, Apo, the sample bias is that they know you.

I definitely knew some people like this at my hotshot magnet school. There was a different subset, that I tended to hand out with and that I now think were much healthier, who were doing the things they did because they found them interesting by themselves, and weren't going for the cover-all-the-bases excel-at-everything die-of-stress medals. In a relative sense, that made them (us) slackers, which is nuts.

My impression from the kids I babysat who are now graduating from my high school is that it has gotten more competitive since we were there.

Tangentially related: Caroline (my 4 year old) came back from the playground the other day saying that there was a boy there who had two mommies. Molly asked her if she would rather have two mommies, two daddies, or a mommy and a daddy. She said she wanted two mommies *and* two daddies.

Kids are so greedy.

33: I got the joke, John.

32: I read that as the pressure existing at the high-schools, not the universities per se. In other words, that is what these girls are being told they need to get into the `right' schools, and their visible competition is being told the same thing. But none of that article (yet another way it is poorly written) addresses things from the point of view of the universities recruitments & admissions.

21: Because two AP courses (one of the girls they profiled) isn't really that much of a courseload for your senior year, and there's 10,000 other applicants just like them. And judging from a lot of the admissions process, there's more emphasis on extracurriculars and intangibles than there was ten years ago when I was applying. Even then, it's a dice roll with the top ones. These girls are all on the East coast, and schools try to select from lots of regions of the country.

10 strikes me as very perceptive. We do have boys who are track stars and top students and who do XYZ; but the stereotype seems to be, for boys, either you're the science nerd, or the drama emo boy, or you're the jock, and if you're wildly successful at one, no one expects you to display similar talent in other areas. (Not that all talents are equally valued, but boys don't seem to have to worry about being well-rounded as much.) The stereotype of the successful high school girl is that she's the top scientist, the lead in the play, the soccer captain, and still has time to apply her makeup.

When they grow up, he can be a great lawyer or doctor; she can be a great lawyer or doctor as long as she's also a great homemaker in her spare time. It's like we're fine with smart girls and women succeeding, as long as nothing traditionally feminine slips. Boys can medal in the individual; we need to take the all around.

38 isn't to say the admissions pressure isn't real, just that the article didn't seem to back it up.

32: For at least a while, MIT admissions made a point of *not* universally preferring the all-around stupendous applicants. This has drifted over the years, and I feel like I got to watch some of the change from the perch of running Rush.

It's like we're fine with smart girls and women succeeding, as long as nothing traditionally feminine slips. Boys can medal in the individual; we need to take the all around.

This.

I think that somehow life is more competitive now. The top is higher and harder to get into, and a higher proportion of people are trying.

From what I read from the liberal arts academic world, the differences between top-ten grad school, top-fifty grad schools, and all the rest is really enormous. And to a lesser degree for undergrad schools and even high schools. Supposedly, at every level the quality of your school plus your grades is the best predictor for how you do at the next level. And the most successful kids seem to be boutique kids like the ones in the story.

The "America, Land of Opportunity" schtick was always an exaggeration, but I think that that happened more during my father's generation (b. 1914) than in mine (b. 1946) and still less in my son's (b. 1973). My Marxist friends call it restratification.

39 just doesn't sound like what high school was actually like though. I don't remember any difference in boys participating in only one thing, and girls participating in zillions.

I think things have significantly changed in the last 20 years.

It's probably wrong of me to comment, since I'm not going to stay around to reply, working around the house to get ready for tonight, but I'm amazed and shocked, really, at the ready idea of "success" everybody is signing on to here. I must be the last hippy, surrounded by people who take "high achievement" for granted as a worth signifier. I knew some of you did, just not all.

From my contacts with my son's ambitious friends, and also the med students I knew at work up until 2000, I got the impression that their days had been scheduled by the hour since they were about 6 or 8 years old.

Boys can medal in the individual; we need to take the all around

Yeah, this sounds right, and it's part of what I meant by girls' tendency to beat themselves up.

I think that somehow life is more competitive now.

We get these same stories all of the time. I remember reading the same in Time in the mid-80s, and again in the mid-90s. I don't particularly believe any of them.

IDP, my life has been an experiment in the success-neutral life. My conclusion has been that you need some success, but not as much as people think to begin with. Some of my hippy slacker friends are in pretty bad shape.

at every level the quality of your school plus your grades is the best predictor for how you do at the next level.

Grades, yes, but not so much with school quality. It only appears that way because the better schools attract more students who would be high achievers regardless of where they attend.

Also, this "perfect 2400 on the SAT" really sounds wrong. Perhaps that will make a nice, arbitrary line to say where it All Went Wrong.

I don't remember any difference in boys participating in only one thing, and girls participating in zillions.

They participated about equally at my school, but I do think the boys knew where their real talents were--yes, you're on the football team and the debate team, but you're really a math dude, and the rest is just gravy--whereas for the girls, what was essential and what extraneous wasn't clear.

I got the sense that for the girls it is not enough, the have to be smart and pretty and an a jock and not ever sweat. Yay feminism, you can have it all.

I don't think this is feminism in isolation so much as feminism smacking up against the wall of patriarchy.

It seems to me that the "if you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything" message that the article mentions in passing (but doesn't really examine) is a direct outgrowth of the conflicts their mothers are experiencing. Have kids, but also have a kickass career. Be there for the soccer games, but be a team player at work. If you run into conflicts, it's your problem and you just need to juggle harder.

There's no difference, in practice, between trying to juggle four AP classes with sports and being the lead in the school play, and trying to be a superstar at work while also doing all of the things society tells you you need to do to be an adequate mom. And the boys are less conflicted and being pushed in fewer opposing directions because their fathers aren't, either.

We get these same stories all of the time. I remember reading the same in Time in the mid-80s, and again in the mid-90s. I don't particularly believe any of them.

I, on the other hand, believe all of them: I think it's getting worse and worse. It's not an accident that we all know so many people on anti-depressants.

46: A lot of it is fear -- I get the impression that the US is a much less secure place than it was even thirty years ago for someone who wants to enter and stay in the middle class. The message that 'no one owes you a job', but if you don't have one you're completely fucked, gets across to kids loud and clear. The six months between the Peace Corps and when I decided to go to law school were terrifying for me; looking through the want ads, and finding nothing for someone with a bachelor's degree but no meaningful work experience.

The difference I noticed between the more achieving of the men and women at my school was that the girls tried hard to be more broad in their applications, trying to find smaller competitive liberal arts schools as well as the big names, while the boys were narrower and more traditional in their application-choices. So when they didn't get into Harvard or MIT, it kind of broke their spirits, and a lot of them ended up getting depressed about going to a state school. I think most of the top girls in my class went to interesting, challenging places.

From the article, it sounded like most of these girls were applying to lots of interesting programs, but mostly the same list--Tulane, Dickinson, Smith, Williams, Bowdoin, Tufts, etc.

IDP, I think Heebie and SCMT were getting at something important with this: The problem with the "cut-throat" world view is that it isn't a very accurate description of the world. People take weirdly circuitous paths; we ought not be telling people otherwise. In fact, I think one of the strange advantages of cultural capital is the knowledge that you're never quite out of a game, if not the specific one toward which you pointed yourself initially.

I see this over and over in the young people I work with. Yes, elite schools can offer stunning resources and amazing connections -- if that's what you really want in life. And if you want to be one of 400 (400!) black female surgeons in the United States, you absolutely do have to follow the path as it's currently being defined.

But boy howdy, there are a lot of joyful, fulfilling lives out there (including but not limited to paid work). And the U.S. is still a reasonably easy place to reinvent yourself, if you want to. And the folks who cotton on to this, who have some autonomy over their lives, are freer in an important way.

MattF, it was reported to be most pronounced at the undergrad-grad and the education-hiring transitions. Not so much the HS-undergrad transition. My friend from a low-ranking school at Texas said that he could pretty much tell right at the beginning who the stars of his entering class were going to be, and they were from the top-ten undergrad schools. I've also seen statistics to this effect.

someone who wants to enter and stay in the middle class

Really, LB? I get the sense that entering the middle class really can be done (and that's what I consider most of my students to be doing), but that maintaining a perch at the topmast of the uppermost class is difficult with all the crowding up there. None of these girls is struggling to, like, not work in a factory or WalMart.

I question the college admissions pressure not from the pov of is it real (it is) but from that of whether it's realistic. 20 years ago, the kids at my California Catholic h.s. felt like we had to take all the AP classes, do lots of extracurriculars, etc., but I'm not sure that's actually true. It's probably somewhat truer for east coast kids--I didn't get into Stanford, but I did get into Brown, which was tougher at the time, presumably because of the geographic diversity thing--but surely the high-achievers who don't get into Brown or Swarthmore do get into Cornell or Oberlin.

And I sense the same is true in academia, that there are jobs for excellent PhDs from middling schools, but that life for Yale grads is somewhat scarier right now. They don't have enough teaching experience or flexibility to impress those middling schools on the market, and there aren't enough postdocs at Harvard for all of them. A Yale PhD of my acquaintance claims that, five years ago, he was the only one in his cohort to get a job. That's terrifying.

62: Well, there's also the union thing.

It's not an accident that we all know so many people on anti-depressants.

I agree.

52: When I read articles like this one, I have to remind myself that they "re-centered" the SAT in 1995, raising average scores and creating a lot more "perfect" scores.

Otherwise, I end up wondering where all these child geniuses came from.

60: I'm being a snob, and when I say middle class I mean upper middle class. I'm sure I could have gotten an admin job no problem, but I was lost and terrified trying to find anything entry-level on a career track.

65: The re-centering changed what it took to get a "perfect" score, yeah (I pre-dated that), but it's seing 2400 instead of 1600 - because of the new writing section, I think? - that's really jarring.

I like this post's question--why should girls be protected from the pressure to compete?--and I like Bitch's follow-up thoughts about mom's vs. dad's influence. But, as a mom of a girl, I still want her to learn that there is more than one model of success in our capitalist meritocracy. It seems to me the driving force behind the desire to get into a "top school" isn't typically a desire for a great liberal arts education, but the fear of NOT being able to compete for the highest-paying jobs in the fashionable locations. I don't want my daughter to be driven by that fear, or to equate future happiness with achieving that goal, though I do want her to feel tough enough to compete with the big boys.

I missed out on high school, so don't really have afeel for what it `was like'. I've taught in a couple of difficult to get into programs though. Grades were a predictor (in one case, the lowest entry percentage from high school was something like 96%, average was probably 99 or 98) but otherwise it seemed quite mixed backgrounds.

62: This is a problem for all borderline-top and top programs. A friend recently went through the job market, and he did land a t-t job, but he found his problems were a) that while he was qualified to land interviews at all of the top schools, he was competing with junior faculty who had been out five years and b) because his program was aspirational-top, his package wasn't pitched to the midrange, teaching schools.

So he ended up being the also-ran for all the top programs, but not in contention at the smaller ones because it was clear from his c.v. that he wasn't someone who should be applying there, but to the top programs....

I think 54 nails it:
There's no difference, in practice, between trying to juggle four AP classes with sports and being the lead in the school play, and trying to be a superstar at work while also doing all of the things society tells you you need to do to be an adequate mom. And the boys are less conflicted and being pushed in fewer opposing directions because their fathers aren't, either.

but the fear of NOT being able to compete for the highest-paying jobs in the fashionable locations.

I think that's right. See #66. I think the article should mostly be used as evidence of the People-ification of the NYT. Maybe it was always that way, and I just didn't realize it.

I assume we're all taking "capitalist meritocracy" as the official propaganda line rather than an affirmation that we do indeed live in a capitalist meritocracy.

66: Well, of course, if you want an upper middle class career track, you don't want to start as an admin. It would be/will be hard enough for me to leap from the clerical side to the professional/administrative side here at the university, despite my various qualifications. It would be just about impossible to get into anything non-clerical at this point outside the university. Sometimes it seems weird to me that I have indeed chosen to live my life as a secretary. But there are many, many worse fates out there.

On that note, I guess maybe those ol' upper middle classes will now get some politics and try to render our capitalist meritocracy a little more secure and equal, since they're seeing a little more of life as it is lived by most people.

I think it's great to teach girls to excel and dream big, but I think the scarring thing comes when girls are taught that if they fuck up, they're giving up "partner of the most prestigious firm" for the gutter. Life is a lot more flexible than that.

These high achieving girls are Proper Victorian Gentlemen! Expected to be able to play cricket, bash the wogs and write poetry on the same afternoon. Only the dastardly Americans with their specialization and practising beforehand ruined the fun. I remember when the college counselor,(from my highly selective and prestigious boarding school) told us that the colleges of our choice were looking for the well rounded class, not the well rounded applicant, so many of us were fucked. The expectations for the girls will eventually catch up, in one hundred years or so.

73: Well, of course, if you want an upper middle class career track, you don't want to start as an admin.

I think the work/family stuff really starts to play in here. While it's a great big flexible world out there with a million career tracks in it, it's really hard to be a woman with kids and a job without a fair amount of money; once you can't afford to hire childcare, your vocational options get very constrained very fast. So there's a lot of pressure on women who want to both work and have kids to not fuck up at all, ever -- once you lose your footing you're off the log, drowning.

60, agreed. I think people are trying to maintain the same position as their parents, and that's harder and harder. I don't want to live in the town I grew up in, but even if I did, I couldn't afford it. I've been successful enough to buy a house, but I couldn't have done it without parental help on the down payment. I'm in the same general area as where I grew up, but in a much less prestigious neighborhood, in a school district with a horrible reputation. Two salaries are currently going towards the mortgage; I could afford it on my own but I'd be house-poor. Endanger one of those salaries and put a kid or two in the mix and things become a lot more dicey.

And I'm doing really, really well compared with most of my smart, high-achieving high school friends from the same kind of town as Newton. Most of them don't own property. One friend with kids is living in his mom's old house rent-free; if they didn't, he'd have to move away. Another owns a house with her husband, the down payment of which came from a duplex that they co-owned with her mother; in order to afford that, her mother had to sell her house in our old, high-status town.

At the same time, I'm making more than my father does, and have been for some time. He supported my mother and 2 kids on that. The parents of almost all my friends owned their houses and were able to support their families on fairly modest incomes. (I lived in a rich area, but my friends tended to be kids of teachers and other solidly middle-class but not high-powered professions.) No wonder these kids are freaking out.

66: I don't think you were being a snob. Life for the lower middle class has been getting a lot worse over the past 20 years. They're the "no health insurance" class, for starters. There is nothing snobby about saying you want to avoid those stressors.

I'm with ogged in 55 and Emerson in 43, and I don't think I'd have to spend to much time in the NYT archives to find studies to back me up.

74: This pretty much describes my neuroses perfectly. It was pounded into my head that in order to get into college, I had to be perfect. It was either straight A's or you could go to McDonald's the rest of your life.

It was mostly parental overreaction: if she doesn't get a scholarship, we can't send her to school, can we? if she gets a boyfriend, she'll get pregnant or become dumb and not have any more ambitions. If she develops interests in things outside of schoolwork, she'll lose focus. Basically, it's what happens when you have parents who are committed to their daughters succeeding but aren't sure how to make that happen.

Of course, it isn't true at all. You can get As and Bs in high school and still get financial aid. You can have a boyfriend and still be a good student. But girls don't know this; and parents don't know this (until they have a few more daughters who manage to get into college without being an overachiever.)

77, 78: Right; the cutoff for 'comfortably secure' is at a much higher income percentile than it used to be.

77: Yeah, wage stagnation is a real culprit here. The house my parents bought for 45K (with no down payment) in 1980 is $165K now, despite being 25 years older, with all the accompanying maintenance issues.

I think people are trying to maintain the same position as their parents

Is this really true? When I was little, my mom worked at Sears and my dad was a mail carrier. Neither of them had a college degree. When PK was little, I was a PhD student and then a professor, and his dad was a high-tech program manager and then, briefly, a stay-home dad. I think that in fact we're trying to stay "even" with where our parents were when we were teenagers, rather than recognizing that it took them twenty years to get there, and they had kids a lot earlier than we mostly do.

I remember someone I went out with a few years ago (who sometimes lurks here--hi!) asked me if I was on meds. I got really offended, because, like, what would make him think/ask that? He said every woman he knew was, that it was a common subject of conversation in his circle. Ivy undergrad and PhD, though.

Now that I've been in my program for four years, though, we seem to have caught up; about half the women I know are on meds for anxiety and/or depression, and it's become a pretty common topic of conversation. Now people ask me what I'm taking, and it's like asking someone what their thesis is on. It's either the drugs or the stress filtering down from the upper crust. (I'm still unmedicated--I prefer therapy--but I'm a lot less moralistic about it in others.)

80- perhaps in part because our notions of both "comfortable" and "secure" have been redefined? Or really just because things are that much worse? Honest question, though I'd think it has more to do with the former than the latter.

The conceptual problem here is that we want to integrate women into the culture without additional just-for-girls baggage, but the culture itself is broken. But, as in the post, I say save the girls first, changing the culture is a much bigger problem.

I think expectations of 'comfort' have been ratcheted up; expectations of 'security' are in the same place, but are much more expensive to attain (housing, particularly, has gotten more expensive, and it's not something that can be easily economized on when things get bad. If you own a house, the mortgage is the mortgage.) I really don't have the sense that needing to find a new job used to be as frightening as it is now.

84: False dichotomy. When I was little, my lower-middle-class parents could send me to well-funded public schools (up until about 4th grade, when white flight and Prop 13 started to really have their effects), and they could afford a house.

80: No, it is not because our understanding of comfortable has changed. It is because the social system has been gradually changing so that only people with a lot of money can navigate it. In most parts of the country, you couldn't live without a reliable car if you wanted to.

It is all fine and good to be a hippie like IDP in 46 and not care about status as long as you never get sick and never get old.

Our European correspondents can afford to be a lot more laid back about education and income, because they have a welfare state.

You can get As and Bs in high school and still get financial aid

Not really enough, though. I may have gotten into nine prestigious schools, but only two offered me enough assistance that my family wouldn't have had to sell their home to help me out, even with loans. That was a bitter pill.

84: Well, it depends on where you set your bar. Of course, most of us are better off than our opposite numbers would have been in 1900.

But health care costs are a lot higher than they were when my father was my age, for example. And a lot of the invisible safety net has fallen apart--people live farther from their families, more family members work all the time and aren't available to give assistance, etc.

And I'm not sure that rising expectations are entirely a bad thing. It's too easy to talk about them as if it were merely a matter of "Oh, now every poor person expects their own HDTV, the kids today and their iPods, grump grump grump." But (and Immanuel Wallerstein makes this point repeatedly) we've shifted the discourse through the twentieth century so that people who don't have health care, who don't have housing , who are in dangerous or violent or impoverished circumstances--they no longer believe that this is inevitable and somehow the best they can expect.

80: A little bit of both. My grandparents didn't have high speed Internet or cellphones or two cars or computers, all things that are now markers of being successfully middle-middle class. So part of it is that in order to be at the same class level they were, I have to have more things.

On the other hand, they could afford a house on one income. I will not be able to do that. They could get by with one car. I won't be able to, because I will have to have a job to have that house and so will shivbunny.

89: I had the same problem (which is one reason I didn't go to Brown et al.) but I also had a friend who had the good sense to call Notre Dame and say directly that she needed more money, and they ponied up. I think the problem for a lot of kids trying to move "up" is that they lack the confidence/cultural capital to realize that they can ask for more than they're offered.

Our European correspondents can afford to be a lot more laid back about education and income, because they have a welfare state.

Right. This hit me hanging around with New Zealanders when I was in Samoa -- they didn't have that panicky careerist mindset, because they weren't frightened about what would happen to them if they fell off the conveyor belt.

89: That seems to have changed (for the better) in the past ten years. Youngest calasister isn't having problems getting aid so far and she's almost quite literally half the student I was.

90: Yes, and, from what I can tell, the lower-middle-class is stuck trying to keep that foothold on the middle class more through outward markers of leisure and comfort than by fighting for health insurance. Weddings are all extravaganzas, even if the couple can't afford a home, and people are buying enormous flat-screen TVs and boats rather than saving for what looks to be a bleak retirement. Why aren't these people angrier about not having a safe, stable future? My parents get really pissed about this kind of stuff in their friends, but they're just as bad, voting Republican while they piss away money on luxury fishing trips, no retirement or health care in sight.

95: Yes, and s/b Yes, but

From AWB in 57:

The difference I noticed between the more achieving of the men and women at my school was that the girls tried hard to be more broad in their applications, trying to find smaller competitive liberal arts schools as well as the big names, while the boys were narrower and more traditional in their application-choices. So when they didn't get into Harvard or MIT, it kind of broke their spirits, and a lot of them ended up getting depressed about going to a state school. I think most of the top girls in my class went to interesting, challenging places.

Strikingly same exact thing happened last year when the 12 or so PhD candidates in my class were on the job market.

Not really enough, though.

Yup. Got in where I wanted to go, but couldn't afford to go. Though B is right that if I had had more of a clue, I might have been able to finagle it.

My grandparents didn't have high speed Internet or cellphones or two cars or computers, all things that are now markers of being successfully middle-middle class.

Many of these things are not just luxuries, they are necessary to access the rest of society. Once upon a time, you didn't need a phone, because most people didn't have them. Now, you can't get a job without a number where they can contact you. Computers aren't just toys, they are the medium in which a fuck of a lot of society takes place. How many jobs can you hold down if you have little computer experience? Car mechanics use computers now.

The cost of being a functioning member of society is simply higher than it used to be.

95: Well, human cussedness, I guess. But also exacerbated by poor schooling, deceptive media, fear, and lots and lots of pushback from our corporate masters.

I'm always reminded of this from Sarah Schulman's (I think) Empathy: "The Cold War wasn't to keep the Soviets in line, the Cold War was to keep us in line."

You could say that people have rising expectations but no place to put them; easy then to channel it into "If it weren't for the terrorist illegal immigrant baby-eating monsters, you could have healthcare and a nice job and a pony."

98: Now I've learned. When I got into AWB-PhD-School, they couldn't offer me tuition money beyond my teaching salary, and I was literally not able to eat on many days. So I barged in, bluffed about being able to leave if I wanted to, and they ponied up from a discretionary fund. Now, thank goodness, they've gotten a great deal more funding and people don't have to do this anymore, but I must have looked really desperate to get that money.

I think you are all crazy. I think that if you told most Americans that you were going to exchange their economic prospects for today with those for the mid- to late- 1970s, they'd shoot you. I would. I think the reverse is happening (or seems to be happening) for people at the pretty-far upper end of the expectation scale. My recollection is that the early 80s recession was much worse than the early 90s recession, but that the latter was much more scary for many people who have parties giving voice to their concerns in the media because the 90s recession was more likely to affect them.

housing, particularly, has gotten more expensive

Also health care, child care, and college tuition.

But if you told them that you were going to give them the same job prospects as those enjoyed in the post-WWII boom, they'd be ecstatic--that's not a very telling point.

There really are numbers about this stuff, like access to health care, bankruptcy, debt etc, if anyone feels like Googling around a bit.

I feel terrified a lot of the time, actually. I think about how I'm not young anymore, and how much looks and youth are important for women's careers. I think about how so many places are axeing healthcare, and how my job is dependant on a really weird federal funding environment. I've pretty much accepted that I won't be able to retire, and that I'm going to be poor later on, because there's no way that I'll be able to make much money or put much aside, and it seems likely that I'll face at least on major financial crisis at some point. Maybe that's just normal adulthood, but it's hell with the lying awake at night and worrying.

I think that if you told most Americans that you were going to exchange their economic prospects for today with those for the mid- to late- 1970s, they'd shoot you. I would.

Seriously? My father, with no college degree, had no trouble moving from one professional job to another in the mid-70s. What seems easier now than it did then to you?

86/87: I'm not so sure. Has the percentage of our poopulation without health insurance/access to quality health care increased that much over the last 50 years? (I don't think so.) It's coming to be viewed as an essential part of "security" only as we grow richer. Health care for the elderly, and for society as a whole, is better than it's ever been. (And not just for the "rich.")

And as to housing, yes it is harder for most people to afford housing these days, but at the same time most people (except perhaps some from wealthy backgrounds) wouldn't dream of living in the house that their parents owned. Average square footage per occupant has grown dramatically, as have the amenities almost everyone considers standard.

And is 87 meant to imply that a perceived need for private schooling (or a house in the "exclusive" district) is understandable because, well, you know, the public schools aren't what they used to be? I wouldn't expect that argument from B, but don't know how else to interpret what's written.

Again, I think there's a lot of moving the goalposts that has gone on here. I'm not even saying that's a bad thing, just that it seems to me a big part of the story.

The seventies, and in particular, the mid- to late- seventies, were a bad time for a fair number of people, LB. Lots of people used to think that's why Reagan won. Maybe the reading of what actually happened in the seventies--stagflation, etc.--is wrong. But I don't think it's an uncommon perception.

The housing thing in 77/81 is a big one. There's a lot of good material on this in "The Two-Income Trap", though I don't really buy their explanation. I feel relatively relaxed about being a renter, in part because my parents were renters for the whole time I lived with them (and my mom still is), but that makes me an abberation.

But they were bad times in comparison to the long post-war boom. Harder than the 50's and 60's doesn't mean harder than now.

My parents used to be obsessed with insurance when I was little, and up until the Bush administration, they always made sure everyone was covered, would take care of health problems when they needed to be taken care of, etc. Now that my mom is no longer covered by my dad's insurance, he has to pay a lot through his company to get it, and I don't have anything except hit-by-a-car-type insurance, all I hear them say about it is, "The government can't go around protecting people's insurance, because you know poor people will just go to the doctor every time they think they're sick." And this is different from what rich people do how? Rich people go to the doctor all the time. They're not milking the system? Besides, their insurance is usually free.

My mom's been recommending plastic surgery for the scar I got on my head because I don't have insurance for things like stitches. How am I supposed to pay for that, again?

We need to distinguish between standard of living (better now) and economic security (worse now).

I think that the big changes are that it's harder to get into the top ( which is higher), it's worse at the bottom, and riskier in the middle. I don't think that the median person is worse of in dollar terms or consumption terms (they're porobably better off), but I suspect that they're less seciure and more stressed.

The minimum standard of (upper middle class) respectability and social viability is hard to reach, and often advancement depends on being able to present yourself as respectable.

I actually went to the high school in the article, though, jeez, that was almost a decade ago. Still, the article gives me no reason to think things have changed all that much (except that there seem to be a wider variety of honors/AP classes than there used to be--back in my day, no one in the social set profiled by the article would have taken economics, because we didn't offer an honors/AP version, and since GPA is done on a 9-point weighed scale ...). A few comments -- keep in mind that there's no way I can think about NNHS without serious adolescent angst seeping through, and that my perspective may be dated.

1. What's deceptive is that the article is really chronicling a certain subset of the students--maybe 1/4th-1/5th, who are part of perhaps the largest but by no means only social network. The preppie types. Newton North also includes the "wrong side of the tracks" part of Newton; it has a very serious auto shop program, for example, and, as they said, there are metco students bused in. You'd better believe there is absolutely no interaction between these groups. Newton has very, very intensive tracking, which is a large part of this. I'm not sure how much this mindset exists among the smart-but-not-part-of-that-social-set students--there *were* female nerds, for example, who seemed comfortable specializing and doing only what they really cared about. (On the flip side: the guys in that set did seem to share in the "must do everything" view, although there was obviously less focus on appearance.)

2. As others have said, the problem is the extreme narrowness of 'success.' There's a lot of northeastern parochialism, too--it's about Name schools, period; there's an annual scramble to scoop up the newest US News rankings as soon as they're leaked online. State schools? Not so much--even the obvious ones like Berkeley, Michigan, UNC. The obsession with credentialing is overwhelming, though not particularly surprisingly; Newton is very much a city of professionals.

3. Let's not be too sympathetic to the "wanting our kids to do as well as us" idea, at least not when measured in relative rather than absolute terms--downward social mobility is important, and we rightly would think it insane for Yao Ming to say he expected his kids to be as tall as him. Regression to the mean, folks. This isn't about slipping out of the middle class; it's about securing a slot on the commanding heights.

4. That said: it really was a great education, and there's no question these kids are academically prepared. And I probably agree with Ogged that in the long run, the kids are better off for this. My worry is actually about the problems for society from an elite conditioned in this way: when you work so damn hard for your credentials, you aren't going to be very sympathetic to the idea that perhaps pervasive credentialing and the concomitant social/occupational rigidity are bad things. You've suffered, damnit, so you've earned this.

The cost of being a functioning member of society is simply higher than it used to be.

That was just my point. It's not that we're all gluttonous with luxuries. What it takes to be a successful middle class person is a lot more things than it did 60 years ago.

It's probably easier for me to own one car than it was for my grandparents. But that doesn't make me middle class any more; class is relative. Shorter me: I think we're agreeing here.

(And what happens when we add credit into the mix? My grandparents paid cash for their stuff.)

A note on France: there are plenty of people here (possibly too many) who don't mind being average. And when I say average, I don't mean the way every upper-middle-class white family in America claims they are average despite the fact that the make over 100,000 and that puts them in the top 10% in reality. I mean average as enjoying the life of a baker, teacher, or factory worker. The downside to this is the fact that many of these kids really don't give a shit about school and don't even bother trying to do something besides making bread.

But they were bad times in comparison to the long post-war boom. Harder than the 50's and 60's doesn't mean harder than now.

I think--again, perhaps wrongly--that employment in the 70s was much more stratified and stultifying than it is now. Much more "waiting to move up the seniority chain," and more subject to pretty exclusive social networks. I believe--again, perhaps wrongly--that if you watch movies and TV from that era, you'll see, quite strikingly, a lot more fear about employment and fear of "the Boss." (And, even if that's true, it may be an artifact of cultural tastes, etc.)

Let me put it this way: if both Democrats and Republicans run on the claim that "Democrats want to return us to the 70s, economically," I think the Republicans will win. There is, of course, a difference between what people believe to be true and what best describes the two periods.

106: "Average square footage per occupant has grown dramatically". That's simply not true. It's true for the newest construction (which is on average 40% larger than new construction a generation ago), but the total housing stock average really isn't up very much at all - something like half a room larger per family (Again, data is from "The Two-Income Trap, which was well-footnoted with such tidbits).

86/87: I'm not so sure. Has the percentage of our poopulation without health insurance/access to quality health care increased that much over the last 50 years? (I don't think so.) It's coming to be viewed as an essential part of "security" only as we grow richer. Health care for the elderly, and for society as a whole, is better than it's ever been. (And not just for the "rich.")

I don't think this is true. When my grandfather was a g.p., he'd take chickens in payment for medical bills. Don't think anyone does that now. When I was a kid, the entire round of vaccinations cost about $50; now it costs more like $500. That's not only due to inflation.

And as to housing, yes it is harder for most people to afford housing these days, but at the same time most people (except perhaps some from wealthy backgrounds) wouldn't dream of living in the house that their parents owned. Average square footage per occupant has grown dramatically, as have the amenities almost everyone considers standard.

The house my dad lives in now is one he bought about ten years about for $80,000; houses on his street now list about $300-400,000. And his house is much smaller than the one my parents raised me in. And again, I think you're comparing what people having kids in their 30s and 40s own with what their parents had raising kids in their 20s: my current (rented) house is huge by comparison with my folks' house which they bought in their early 20s, but it's pretty much equivalent to my grandparents' house, which they bought in their late 30s/40s--the same age I am now.

And is 87 meant to imply that a perceived need for private schooling (or a house in the "exclusive" district) is understandable because, well, you know, the public schools aren't what they used to be? I wouldn't expect that argument from B, but don't know how else to interpret what's written.

No, it's meant to state quite directly that public school funding has collapsed. But it's also true that the popular perception now *is* that public schools are dangerous/inadequate, which wasn't the case in the 60s. Whether or not that perception is correct, it still makes a big difference to how secure people feel.

"pops, what was it like when you were a kid?"

"well sonny, we could walk downhill to and from school everyday. And it was a good school, too."

117- Yeah, I've read Two-Income Trap. You've got selective use of data here. Of course old houses haven't grown, but you have on average fewer people living in them, so, as I said, square footage per occupant is way up. (And total stock being half-a-room-larger per "family" is actually a big difference when you factor in both (1) increased size of rooms and (2) smaller size of average "family.")

115, 116: We're really overlooking the fact that the gap between "top 10%" and "top 1%" is much, much wider than it was thirty years ago. As, indeed, is the gap between the median and the top 1%. Saying that people have more stuff doesn't address the issue of relative poverty and/or insecurity, which once you get past the basics of food and shelter, is what really matters.

I must be the last hippy, surrounded by people who take "high achievement" for granted as a worth signifier. I knew some of you did, just not all.

Hey IDP, I'm with you.

And I'm 36 now and I've been happy for years - hell, I think I've always been happy (apart from a couple of hiccups - and they were caused by things that happened, not angst from within). A fair proportion of the women I know are on anti-d's though.

I feel as if I've somehow derailed this conversation from somethnig useful to a boring discussion of historic socioeconomic data that is comically short of data. Sorry. Go back to talking about stressed-out overachieving girls, please.

121- what you say is true, but it's a little funny that your frame of reference is all about the top 10%. How has the gap between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile changed? That's, to me, more interesting. (And if as you say all you really care about is relative insecurity, we might be a good deal better off than we were 50 years ago on this measure. I bet there's been convergence. And who gives a fuck about the "relative poverty and/or insecurity" of people in the top 10%, anyway?)

115, 116: We're really overlooking the fact that the gap between "top 10%" and "top 1%" is much, much wider than it was thirty years ago.

Fair enough, but why should anyone between, say, 1% and 89%, care? I don't think it's wrong to worry about this, I just think that stories that have such a focus in the NYT are part of the fact that it really has become sort of a People magazine for those with reasonable aspirations towards that top 1%. It's probably a decent business model, but I'm not sure it tells me what we should worry most about as regards national policy.

118: I have to trump B. My dad was a GP, and he took turnips in payment.

Also squabs and geese. Mmmmmm.

124, 125: I think life's gotten a lot grimmer and scarier down at 30, 40% -- a lot more debt burden, less access to health care, less job security, and so on. I'd have to look up references, but that's the assumption I've been working from.

124, 125: I think life's gotten a lot grimmer and scarier down at 30, 40% -- a lot more debt burden, less access to health care, less job security, and so on. I'd have to look up references, but that's the assumption I've been working from.

Maybe, but I doubt you can infer that from these sorts of articles, or that one could fairly claim that such articles are meant to get that point across.

121: it's true that the girls in these articles are, basically, panicking over whether they will be in the top 10% or 1% (or perhaps 5% vs .1%). The questions are whether this panic is rational w.r.t. their ultimate happiness (they're clearly right to panic about getting into Harvard, but as others have said, they can all easily get into midrange schools), and whether, even if it is, it's nevertheless unhealthy to foster this sort of meritocratic (in the pejorative sense) culture among our future elite. For this group, at least, it's not really about health insurance; it's about the shame of having to go to (just for example) UChicago.

I worry that there's some kind of implication that girls are taught as high-schoolers that their "life" is school and that everything else is not related. A lot of the major emotional breakdowns that I see at the college level are in girls who are trying to take seven classes a semester and get A's in all of them, and then they have boyfriend trouble and they're too ashamed of having a boyfriend in the first place to deal with a personal life alongside their schoolwork. The stress of creating that distinction just kills them. They might be intellectually prepared for an adult life, but they're not emotionally prepared.

[Ack: I mean whether it's healthy *for the rest of us* to foster this culture ... ]

My dad was a GP, and he took turnips in payment.

Electricity changed everything, huh?

it's about the shame of having to go to (just for example) UChicago.

Be fair: that's a lot to have to bear.

And is 87 meant to imply that a perceived need for private schooling (or a house in the "exclusive" district) is understandable because, well, you know, the public schools aren't what they used to be? I wouldn't expect that argument from B, but don't know how else to interpret what's written.

This is a situation peculiar to California -- we used to have some of the best public schools in the country, until Prop 13 came along. Prop 13 was sold as much-needed property tax reform, but it absolutely devastated the public schools since that's where the funding was coming from. It also spread out the funding so that schools in the rich areas were no longer getting more than the schools in the poor areas.

That sounds great in theory, but rather than getting a better education for poor kids, it caused massive cuts for everyone, and it created a shortage of funds not just for "extras" such as art and music, but for school repairs. Schools in the rich areas make up for it by setting up school foundations and raising money from the local community, and by passing city and county bond measures for school construction and repair.

Meanwhile, the schools in the poor areas, who have neither the financial support nor the time from parents (who has time to join the PTA when they're working 3 jobs?), and whose local communities can't afford to pay for bonds, continue to have substandard programs while the facilities are falling into total disrepair. The result is that we've gone from having some of the best schools in the country to mediocre schools for the rich kids and absolutely awful schools for the poor ones.

133: OH NO YOU DIDN'T!!!

129: Here, I may be flat wrong, but I'm talking about what my perception was as a college graduate with professional parents and a prestigious degree trying to find a job. The impression I had was that once you were out of the top 10% income bracket (or a career ladder leading clearly to that bracket) that there wasn't any net underneath you. If you fell out of the upper middle class, you could just as easily end up working poor as middlingly prosperous -- there wasn't any way to count on being able to do okay.

But they were bad times in comparison to the long post-war boom. Harder than the 50's and 60's doesn't mean harder than now.

The thing is, the 50s set up economic expectations that are going to be very hard to meet ever again.

Perhaps we should just compare our economic state to the 1830s, and be thankful.

Can't someone just send up the bat-signal and make DeLong answer this (for whatever "this" is)?

My only point was that I feel no pity for people making more than 100,000 = top 10% income earners in America. I especially hate it how all these people claim they are upper-middle-class. If the 100,000 dollar salary is for one person, you can bet they have decent health care and a 401k. If these people have any sense, they don't buy monstrous cars and house, and they will live very comfortably with generally good security.

Certainly the people from the TRUE middle class (median income is around $44,000) are the ones who have very little economic security. They don't generally have the education to switch careers in case their job is eliminated, and they usually don't have great health care.

136- and my only point way upthread was that I think a lot of your perception here stems from a very skewed view of what it means to "do okay".

Okay, listen to this:

I especially hate it how all these people claim they are upper-middle-class. If the 100,000 dollar salary is for one person, you can bet they have decent health care and a 401k.

You're bitching at someone who's calling themselves 'upper-middle-class' rather than, I assume, rich, because they have health care, and a 401K? Being able to go to the doctor, and live on something better than cat food when you're old is more than the middle class should aspire to?

Health care and retirement should be middle-class minimums. If you don't have those, you're working poor, not middle class.

141: What's your definition of rich if the top 10% doesn't meet it?

Health care and retirement should be middle-class minimums. If you don't have those, you're working poor, not middle class.

So basically, most of America is working poor, now, and the "middle class" is made up of maybe the 75th-90th percentile? What is this, the 18th century, except a great number of the working poor have white-collar jobs?

141: I agree, I think, with your larger point, that health care and a retirement shouldn't be luxuries, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that someone who is in the top quartile of Americans is working poor.

I think a more useful measure is whether your income comes from work or wealth, generally -- the interests of a high-income wage earner are in many ways more aligned with lower-income wage earners than with wealthy people.

But the point of my comment wasn't the $100K income, it was the health care and 401K. Anyone whose economic position doesn't provide for health care and a reasonable retirement is in a scary, bad place, that even quite well off people are frightened of. And that's most of the people in the country.

People who were employed their whole lives used to have pensions. No one who doesn't work for the government has a pension any more.

141: That is, I agree with you, those should be the standards, but they aren't. I think middle class tends to be self-defined as having enough money for food and shelter, and a little in the bank for frivolous purchases and regular dining-out.

it's a little funny that your frame of reference is all about the top 10% (this and 139): Well, that's what the article under discussion seems to be focused on. Therefore.

As to why everyone else should care, I think that's obvious, too: if the top 10% are relatively poorer, then sure as shit the rest of us are, too.

134: Prop 13 was California, but it began property tax revolts in the rest of the state. As so often, we led the charge.

What is this, the 18th century, except a great number of the working poor have white-collar jobs?

Yes, and by those standards, things aren't so bad at all.

I mean, hey, no more more chattel slavery!

Sorry, but I have a hard time getting it up to care about kids who don't get into Guaranteed Security U. and have to settle for something else. Yes, it is painful and hard. I got into the school I originally wanted but couldn't afford it; a very prestigious school flirted with me a bit (yes, beyond the mailers everyone gets) but I couldn't even afford to apply. They are terrible lessons but they are worthy ones. I went to what started out as my second choice, dropped out a few times so I could make enough to pay for another semester then drop out again, etc., and in the end am happy for the confidence I gained by being tossed off the well-worn path and surviving anyway.

I get that changing society and readjusting everyone's definition of "happy" to mean happy is a bigger task than supporting those young women while they run a damaging, unhealthy gauntlet but I am having trouble buying that it's somehow better to simply encourage them to beat their competitors and move on. If the problem is that they are in constant competition and there is no good that's good enough then is escalating things - and "supporting" them to make sure they succeed in the game of cutthroat is surely encouraging escalation - really the way to make it better?

I think you're comparing what people having kids in their 30s and 40s own with what their parents had raising kids in their 20s: my current (rented) house is huge by comparison with my folks' house which they bought in their early 20s, but it's pretty much equivalent to my grandparents' house, which they bought in their late 30s/40s--the same age I am now.

My parents bought a 1000 sq ft house with a yard in their mid-20s, then moved up to a 2000-square foot house in their mid-30s when they had two kids -- both on one salary, and both with lots of land for kids to play in and to buffer the house from the street. I bought a 1200-square foot house on a very busy corner with a postage-stamp-sized yard in my mid-thirties on one salary, and it would take a second salary to move up.

Granted, this is the Bay Area, and the housing problems are more extreme here, but I'm still way behind where my parents were at a similar age.

My own observations of the HS period are really of a different class of girls young women. The ones I'm thinking of were ambitious and somewhat driven, but very optimistic and cheerful. Their parents were upper-middle-class down to successful working class. And they were terribly busy and overscheduled, but I don't think that they felt the stress that the girls in the article felt, mostly because they were aiming for the top 20% rather than the top 1%. And they were very happy to have sports and academics to concentrate on, rather than exclusively the traditional girl appearance and socialite obsessions. In appearance they ranged from lovely to alternative/dikey to tomboyish.

I really felt that they were luckier than comparable boys, because the coolness, alternative, attitude stuff guys had to cope with was so self-destructive. (Even though I liked the attitude guys much better than the preppy kids.

144, 146: Exactly. I probably shouldn't have said 'working poor', but that's why high achievers are so frightened -- if they stay on track, they can have what should be a reasonably civilized life, where illnesses get treated and old age isn't a terror of inevitable poverty. Once they slip off that track, then things get very scary, very quickly.

150: comparing housing prices in any given location over decades really is problematic, because what you're getting isn't really "square feet of housing"; it's, as they say, location and location and location. Housing's still pretty cheap in lots of newer areas, or, heck, Detroit. (This applies very much to, eg., the city in the NYT article; *of course* few of the kids will be able to afford to buy there at the age their parents did, and that's not a tragedy at all.)

Backed in HS, ogged was known as a girl, albeit not an amazing one.

Well, amazing in her capacity for producing body hair, certainly.

153: True, but my house at this particular point in time is in a much less valued location than my parents' houses were at the time they bought, and there is no cheap housing to be had anywhere.

151: I'd agree with this. Several of my HSmates and I have discussed the fact that most of the women we knew were smart, capable, confident, competitive, and relatively happy, while the guys were often socially outcast, beaten up, and self-loathing, except a precious few. After HS, though, that all changed. We went from a world in which being a smart woman was prized to suddenly being taught that we had to cower in the face of male brilliance, and most of us emerged from that trial just fine. The men, on the other hand, almost universally, failed that transition. Almost all of my very smart guy friends dropped out of college, got into drugs, spent time in jail (usually for sexual assault or drugs) and we were all shocked.

152- So the point of this thread is it isn't easy being a white bourgeoisie white-collar professional?

So he ended up being the also-ran for all the top programs, but not in contention at the smaller ones because it was clear from his c.v. that he wasn't someone who should be applying there, but to the top programs....

I don't get this, to be honest. Why would the smaller programs deliberately seek out the mediocre?

I don't get this, to be honest. Why would the smaller programs deliberately seek out the mediocre?

Because they'll stay.

152: this is a debate that isn't going to get resolved in a comments thread, but I just think "Once they slip off that track, then things get very scary, very quickly" is only true for definitions of "that track" or "very scary" that are far broader than anything legitimately in the cards for *this group of people*, and that this shared paranoia, as they become the Deciders of the world, in fact reinforces the rigidity of the system--rigidity that serves to exclude those who really *are* in danger of scary life-paths.

159: It's not that they're mediocre because they don't come from Ivy League programs, you snob. It's that a Yale grad simply doesn't have the experience needed to teach the amount they would have to at a middling college. It's also that at a lot of the Ivy League programs, the students are discouraged from doing professional development--publishing articles, doing conference papers, etc. I've seen a lot of job talks by people from top schools, and they are just obviously not a good fit for a school where the students need a lot of guidance and personal attention, and they're also not that impressive, CV-wise.

161: Agree with X. Upper middle class frailties are fun, but I'm not sure they're much more than that.

161: Yeah, it's really hard to get worked up about not being able to hire that German nanny and having to get a Caribbean one instead, or only being able to renovate one room in your brownstone at a time. I've sat in on a lot of these conversations, and it's really depressing how shallow the bourgeois sense of tragedy runs.

How about some personal data?

My mother and I were recently commiserating on the post-college life. It turned out that back when she was living skinny in Manhattan, she spent no more than 15% of her paycheck on rent. Elsewhere, I have a pretty good housing situation within the constraints of not having a roommate and being near dense public transportation. My rent is half my after-tax paycheck.

So, not having prospects for a secure retirement is a bourgeois fear, that entitled middle-class people should just get over? Funny, I thought that poverty in old age was genuinely, objectively unpleasant.

Same with health insurance. I don't think I'm afraid of being uninsured because I'm an easily panicked sissy -- I think it's because I like knowing that when my children have facial injuries, I can afford to get them stitched up.

The questions are whether this panic is rational w.r.t. their ultimate happiness (they're clearly right to panic about getting into Harvard, but as others have said, they can all easily get into midrange schools), and whether, even if it is, it's nevertheless unhealthy to foster this sort of meritocratic (in the pejorative sense) culture among our future elite. For this group, at least, it's not really about health insurance; it's about the shame of having to go to (just for example) UChicago.

No one is right to panic about getting into Harvard, unless the panic is directed towards the prospect that they will, rather than won't, get in.

Chicago, on the other hand, truly is a source of undying shame.

166 to 161.

Same with health insurance. I don't think I'm afraid of being uninsured because I'm an easily panicked sissy -- I think it's because I like knowing that when my children have facial injuries, I can afford to get them stitched up.

I think the claim is that you are genuinely unlikely to go very long without decent health insurance.

this is a debate that isn't going to get resolved in a comments thread, but I just think "Once they slip off that track, then things get very scary, very quickly" is only true for definitions of "that track" or "very scary" that are far broader than anything legitimately in the cards for *this group of people*

I'd agree with you to a certain extent if it weren't for healthcare costs. Say you're on that track, and you get a serious illness at the wrong time. People are being bankrupted by this, forced to sell their homes and are unable to work to support themselves, which would be what would get them back on the track. Yes, that beats not being able to get treatment at all, but IMO it's more than a style-section middle-class foible to have concerns about that happening.

152: You really think so? None of the high achievers I knew in HS were preoccupied with aiming for the top because it would guarantee them housing, health care, and retirement. I know that when these things were magically taken care of for me by mom and dad led me to take them for granted. Sure, I knew that there were people out there who were a lot worse off, and that I should feel lucky, but their ready availability had more of an effect of making them seem attainable, rather than scaring me into thinking I had to do as well as mom and dad.

For me, I felt like I needed to work hard because I felt like that was what was expected of me, and because I had been told all my life that I was good at this school stuff, and thus thought that I should accentuate the positive.

a bourgeois fear, that entitled middle-class people should just get over?

Not "get over," but realize is just the very tippiest-tip of the American-suffering iceberg. Yes, it is concerning that the uppermost classes are now feeling some shadow of a fear that their lives might one day resemble the everyday lives of the classes below them. But I think some of the anxiety I feel about the Times's commitment to endless discussion of these bourgeois fears is that it is deeply embittering to those of us who not only fear that we might go a day without health insurance, but live in a reality that might never include health insurance. If it's motivating to those with money to get them to identify more with people who have less, then great. (If things are this bad at the top, imagine, &c.) But I don't think that's what it's doing.

166: I don't think that's the claim as that the people profiled in the article, worried that their lives will fail horribly, would have to slip down several income strata before they wouldn't have health insurance. Their parents could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars less per year. If they get Bs, they'll go to Stanford instead of Brown.

159: It's just not the case that whoever lands the top job that year, or a series of top jobs, has landed every job she applied for all the way down. If you have offers from Cornell and Princeton, you probably also have a rejection letter from Podunk State U, or Artsy Teaching U, too. The smaller teaching schools tend to prefer proven teaching ability over potential research ability. If your c.v. is geared towards proving the latter, you're not going to do as well at those smaller schools.

Oh, the Times sucks on that front, absolutely -- it's entirely focused on the woes of the very, very well off, and should probably be stormed by mobs of torch and pitchfork wielding peasants for it.

I'm just trying to make the point, awkwardly, from my privileged upper-middle-class position, that part of the pressure on people these days is that a reasonably secure life used to be available further down the income/class ladder than it is now. Security, at this point (can I call health care and a retirement fund security?) is a privilege restricted to the upper middle class, and anyone not coming from inherited wealth has to scramble hard for reasonable security. My grandparents were pretty secure down at the 40 or 50% income wise -- no one at that same income percentile is secure now.

An argument in favor of multiple versions of your cv, I guess (unless you can't establish more thean one ability).

And I think the thing that ties all these arguments together is a feeling of betrayal, that we're told if we work hard and keep our noses clean, we won't end up "down there," whatever that is for each of us. Deep within all of us (here, anyway) is some kind of meritocratic faith that we can protect ourselves from a life we fear, if only we work hard enough. It was scary for me to realize that, although I have managed to protect myself against my own personal terror-well (married, with kids, to an emotionally abusive husband), I've nearly fallen into others I didn't plan for.

And when I looked up, and saw that some of my college classmates, the losers who got lots of C's, did drugs, and took bonehead classes, got $85K jobs with moving packages right after graduation, I started to wonder if I really had made all the right choices after all. (The answer, of course, is yes, since I wouldn't be able to stand the kind of job that pays that kind of money, but it does throw a wrench in the old meritocratic imagination.)

I bet you could learn to stand one.

I dunno, Ben. I'm not good with authority figures.

If they get Bs, they'll go to Stanford instead of Brown.

Um, not sure what era you're talking about, but it's significantly harder to get into Stanford than Brown.

Yep. (Didn't, did.)

Many years ago, when I was a lass, my parents moved to Newton, MA because it was supposed to have one of the best high schools in the country, and my father had recently taken a teaching position in the Boston area.

Because of Newton High North, I went to college very early. To escape Newton High. Because my previous [also public] high school was so much better. So very much better. The AP classes at NHN then were on a par with "ordinary" classes at my previous school. There were only three people in my "senior" Russian class, all of us transfers from elsewhere - and none of us seniors. The school kept telling my parents how privileged I was to go there - despite the fact that I had, as a sophomore, taken classes at my previous school that were more advanced than anything NHN offered, despite the fact that I'd already taken the SATs [about which I was wretchedly ashamed, as I'd only got a 798 on my French subject SAT...] So I left, got an early admit to college, and relegated NHN to the dim recesses of occasional nightmares.

I wonder if Newton High North has really improved, or if they are still a moderately good high school that puffs itself off as better, where parents are more likely to treat their children as trophies [back in the Eocene, it was more important for girls to be PRETTY! - the over-the-summer plastic surgery "vacation" was typical], where "high performing" = "lovable" [or at least "acceptable"]. And haven't any of these kids heard of applying for a transfer to their preferred university after freshman year elsewhere, when spaces open up due to attrition?

/rant

My grandparents were pretty secure down at the 40 or 50% income wise -- no one at that same income percentile is secure now.

I realize you were responding to someone other than me, but I think this not very correct, even once we soften the patently silly absolutism of "no one". As I said above, to the extent that fewer people in this income range feel secure, again I think part of the issue is that people today expect a greater level of security than ever before. This is a natural result of our increased wealth, but it makes comparisons with the gramps somewhat inapt.

(Although I'll absolutely agree that "soft" security provisions -- familial, church and community support networks and the like -- have eroded due to increased mobility, and weaker family and community ties, etc. Should our public policies attempt to remedy this?)

Okay, defined benefit pensions used to be fairly common, and now they're quite rare. That's a huge difference in security. Most Americans have no, or a laughably inadequate amount of, retirement savings.

I'll just point out that "I don't have it so bad, but man those other suckers, they're totally screwed" is a pretty common mindset, and clearly the more common it is the less accurate it can be.

I also think that fear of ending up "down there with all the losers" has to be pretty strongly correlated with "success", however you want to define it, since what's the point of putting yourself through five more years of schooling / working crazy hours as an associate / sucking up to your asshole boss / whatever if you make enough money to pay the rent, go see a movie now and again, and buy all the beer you care to drink?

181: Yeah, I couldn't help but think Esther would have thrived at my high school, where the course offerings were incredible, the activities fun and disciplined, but not threateningly pressured, and the students relatively socially pretty chill, even if they were academically competitive. Plus, she would have been accepted to all those schools she applied to, no problem. I.e., it's not her "amazingness" that makes her self-critical and unhappy, it's her particular environment. (Plus, at my HS, being a tall, pretty-but-normal-looking aspiring theologian would have made her pretty much the most popular girl in school.)

184 is missing the final "and are content with that."

181: Jeez, you're pretty incredible with the languages. That's the one academic ability I've always longed for.

And Ogged, your comment in the original post is going to pick at my brain for ages. There are soooo many high schools, both public and private, that I can think of in the Chicago area that could be shoehorned into this article. Can I at least get a hint? Suburbs or city? Private or public?

Obviously there's only one he could be referring to. Granted, I know of it because my mom went there (in the 60s) but I only know of it as being "it" for other, lamer reasons.

Wonder if I'm wrong, though.

Oh yeah, and right on to this statement:

No one is right to panic about getting into Harvard, unless the panic is directed towards the prospect that they will, rather than won't, get in.

I agree on w-lfs-n's other point too, though I will defend most UofC graduate programs tooth and nail.

As for the article, I guess this was what tore a lot of people at my high school apart, and I did certainly notice it more in the girls. Part of that was because my circle of guy friends were way more relaxed. Either they intended to just go to State School on massive scholarships, they had a prestigious-but-not-top-5 university place that would be fairly secure, or they were on our math team and/or science fair crew, in which case they were ranking in national competitions that would basically guarantee a great college placement.

A lot of the girls, meanwhile, seemed determined to be in Student Council, compete in the state-wide competitions with math team, perform some research, who knows how many extracurriculars, etc. I didn't know many of those people, because they were boring. My female friends who relaxed more seem to be doing better these days anyway.

But ultimately, my perspective is far too narrow to contribute anything of much use. I haven't been around people outside the top 5% in any academic setting since elementary school, so all my views on probabilities of getting into places and how hard schoolwork is supposed to be have been completely warped.

181: not sure what to make of this-- Newton North was the only public high school I went to, so I can't compare in the way you did, but while it made me deeply miserable in ways I probably won't get over for decades yet, I have a real hard time seeing it as anything but academically excellent. I seem to recall being disappointed that class discussions in first-year Hum at Chicago were at a noticeably lower level than those in AP English at NNHS; make of that what you will, Chicago-haters. As for the AP classes being like 'normal' ones elsewhere--again, maybe this is just dueling anecdotes, but as I recall, the classes were aimed at students getting 5s on the tests, and generally succeeded at that. It wasn't a place where they encouraged everyone to take the class but people only barely passed the test.

It is certainly true that the "good" classes at NNHS were distorted by which were and were not considered The Right Path (e.g. econ being for jocks because it wasn't offered as an AP); perhaps Russian was an example of that. But I do think we should accept at face value the assertion that for the upper strata, it's a very rigorous education. Though obviously my desperation to believe that is independent of its truth-value.

I'm really enjoying the backbiting and competition over whose suffering in high school was greater. Will we be proffering our "wedgied by the football J.V." stories soon?

Some day I will figure out what I think about success, etc., and write about it, but it's been 20+ years of flirting with but never really embracing the fast track since I discovered that what worked in high school didn't work beyond that and I don't know that I'm all that much closer to enlightenment.

Re LB's and Magpie's points about security, housing costs, and the like: isn't part of what's going on that more success-oriented people are more mobile than they used to be and cluster in desirable areas, thus driving up prices? I generally agree with what you're saying, but it's probably skewed a bit by the economics of where you (and I) live.

One source of stress has nothing to do with traditional economic needs -- it's the need to achieve whatever standard counts as "success", "respectable", "classy", "somebody", etc. It's a relative, competitive, rat-race social-climbing thing. That's a lot of what's going on here, I think.

However, that's not completely easy to opt out of. The lower half of the income scale is stagnant on income and losing on security, and the bottom fifth or so may be objectively worse off in every way. Lots of lower-half jobs that used to have benefits, security, and pensions either don't exist any more, or else have been stripped and degraded.

And security and benefits aside, someone in the lower half is going to miss most of the sweet life you see in the media. You really have to recalibrate your desires in a nonconformist direction. (Which I did, but look how that worked out).

So are there low-stress, benefitted secure upper-half niches for people who don't care if they're in the top 10% or 1%? It seems to me that ALL jobs have become more demanding in recent decades. Probably the girls in the article don't have to worry about falling into the bottom 50%, but they could end up with stressful, unrewarding, insecure jobs in the 60% range.

166: The old age thing puzzles me, because if there's one group in America who seems to be taken care of, and politically untouchable, it's the elderly (relatively speaking). Yes, it's now defined-contribution not defined-benefit; yes, that's worse. But remember--even if the implementation was fucked up, the power of the elderly is such that a Republican-controlled gov't felt that they had to add on a huge new entitlement. Look at income statistics, etc. We're long, long past the age of grandparents eating dog food to survive. I envy the elderly! If the claim is that SocSec, Medicare, etc., are all about to die, that's different--but I thought the standard line since the privatization attempt was "it's not broken!"

192b: I really think this clustering effect is a huge part of it--and it's only encouraged by the sort of "if it's not Harvard, kill yourself" thinking the article highlights ("how could anyone live ANYWHERE but Manhattan?!").

194: But this generation of elderly folks has it about as good as it's going to get, in that many have defined benefit pensions as well Social Security and whatever savings they may have accumulated, have benefited greatly from housing price appreciation, etc. People who retire with minimal or no private retirement benefits (pension/401(k)), are still paying mortgages or rent, etc., are going to have it a lot tougher.

I do think that there's a goodly dollop of BS in all those projections of retirement savings needs that come out of mutual fund companies and securities firms. They have a strong economic interest in scaring people into investing more of their incomes and act accordingly. But the retirement prospects of, say, a 50-year-old who's worked in retail all their life are not pretty.

Its not that 401ks are less secure than pensions, its that its less likely to be forced to contribute, so people never both to. I think its also misleading to make the healthcare issues the focus of a discussion of social status insecurity, which is what this really is about.

ITs also crazy to look at the price rises in boston, SF, and NYC housing markets as some sort of nation-wide indicator. THeres plenty of large, cheap housing in Tulsa.

I mean, if society is become MORE permanantly stratified, with the kids of the rich amost all going on to be rich, etc., then year-to-year income fluctuations really shoudln't have that much effect on your social position.

196: Assuming employer solvency (a huge and problematic assumption), of course pensions are more secure than 401(k)s. Among other things, a defined benefit plan puts longevity risk on the plan rather than the individual. In a 401(k) world, every individual needs to be financially prepared for a lifespan out on the tail of the population; DB plans can fund for the center of the curve.

It's also worth noting that "generous" employer contributions to 401(k)s tend to be significantly lower than the amounts needed to fund a defined benefit.

I guess what I meant to highlight in my original comment was just this: what's particularly odd, in hindsight, about NNHS is that you have a large social circle who thinks that failing to get into one of maybe twenty colleges means their lives have been utter failures -- and yet this circle is spending 7 hours a days in the same building as, though never interacting with, a huge number of folks with quite different expectations and assumptions about life. If this story were really about Reasonable Fear Of Falling, why is it the *least* at-risk who are most afraid?

JGO in 171 nails it: for the kids, at least, it has almost nothing to do with health care and whatnot, which at that point are going to be taken for granted. It's about What Everyone Says You Need To Do; it's about parents saying no college will take you if you don't get a perfect SAT or that you've ruined your life because you got a C one quarter in 8th grade. Kids don't come prepackaged with realistic causal models of the world; this--the paranoia in the article--is precisely about kids acquiring very peculiar ones from their parents, teachers, and each other.

The old age thing puzzles me, because if there's one group in America who seems to be taken care of, and politically untouchable, it's the elderly (relatively speaking).

It's the next generation of old people that people are talking about, not this one (me). Besides the loss and dilution of pension benefits (my old job now has three tiers, with recent hires getting much poorer benefits), Social Security is under attack (by people who want to "save" it by reducing benefits).

Always remeber North Dakota, were a livable 2-bedroom costs ~$20,000. (That's after enormous inflation -- 15-20 years ago it was ~$3,000.)

198: you can buy instruments that pay out fixed payments until you die, based on how much money you pay (401k balance) and actualrial tables; i forget the name right now).

I thought I wasn't going to say anything, but 197 comments in....

Retirement is insanely less secure than formerly. Defined-benefit was the norm just 20 years ago, people. Now it's viewed as cause for firing a CEO. And guess what - all those companies throwing tens of thousands of people off the pension rolls at a time: they're not reallocating those funds into 401(k)s for the employees. So now retirement funds have to come from the same paycheck that hasn't risen in 5 years because every year's "raise" goes into ever-greater health care contributions.

Meanwhile, just 30 years ago, tens of millions of Americans without even a credit of college on their CV had (the prospect of) lifetime employment, a healthy pension, and health care that didn't threaten their other expenses. That was the floor for anyone with a Bachelors. Now that kind of job security is a fantasy, no matter your credentials.

It's pretty simple: we've traded security for stuff, but none of us ever got a vote. The trade was made for us. And that's a pretty insecure-making change to happen in exactly one generation.

BTW, Jane Austen has been abandoned. Just because she's homely, and because Ogged wanted to taunt LB.

201: Annuities.

193: I hardly think it's that bad in the 60% range, so long as you know where to look. When most of my friends were interviewing for investment banking, grad school, or consulting jobs, I lazed around and decided that any job taking up more than 45 hours a week of my time would suck.

Without too much looking, I found a great company in my hometown with mediocre salary but great benefits and an hard-to-beat schedule (plus no dress code!). Sure, I only earn the median US salary coming out of college, so all of my friends who got jobs are earning more, but they also work far more hours and don't have the time or subsidies for grad school. Plus, full medical, dental and 401k benefits. These things are all pretty possible, you just have to look in less typical places.

Insurance companies and commercial banks tend to provide the perks of upper-level white-collar jobs while keeping low hours (and of course lower pay). There are also a number of quirky mid-sized companies (500 to 5,000 employees, I'd imagine) that are large enough to afford good benefits for their workers while being small enough to keep a unique corporate culture that actually allows work-life balance. You do need to really work to seek those companies out, though, be willing to be upfront with your schedule and benefit priorities, and be willing to accept a lower salary for a more relaxed life.

Kids don't come prepackaged with realistic causal models of the world; this--the paranoia in the article--is precisely about kids acquiring very peculiar ones from their parents, teachers, and each other

In fairness to the parents, I think they're thinking that what they're doing is giving their kids a long-term option to do whatever they want, whether that's something that requires they stay on the track--like i-banking, punditry, and the like--or not. The difficulty is in putting them on the track without having it completely warp their values, but that's where we get to lament bad parenting (theology girl seemed pretty sane in this regard).

201: annuities.

201: Yes, you can. They're called annuities, and built into the pricing is a nice profit margin for the insurance company and the agent that sold it to you, as well as a premium to account for the fact that individual annuities tend to be purchased mostly by the sorts of people who can reasonably expect to live longer. A DB plan that covers a cross-section of employees can provide the same annuity at significantly lower cost.

Thank JGO

Could someone link to some chart that says what constitutes the various percentiles?

That is, just what is the income of someone at the 90th percentile?

But the retirement prospects of, say, a 50-year-old who's worked in retail all their life are not pretty.

Someone who was in the bottom 20% of jobs for their entire life has always been pretty much screwed. They've never had much more than Social Security to fall back on, since even in the golden age of the 50s and 60s, high-paid manufacturing was a middle-class occupation, not a working poor occupation. There were still plenty of people back then getting screwed over at the bottom.

201: But I'm pretty sure that these are not a great deal, unless you outlive your odds. And nothing to leave to your kids.

Again, security at a price. Which would be fine, except that price was supposed to be paid by living a responsible life up until retirement.

Household income in the United States

212: Wow, cool! This year, after spending five post-collegiate years in that red zone, I jumped up to the bottom of the yellow area for a year. It's really nice, but, knowing that my extra income might fall away next year, I'm preparing against more red years. Oof. Now I know what that means.

According to the Wiki about 45% of households earn less than $40k / year. They're probably least likely to have retirement plans, medical benefits, or pensions, too (not completely sure).

210: I think that's a dubious definition of middle class; in 1970, there was 1 manufacturing job for every 10 Americans; there are now 1 for every 20 (and they're much less secure jobs). Whereas the service sector was 1 for every 12 Americans in 1970; 1 for every 6 now. So just 30 years ago, plum manufacturing jobs were within reach of anyone who lived in an industrialized region, and the service sector was much more limited. The situation has more than reversed.

The fact that working in a mill used to mean middle class security was the whole point. It wasn't about Marxist "class" signifiers, it was about a better life. Now, people with all the indicators of upper class life have little of the security.

(Info here. Purely coincidentally, I've worked with this guy on a demographic study for a neighborhood I was working in.)

There were still plenty of people back then getting screwed over at the bottom.

More, I gather, as I believe that was the point of some of the Great Society programs.

As was mentioned upthread, some of these women would be able to get into the college of their dreams if they did not go to such a competitive HS. Let me be the first to say that I am glad that our most exclusive colleges don't accept some of these students for that reason. Sucks to be them, but the student at the mediocre HS that works hard, but still ends up going to local State U. (often because that is all the parents encouraged--just get into college) has it worse.

187: My father had about 14 languages in his repertoire, so he encouraged his offspring to study other languages. I'm the one who pursued it most, but I was in an environment where I learnt English, Norwegian and Arabic as a small kid, and started learning French when I was about 4. [We lived abroad for several years in my early childhood.]

I exposed my kid to French and Spanish when he was little, but he did horribly in school when he took Spanish - he speaks it pretty well, but his reading disability + lousy spelling ability = vast amounts of confusion on tests = lousy grades. His Spanish teacher was confounded by that, as he seemed to be grasping the language - so one can speak something and still not do well academically at it.

190 - I don't doubt that it's a decent high school, but it paled in comparison to the one I'd attended freshman and sophomore years - and that school didn't trumpet itself as being "best". After my experience, my parents went so far as to put my younger sister into private school rather than send her there.

Looking back, I realise that I was only there for a few months; after I threatened to run away to Haight Ashbury, I was allowed to finagle my way into college. [It helped that I'd already taken the SATs sophomore year and was already getting feelers from places.]

That I still remember the nightmarish quality of those few months would worry me, but I haven't really thought about it in decades.

217: I'm not so sure about that. For a lot of people who graduated high up in their high school class and tested alright but would be mediocre students at Top Class U, they might be better off going to the top state school in their state. Usually the scholarships are a lot easier to come by for good in-state students and they'll be able to stand out as top students that professors love. It's not as if the top state schools are lacking in research or anything.

Unless the student is poor enough to get a great grant or rich enough to not care, the lower or non-existant debt coming out of the better state universities is an incredible bonus.

Re, "nightmarish": Oh good gracious. This place is obviously a very good school that almost any parent (IDP aside) would be delighted to have their child attend.

Re: the argument about getting into a better college if you're the big fish in a crappy pond, that's a ballsy move- who would really be willing to say "Jonny/Jenny is going to a crappier high school so s/he can get into a better college." Very few.

An argument in favor of multiple versions of your cv, I guess (unless you can't establish more thean one ability).

That's all it takes. AWB's observations aside, most of the top programs manage to place most of their students, and there isn't a whole lot of distinction between whether you had a lot of teaching responsibilities or just TA'd for two years. Extra teaching is nice. Having big names on your committee is nicer.

Ballsy, but not necessarily incorrect. Especially if "crappier" means "less than insanely accomplished."

But don't underestimate the significance of the social capital developed in that kind of environment when it comes time to play in the big leagues. Academically, I was fine at Big-Name U. In all other respects, I was totally lost, which is the probably the biggest reason I left for State U (finances were also in the mix, but I think part of my emphasis on finances at the time was rationalization for the other stuff).

219: Oh sure, it is often a better decision to go to the cheaper, less prestigious college. In fact, some of the women in the article might be happier, maybe even more successful (unlikely as it might seem) if they go to UMass Amherst instead of Harvard.

My assumption is that Ivy League and similar institutions are de facto gatekeepers to certain kinds of professions and so if you want to very successful in those professions then it is much better to go to Harvard. And since I would prefer the option to go into law, academics, etc. to be open to all, not just those lucky/wealthy enough to go to Newton High--I'm glad these colleges give preference to applicants from differing backgrounds.

220 & 222: It is a ballsy move, and I don't think it really increases your chances of getting into a top school overall.

Even though top universities may take more big fish from small ponds than they would if they only took the the biggest-looking fish, there are far too many small ponds out there for it to be a reliable boost. If you go to a tiny crap high school, there's no direct comparison that lets the universities know how good you are relative to the tens of thousands of other valedictorians at schools no one's heard of. At least if you went to a top high school they'd probably see enough applicants that they can get a good (err, better) grasp of your abilities from the transcript and CV.

If you're lucky enough to have the choice, I'm all about the high-achieving high school. It'll probably be a lot more interesting, even beyond the opportunities it creates.

Thinking back over this thread, of course everyone who said that the kids themselves aren't worried about long term security and health care and such is right -- I guess I think their parents probably are worried about those things, and that it adds to the pressure Ogged described in 206.

226: Basically the parents have a better-informed version of the same anxiety the kids do. The kids just think they have to check all the right boxes in order to live an acceptable adult life. The parents can explain why they think that.

I guess I'll switch. People who really want to make in the big time within a field, even in the humanities, probably have to do about what they're doing. However, that means the story is not mostly about middle class insecurity, but about ambition.

There are areas where it's the big time or nothing. Somewhere someone said, maybe on Leiter, that if you want to be a philosophy prof you just about have to go to a top-twenty grad school, and to go to a top-twenty grad school, it helps to go to an undergrad school of equal rep.

My own school (Reed) cultivated its grad school connections, which were excellent in some fields when I was there (Bio, Chem, Anthro) and not so good in others. Faculty in those departments were pretty tough on students, and were pretty harsh to those who weren't top twenty material (two of my friends).

LB, I'm not a parent, and didn't have health insurance growing up (or now), but do parents in this income bracket really worry about their children having adequate old age and health benefits in their future careers? I mean, I can see that it would be a concern, but isn't it subsumed into the more general drive for success?

I mean, I kind of agree with what you said earlier, good insurance and old age provisions should be minimun goals, but that seems like the baseline for everyone. Surely the successful and/or wealthy parents of these women want them to get into the Ivies for different (presumably more status-oriented?) reasons.

The motivations are going to be different for different students. Someone whose family doesn't have a lot of money, but is going to a school like that, might see it as the best way to get a high-paying job. Someone else might be on an academic track, and even the not-particularly-motivated kids of the rich might need to go to a name school to find a suitable mate. I was writing more about whether this kind of high-pressure environment is bad in itself, and I don't think it is.

parents in this income bracket really worry about their children having adequate old age and health benefits in their future careers?

I think so, yes. My parents were kinda in this income bracket, professional in NYC, and they worried like crazy about the two of us until we got on secure career tracks.

, but do parents in this income bracket really worry about their children having adequate old age and health benefits in their future careers? I mean, I can see that it would be a concern, but isn't it subsumed into the more general drive for success?

I think that's right. Fear about "old age and health benefits" is how parents who are fortunate/deserve their success/whatever are allowed to obsess about whether their kids will be fortuante/deserve their success/whatever at an even higher level than the parents.

Tim, if you don't mind saying, do you live in a relatively high-cost or low-cost part of the country?

Dude, we haven't even ascertained wither Timbot is human, and you think he's going to reveal a location? He's in the Matrix, that's all you can know.

It's a very expensive vat.

On the actual point of the post, which you were trying to get back to in 230, I think you've got a point that the pressure to achieve is much of a problem than the ambivalence about how to achieve while remaining hott, and sweet, and modestly unassuming. People who come out at the tops of competitions, whatever they are, are always going to be putting a crazy amount of effort into it.

234: True dat, but I really am curious how much of this anxiety is tied to wanting kids to be able to live at a comparable standard to their parents in the same area where they're living now.

SCMT:

I should've read my Krugman this morning:

"according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it's harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago."

Sounds like you could win an election with a Return to the 70s theme.

comparable standard to their parents in the same area where they're living now

Not that anyone has dismissed this consideration, but it's a big one. Most people who grow up in or around one of the major US cities envision life only in a similar place; if you grow up in Manhattan, a move to Tulsa isn't just to some other American city, it's exile. And the major cities are really very expensive, and if you hope to live in one as an adult, without roommates and without fear of getting mugged when you go out, you have to aim pretty high.

but I really am curious how much of this anxiety is tied to wanting kids to be able to live at a comparable standard to their parents in the same area where they're living now.

I'm willing to believe that's the case, too. But, because the income curve slopes so steeply, people who are one percentile down from you (or up from you) may have (apparently) very different lives. It's not the least bit clear to me that you can guide a kid (or he can guide himself) with that level of specificity, unless there is a severe commitment to do so. (That, I think is another of the deep social capital truths--if you grew up with a father and/or mother who was always at work, and still grew up pretty happy, then it's going to be much easier for you to commit time without fear that you're missing something/less happy than others/ etc. It's not that you learn to make such commitment; it's that you learn to structure and live the rest of your life with such commitment.)

And, no, I'm saying shit about my vat.

237: Huh. I'd love to see the breakout by age, because I find that astonishing.

238: True fact. I'm priced out of downtown Manhattan, which weirds me out completely considering that I've moved up the income ladder from my parents. (Although, to keep in with the theme of the thread, while I'm pretty sure I'm in a higher income percentile than my parents were, I live less well than they did. Most of the difference is housing costs, although come to think of it some was the non-cash income of free travel from Mom's job.)

A friend, another fancy lawyer type, just left the bay area because trying to buy a house here is so crazy.

229, etc.: I know my (raised solid working/middle class, middle class while he had kids at home, upper/middle-to-upper by the end of his GigantoCorp career) dad heaved a sigh of relief once both his kids reached what appears to be stability and security, although this particular kid is only just there (if my wife didn't teach as an adjunct at a local Univ., we would have effectively NO access to health care).

The parents at this HS may be another slot higher than my dad, but I think that, for anyone who hasn't spent his whole life in the upper crust, fear for your kids' prospects on even the basics is justified.

To me, the breakdown is this: you have a choice between pursuing personal goals or pursuing security. Except for a fortunate (or avaricious) few, those are different. I want to be my own architect; I will never have affordable health care (except through my wife) until the Dems get it for me. If not for the aforementioned back-door route, my wife would have been stuck indefinitely at a health-care providing job that gave her insomnia and us unprecedented marital nonbliss. Shit's fucked up, man.

I'm priced out of downtown Manhattan, which weirds me out completely considering that I've moved up the income ladder from my parents.

The common assumption is that the NYC you live in is a substantially more inviting place to live than the NYC of the 70s. Don't know how you fold that in.

Seriously. I watched Death Wish and The Warriors over and over growing up. I know how it was, yo.

Eh, I liked it fine in the 70's -- better, in terms of retail. I'd trade the crime and the dirtier streets for the old rents. (This is callous of me, people were dying from the old crime rates, and so on and so forth. All I'm saying is that for my tastes, the 'improvement' isn't worth the change in price.)

240: I guarantee you'd hit 80% among anyone older than, say, 35 in the Rust Belt. Except for the elite, the deindustrialized portion of the US has walked backwards massively since 1981. Furthermore, don't forget that the Great Plains/Great American Desert is depopulating - all these small (not tiny) towns that are dying or dead were still alive, if withering, just 30 years ago.

JRoth, do you have any bits of work accessible on the interwebs?

I tell you what, I was only 6 when my family left Westchester, but I can still viscerally understand the ways in which Manhattan was better in the '70s. Despite fears inculcated by my mother's "lock the doors, kids, we're driving through the South Bronx," I loved the way the level of street energy was so high. That was caput mundi.

I think a lot of it was the small-grain density of activity - it was still the age of small-scale manufacture right above retail storefronts, with different socioeconomic profiles almost literally from block to block. Which is why even a thriving modern day Manhattan can't match it - ultimately, less going on.

Right -- weird little factories and wholesale stores, areas of a block or two that were a neighborhood to themselves where all the stores were selling something particular, lighting fixtures or novelty/joke goods, cheap old bakeries... I still love the place, but it's not the same.

Without a doubt there's been a huge concentration of educated people into cities, which makes them much nicer places to live. In my case, the Bay Area is expensive, but working at tech startups gives me incredible job satisfaction and pretty good pay, and you can't do that anywhere else. So it's worth it, and it's hard to add to the housing stock out here because we like it not very dense and zone accordingly, so prices get bid up. I'm sure the same thing is happening in Manhattan but in law/banking vs. tech.

When the slope of the wealth distribution curve increases as you go up, the richer you are relative to the country at large, the poorer you are relative to the 100 people you know. I think this effect is underappreciated.

248: Christ, the question I've been waiting for.

For a former employer, about half the projects on this page were done mostly by me. All community planning. I've done buildings, too, but nothing as readily pointed-to.

Someday, maybe soon, there will be more.

weird little factories and wholesale stores, areas of a block or two that were a neighborhood to themselves where all the stores were selling something particular, lighting fixtures or novelty/joke goods, cheap old bakeries... I still love the place, but it's not the same.

This sounds a lot like what I imagine LA to be like, at least the downtowny parts.

By the way, how is it that no one has mentioned power laws in all this? Ceteris paribus, you're going to get n=1/n for all of these social constructions. And, as a result, insane opportunity at the top, with a super-steep slope that feels slippery, even if the lower bound isn't so bad.

IOW, slipping from top 1% to 2% doesn't sound bad, but you've just halved your relative wealth. Whereas going from 65% to 64% makes no discrenable difference.

The point of which, BTW, is that we need collective action to flatten out that curve unless we all think we'll reach that ever-pointier peak.

I'm with McManlypants on this one (ca. 149). Anecdotally, the one person I knew personally from my well-regarded inner-city HS who went to Harvard had a mini-nervous breakdown during her first year, came back home for awhile, then spent another year there and I don't know what happened to her afterwards. By contrast, a lot of the people I was close to at the end of HS went to either the predictable small liberal arts colleges (Macalester, Carleton, Grinnell etc.) or to the University of Minnesota. Pretty much everybody did okay, as far as I've kept up, and some did very well indeed. A couple of the young women I knew who most fit the profile in the article really seem to have peaked in HS. Sure, they're doing alright now, but after getting into very selective colleges, they wound up trending back towards the comfortable middle.

The thing is, once you get out of HS, life runs on connections. Sure, if you get into an Ivy or Seven Sisters, you'll have built-in 300-year-old networks to help you advance your career, but there are plenty of people with mediocre educational backgrounds who've worked their way into the upper strata simply by being punctual, polite, hard-working and clever about seizing their opportunities where and when they find them. I think the real fear being expressed by both the types of parents and the types of students in this case is that once the students find themselves outside the cozy confines of educational institutions, they won't have the wit or aggression to go for the throat.

Speaking of NoDak, all of the above should be read in the context of my bitterness that this Chuck Klosterman nebbish is the toast of New York and I'm just some schmo in a boring financial job, casting my pop culture pearls before swine. (Not you guys, my coworkers.)

252: Cool.

This sounds a lot like what I imagine LA to be like, at least the downtowny parts.

Except, if I'm not mistaken, even the downtowny parts of LA aren't that walkable - we're talking all of this in 264' chunks.

256: Thanks! I liked the work, but got pretty sick of only doing planning - when these projects went to construction, they moved to another guy's desk! Argh.

Housing is interesting as hell. Current trends are a major source of the Bad Stuff we're bemoaning on this thread, but hard to turn around.

254 seems to be a more concise, better worded, latter half of 251.

And 257 is true, but in LA cars are cheap and parking is free! It's clearly not the same as Manhattan-then, but there are some similarities. Maybe.

Great North Dakotans: Klosterman. The Great Gatsby. Charlie Christian. Peggy Lee. Bobby Vee. Chopper. Minneapolitan. My stupid sister-in-law. And many more.

YMMV on Charlie Christian and Bobby Vee.

255: Oh yeah, I was thinking of this way back, but it seemed too late to comment on: I think there's a trend (maybe not among the children of the elite, but among more middle-classy types) for girls to work to their limits in HS but not be able to raise it another level for college, where the boys coast a bit, but have that extra level [note: I know this is a gross generalization]. My anecdotal evidence is the co-salutatarians in my HS, who weren't in the top 5% in overall aptitude, much less top 0.8%. But they took their honors courses, did their homework, etc. Fortunately, neither attempted a top-level school (one, wisely, took a full ride at Trenton State - not a great school, but worth it for free). By contrast, most of the boys at the top of the rankings were trying less hard (as were the smarter girls a few notches down). That said, only a few of us went to top schools.

As for social networks, my sister (Mt Holyoke) has had plenty of pleasant encounters thanks to the sisterhood, but only one professional opportunity, and I think she might have gotten that one regardless. I think you still need to be aggressive to benefit from those networks (which is not to minimize them, just to point out that ambition still is necessary if that's your only entrée).

254 seems to be a more concise, better worded, latter half of 251.

W00t.

I should admit that that insight was borrowed from an article on blog-link distribution I read just the other day....

259: Oh, I was proud as hell of the work. And there was a research project the boss did (that I helped with) for realigning municipal boundaries that was freakin' brilliant, and would have a huge beneficial effect. But will never happen. Alas.

260: If one walks in LA, the Pedestrian Police swoop down and demand to know what is going on. I believe it's considered terrorist activity to be on foot, unless one is walking a dog.

Once Genentech works it out, all babies born in LA will be pre-natally gene spliced to have wheels.

264: Plenty of people walk in Los Angeles. They're called "non-whites".

Sorry John, I'm not actually a North Dakotan. Born here in Minnesota, thank goodness. But there are some parallels between me and Klosterman (midwest, similar age, worked for small papers, interested in pop culture) that make me wonder why people are interested in his writing and not in mine. I'm just not a chancer, that's the problem. It's not just a NoDak thing really, more a question of wanting to leave a place badly enough that you'll do whatever you can to get out. And unfortunately for me, I guess I like Mpls. too much to really take it to the edge.

265: Non-whites, terrorists, same difference.

220: It was nightmarish for me back then - imagine being 15 and discovering that your [ostensibly] AP French class is covering the same material you covered in 8th grade, that this will be your last year of Russian because they don't offer anything beyond the level you are taking, that you've already taken the "senior" level math class as a freshman elsewhere, and that, in the eyes of the school, you should be content to sit around doing very little, and be grateful that you're at "one of the best high schools in the country". And have the guidance counselor huff and puff because you've already taken all of the SATs you need without benefit of "one of the best high schools in the country", and pretty much can't improve your scores unless you retake the French one, so there's nothing much to advise you on, or take credit for, and the only class you find remotely interesting is the one that's being done as an experiment by a Harvard professor and will only last for one semester. [He, at least, is happy to write a recommendation letter and says he'll talk to a friend in Radcliffe's admissions office, if you like, in support of the alternative-to-running-away-to-San-Francisco plan.]

They were probably lucky that I was a peace-loving hippie chick who would not have thought of taking an automatic weapon into the admin offices and removing half a dozen of the most egregiously self-congratulating officials.

265: "Walking While Not White" is pretty much as bad a crime as "Driving While Not White". I took my housekeeper's cousin around Beverly Hills because he wanted to see it and was afraid to get off the bus there, lest the cops suggest he get right back on.

So how was the Haight?

255: Totally agreed on the networking bit. Most of the good things that have happened for me have happened because of my hunger for connections and acquaintances; people can see my eagerness for discussion on my face. Some of my more well-bred friends tend to think my kind of hunger is gross. It is, but it doesn't mean I'm not going to do better than them in the job market.

Argh. This is why being afraid of new people and wanting to spend most of each day hiding under my desk is serving me so poorly professionally.

272: Word.

270: Hell, in retrospect, I should have run away and snuck into Berkeley. I would have had much nicer weather. And probably better grass.

I agree with 272, along with about 50 more verbose comments here.

People often say "I've got one piece of advice for you in graduate school: PICK THE RIGHT ADVISOR." I never feel comfortable responding by saying "Okay, I screwed that one up; what's my next step?"

Similarly, people say "It's not what you know, it's who you know" as if that's some sort of actual advice. The response would naturally be "Okay, so what if I don't know anyone. Do I have no hope at all?" People usually hope you don't say that.

275: In my 3 years in college I had 3 or 4 advisers in 3 majors. The feeling was pretty mutual. I bonded with my music teachers, but I just didn't have the talent.

Not knowing anyone is a big minus.

The best advice my adviser ever gave was "don't go into academe; you'll be broke for the rest of your life".

Both my qualifying exam and my thesis committee meeting concluded with the faculty telling me I need to talk to people more, that I need to tell more people about my project. I think they're right and I may have saved several months if I had done so, but for some reason it seems so hard.

for some reason it seems so hard

People make the mistake of thinking that networking is some unique part of the job that they're either cut out for or not, as if the rest of their grunt work is done because of their natural aptitude. For a lot of jobs, networking is just another part that you have to suck it up and do, and it makes a huge difference.

One of the great sorrows of my recent life is having to admit that it does make sense to favor Ivy educated candidates when hiring. Not because they're the least bit better at the job -- I've never seen any evidence for that -- but because of the network. Very few people I went to law school with will ever be general counsels at Fortune 200 firms.

Except that it's not part of the job -- that is, the people who are paying you to perform tasks have no interest in whether you network or not. It's a routine you have to go through to be allowed to perform the job.

279: Absolutely, ogged. Lots of people in my program tell me that I'm just "so good at talking to people," but that is in no way true. I'm just used to it now that I've been doing it for so long. I'm naturally extremely reserved.

Except that it's not part of the job

Sorry, yeah, "job" is wrong; it's part of your career advancement.

(Oh, I know that's not really true. I'm just being bitter because I'm so bad at it and hate it so.)

(This, of course, does not compare with dealing with my daughter's dealing with the whole array of issues in the article, and some others. That's her story to tell, though, so for this purpose I'll just say that young life is a lot tougher now than it was 30 years ago.)

281: Depends on the job. Being able to talk about what we do well is what my people are hired for. If all you do is write articles and books, but you can't think on your feet at a conference, explain your work in five minutes, or give an impromptu lecture, an academic has little hope of success.

I agree on w-lfs-n's other point too, though I will defend most UofC graduate programs tooth and nail.

My other point wasn't meant seriously; I liked Chicago fine and anyone ashamed of having attended oughtn't to have in the first place.

What's really irritating is when your advisor actively discourages networking: mine grudges us going to conferences. He thinks they're a waste of time. His reasoning? "I never learn anything at conferences."

Note also that he's a bad, unethical person and is socially poisonous (think rampant favoritism with lots of behind-the-back fun-making).

I hate grad school, and I can't seem to escape.

If all you do is write articles and books, but you can't think on your feet at a conference, explain your work in five minutes, or give an impromptu lecture, an academic has little hope of success.

The funny thing is that I can do the equivalent of all of these things just fine. What I can't do is dial the damn phone.

One piece of advice I'd give undergrads is that if none of their teachers have talked to them about their academic career by about the middle of the third year, they probably won't have one.

People talk about using college to experiment and "find yourself", but at Reed at least they didn't think that way.

TJ, he's probably encouraging some people. But not you. Bad warning sign.

John,

I don't think so- I'm the one he's always telling about his disfavored students.

TJ---If there's anyone in the department you like even a little bit better, switch as soon as possible. It doesn't matter if your current advisor feels betrayed by the move.

290 Actually Emerson, I'd argue that point to the death. Academics pick out students who remind them of themselves at that age. That philosophy won't ever change the personality distribution in fields with a bias.

I got very blunt messages that the next math class I'd take as an undergraduate would probably be too hard, and it never was, (and I was getting A's in all of them). But I was goofball with a really wonderful ass.

That said, I recognize your underlying point about these delusional undergrads who think they've got what it takes, even though they're barely cutting it in their undergrad classes

Funny, my undergrad advisor said "Typically I discourage people from going to graduate school, but I think you could have a good career in philosophy." That was a couple of years before he said "What happened to you?" Another, wiser, professor when asked whether he had advice for undergrads considering grad school said "Do something else."

with a really wonderful ass

Not proven.

One thing about Reed was that it was basically a feeder school for grad schools, and looking for potential students was their whole game. So if they weren't looking at you, that was a clear message.

That said, I recognize your underlying point about these delusional undergrads who think they've got what it takes, even though they're barely cutting it in their undergrad classes

Yeah, I've got students coming into my office saying their plan is to go straight from their BA to a PhD, probably interdisciplinary, like in English, Comp Lit, History, and Philosophy, and I'm thinking, "But... you're not even the best student on your side of the classroom!" Then I've got other kids who are coming out of undergrad with teaching experience, an idea for a thesis project, theory, lit history, and beautiful writing, and they want to stick around for an MA. I keep wondering if we could have an expectations-switching experiment.

"Do something else" is good first-cut advice for most students. Especially if they want to do anything outside the most technical of fields --- in the latter, grad school is much more continuous with undergrad and for longer, because you spend a long time acquiring the shared technical core of the field.

296: Yes, it is. I think the fact that it would satisfy even you makes it all the more important that you never see it.

Yes, it is. I think the fact that it would satisfy even you makes it all the more important that you never see it.

The opinion of the sisterhood doesn't count. And I don't need to see it. I'll take gswift's word for it, for example.

I never figured out how it might be possible to have an "advisor" who actually knew my hopes/goals/aspirations as an undergraduate, or how to get some faculty member to "mentor" me in his or her non-copious spare time. I still have no idea how these things might potentially have been possible, and didn't know anyone in my department who experienced either of them. There was a brief moment of panic when applying to grad schools, when I had to find somebody to write recommendations, and I thought "phew, thank god I went to office hours a few times, I'll get recommendations from the professors who actually know my name because I went to office hours. Boy, those people who never went to office hours are shit out of luck when it comes to recommendation letters. But you know, these professors don't actually know hardly anything about me, so I don't know what use anybody's recommendation letters could possibly be anyway, except just as a way of saying 'Yes, this person exists.'"

397: Yeah, Reed had a famous sociologist (Jo/hn Po/ck) who is the intellectual grandfather of an comparatively huge number of sociologists, so much so that there's a retirement festschrift for him with contributions solely from former undergrads of his.

303: A comment from The Future!!

Hm, yes. Pity it didn't contain any useful stock information.

302: Finding a neuroscientist to mentor me at the end of undergrad was pretty simple. I just emailed a new assistant professor, he said, "I'm still setting up so come and do whatever you want," and so I started analyzing data for him. When letter of rec time came around it was obvious his would be a pretty strong one.

Best advice for graduate school: "If the answer is 'maybe I want to', the answer is 'no.'"

Ned, I was in the same position. I didn't know I was supposed to be making relationships with professors. I'm still not very good at it. I never went to office hours (why? I was getting As), I didn't ask for extra work (why?), but I managed to get recommendations. I did have one prof. who told me I should go to grad school, and it's pretty much on the strength of his recommendation that I'm here.

(fucker.)

Hey, can anyone post the key paragraph of the Krugman column that JRoth cited in 237? I want to go poking around the Pew Research website to see the methodology on that study (and the exact wording of the question) and I don't have access to Times Select.

I read the article with a great deal of shock. How is it possible that these girls, with their Honors theses on existential philosophy, aren't getting into the colleges of their choice? Seriously, how many girls like this can there be? I was bright, but not this bright, as a 17yo, and I got into all 9 of the "highly competitive" schools I applied to.

Methinks there may be some "AP inflation" going on, in which AP classes don't carry the same weight with admissions offices as they used to, because they have become so commonplace. I would also not be surprised to learn that the content of these AP courses has been dumbed down somewhat, in response to more and more students — presumably not all of whom are geniuses — expecting to take them.

In other words, perhaps Esther Mobley's essays on philosophy just aren't very good.

Best advice for graduate school: "If the answer is 'maybe I want to', the answer is 'no.'"

This is probably true in general, but I came to grad school partly (i.e., > 40%) from a desire to live in a different country. Very slightly more substantively, I'm always a bit suspicious of people who say "I feel this is my true vocation" for the same reasons that people are suspicious of people who say "This person is my soulmate."

I remember P/ock well, though I never took a class from him. One of his traits was a very strong (ex-Stalinist) personality and a very narrow concept of sociology, and according to report his students all broke away from him after they left. (Your information seems different than mine.) He seemed to attract students suffering from certain kinds of alienation, who were attracted to his analytic debunking of experienced reality and conventional thinking.

Gra/ce K/elly in anthro was very well regarded and had connections at Cambridge.

One of my friends had bad experiences with Kelly and is bitter to this day.

One piece of advice that used to be given was "Don't go into debt to get a PhD". That's quaintly archaic today.

according to report his students all broke away from him after they left.

Yes, this is broadly true as far as I know: even amongst the people who contributed to the volume he inspired a mix of strong and mixed emotions, in classic intense/conflicted/father-figure mentor style.

A while ago I had a kid come in and say she had chosen to apply to Crap School X because she would like to live by the ocean for a few years.

You say that as if it were a frivolous thing.

Do you have a citation for the festshrift? I'm sure I know some of the people.

I would also not be surprised to learn that the content of these AP courses has been dumbed down somewhat

AP classes are really on AP insofar as they're geared toward the AP subject tests, which are standard nationally, and haven't been dumbed down, as far as I know. And the multimedia presentation that accompanies the article says her AP history essay won top prize in the school, so I think she can write.

It could be that at the top level standards are higher and students are more competitive. Almost no one had AP when I was a kid.

312 depends on the field. I'd say that's absolutely still true for math.

314 I don't see what's so bad about that.

317 is right.

317: Good points, although there still could be "AP inflation" going on in how the courses are perceived by college admissions committees.

Do you have a citation for the festshrift? I'm sure I know some of the people.

Here's the book, and here's an alumni mag article, and according to a JSTOR review, the contributors are: Jam/es Ba/ron, Da/vid Gru/sky, Don/ald Trie/man, Pa/ul Sie/gel, Wil/liam Mas/on, Ne/il Flig/stein, Ka/ren Oppen/heimer Mas/on, Car/ol Hei/mer, Rob/ert Ma/re, Mar/tina Mo/rris, and Wil/liam Tu/dor. Several of these are pretty big names as these things go.

20+ years ago, there was a big difference in content between most of the AP courses I took and the courses that were being offered by more intense high schools (my calculus teacher would have been outstanding anywhere, but he was also a total nut). I'd be surprised if the distribution has changed all that much today. Yes, there are probably more lousy AP classes being offered, but probably also more outstanding ones.

At some point upthread the notion was kicked around that universities don't like to admit too many kids from the same high school. Thus Podunk Joe who maxes out his opportunities has a better shot than Esther Mobley.

So ironically, parents who move to the ultra-competitive best school in the big city district may really be doing their kids a grave disservice in the quest for a brand-name education.

Dave, the thing is, it doesn't matter how good or crappy the AP class was - you take the same AP exam at the end of the year as everyone else, nationally. (If you bother to pay for it, which presumably this crop of kids' parents do.)

Nope, don't know them. The three names I expected to see must have crapped out.

K/elly described P/ock as a "functioning psychotic". That's what I meant by "strong personality".

Gonerill: At least two of the three have PhDs and are working in sociology. They just boycotted the festschrift.

I would be interested in seeing the breakdown of scores awarded on AP exams over the years. Assuming the proportion of excellent students to total students is relatively constant year to year, one would expect that as an ever-higher percentage of students take the AP exams, an ever-lower percentage of 5's would be awarded. If the proportion of 5's has remained constant or increased, the scoring may be more lenient, or the exams themselves may be easier.

326: Like I say, doesn't surprise me, from what I've heard. Who were the boycotters?

And let's not leave out the conspiracy theory angle: The AP exams make money for the College Board, which while ostensibly a non-profit organization, still must like to have money coming in. It's obviously better for it to have more students taking the AP exams than fewer. Hence, easier exams.

This wouldn't be the first time such a thing has happened with the College Board; can anyone honestly dispute that the SAT of today, with no analogies section and a vapid, meaningless "essay" section, is less rigorous (despite being longer) than it used to be?

The conspiracy angle is actually pretty convincing to me. The SAT company is horrible.

Wow, this is like the first time I've ever intentionally convinced anyone on Unfogged about anything.

329: You don't need the exams to be easier in order to get parents to pony up the $70 or whatever it is per exam. I think it's more likely, though, that they've added (or popularized) more AP courses outside of the math, hard sciences, English, and history standards.

I'm very gullible.

M/ark G/ould, D/ean G/erstein, and maybe S/ylvia M/argolis

I think that adding AP is one of the first things a school district does to upgrade. I've seen news of that off and on for years here and there. AP has a link to property values, you know.

324: Yes, I know that. But there can still be a lot of difference in the quality of classes offered between middling schools and outstanding schools. My point was that I'd expect the increase in total numbers of AP courses offered to include something like the same distribution of outstanding, mediocre, and lousy as existed when I was in HS, as opposed to the "dumbing down" postulated above.

In Portland one or two schools put in "International Baccalaureat", which is a step up from AP.

329 -- I don't really see how the analagies section could be described as more rigorous than the remainder of the SAT -- so that dropping it would make the test less rigorous. That section always seemed pretty bogus to me.

323: But as was also mentioned upthread, the hotshot schools are known by the colleges, so that the admissions folks have some context for your grades and so on. When I was in middle school, my dad half-joked about moving to West Virginia (not very far) to improve my college chances. I can't run the experiment and prove that he was wrong, but I think that the opportunities at the better school outweigh the bigger-pond phenomenon. I think this is even more true if you're considering the high school education in itself, and not just as a feeder to a good college (which is itself a feeder to a good professional program, et cetera, et cetera...)

I saw an article the other day indicating that the relative merits of AP, IB, and a couple of other things I'd never heard of is hotly disputed within the relevant demographic.

We are involved in trying to get IB into our local school system.

The SAT banned analogies too? We're two peas in a pod.

In Portland one or two schools put in "International Baccalaureat", which is a step up from AP.

Ha, when I was in high school and visiting colleges (itself a wasteful boondoggle, the modern college visit), at every single session, there was ONE PARENT in the audience who, as soon as the speaker mentioned the policy on AP tests, immediately raised her hand and said "What about IB's?", while nobody else in the audience knew what she was talking about.

308: Sorry, the whole para offers no additional information:

And voters realize that society has changed. They may not pore over income distribution tables, but they do know that today's rich are building themselves mansions bigger than those of the robber barons. They may not read labor statistics, but they know that wages aren't going anywhere: according to the Pew Research Center, 59 percent of workers believe that it's harder to earn a decent living today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

I don't really see how the analagies section could be described as more rigorous than the remainder of the SAT

Well, for starters, SAT analogy questions had right and wrong answers. The SAT essay questions don't, and their grading, as noted in the link I included above, is a load of nonsense.

Second, analogies test your ability to understand relationships between concepts. I can't think of a better (i.e., more easily testable) proxy for the kind of thinking that is actually required to do well in college. Of course, not everyone is capable of this kind of thinking, and so the analogy section was denounced as meaningless and duly replaced with an essay section.

The essay section truly is meaningless, but it does let more students earn higher scores. This seems to be the purpose for which it was created, so I suppose it is working out fine in that regard.

I went through an IB program. Got the diploma too.

344: Darn, thanks for trying. I looked around their website a bit anyway, but couldn't come up with a likely study from which he pulled that figure.

Jackmormon,

too late ;) I'm working on working on my thesis.

So Heebie, how was the IB? It was very aggressively sold in Portland. I believe that the concept is to bring a few US HSs up to the average level of the European academic HS-equivalents (though not to the very top level of European academic HS-equivalents).

Apo just got a cite from Firedoglake. Good dog!

It was incredibly intense. It was much harder than college. I pretty much can't understate it. From 10th grade on, twice a year we took 4 hour essay exams where we were expected to produce a page every ten minutes. You take courses that last two years and are expected to have it all mastered in one exam. I got a C on a 3000 word paper my freshman year and was in tears.

So, this is in Gainesville, Florida (hence the Go Gators) - not exactly Chicago or New York or something. Many kids really burnt out and hated it. About 30 kids got the diploma out of 120 or so that started in 9th grade.

You realize that this makes you French?

"much harder than college": I went to a big state school.

The Gators winning the national title in basketball two years in a row makes me French?

The IB tried to duplicate the system that made Michel Foucault what he was. Need I say more?

Mmm, you probably need to say more. Or maybe I'll just crash and look him up in the morning. I'm very sleepy now.

What an interesting thread I wish I'd read it earlier because I'm still trying to think through the issues.

I differ in important ways from most of the vocal participants on this thread: through HS I was smart, but not overly confident in my ability to succeed in academics -- outside of math and abstract sciences and that I grew up in and now live in a small-medium sized west coast city.

A couple quick observations on the whole thread:

1: I'm a huge advocate of encouraging people to worry less about careers in their early 20s. It has always pissed me off when I feel like a good chunk of the people around me are happy to step on my head on their (perceived) way up the ladder when I don't feel like I'm trying to compete with them. I that when I found out that one of the Reagan white house staffers (I don't remember which one, but one of the Sacramento Mafia) had spent his 20s traveling around the world on a shoestring, working his way but playing piano in bars I as much more sympathetic to him.

2: OTOH, in many ways I wish I'd been pushed to more academic when I was younger (I had personality conflicts with school that I didn't get figured out until, more or less, my junior year in HS). But all of my friends were other people who were smart but alienated from school in one way or another by their personalities and I'm much happier to have had them as friends than to have been more successfully integrated into HS.

3: The biggest problem that I have this sort of competition is that, by definition, it is competition based in success on conventional organized activites. I have more respect for people who invent challenges for themselves and succeed at them than I do for people that are very good at doing what's expected of them. It saddens me that the former personality type isn't usually rewarded, though I think it makes for more interesting people [insert obligatory comment about ogged being evidence to the contrary].

Thankfully, I feel like all of these prejudices were relatively widely shared in the city/social group in which I grew up. I do think the west coast has a larger percentage of accomplished people that are less invested in credentialism.

Emerson: At least when I was looking at high schools, Southwest HS in Mpls had an IB program. I didn't keep in that close of touch with my grade school friends who went there, but it did seem like the more academically-minded one of those friends was taking some classes a year earlier than I was at my Catholic HS.

I should add that, as someone who's always placed an emphasis on doing things for personal motivations rather than on competition for rewards, I have still discovered that I have an "overdeveloped sense of responsibilty" and tend to be overly stresses anyway. So I would identify myself as someone who aspires to have a job with a moderate to good income and good life / work balance I realize that I am not personally good at negotiating life/work balances. Sometimes I think that, as long as I'm going to be high stress anyway, i wish I would have / could have sold out for a high paying job. Most of the time, however, I'm really happy with having worked for a variety of tiny companies and been able to have a lot of freedom in my jobs.

One last thought. I am also terrible at picking up the phone to call people I don't know. I'm happy talking to people I know, but hate cold calling people.

Which makes me reflect that, one of the virtues of the improvisatory aproach I've taken to my career is that I am now (at ~ 30 years old) quite comfortable with the fact that I have strengths and weaknesses and with my particular strengths and weaknesses. I don't know what the experience of people who went through more pressure packed HS experience is, but for me I think has been helpful that having the freedom to somewhat chose my battles, has helped me recognize which battles are good ones for me to take on.

Hm. If gswift is Ogged's alter ego, based on 357-60 NickS may be mine. At least as far as philosophy goes:

I have more respect for people who invent challenges for themselves and succeed at them than I do for people that are very good at doing what's expected of them.

361: I very much liked that line too.

insert obligatory comment about ogged being evidence to the contrary

Whoa, I know and dated some high-achievers, but I was always notably a slacker. Typical grades: A, A, A, D. A, A, A, C, C. But in any event, I think the "people who invent challenges for themselves" criterion doesn't exclude the people you might mean for it to exclude. The superstar students typically do do some pretty extraordinary things, beyond playing academic fetch. Esther Mobley has given the sermon at her church a few times; a high-achieving friend of mine started a tree-planting drive in high-school. Either of these things clearly redound to these people's credit and require internal motivation, but because they're also good at six other things, we tend not to credit them properly.

363 -- you miss the point. I believe, based on this blog, that you have created a sizable task for yourself and succeeded quite admirably.

I was joking that, while this would normally put you in the category of people I have significant respect for, that we just can't have that.

I think the "people who invent challenges for themselves" criterion doesn't exclude the people you might mean for it to exclude.

Well, I liked it not because it excludes people, but because it includes, as worthy of admiration or respect, certain people who are not conventionally "successful."

But in any event, I think the "people who invent challenges for themselves" criterion doesn't exclude the people you might mean for it to exclude. . . . Either of these things clearly redound to these people's credit and require internal motivation, but because they're also good at six other things, we tend not to credit them properly.

I was aware of that when I wrote my comment. It is, of course, true and envy and spite are ugly things (not that you were calling me envious, but there are people that I am envious of). But the stereotype I was describing does exist and is not limited to chets.

I do think the west coast has a larger percentage of accomplished people that are less invested in credentialism.

That strikes me as very true, and symptomatic of a big difference between the East Coast and the West Coast. Also, as I understand it, the chycks wear less makeup on the West Coast.

More generously, I appreciate alif's comment, and it's true that my original comment wasn't, exactly, about taking credit from the high achievers, just commenting that I think it's creditable when people spend lots of time on things that are both meaningful and don't show up on a resume of college application.

I put "commenter at Unfogged" on my skillset on my resume. You didn't?

364: NickS, a word to the wise: it's not customary to say nice things about Ogged here.

Remember, John, senior citizens are not exempt for beatings.

just commenting that I think it's creditable when people spend lots of time on things that are both meaningful and don't show up on a resume of college application

Fair enough.

Ogged, the recourse to implausible threats of violence is the last desperate effort of, you know, whatever.

My other point wasn't meant seriously; I liked Chicago fine

You would.

recourse to implausible threats of violence is the last desperate effort

I think you mean it's the blog's lifeblood. The only problem now is remembering all the people I'm supposed to beat up.

Pretty much any commenter you happen to run into, isn't it?