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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively.

Maybe it's a US thing?

We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.

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Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.

So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.

Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.

It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult.

If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.

There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.

> There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them.

Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.

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