Despite all this, Huffman reflected that she felt as if she would have been a bad mother if she didn’t give her child every advantage in the admissions process, which in her case included breaking the law. While that may not make sense outside of her bubble, I think this conundrum is the true key to her actions, and is akin to the motivations of many of the hyperchecking parents I mentioned in last week’s newsletter about online grading portals — parents who obsessively check their kids’ grades in a way that strips those children of any sense of agency. Those parents seem to feel that unless they’re pushing their kids as hard as possible to secure their futures, they’re bad parents.
To be clear: Being a helicoptering hyperchecker parent isn’t the same as doing what Huffman did. Most parents aren’t involved in pay-to-play schemes or arranging for fraudulent SAT scores. It’s worth acknowledging, too, that most of what we’re talking about falls under the general heading of champagne problems. I’d also put in a word here for restoring funding to public colleges and universities that was cut after the Great Recession, which is a far more pressing problem than parents who are overly involved in their kids’ schoolwork.
But I also want to provide a reality check.
I truly empathize with parents who feel that the world is now so competitive that unless their kids have perfect grades and an overabundance of extracurriculars, and therefore get into a selective college or are awarded substantial financial aid, it will adversely affect their kids for a lifetime — either they will never get a good job or they won’t be able to attend a decent school without accruing crippling student loan debt.
But those things don’t have to be true. I asked Jeffrey Selingo, a former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and the author of “Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions,” to bring this issue back down to reality. In “Who Gets In and Why,” Selingo notes that while getting into Harvard might give a student a better shot at a top graduate school or a job at Goldman Sachs, “if you’re a well-prepared student whose parents attended college, you’ll likely find important connections and pathways to success at nearly any school on your list.”
And in an email, Selingo referred me to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard as a tool for assessing how different undergraduate majors net out in the job market. In “Who Gets In and Why,” he noted:
In general, browsers of the College Scorecard will see that graduates of nursing, computer science and information technology programs earn the most a year after college — almost no matter where they go — while psychology, drama/theater arts and biology are the lowest paid (likely because psychology and biology majors go on to graduate or medical school, where the real money comes).
When you compare graduates with the same major, the differences are not overwhelming. For example, according to the College Scorecard, the median earnings for a computer science major at Binghamton University four years after graduation are $114,997, compared with $126,103 at the far more selective Georgetown University. The median earnings for a history major from U.C.L.A. are $47,888 four years after graduation, which is less than the $51,858 median for a history major from tiny Centre College in Kentucky.