Agree!
I think this is a little outdated.
Sometimes your family, and lets face it we’re talking your parents here, freak out because you are not going to college. Clearly that means you won’t ever get a PhD, or even the absolute minimum of two Masters degrees much less a simple Bachelors without which you can’t sell shoes because I suppose shoe salesman would need at least some kind of associates degree. But if you just ignore them and go ahead and make yourself a lucrative career and make more money than they ever have which is of course the actual reason for getting college degrees in the first place, then maybe you’ll find out your father had told people before he passed away that he actually was proud of what you accomplished on your own even if that would have meant the world to you to hear from yourself. So ‘achieve’ can mean different things to different people.
I’m married to someone who graduated from one of China’s Big Three Universities (Peking U, Tsinghua and Fudan) and most of her social circle is high-achieving folks from those three schools either in China or the US/Canada.
The pressure on the next generation to excel academically is intense, and I have had many a tense stand-off with “aunties” who are trying to inflict that on our daughter.
At Chinese New Year this year I had to listen to a mother berate her son who has just started college at what most would characterize as a top university (flagship state institution in top 20 by almost all rankings). He did not get into Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia of Princeton. As far as his parents are concerned he is a failure and a disgrace.
About ten years ago we had a similar conversation about someone who only got into Brown and Dartmouth and not any of the REALLY prestigious Ivies or MIT/Stanford. That kid is not on speaking terms with her parents now.
We’ve known kids who have attempted suicide. Kids who have checked out completely and become drug users during college years. Kids in mental institutions. And of course kids who are partners at McKinsey and Bain, kids who are neurosurgeons, work at Google and Amazon, etc.
We know two kids who have developmental delays. Their parents pretty much pretend they don’t exist.
I’m not saying this is unique to Chinese and Chinese-American communities. It’s just the world I’m exposed to. I don’t know too many people outside this community who are high achieving in this sense. My side of the family thinks UVA is a great school and anyone would be delighted if their kid went there.
Indeed a lot of Nigerians would thrilled if their child got one of those jobs, as it would be an enormous step up from subsistence farmer or urban laborer.
Being married to an African and knowing a lot of African immigrants in the U.S., my take is that:
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Yes, the pressure on children to achieve a prestigious career is substantial
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When children don’t reach this level of achievement, the parents come to accept it.
He is incredibly funny. You linked to his best video.
My sarcasm meter is in the shop for maintenance, but taken at face value, the above is simply not true. Not for me, nor for anyone with a degree I know.
I disagree. College degrees are mostly about employability. That may very well mean you need that much education to be employed in the field you want to work in, like medicine, or engineering. Bottom line, though, is that college is more akin to a trade school (for trades that require academic knowledge) than it is learning for the sake of learning.
Put another way, if you could get a job you love with unbounded opportunity for earnings and advancement with a HS degree, why would you spend 4 years and $150k to attend college?
It is for many of people. But some parents when they are not putting an absurd emphasis on a college degree and the making money as a result do occasionally mention that education is the means to make you a better person, and is a reward in itself, yet still not realizing that school is not the only avenue of education. Still, many people consider a college degree a golden ticket to a high paying job and learning stuff is a secondary side effect.
Maybe not - but it was certainly true for me and most of the people with a degree I know. Why would I bother spending four years and thousands of dollars to have the same life my parents did?
To add to the above, there’s a huge difference depending on whether parents perceive their kid being unable to achieve the parent’s dreams, or unwilling to.
If Michael’s parents want him to be a doctor, but he simply hasn’t gotten the brainpower, they’ll cluck and sigh but accept it. After all, most people can’t be doctors anyway.
But if Michael is a straight-A student and is plenty good enough to get into Harvard Medical or Johns Hopkins, but refuses, wanting to be a painter instead, that’s when the parents will go ballistic.
Why, because it was fun and interesting 
. Also I never aspired to be better off than my working class/lower-middle class parents. We were always able to afford food and rent when I was a kid, so, eh - good enough.
Mind you, I went to a state school back (wayyy back) when the tuition was several hundred/semester. I used to be a bit self-righteous about people using college as a (sniffs condescendingly) trade school. But I find it’s harder for me to maintain that kind of lofty condescension when I look at what people have to invest into it these days.
So did I - but my parents couldn’t even afford the $462.50 tuition per semester and although I was the oldest child, I wore hand-me-downs until I got a job. College wasn’t fun and interesting enough to spend years working full time at minimum wage and taking 12 credits to end up living like my parents. Not when I could have earned what they did right out of high school.
Completely understandable. We’re all shaped by our upbringing. My parents were economically comfortable working-class trades people, but unusually also well-educated intellectuals who were at least mildly indulgent of me treating education like a hobby (mind you I worked and paid my own tuition and books as well). My father, who has a PhD in physics, pushed me to major in philosophy of all things (I didn’t). So I was a bit primed as a young man to shake my head sadly at all the accounting majors, so eager to join the rat race.
It’s a shitty attitude of course. An intellectual snobbishness not terribly different in kind than the hyper-competitive snobbishness that dismisses non-professional jobs, as this thread has been discussing. I know someone who has a kid who is currently eyeing an accounting degree and I was encouraging them to give it a shot if they want to go there. After all my favorite cousin is an accountant .
This is not my experience with immigrant families at all. There is a lot less focus on “ability” and a tendency to assume the only limiting factor is how hard you work.
My father and one of his coworkers both emigrated from Pakistan to the US with five or six kids aged between 10 and 20. My siblings and I were always top students in Pakistan. Dad’s co-workers kids were average students at best (we all went to the same schools in Pakistan).
My parents are very proud that we all have college degrees, most of us one of more graduate degrees and all have incomes in the top decile of the US.
The other family’s parents are very proud that their kids are all employed, are close to each other, are kind and considerate to kith, kin and stranger.
A LOT of immigrants from Pakistan in the 1980s including some of my cousins are happily employed in blue collar professions and do not have college degrees.
But oh boy! The expectations for the next generation are more or less uniformly ridiculous. Whether your parents are doctors, IT entrepreneurs, police clerks, mechanics or cooks, the expectation is that you will go to a top school and get into a prestigious profession. Becoming a Nurse Practitioner or Physician Assistant would be about the minimum that doesn’t embarrass your parents.
Mining the depths of my memory bank, I remember taking Intro to Chemistry back in 1988, when I went back to college, and had a Southeast Asian classmate, probably from Vietnam or Laos, who was taking it for the 3rd or 4th time. I overheard the instructor (community college) telling him something like, “I know your parents want you to be an engineer, but if you haven’t passed the class by now, this is not for you; change your major to something you really want to do” but he tried again, unsuccessfully once again. I don’t know what he eventually ended up doing.
I don’t know if college necessarily makes you a “better” person. It’s not like most colleges are military academies where you spend four grueling years learning tradition and mentally and physically training so you can lead people in combat or something. I’ve often observed the college tends to be a bit of a 4 year resort for the children of affluent families where they can spend time partying, pursuing eclectic interests, networking with their socioeconomic peers, “finding themselves”, and otherwise living in a bubble until they join the real world.
You have a weird idea of what makes a better person. An education, not college, makes you a better person by exposing you to more of the world than you can see with your own eyes, and provides you the knowledge and wisdom of others.