To Arvi,
“Robert, Maybe I am asking a very controversial question but I want to understand your perspective on this
question. I truly appreciate your son’s efforts and yours.”
Thank you for the required bow, now on to your question. LOL.
“But I feel that rather than going to college early, if your son had put lots of effort few more years then he could have got entry in Ivy League colleges or the ones like MIT or Stanford. My understanding is that colleges like those provide so much scope and rigor that would put a student in the top few % of talents which is more beneficial for the student in the long run. I know very little about universities in USA and very little about Houston university, so excuse my ignorance if Houston univ. is also in the top tier.”
Great question, and as long as you don’t dig into his medical history (of which there is none, thankfully), or ask for his Social Security number, feel free to ask just about anything. Nee1’s answer did cover half of my answer, which was the location and keeping our family together. My wife doesn’t work (which is fine by me as Texas is a very low-cost place to live, especially with our life style, and I make plenty for all 3 of us), so, yes, she could have moved out with him, possibly to an Ivy League school, and believe me, she reminded me of that option. As it is, we have Rice University in Houston, which is near-Ivy in quality and probably the best school in this part of the country. David tried to take a math class there, my wife talked to them, and they still told him to take a hike - and not the first time. The private school that I mentioned earlier, the ‘best’ one in Houston for K-12 years, also told us to get lost after they interviewed David for Kindergarten - it wound up that they didn’t care whether he could read fluently or knew math, or whatever, they just didn’t want him. In both cases I was relieved, as Rice and the private school are across town, which would have been a pain. We also looked at the Texas Academy of Math and Sciences (TAMS), which is a bit north of Dallas, making it a 5 hour drive for us. He would have been 14 when he enrolled, while everyone else is 16. The idea there is that you start college classes during what would be your junior year of high school (i.e., age 16) and get dual credit - then you can finish college at Age 20 (would have been 18 for David), rather than Age 22. We never applied there, as I couldn’t make it work in my head. They had the kids live in a dorm and they just seemed to give them too much freedom for David to do well in, which leads to the next parts of my answer, which is that I’m not a typical dad and David is a typical American kid (i.e., tries to get away with as doing as little academic work as possible).
But first, my job. It’s not going anywhere. The Space Station program is managed in Houston, my company’s work is based in Houston, so that’s where I need to be. My value in a new area would not be as great, if I even got work elsewhere. In other words, I just wasn’t interested in starting my career over, so I would be staying put, regardless. Next is my wife - being an immigrant and not having an engineering background, her ability to ride on David’s back to make him study was limited. In other words, he could fool her any time he wanted by saying “Of course I’m studying”. I was tougher to fool, and took some significant steps to make it tougher for him to get around me (such as opening up his laptop and removing the wireless antenna from his laptop when he was picking up the neighbor’s internet…something he still doesn’t know I did). So, I needed to be with him, just so he would study (and his nightmare semester that I mentioned earlier proved me right) - and I knew all that because I was (is) no different. So that limited us to the Houston area. Also, I like doing stuff with my hands, particularly relating to cars and our house, and I have decent skill level at it, to the point where we don’t need auto mechanics and tradesmen. I wanted to pass that on, as no one can predict the future and those skills can save people a lot of agony and money (in the case of our air conditioner once, it stopped working, and I had it fixed in 45 minutes - it was a capacitor that went bad, and I had a spare - it was summer so it was nice have it back on line that quick). So I needed him around to learn that.
Finally there’s the money end, and that is partially political for me, and partially greed (I admit). The political part is that the private schools simply charge huge amounts of money for what is now a sliding tuition scale. They have a “sticker price” which is probably double their cost for your kid. They then make you fill out a federal form and they go run it through a program that weighs your income and assets, and gives spits out what your cost will be, and it’s a combination of maybe tuition grants, loans, and work (for the student). It has nothing to do with whether your kid is bright. In fact, the Ivy League announced publicly that they were through will all merit-based scholarships about 2 years ago - so all financial aid is now need based. In reality that means that what you pay in tuition at these schools is based exclusively on your income. I don’t buy a car that way, or a house, or a can of soup that way, so I was not about to do that for college. They can shove it with their little redistribution schemes as far as I’m concerned. (my mother has given me more stories from her days as a univeristy administrator that just get me angrier)
So it came down to keeping him local, and with a public college. As it is, he did get a decent education at the University of Houston. From what I can tell, they are selective, but in a different way. At UH, they will admit people that may not be the top students, but they did not give them a pass. In his engineering and math courses, during the early years, it was not uncommon for 80% of the students in a class to drop out prior to the end of the semester (they started with huge classes, but they were down to reasonable size for the second half of the semester). They were that tough. They gave you a shot, but it was up to you to take advantage of it. I see a lot of merit in that. His friends that graduated there all got engineering jobs in the oil industry, except one that joined him in grad school. The ones that took the jobs, I suspect started about $80,000, the one that went to grad school with him got an offer for just over $100,000 (he’s about to finish). And once you start working at a large company where you went to school becomes a minor issue - so it’s difficult to see much benefit, at least from a money standpoint, in the Ivy League.
As far as getting a better, more thorough, education, sorry, but he’s not into answering all those deep questions that have sent philosophers banging their heads against the walls and screaming from the mountain tops, for millennium. Just not into that stuff. For him school is simply a path to a job, and UH does just fine providing that path, at least for engineering students.
