My friend’s son curretnly attends Whitney and I have to say that your comments sre unjustified. These kids really work excrutiatingly hard. Getting into Yale, harvard and Prineton is a lot more challenging and competitive. Please dont ridicule the students because they are truly amazing kids.

But perhaps it didn’t matter, because I still went on to a top-3 university in California, and I went on to a great law school, and I studied international law at The Sorboone in Paris, and I have been practicing law for the past 8 years.

I have kept in touch with some of my friends from Whitney. The guy who graduated valedictorian from Whitney works as a senior staff computer network engineer at a university (the university I attended as an undergrad). The guy who graduated No. 2 right behind the valedictorian is a hand surgeon, but only after being rejected from every medical school he applied to the first time he applied (obviously he finally got in, but not to any of his first choice schools). Another guy from Whitney who did fairly well in high school now sells pharmaceuticals. And still another Whitney guy I know is a CPA. Don’t get me wrong, all of these guys have noble professions, they all did well in life. But as well as they did at Whitney (they all outscored me on the SAT’s, had better grades than I), as well as they did, none of these guys really went on to do anything very spectacular or noteworthy. Which is to say they did just okay. And I’m not measuring their success in dollars (the hand surgeon makes good money), I’m just saying that after all of that hard work and sacrifice at Whitney, their end result was more like a firecracker rather than the hydrogen bomb explosion we might expect from such overachievers.

Moreover, perhaps because my high school days were rather laid-back and fun (certainly not the pressure cooker experienced by the average Whitney student), I had TIME, yes, valuable TIME, to pursue and experience other things outside of pure academics that have indeed educated me and given me a much stronger platform from which to pursue life and all of its complicated issues. The point I’m trying to make is this: The education of a young adult in their most impressionable and critical years (i.e., high school) must allow for the student’s self-education through different experiences, good and bad, doing different things and going outside of one’s comfort zone. While I don’t mean to criticize Whitney students, the very program that produces excellence in academics creates an environment where the students will spend most if not all of their time with kids who are exactly like themselves, doing exactly the same things, living the exact same type of life. I’m not sure if that type of socialization (or lack thereof) really benefits the student in the long run– Reality might hit those poor kids like a ton of bricks when they finally get out of school, and when it does, many of those kids might not be able to cope with it.

I know a brilliant guy who went to a magnet high school, graduated top of his class, went to Berkely on a full ride, got his PhD at the University of Chicago, he worked briefly as an economist for a past presidential administration — but he couldn’t cope in that environment. He lost all his money daytrading and now he’s a minor partner in a dry-cleaning business. He spends his days taking in dirty laundry. And while he makes decent money, and while dry cleaning is nothing to be ashamed of, I’m not so sure dry cleaning is what his parents expected from their over-achieving son. He did everything his parents wanted him to, and now he spends his days doing the same thing his parents did as immigrants to earn the very money to put him through school in the first place.

Well, I would nevertheless consider putting my own kid through Whitney if I still lived in Cerritos, but I would try to make sure that the little bugger gets a well-rounded education for life, not just for getting high marks on exams, and put in a good dose of character building, which is really what counts in the real world. Character, good character, goes much further than good grades.

To get into a top American university, you need to get into a top American HS. Does this answer your question?

Whitney, by itself, isn’t nearly as hard as the book tries to pretend. Getting As is mostly about being motivated — it’s still the overwhelming grade in every class because there’s a set level of performance for each grading tier. 10% of each graduating class are valedictorians because they all have 4.0s. It only really becomes difficult when your goal is to destroy the test, simply because you aspire to that ability. Sure, we all could have gotten by at easier schools, but is that any way to live? In an age of robber barons, do-what-you-can-get-away-with policies, and take-advantage-of-the-system mentality, what is the right attitude?

More importantly, the world is so much bigger than the little nothing town of Cerritos. If you want to compete at that level, Whitney is just a very small taste of what’s out there — especially once you get to college or medical school. In my experience, the people who have achieved the most and done the greatest things are from all over the place, and the thing they have most in common — more than natural ability or Herculean effort — is a sense, a vision, and a true desire of what they want to achieve.