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Putting Our Children on the Road to Success

Ruben Navarrett Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- It's that time of year when anxious high school seniors assess their worth by checking their email.

The nation's colleges and universities are announcing their decisions. At prestigious schools like Stanford, Yale and Princeton, one out of every 20 applicants is admitted.

No wonder so many people are picking up the recent book by Frank Bruni, "Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania." The New York Times columnist presents a truth that many of us learned from a brutal teacher: life.

As Bruni writes: "Where we go to college will have infinitely less bearing on our fulfillment in life than so much else: The wisdom with which we choose our romantic partners; our interactions with the communities that we inhabit; our generosity toward the families we inherit and the families that we make."

All true -- especially the part about choosing a partner, who will either lift you up or pull you down.

Recently, my wife and I were having dinner with my college roommate and his wife. Both of us have young children. My old friend raised a provocative question.

 

"Which would you prefer?" he asked. "That your kids grow up to go to Harvard like we did, or that they grow up to be good people?"

I had the same answer he did: good people.

Growing up in the hardscrabble farm land of Central California, it meant a lot to our families that we went to the Ivy League. It would mean less if our children went there. Besides, as a lawyer and a journalist, my friend and I have probably met more Ivy League graduates than "good people."

Still, we all want our children to have an unlimited sense of possibility. And so I recently took my 11-year-old daughter to visit 10 schools through the Ivy League Project, a privately run program that introduces Latino students to East Coast universities. Students pay a fee, which they get from family, friends and fundraising.

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Copyright 2016 Washington Post Writers Group

 

 

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