ASPIRING PARENTS AND SCHOOL CONTEST

Abstract

Recently The New York Times ran a headline, “Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits, Suit Says”. The lawsuit against the esteemed university is a manifestation of wider disenchantment that elite universities in the United States engage in biased admissions hurting Asian-Americans. This thesis builds a two-round contest model meant to reflect that high parental investments geared towards academic achievements can be detrimental to students in developing non-tangible attributes (positive personality). Contrary to popular belief, we find that excessive parental investments is an outcome of the competitive race. However, they do not necessarily crowd out children’s efforts to compromise on their personality development. This astonishing result is predicated on the assumption of perfect substitutability between parental investments and children’s effort in school performance. If the two types of investments are complements, it might even be plausible to think that parental investments would have a positive effect on personality development.