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I didn't know a single mom who stayed in town for recruitment. It may happen some places and at some strata of selectivity of groups, but even as a SEC/UGA alumna, that's foreign to me. And while I too have heard the stories about transfers and enrollment, I never knew one in real life. (I did hear one friend of a friend stories about a girl who when rush went bad at UGA just went home and didn't come back. I don't think it was that she wanted in a sorority that badly, but just like the mom who wondered about whether Auburn was the right choice, she thought that recruitment was a predictor of what the rest of the college would be like.)
I think that these stories, rather than being generally true are the overblown urban legends of southern Greek life. For every 1000 SEC PNMs who get bids, how many girls do you think drop out and transfer in a given year? I bet it's not even one.
While there may have always been helicopter parents, the difference is that many of them today believe that the rest of us should regard their behavior as normal, positive, and healthy when it's all the more likely to encourage dependence, self-centeredness, and narcissism in the kids. (I'm emphatically not saying that every mom posted recruitment thread is evidence of this, but maybe 5% of folks need to get a grip on reality and quit ruining their kids for real life.)
(And in that generation, don't you think people thought MacArthur's situation was weird? Would the world be a better place with more MacArthurs or would it be intolerable? I don't dispute he was a great man, but he's complicated.)
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