Silicon Valley Origins and Stanford University

I live in the Santa Clara Valley of California, the high-tech capital of the world – yes, the world! As recently as the nineteen-fifties, we locals were surrounded by acre after acre of apricot, cherry, and prune trees, and people called the region the Valley of Heart’s Delight. And a beautiful, bountiful landscape, it was. Today, after monumental change, the heart of the Santa Clara Valley has become known as Silicon Valley, and the cash crop of the region derives not from produce, but from silicon, that natural element crucial to the ubiquitous transistor and the integrated circuits which combine hundreds of thousands of transistors on a tiny silicon “chip” no larger than a fingernail. There are virtually no producing orchards left in the Santa Clara Valley. Today, the landscape is covered with pavement connecting hundreds of industrial parks and large corporate campuses. Electrical engineers are everywhere, and venture capitalists are here, too, ready to loan money to promising fledgling operations whose founders have “the next big idea.”

This is where it all began: a tiny garage on Addison Avenue, in an unassuming residential area near downtown Palo Alto and just down the road from Stanford University (more, to follow). Fortunes have been made (and lost) in Silicon Valley as fragile, seedling companies strived to take root and grow, over the years, into towering trees whose far-reaching branches continue to merge with those from neighboring seedlings. The result is an overarching canopy of scientific knowledge and technical know-how which has changed the way we live our lives.

           The Famous HP Garage

How and why did this remarkable transition occur in fewer than six decades, and why here? The local story of Apple Computer is familiar enough to present-day residents of this valley. As impressive and ubiquitous as the company and its products may be, Apple is but the result and not a primary cause of the tech culture we witness today in the region. Apple Computer was founded in 1976 in a nearby Cupertino residential garage by two youngsters, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who truly believed they could build a better computer than those produced by other “hobbyist afficionados” back in those early years. Wozniak had the technical knowledge necessary to create a viable Apple II computer for the market and Jobs was the corporate/marketing visionary with the stamina to make Apple Computer happen as it did.

                     Stanford University: The Catalyst for Silicon Valley

Two young electrical engineering graduates from the Stanford University graduating class of 1935 came along much earlier than the two Steves of Apple, and it was their success that heralded the transformation of the Santa Clara Valley. William Hewlett and David Packard were the names, and their fledgling company became Hewlett Packard, also known as HP, one of the truly great icons in Valley history. Have you visited the famous “HP Garage” at 367 Addison Street in downtown Palo Alto? Although rarely open to the public, it is visible from the sidewalk. It was in this tiny, detached garage directly behind their rented quarters that Hewlett and Packard began HP by designing and building a simple piece of electronic test equipment called the 200A audio oscillator. From such a simple beginning, these young entrepreneurial engineers built corporate giant, Hewlett Packard, long the leading supplier of state-of-the-art electronic test/measurement equipment, computers, and printers. During my thirty-seven year career as an electrical engineer in this valley, many of my working hours were spent in a product development lab surrounded by stacks of HP test and measurement equipment. Any older electrical engineer, anywhere, can relate!

                     Workbench in the HP Garage ( As It Looked Back Then )

The Hewlett Packard story showcases the two primary reasons that cities including Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose find themselves at the focus of the world’s tech capital. The two prime movers underpinning today’s Silicon Valley were: Stanford University and its famed Professor of Electrical Engineering during the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, Frederick Emmons Terman. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were both electrical engineering graduates, class of 1935, who studied at Stanford under Fred Terman. It was Terman who recognized the talent of his two charges and suggested that they consider an alternative to the long practice of recent west-coast electrical engineering grads which was to pack their bags and head east to where the jobs were. Famous corporate names like General Electric, Westinghouse, IBM, Bell Labs, and countless others were well established on the east coast and always on the lookout for engineering talent. Looking southward from the Stanford campus in 1938, little, save acres of orchards, could be seen – certainly few established companies with good opportunities like those on the east coast.

Fred Terman was, himself, an accomplished electrical engineer who wrote the “industry standard textbook” titled Radio Engineering back in 1932. As a student at Stanford in the early nineteen-sixties, I myself used the 1955 fourth edition of his book. Terman was not only a nationally recognized engineer but an uncommon visionary, as well. At the center of his vision for the future, was Stanford University. Accordingly, he convinced his talented pair of students, Hewlett and Packard, to break tradition, remain in the region, and begin their very own company, right here! They did precisely that at 367 Addison Avenue, less than three miles from campus. HP grew rapidly to become an industry giant with an uncommonly fine corporate culture and identity. And the rest was history, as Terman, from his Stanford faculty position, took an ever more active role in promoting the local region and seeding it with other start-ups during the years that followed. Not only was the proximity of Stanford University an attraction to young entrepreneurs bent on acquiring state-of-the-art knowledge, the fresh, scenic beauty of the region and the fine weather were not to be discounted, either!

Terman was instrumental in Stanford’s important 1951 decision to incorporate some of the University’s prime, ninety-four hundred acres of extensive campus as the Stanford Industrial Park. HP, in its heyday, established its corporate headquarters on the edge of the new industrial park – a familiar sight on Page Mill Road, just west of the El Camino Real. Many tech and venture capital firms followed suit and settled nearby on Stanford land. The Stanford Shopping Center sits on Stanford property under a very long-term lease agreement with the University. The founding grant from Leland and Jane Stanford stipulates that the land they bequeathed as part of the university charter shall never be sold.

Stanford University is a fascinating study in itself. Founded in 1891, in memory of their only son, Leland Stanford Junior, who died at the young age of sixteen, Leland and Jane Stanford dedicated the school to “the children of California.” Stanford has made an incredible mark not only on this valley, but on the world at large, thanks in large part to the vision of Fred Terman.

Once his former electrical engineering students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, were convinced by Terman in 1938 to plant the seeds of their start-up company near Stanford and downtown Palo Alto, things happened quickly. In 1953, the Varian brothers, Russell and Sigurd, were the first to occupy the university’s newly established Stanford Industrial Park which was ably promoted by Terman. The headquarters for Varian Associates was located at the juncture of El Camino Real and Page Mill Road. It was there that the brothers manufactured their important klystron tubes, devices which operated in the microwave spectrum and proved so vital to the burgeoning communications industry. The author fondly recalls his summer job at Varian in 1961, testing large, water-cooled, high-power klystrons. My first full-time employment after college was with a small electronics company just up the road from Varian Associates, also within the Stanford Industrial Park.

                            Enter William Shockley and Transistor Technology

In 1955, William Shockley left Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey, where, in 1947/48, he developed transistor technology working with two colleagues. For that momentous achievement, the trio shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics. In that very same year, Shockley, with funding support from industrialist Arnold Beckman and Stanford, began operations at Shockley Semiconductor in a tiny converted storefront building on San Antonio Road in Mountain View. His plan? To make transistors a commercial success – and himself a lot of money! The transistor was, in most significant respects, a miniature replacement for the large, “clumsy,” and power-hungry vacuum tubes which had long served electrical engineers as signal amplifier/switching devices since first introduced by Lee De Forest in 1906.

        

        2N697 Transistor

Although germanium was the “solid-state” semiconductor material originally used by the Shockley team at Bell Labs, Shockley, a brilliant physicist with a Phd in physics from MIT, ultimately surmised that the future of commercial transistor technology would rely on another semiconductor known as silicon. Thus, we locals are residing not in Germanium Valley, but Silicon Valley. The development of the transistor proved such an important and pervasive a technology that its silicon ingredient symbolizes much of the other incredible and related technologies that were to emerge from this region – hence the name Silicon Valley.

In 1950, Shockley published the first authoritative book (indeed, the bible) on semiconductor behavior, Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors. The publication of Shockley’s famous volume heralded the coming age of computers.

Transistor technology was the “big new thing” (a vast understatement) in 1955, destined to replace the vacuum tube and change our world – which it did. Transistors, with their constantly advancing “solid-state,” semiconductor technology and incredible miniaturization continue, still, to change our world, and Shockley deserves much of the credit for that. But, after bringing silicon to this valley, Shockley’s start-up company, here, was destined to be only an indirect factor in all that was to quickly transpire.

William Shockley was a brilliant physicist, but a terrible manager of the men he hired into his new venture. He also knew virtually nothing about the business world, but he had personally recruited an extremely talented band of engineers, physicists, and chemists into Shockley Semiconductor. The best and brightest of the bunch were destined to leave Shockley’s employ after only one year and make real Valley history at another fledgling company – Fairchild Semiconductor, in Mountain View. That group of employees became known as “the traitorous eight” after handing Shockley a mass resignation and heading out the door for Fairchild and better prospects.

Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were the spiritual and technical leaders of this band of eight. By 1961, they, and their team had catapulted Fairchild into fame and fortune by developing the “integrated circuit” manufacturing process which allows the economical mass-fabrication of thousands of interconnected transistors on a single tiny chip of silicon. That post-Shockley leap in semiconductor technology/fabrication was THE pivotal point for everything – literally the beginning of the digital computer age as we have come to know it. Coupled with Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication and Norbert Weiner’s pioneering book, Cybernetics, Fairchild’s brilliant band of eight and their breakthroughs in semiconductor fabrication allowed digital technology to mushroom in the Santa Clara Valley and elsewhere to heights unimaginable even to the most optimistic of visionaries. Just contemplate your own iPhone!

Shugart Associates in Sunnyvale along with Quantum and Maxtor were other fast-growing companies in the Valley that developed and manufactured data-storage devices known as “disk drives.” These electromechanical devices used magnetic recording to store hundreds of millions of data bits (1’s and 0’s) on their whirling, plated aluminum platters. Fairchild’s integrated circuit technology gave us powerful small computers requiring immense data-storage capability, hence the burgeoning disk drive industry, which became a very big and important player in the growth of Silicon Valley. Today, most computing devices use – you guessed it – semiconductor data storage instead of magnetic recording.

In 1969, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild to start yet a new venture which emerged as Intel whose fabulously successful and quickly ubiquitous microprocessors (computers on a small silicon chip) further enhanced Silicon Valley’s status. Almost on cue, garage start-up Apple Computer, under Steve Jobs’ visionary guidance, surfaced around 1977/78 right next-door in Cupertino and very successfully implemented the Apple II vision of semiconductor computing technology for the “masses.” This, while consistently attaching its renowned brand of imagination and excellence to the products Apple continues to produce. The iPhone concept/implementation has changed everything, has it not?

In closing, I should add that Stanford University was not an idle spectator to all of these world-changing developments after getting things started in the Valley. Rather, the University quite brilliantly adopted an active investment role and cultivated an on-going influence on many of these success stories, including even Shockley’s ill-fated effort. For starters, the school remains a long-time landlord, collecting rents on its numerous ninety-nine year property leases – prime Palo Alto property which was included in the original ninety-four hundred acre Stanford endowment. Stanford also rapidly expanded its engineering and computer science curriculum over the years, providing both personnel and expertise to the region.

When former Stanford engineering student Cyril Elwell (class of 1904) opened his Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company (a forerunner of radio) near the campus in 1908, he obtained a five-hundred dollar loan from Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan. Several of the faculty also invested. In that sense, Stanford can claim credit for the emergence of venture-capital financing which has long been so prominent in the Valley and so vital to start-up companies!

This historic stock certificate from 1910 for over one million shares of Poulsen Wireless reflects Elwell’s founding interest in the newly organized company.

Many years later, in a newspaper article addressed “To the [SF?] Examiner,” Elwell wrote: “Your editorial …did not go far enough back in crediting Stanford University as the pioneer of the fast growing electronic and atomic eras.” Elwell proceeded to relate my account of the early history regarding Stanford’s influence on his fledgling company. Poulsen Wireless ultimately became Federal Telephone and Telegraph – a very long-standing company.

How often have you used the Google search-engine on your computer? Thank two former Stanford students who founded Google and provided the world a revolutionary way to search for (and locate) most any information one can imagine. The importance of Google search to enhancing the flow of vital information and collaboration for the worlds of tech and medicine can scarcely be overestimated. The list of similar examples involving Stanford’s influence is long and signficant.

Suffice to say, Stanford University has not built its huge endowment since opening its doors in 1891 by collecting tuition and room and board from its students. Look to Fred Terman and wise investing by the University to account for its continued funding – to the tremendous benefit of Stanford students in need of financial aid, to this Valley, to the state of California, and, without exaggeration, to all the world that depends on technology.

Such fame, fortune, and game-changing technology has happened within this regional neighborhood – in barely more than one human lifetime. There is a cost, of course, to all of this, and many choices will be required as we go forward. The region fairly hums today to the activity and progress within. Sadly, gone forever are tranquil afternoons amid the blossoms in the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” The simple fact is this: this Valley is permanently changed, and so is the way we all live our lives because, in large part, of what took place, here.

A Lasting Presence Amid a Sea of Constant Change

Is it not a comfort to find something in this life of constant and rapid change that bucks the tide? For me, it most certainly is – but why is that?

The cloistered, open-air sandstone hallways of Stanford University contain a number of interesting things, but one unlikely candidate has left an indelible impression upon my sensibilities.

This finely-tiled drinking fountain was a gift of Stanford’s class of 1926. For almost ninety-one years, tucked away from view in a corner of the arched hallways which surround the school’s “inner quadrangle,” this little jewel has rebuffed the onslaught of efficient, modern, stainless steel replacement plumbing…and I am so glad for it. And it is still functional, reliably delivering a sprightly stream of cool drinking water upon command – despite its advanced age.

Linda and I had visited the nearby Stanford Museum (now known as the Cantor Arts Center) last week. As we walked from there to the campus bookstore, we cut through the inner quad, the focal point of the university campus. I took this picture as we turned into the surrounding hallway, and, as has been the case since 1960 when I first enrolled as a student, the fountain was still there, unchanged and right where it was supposed to be. The experience for me is akin to happily greeting an old, dear friend once again who is defying age and still doing fine – looking good despite the many years.

We First “Met” in 1960

I retain a somewhat fuzzy yet stubbornly persistent recollection of first encountering that colorful old fountain and pausing for a drink during my first week as a student in the fall of 1960. As I recall that Saturday afternoon, I was crossing campus on my way to the women’s dorm to pick up a girl named Virginia, my Saturday afternoon date to my first Stanford football game as a student. The University of Wisconsin was the opponent that day in the contest held in 90,000 seat Stanford Stadium, a half-mile walk across campus.

I remember pausing for a drink of water and subsequently encountering and greeting a recent acquaintance of mine who was passing by. As I turned to continue my journey to the women’s dorm, I cast a backward glance at the unusual, tiled fountain which had just satisfied my thirst. At that point – for whatever reason – I bookmarked the moment in the deeper recesses of my memory bank, and it has remained there ever since. Perhaps the euphoria of being a newly-arrived student on the Stanford campus on a football Saturday was the catalyst.

For sure, the memory of that moment and that location (the fountain) is still subject to immediate recall after, lo, these many years. I have always been intrigued by events of the past – the power of time and place in our lives, and that incident and that place have somehow stood the test of time – fifty-seven years, to be exact.

Hopefully, I can still manage to amble past that very spot on Stanford’s inner quad twenty years from now and renew my acquaintance, yet again, with that same unassuming, yet satisfying campus landmark. I hope it will remain just as it was and is in 1926, and 1960, and 2017, immune to the ravages of time and change, even though I surely will not be so fortunate.

The Coming Decline of College and Professional Football; The Resurgence of Track and Field

The decline of college and professional football as we know it is now underway and fast gaining momentum. The reality is undeniable – virtually a “no-brainer.” Here are the key reasons for the trend:

Football, especially at the college and professional levels, is a dangerous sport. In the professional ranks, football played over a career lasting more than seven years often exacts severe penalties in the form of lifelong disabilities, minor and major. Listen carefully and heed the testimonials of many professional players who retire in their thirties and live the rest of their long lives enduring disability and pain from the injuries and general wear-and-tear suffered during their football careers.

The most recent data regarding the cognitive effects of concussions and repeated head trauma is the most damaging of all to the future of the game. “Better helmet design” is not a viable solution to this problem. One might be tempted to rationalize the problem by invoking the arguments that not all players suffer cognitive issues later in life, and there will always be professional athletes willing to trade the risks for a lucrative career. One might argue that embracing football’s risks is one of the grown-up choices one makes in life – let the athletes decide! But football’s dilemma is not that simple.

Here is what will happen – is already happening – that portends the decline of the sport: Parents will increasingly be unwilling to expose their young students, at the high school level and earlier, to the risks football entails.

Without active high school programs to function as a junior farm system for the colleges and universities, the pool of talented college athletes will diminish. Without enough good athletes participating in high-visibility college/university programs, the professional level will suffer. Simply put, the current popularity and “success” of football at the college and professional levels cannot survive a crumbling foundation at the high school level, and that is precisely the current trend as parents and students weigh the risks and order their life-priorities. The turn-out for high school football has notably declined in the past two years since concussion data has been made public.

MONEY: Yes, the root of much if not all evil! When is the last time you have attended a major college football game? Was it a great experience, well worth the individual ticket price of $40 to $90 for mediocre seats? As a life-long college football fan following, among others, my alma mater, Stanford University, here is a summation of my experiences with the college game:

-Very high ticket prices today even for mediocre seats, most all of which are now “reserved.” Gone are the general admission end-zone seats which were, until recently, readily available on game day for a family-friendly price of $15.

-Want to bring your youngsters to a college game despite the high cost? Gone also are the sun-drenched Saturday afternoon game days at places like Stanford Stadium, the setting for so many of my football memories involving great players and big games. Today, you and your children will more likely than not be filing into a college stadium for a 7 pm game on a cool fall evening – bed-times for your children be damned. For the first several decades of its existence, the old Stanford Stadium seating 80,000 did not even have lights!

Stadium-goers can thank television, the sports networks, and big money for relegating the truest and most faithful fans to second-class status. Games today are scheduled exclusively for television and the big money the networks bring to the athletic conferences and schools.

-Oh, and speaking of television: For fans attending the game, expect, in addition to exorbitant parking fees these days, lots of dead-time throughout the game in order to parade the line-up of lengthy television commercials. Games today are drawn-out affairs because of this. Not so very long ago, the infrequent sight of television vans outside Stanford Stadium was exciting, indicative of national attention on a particularly important game to be played that afternoon. Today, PAC 12 conference games are routinely televised; no longer is that a plus for the fans in attendance. Rather, it is bad news for the reasons just cited. Bottom line: Too many games on television, too much exposure, too much money in the sport…just TOO much!

-The last, but certainly not the least of issues: The charade of college football as a sport played by “student-athletes” simply cannot be ignored even by the most die-hard of fans. The reality today is that many college/university football programs are more representative of an NFL farm system for aspiring professional athletes than a legitimate student-athlete endeavor. Graduation rates for football and basketball players are pitifully poor for many colleges and universities – even some “elite” ones. I am pleased that Stanford University is not one of those whose athletes are “in school” to play ball. Stanford runs an exemplary athletic program despite being caught in the cross-currents of today’s money/sports realities.

-A sure indicator of the excesses inherent in today’s system is the fact that the highest paid employee at the big football schools is…the head football coach! Salaries in the millions of dollars are becoming common. Neither the presidents of those same universities nor renowned Nobel laureate professors on the faculty come close to earning as much as the head coach at the big football factories. Success on the football field translates into big bucks for the school from influential alumni donors who live vicariously vis-à-vis football success on game-day, ethics be-damned. The whole situation is really quite pathetic and hypocritical! Click on the two links at the end of this post to previous blog posts of mine which cover the corrosive effects of money on football today in more detail.

Take Care of Your Body, Especially the Brain and Knees!

Have you ever sat in a doctor’s exam room waiting for his/her arrival and noticed the anatomy charts which are often present on the walls? Inevitably I am amazed at the miraculous intricacies that reside within the eye, the inner ear, and even the knee. The knee: A remarkable example of bio-engineering, is it not? Whenever I see the “knee picture,” I cannot help but shudder in revulsion at the thought of the damage a bad football hit can and very frequently does inflict on such a remarkable natural creation. Were I the parent of young boys, I would discourage them from playing tackle football for the sake of their knees alone. I am the grandfather of two young boys, quite certain that their parents will not support football as a sporting activity for either of them. What are the alternatives?

The Resurgence of Track and Field for Youngsters

I heard a news report the other day that high-school enrollments in track and field now exceed declining football enrollments for the very first time. Nothing could please me more as a former high-school hurdler on the San Mateo High track team…way back in 1958! The present trend reflects both the new concerns with football and a re-discovery of the virtues inherent in the sport of track and field. Youth soccer has already made great inroads as an alternative to football, but I see track and field as the long-ignored venue that offers even more variety and opportunity to young athletes. I was dismayed while watching the Rio Olympics that so many track events were run to less than capacity crowds. That never was the case in my day and probably would not have occurred in a European Olympic venue. Track has been off the radar screen for a long time in the USA, but all good things have a habit of returning to favor. I believe that track and field’s time has come again as a great alternative to youth football.

When I was in high school, track and field had an avid following in this country. In 1962, my father and I attended the two-day track meet held in Palo Alto, California between the USA and the Soviet Union. The competition engendered huge national/international interest and filled the old Stanford Stadium to its 80,000 seat capacity for both days. I was thrilled to witness the Russian star, Valery Brumel, set the then-world record in the high-jump at seven feet, five inches.

I was recently surprised when my eldest granddaughter, Megan, announced she was attending track camp this past summer. She has just entered high school this fall and plans to run track, possibly the hurdles – like Grandpa! Megan worked hard all summer on conditioning at track camp, and I was impressed by her dedication and the fact that other of her friends were also going out for track. I suspect Megan and her friends are fashionably riding the cusp of a new wave – the coming resurgence of track and field as a great sport for youngsters – boys and girls. Nothing would please me more.

My Favorite Track Event: The High Hurdles

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me – Burlingame High Track, 1958                              Liu Xiang – Athens, 2004

 

Click on the links, below, to go to the post archives on my Home page for these pertinent posts:

-College Football Today: Running Toward the Wrong Goal (9/1/13)

-Should College Football Players Be Paid? Since When Do We Pay “Real” Students? (11/1/14)

-Life-Lessons Learned from Playing Sports (2/2/14)

Another Student Suicide: Academic / Parental Pressures on Today’s Youngsters

Yesterday, on Facebook, I learned of yet another student suicide at one of our local public high schools, Gunn High School in nearby Palo Alto, California. I am very familiar with Gunn and its outstanding academic reputation thanks to faculty contacts. There have been several suicides by Gunn students over the past few years. The school and the school district have been very proactive with new student-help programs, as a result. As evidenced by one Palo Alto student’s open letter to parents, published yesterday in the Huffington Post, high expectations and parental pressures are often part of the problem. More on that letter, in a bit.

How does one make sense of a (usually) promising young man or woman who is so distraught as to take such a drastic, final step?

I have no degree in psychology, but I am a retired electrical engineer who has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for many years. I do know something about the culture and attitudes, here. Although each suicide and every distraught student has a unique personal profile behind his or her problems, there are some common denominators which become apparent to those of us who have lived here, worked here, and raised children in this valley.

I have alluded to the culture of this place numerous times in past blog posts. For the uninitiated, Palo Alto is the focal point of the phenomenon known as “Silicon Valley,” and it is also home to Stanford University. There is little argument over the contention that this valley is the technology capital of the world…yes, I do mean the WORLD! I emphasize this because few such statements can survive the test of scrutiny and counter-claims – this one does. Why is that important? Because this region is different; Silicon Valley and its denizens are immersed in a lifestyle which can rightly be called driven and success-oriented. At stake for many of the adult parents who live here are huge financial rewards and ego-gratifications which are available nowhere else to this degree in the world of technology.

People here are high achievers in their fields. You do not hold a “significant” (the term subject to definition and scrutiny) job, here, for long if you are not motivated and capable, and this can be a source of considerable angst for children of such parents. Not surprisingly, youngsters feel academic/parental pressure to “succeed,” here. At the same time, quality time with very busy (often two-income) parents is in short supply. “Quality time” between parents and student is often limited to frequent chauffeuring between various sports and activity venues.

In discussing the growing desperation of today’s students, there are no absolutes – no “always the case” scenarios, but there are trends, and identifying these is key to understanding the problem of distraught students.

Here is my list of “givens” as I see them:

-Student suicide is related to many factors – for example: Inherent mental illness, lack of love and attention at home, disturbing relationships with fellow students, bullying, and possibly school policies which stress students with excessive homework, etc. Each student’s situation is unique.

-Attending school with classmates who are uniformly gifted and driven is bound to be a source of added pressure. It is not about getting decent grades, here in this valley; it is about getting top marks – good enough to get into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or UC Berkeley.

-Parents who desperately want their child to reach the highest pinnacles of success (starting with admission to a prestige college or university, as an example) can have diverse motivations – from those who are genuinely motivated to help their student reach what seems their inherent potential, to those who relish living vicariously through their student and their student’s achievements.

-Even parents genuinely concerned for all the right reasons about their student’s future prospects have different motivations based on the parents’ personal concept of “success” in life. If that concept minimizes the importance of a student’s emotional well-being and happiness during the formative years in favor of  emphasizing efforts to gain all the advantages and trappings of  “success,” there will be problems.

-Students who strive for top grades primarily to please (or appease) their parents are the most vulnerable to severe discontent or worse. Wanting to please one’s parents is an admirable trait and a healthy motivator as long as parental love and affection do not hinge on the student achieving “success”… as defined by the parents.

-The fortunate students are those whose parents demonstrate unconditional love for them at all times, despite the inevitably necessary “motivational discussions” regarding attention to studies and homework.

-The most fortunate of youngsters are those whose curiosity and hunger to learn about and “know” our amazing universe drive them to work hard in pursuit of their passions. Parents of such students have typically instilled these “learning attitudes” in their youngsters at a very early age. These are parents who truly value education (not merely grades) and respect the power of knowledge – prime attributes of a happy, mature, and well-adjusted person…and the youngsters follow their lead.

It is true that no matter how dedicated and genuine the efforts of parents may be during this process of raising and educating children, things can still go wrong in young lives. I do think that parents in a success-oriented region like Silicon Valley are well advised to sincerely evaluate their own priorities and value judgments concerning education and “success” in life. These parental priorities will have a direct influence on their student’s attitudes and well-being.

As for “success,” money is no guarantee of happiness, and money is but a marginal indicator of  meaningful success. As a parent with genuine motives, one can only ask of students that they truly try their best at school – with knowledge and wisdom as goals rather than letter grades.

The aforementioned open letter to parents from a Palo Alto student which was published in the Huffington Post on January 27, 2015 stressed the generalized concerns of students:

-“It is our relentless schedules, a large range of social issues, personal horrors I can’t think to relate, and our terribly unforgiving parents. Good God, the things you put us through. It’s AP classes, it’s SAT prep from day 1, it’s punishment for less than a 4.0 GPA, and it fuels the tears that put us to sleep at night while you rest soundly. So many students, if not the majority, are the embodiment of pure stress.”

-“We are always in this loop of what-if’s, worrying we will disappoint our unsupportive parents who, quite frankly, deserve no part in our future, “successful” or otherwise.”

-“Suicide continues while our parents value wealth and success over our lives. We cannot wait for change. We need it now.”

These are powerful messages.

It is so important for parents to pay close attention to the emotional needs of their students as well as to their “success” track in school.

I can speak from experience to the fact that there is too much emphasis, especially in Silicon Valley, on the near-perfect grades necessary to gain admittance to prestige colleges and universities. A strong “B average” at Gunn High will not get you into Stanford or even into UC Berkeley, and I say, “So what?” It will gain entrance to many other fine state universities and private colleges, where a good education is awaiting those willing to grasp it. I would much rather see a student commit themselves to serious study in high school because they are genuinely curious about the world in which we live as opposed to striving for a GPA which will gain them entrance into top-tier schools. It is truly what you learn and what you know that will count down the road, and that is not necessarily reflected in a student’s “A” course grade or a degree from a prestige school. There are many fine schools to choose from which offer excellent educations and which rarely demand “perfect” academic records.

The comforting truth for both parents and students is that future employers (beyond the first) will be far more interested in your past employment record and your job interview than what school you attended. That should be cause for all parents to relax a bit about the occasional “A” grade that got away in high school; it is not the end of the world.

Postscript: I have written several germane blog posts on education, colleges and universities, and student learning. These can be found in my blog archives (go to the “Home” page of my blog and click on “Categories”/ “Science/Math Education” in the right-hand column). Also see my newly published book, Nurturing Curiosity and Success in Science, Math, and Learning which deals with many aspects of the above discussion – especially parenting skills.