About Parents behaving badly:
It's now all about the money and there's alot fueling the parents emotions to behave so badly.
From the latest US Govt Survey of Consumer Finances, those with a college degree have a median income 2.22x and a median net worth 4.35x higher than those with only a high school education. It's almost a dividing line now-a-days between the haves and the have nots. So parents want kids to go to college so they can have a successful adult life. But 78% of adults live paycheck to paycheck with little to nothing saved for even their own retirement, let alone anything saved for their kids college. So parents want their kids to college, thinking it's essential for their kid to be successful as adults, but most of the parents are broke and in debt to begin with. Then factor in the tuition prices of schools like Moeller, St. Xavier, Elder, etc.
Now let's also factor in the price of college which is now astronomical because it has been rising at a rate of 3x the inflation rate since the student loan program began. That's because the colleges keep raising their tuition rates to capture more loan money from the government. The government doesn't care how much things cost as long as they can just pass it on to whoever signs the loan. It's a $1.5 Trillion industry (scam). So the only way their kid is going to college is to be either be broke and in debt a decade or so to pay off student loans (Average = $39K, with $100k debt not uncommon). Or their kid can get a scholarship so the parents don't have to pay. So of course they're going to push their kid and their kid's school.
Whatever it takes for their kid to get a scholarship because the alternatives are ugly. Either their kid will stay on the low end of the wage scale or be in massive debt for a very long time. So of course there's a lot of fuel and emotion behind why parents are behaving the way they are, as wrong as it is.