Admisions talk dominates the senior year of high school, despite evidence that an elite degree guarantees nothing.
By Jonathan Alter, from Newsweek/Kaplan “Special Edition”, How to Get into College 2008
My daughter was running errands recently and ran into a woman our family knows vaguely from around our suburban town, a fellow soccer parent. The woman hadn’t seen our daughter for four or five years. She didn’t ask how she’s been or what she’s done since they last saw each other. She didn’t even say hello. Instead, she immediately asked where she was going to college, then launched into a description of her own kids’ prospects.
This is hardly unusual. High-school seniors and their parents know that for at least a year almost any conversation outside the family will inevitably turn to college admissions. But the obsession has reached the point of rudeness. Whatever happened to “Nice weather we’re having” or “How about those Red Sox”?
Do I think that college mania is out of control in the clammy precincts of the upper middle class? Do I worry that this mania is now warping people’s understanding of what’s important in life? Do I wish that I were the doctor of the universe who could prescribe one big chill pill to high school students and especially to their parents? That would be a yes on all counts.
Some of my friends have argued that I have no standing to make these claims. They hear me talking plenty about college admissions and they know that my family has done well. They insist that it isn’t cricket for me to denigrate the game we have learned to play so expertly.
True enough. We paid for test prep for our oldest and will do so for our two younger kids. We took college tours and asked the usual nervous questions of the college counselors. But I still cling to what I call the “300 school” theory of success in America - that students can attend any of 300 or so colleges and receive a terrific education and even a leg up in the struggle to get ahead. It’s an arbitrary figure. Maybe the number is actually 500 or 1,000. The idea that a student is doomed to second-class status if not admitted to one of 10 or 20 or 50 schools is at odds not only with several studies on the subject but with my own informal observations.
As a journalist, I cross paths with a variety of successful people. Some went to highly selective colleges. Many did not. What they got out of college had much more to do with what they put in than where they went. Their hard work, ingenuity and openness to new experiences were rewarded almost anywhere.
Many parents know this in the abstract but still can’t back off. I was appalled to hear recently about a father who told his son that he would pay for college A but not for college B. He thought he knew better, but was in fact making a silly status distinction, like choosing one vacation spot or car model over another. I’m not holding my breath for large numbers of helicopter parents to shut off their rotors, but I do have a few suggestions to ease the mania:
First, parents should encourage little or no discussion of college until the end of sophomore year. It’s bad enough that half of high school is taken up with an emphasis on what comes next. Beginning the process during sophomore year means that three quarters of secondary school will be consumed in preparation. The only exception should be families who have little or no prior experience with higher education. For them, early campus visits (even beginning in eighth grade) can energize students and persuade them to work hard and aim for a college education.
Second, students and parents should focus less on visiting schools and more on their college essays. Campus tours begin to blur after a while and their success is often dependent on whether it rains on the day of the visit. Essays, by contrast, get short shrift. I’m amazed by how many kids I know who grind through three years o ftest prep and grade grubbing only to complete their essays at 2 in the morning on the day they’re due. Considering that admissions offices concentrate heavily on the essay in the hope of catching a glimpse of the real person beneath the packaging, this is unwise.
And finally, it pays to relax. College admissions officers tell me that they can smell overwrought parents and students from a thousand miles away. If they wanted to fill their freshman class with high-SAT robots, they could quit and let a computer decide who gets in. But colleges want deeper and more-complicated human beings - students whose interests extend beyond where they may go to college.
So the next time you run into high-school seniors, feel free to talk about religion, politics, even sex before turning to the subject of their educational future. They’ll be grateful you weren’t rude.