There are a plethora of books out there about the college admissions process. With the increased anxiety about the selectivity of the elite colleges and some major state universities, a market has been created for authors to bind their so-called secrets about how to get into colleges and sell them as if it some sort of tell-all book. Naomi Schaefer Riley of the Wall Street Journal, recently reviewed two of these books, Acing the College Application and What High Schools Don’t Tell You: 300+ Secrets to Make You Irresistable to Colleges by Senior Year.” The excerpts that Ms. Riley pulls from these books has me worried that there are parents out there who will believe this stuff, employ their strategies and hinder the social-emotional and educational growth of children.
By way of example, Michele Hernandez writes in Acing the College Application that it is her experience that if an applicant has educated successful parents, then the applicant’s chances of acceptance are far lower. While it is often true that colleges will give additional consideration to a similarly-achieving child of a low-income family who will be the first member of a family to attend college, her solution is absoultely deplorable–lie by omission. The article reports that Ms. Hernandez suggests the student be intentially vague. Don’t tell them your parent is a neurosurgeon–just say “medical.” The idea she posits as a strategy is to blur the lines of ethics and intentionally midlead or confuse the admissions committees to give yourself a better shot. From my perspective, this is not only deplorable to teach our young adults to use this as a strategy to get ahead, it is ridiculuous. Does Ms. Hernandez honestly believe that after years of hard work, long nights getting that research paper just right, hours of practice on the athletic field, summers abroad, spending spring break providing community service to needy families in a third world country, and parent’s efforts to quiz children so they are ready for their finals, that what their parent’s do for a living–or better yet how you report what your parents do will ultimately make the difference between acceptance and denial? Are you kidding me? That’s an insane attitude that suggests that none of the real work matters–it’s all about how you spin it on your application. But wait, it gets worse.
In What High Schools Don’t Tell You, Elizabeth Wissner-Gross suggests that as early as middle school, students need to adopt an ambitious high-reaching goal and then structure their time accordingly. She prescribes students to pack their summers with enrichment activities. While doing some things in the summer are a good idea (e.g., taking a summer SAT prep course, travelling to Europe, going on a mission trip, taking a class at a college summer school), Ms. Wissner-Gross takes it too far. Ms. Riley quoted from the book, “…down time need not be unstructured to be relaxing and help a student decompress, [and] children who insist on hanging out with already known friends during the summer often miss out on wonderful opportunities.” In other words, make sure a student’s summer is crammed with activities designed to pile up credentials and polish a resume, but don’t spend time with your friends as they are an obstacle to your goals. Oh, that’s sounds healthy.
Let me be clear. I believe it is absolutely damaging to a child’s development to approach college admissions this way. The teen years are largely about socialization, identity development, and discovery. The goal of parents is to help them become independent and explore their world. By prescribing and structuring their every move and replacing the goal of personality development with the goal of getting into Harvard is disengenuous and will literally stunt their emotional growth. Maybe the strategy outlined by Ms. Wissner-Gross will get you into an Ivy, but will the child be equipped to handle it? How about the resentment they end up feeling because their parent’s robbed them of their childhood to reach a goal their parents wanted for them?
I find the type of advice dished out by these books not only damaging to children, they actually damage the entire college applicaiton process. It does not ease anxieties by providing people with a legitimate plan to help a student ”get in.” Instead it preys on the fears of parents and students, leaving them susceptible to fall for these gimmicks that have the potential to a) not work and b) hinder a child’s social-emotional growth. It further prompts families to apply to more and more colleges and do more and more things to gain an advantage. All this does is to perpetuate the problem and drive colleges’ selectivity index (the percentage of applicants offered admission) down further, creating more hysteria.
What’s my advice?
- Students do need to be passionate about something. Allow them to explore their world and interests. When they have an interests in a topic–history, poetry, baseball, the guitar, help them to pursue it. These passions are good for children. It helps their esteem because they become experts as something. Their skills they used to learn about that topic are skills that can transfer to other areas. For example a child that has an interest in World War II may read all about it, exercising his reading skills, which then, because reading novels has been a struggle in the past, helps with his English grade. It does improve the chances of admission at selective schools as they often prefer to see a student who is an expert at a particular topic rather than the conventional “well-rounded student.”
- Students should seek balance in their lives. The goal of adolescence is not all about getting in to college. Therefore, the adolescent’s life should not be all about tasks that will add to their resume. Educational experiences, fun experiences, social experiences, service experiences, and even boring experiences should all make up the adolescent’s daily calendar. Too much of any one is unhealthy.
- Be child focused, not college focused. If children are made to stretch themselves academically just a little bit each year, while also allowing them to explore their interests, students will find their way. The type of college, the level of difficulty of their academic program, and their plans for study will become obvious. I believe this will make them happier, allow them to choose a path that is truely theirs, and waste less time doing what they believe is what they must do rather than what they have an aptitude for and are passionate about.
