COLLEGE COUNSELING CULTURE

New Crabby Post!

2010-09-10T09:24:00.002-05:00

Check out the Crabby Counselor's new post about stress and the college application!

The Crabby Counselor

2010-08-19T20:21:00.000-05:00

Hi! If you're looking for The Crabby Counselor, click on this post's title or go here. He'll be commenting on college admission and all it inspires every week or so! Enjoy.

Helicoptering, Continued

2010-07-16T11:33:00.002-05:00

See my new post on Wordpress here.

Migration to Wordpress

2010-07-13T09:32:00.000-05:00

I am migrating my blog to Wordpress, which you can get to by clicking on the title above or here. It has a cleaner layout and more options. If you've been following my entries here, I hope you'll visit me there.

College Night at the Field Museum

2010-07-12T14:36:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday was the date of an extraordinary college fair: Nearly sixty colleges displayed their wares and made connections with over 200 charter school counselors and administrators as part of the National Charter School Conference held here in Chicago. The fair itself was organized by the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and was held in the great hall of the Field Museum.

As far as I know, it's the first major event specifically bringing together college admission officers and charter school personnel. INCS and I put together a small "Meet the Charters" event at a local public library last year, which was very successful, but this year was way beyond that. The Field's hall was elegant (with Sue the T. Rex looming over the participants), and there was great food and wine served by waiters and chefs--a far cry from the usual gym or cafeteria college fair.
I'm pleased that the program I brought to INCS three years ago, College for All, has given rise to greater connections between charters and higher education institutions. Because they're small and idiosyncratic, charters can sometimes get lost in the shuffle, so enabling schools to meet them increases the opportunities for their students.

So far, feedback has been great on both sides. I'm not sure how or whether we'll top this event though. The charter conference is in Atlanta next year, so we'll see!

Out of Control Parenting

2010-07-07T21:09:00.000-05:00

The "helicopter parenting" phenomenon seems to be getting nuttier by the minute and it's easy to harrumph over the latest anecdote about a mother calling the academic dean of a college to ask why her child got a bad grade. As a college counselor at an "elite" private high school I often had to deal with mommies (seems like it's more often mommies than daddies) who wanted to know how their child could get an A instead of an A- so he or she could get into Brown. Or who basically ran the college process while the children lazed about in blissful torpor. These stories tend to validate our feeling that the current generation of college-aged students has become way too pampered for its own good.

Unfortunately for us, Margaret K. Nelson has written an interesting and level-headed book on the topic called Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times. Rather than gleefully narrating the various misbehaviors of these over-involved parents, she approaches the topic from a sociological perspective. (Nelson is a professor of sociology at Middlebury College in Vermont.) Using class divisions and technological innovation as prisms, she looks at why parents might behave the way they do and provides some clear, if incomplete, insights about why parents these days do the things they do.

Nelson bases her conclusions on a relatively small sampling of individuals she divides into "working class," middle class," and "professional middle class" parents. As a result, her brush paints a rather broad picture of child-rearing practices in each group. She writes that WC and MC parents "are...less interested in intimacy and engagement [with their children] than they are in clear rules of authority within the family." In contrast, the PMC parents she describes have "a lengthy perspective on children's dependency without a clear launching point for a grown child," and "put child rearing front and center: even in the midst of extremely busy lives, they highlight the significance and meaning they find in this activity, and they avoid shortcuts (such as playpens) that could make the job easier."

But more interesting is how Nelson contrasts the WC/MC and PMC views of their children as individuals in a way that puts most of the helicoptering onus on the PMC parents. Less privileged parents, according to Nelson, "insist that by the end of a comparatively short educational career a child should be ready to pick a career, find a job, and begin the next stage of life as a fully formed adult." They "want to encourage their children to grow...But their role involves acceptance of the particularities of their children and does not rest on a view of unlimited potential, of children who can become 'the best.'" Especially in relation to college, WC/MC parents want their children to do something productive, not play around for four years.

In contrast, PMC parents see their children as ongoing projects with unlimited potential. As a result, there's no end to the work of seeing them develop, which is why they insist on being "present" so constantly. For them, college isn't a "vocational training ground," it is a place for personal self-development: "...in lieu of job preparation, elite parents talk about the important opportunities colleges might provide for self-discovery and for gaining self-confidence. Rather than viewing college as a launching pad to independent adulthood, parents see it as a time for their children to acquire the necessary cultural and social capital to be able to seize any opportunities for status that may arise." No wonder my students' parents wanted them to go to Brown and not Tufts!

If you perceive your children as "out the door" when they turn 18, there's no need to keep a continual eye on them. As a parent, you've done your job and what results is what you've got. PMC parents have created a never-ending process that needs continual tweaking and adjusting. They see their children as extensions of themselves and their parenting, and so must always be involved. College is a place to refine their projects in the never-ending drive toward "perfection," whatever form that may take.

Nelson makes the case that technological devices such as baby monitors, security bracelets, and cell phones have changed the ways parents connect with their children, often making them more fearful, not less, and promoting a sense of needing to be continually in touch with their offspring. She notes, however, that PMC parents are less likely to rely on technology to monitor and control their children than are MC/WC parents because of their commitment to molding their children's "potential" and being intimately involved with every detail of their lives. PMC parents make calls, write emails, and so on as a natural extension of their involvement with their children; MC/WC parents are less likely to do so because they see their children as already on their way to independence.

Parenting Out of Control does a good job of delineating some of the possible sources of helicopter parenting even while it remains frustratingly shallow. It relies too heavily on Nelson's small sample and seems to lean too much on stereotypes of privileged versus non-privileged parenting and family life without offering real three-dimensional analysis. However, using class as a way to talk about families' expectations for their children and college is a fresh way to talk about the subject, and readers attuned to the relationship of college attainment to status consciousness will find Parenting a good source for further discussion and observation.

YouTubing the Admissions River

2010-02-25T13:21:00.004-06:00

Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it. Cloning afghans (the dog not the blanket), building half-mile high buildings, teaching chickens to count--we just don't need em. The same is true, I think, for inviting students to submit YouTube-style videos as part of their college applications, as Tufts and as at least one other college have done in the last few days.

There's no question that the challenge of creating a video, even a simple one, can be exciting for someone who has grown up with pocket-sized video cameras and iMovie. Capabilities and equipment that were once confined to studios and labs have become commonplace and people have taken full advantage of them, sometimes to great effect. It's useless to pretend they don't exist or that students haven't grown up with them.

But is it appropriate to invite YouTube-style videos as part of a college application?

Well, why not? Will it give better-heeled applicants an advantage? Probably. Will it induce migraines and binge drinking in admission officers who have to watch them? Definitely. But the big question is, what will the criteria for evaluation be? I've already read one comment that said an under-produced video seemed more authentic, and therefore more credible, than a slick one. Is that fair to the slick one? And wouldn't USC or NYU see the situation quite differently? Is a slick clip the equivalent of an essay that's been worked over by Joyce Carol Oates? Or is it just evidence of a real talent that could energize a campus? Does a student who uses a production crew get points for leadership or slammed for having others do his work for him?

I don't buy the argument that students may one day regret sending a clip into a college. They have grown up watching people, famous and ordinary, voluntarily humiliate themselves--sometimes as part of "rehabbing" their careers--in ways that we could only speculate about before. It's a hallmark of every reality show, from "American Idol" to "Jersey Shore" and shows no sign of abating. (Who's the breakout star of "Shore?" Snookie, the most embarrassing member of the group, who now makes highly anticipated appearances seemingly everywhere, and is planning her own handbag line.) It seems normal to confess egregious thoughts and behaviors to millions--think "Hoarders" or "Celebrity Rehab." And to think that only yesterday we were wondering if admission officers trolled social internet sites for dirt about applicants. Why go through that trouble when they'll send it themselves?

People are perfectly capable of humiliating or even incriminating themselves if there's a chance they'll be stars. (Recently in Chicago a group of students filmed themselves beating up another student and posted it on YouTube. What's the thought process there?) And who knows, there may be some pretty interesting things to come out of a video, but my guess is more often than not, not. When I was at Amherst in the far away 90s a transfer applicant sent in a 6-minute VHS videotape (remember them?) of himself in jacket and tie seated behind a desk telling us why he thought he was a good candidate. His final line was "And by the way, I'm not wearing any pants." This might have been amusing except for the fact that when he got up to turn off the camera, he was wearing pants. So, double fault. Presumably, kids are better editors today.

Students have been sending tapes of their auditions, their dance recitals, and other performances as part of their applications for a long time, so maybe YouTubing is just the next incarnation, with the problematic addition of self-conscious production values instead of dad's shaky and unfocused videography of an actual deed. The big difference is that the latter is a record of something; the former is of supposed value in and of itself. We're in an age where "broadcasting yourself" makes everyone a potential star, but is that what it all comes down to in a college application?

I don't see any reason not to look if students send a video (shouldn't we call it something else now? Or do we and I just don't know it?), but I'd exercise caution before making it even an optional part of a college application. At a College Board Forum session I attended last weekend here in Chicago about using new media to communicate with students, YouTubing wasn't even mentioned. If it does become a fixture, I hope at least that admission committees will figure out just what they'll be looking for first.

A version of this post also appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Child Exploitation at USC

2010-02-08T10:28:00.004-06:00

Just when you think you've heard it all there comes another shocker, this time about USC's committing one of its football scholarships...to a 13-year old. That's USC's Class of '19. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, the USC coach made a similar signing when he was at UT--Knoxville, and has continued his kiddie recruitment at USC. Here's an excerpt from the IHE article:

The University of Southern California's football team has committed one of its football scholarships for the 2015 entering class to David Sills, a 13-year-old quarterback at a middle school in Delaware, The News-Journal of Wilmington reported. Sills told ESPN that Southern Cal has always been his "dream school."

You can read the full notice here. The newspaper article is at Delaware Online.

How many things are wrong with this picture? Preying on a 13-year old boy is one. This sounds like child trafficking to me; if it had been done over the internet by a skeevy 45-year old we'd be prosecuting him. But out in plain sight, where the context is "education," (and by that we mean "sports"), it's being presented as something amazing. What does USC hope to gain by trolling middle schools for future football recruits? Do middle schools want older men in "coach" getups to start showing up at their games? I don't think so.

I volunteer at a national teen crisis line (National Runaway Switchboard) where I get calls from kids who have been lured away from home by "friends" they've made on the internet. They get sent airline tickets and instructions, and leave with promises of wonderful relationship with ideal partners, only to be greeted at the airport by an overweight, balding perv who loves young men/women. Blinded by what looks like love and affection from someone who understands them, they're trapped by someone who wants them only for his/her own purposes.

Aside from the ethical issue of subjecting an adolescent to the pressure of college recruitment while he's still in 8th grade, how is he going to live a normal life for the next five years, knowing that if he breaks a leg or tears a tendon, USC will toss him out with the trash? Is it remotely fair to put a child, however talented, in this position? And even though David Sills says USC has always been his "dream school," how does he know that it will still be his dream when he's old enough to vote? How developmentally inappropriate is it to lock him in to USC (in theory) with blandishments of scholarships and visions of sugarplums when he should be having fun playing football in school and awkwardly starting to date? How are his teachers going to cope with a young man who seems to have his life already set? What's the point of learning English or algebra? I hope his parents are not so starry-eyed that they'll roll over for this, but I wonder.

What is USC's coach thinking? And what does USC plan to do about it? One can hope that it repudiates this ridiculous and totally inappropriate stab at building a child army as soon and as publicly as possible. If I were president, I would fire Lane Kiffin immediately. But with the power college football coaches have these days, that's probably not going to happen. Shame on you, USC. Fire Lane Kiffin and repudiate this insanity.

And just so you know, I'm not the first one to wonder what's going on here...See this post on Bootlegger Sports from last June. And evidently USC has done some damage to other 13-year olds: See this article at rivals.com. And know also that the NCAA doesn't seem to have any guidelines for recruiting anyone before freshman year of high school, much less make a commitment to same.

To Tell or Not to Tell?

2010-01-29T11:56:00.001-06:00

Recent postings on the NACAC elist have weighed in on the merits or demerits of posting college admission results in a public place like a bulletin board. At some schools, it’s nobody’s business; at others, it’s a celebration of community spirit. A lot of that seems to depend on the social/economic situation of each school, which makes this activity an interesting barometer of college outlooks at both the school and the individual student level.

For privileged schools, the competition is so intense it’s dangerous to post all acceptances, especially when there’s always the chance of hearing, “Why did Jimmy Smith get into Nirvana U when my Susie didn’t?” and worse. The can of worms here is very large and smelly. Despite what we’d like to think and how we try to present it, privileged families often see college admission as a contest to be won and, even more insidious, as a zero-sum game: If your kid wins, mine loses. (As if not getting into Nirvana means you end up having to attend Hollywood Upstairs Medical College.)

On the other hand, less-privileged schools like charters and others serving low-income and first generation students, are justifiably proud when their students are accepted to post-secondary institutions. They have to work many times harder than privileged schools to bring their students into striking distance of four-year colleges, so a success there is a major event, even if the college isn’t “top tier” or “most competitive.” The point is to have students attend and finish well so they can help create the critical college-going culture schools need. And the challenges aren’t just academic; they have to address social, cultural, and other challenges not as prominent with their better-off peers.

I like to see the map of the U.S. with pins showing where students are when I visit a school. That tells me a lot about how widely the school has asked its students to look, which also tells me that they’ve really encouraged their students to think broadly about what they want. In a low-income school, that can be quite an impressive display (think not only acceptances, but good scholarships, financial aid, and an ability to see the world), providing inspiration for future graduates. It’s a community as well as an individual achievement.

As far as posting acceptance letters (all or just the final one) is concerned, I always feel uncomfortable. It looks like scalp collecting at privileged schools, which promotes the competition we try to tamp down. The “wall of shame” where some students post rejection letters (always a student idea, as far as I can tell) can be cathartic but a better idea to me would be to have a bonfire where students could consign these negative spirits to cleansing flames without having to reveal anything specific. (Maybe they could throw in some of the piles of mail they’ve gotten from colleges over the year as well. I’ve also advocated a collective scream along with all this—an atavistic release of all the tension that’s built up throughout the process.)

Parents and schools at all socio-economic levels can be justifiably proud of their students’ accomplishments. If we’ve done our duty as counselors we’ve also communicated the fact that the importance of the college experience is less about where you go than what you do when you’re there.

A version of this post also appears on Admitted, the blog of the National Association for College Counseling.

It Does Not Compute

2010-01-19T10:13:00.000-06:00

Like many large ideas that once had meaning, the term "paradigm shift" has been trivialized to mean any time a group of people change their outlook about something. But as originated in Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, it actually is a powerful concept. Kuhn demonstrates how the shift from an Earth-centered to a sun-centered concept of the solar system not only revolutionized science, it also completely changed the ways humans perceived themselves and their relationships to the world. A paradigm, in this sense, enables us to filter our perceptions according to a rational-seeming model. It also influences our behavior. When it is challenged or destroyed, we have to rethink who we are.

On a slightly less complex level, we also organize our world experience with metaphorical constructs, depending on and influencing our behavior. If we think human society is a cesspool of sin, we act one way; if we see it as a cradle of civilization, we act another way. For very complex manifestations like the brain, we rely on metaphors (think of them as mini-paradigms) as explanatory devices, even though they don't actually explain anything, but instead simply give us something to visualize.

Here's where it gets complicated: How we act as the result of our metaphorical constructs may be appropriate for the metaphor but not for the metaphor's object. So, for example, with the rise of the idea that the brain is a "computer" we have created ways to treat it as such. I don't think it's a coincidence that as computers have become more powerful and complex, the ways to test and collect data on students in every grade have become more complicated and intrusive. Our faith in and dependence on computers have lent credence to the metaphor that the brain is a computer, and therefore can be treated as one and in fact be thought of as separate from the body, a programmable thing that simply tells its holder what to do.

In his new book, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who gave us the term "virtual reality," rebels against the prevalence of the brain/computer metaphor because it threatens to dehumanize us. An excerpt in Harper's this month starkly outlines the problem:

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. Demand more from information than it can give you and you end up with monstrous designs. Under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, for example, U.S. teachers are forced to choose between teaching general knowledge and "teaching the test." The best teachers are thereby disenfranchised by the improper use of educational-information systems.
What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships.

Lanier's description here can be seen as elasticizing the brain/computer metaphor: If the brain is a computer it should be easy to collect data from it; if that data is collected and analyzed, it distances us from the individuals we got it from, and enables us to see them not as individuals but as data points for the larger "computer" that uses them as data. While collections of data as well as metaphors can direct our behavior, they shave off the rough edges and anything that doesn't fit. They are designed for generalities, not specifics. When we mistake the latter for the former, when we take the metaphor as reality, we can go seriously off course.

I'm spending time on this topic because more and more I see children treated like data in schools I visit and spend time in. Schools are oriented toward getting higher test scores, not better education (no, they are not the same thing...); they are forced to aspire toward artificial goals laid out by computerized systems that analyze and crunch numbers instead of genuinely reaching out to and helping the flesh-and-blood students in their classrooms. These imperatives suck all the pleasure out of attending school and out of teaching, for that matter. Even at small charter schools I work with, emphasis on score improvement seems to overshadow the possibilities of enjoying reading or math or history.

Upper and middle-class kids should not be the only ones getting real enrichment programs; their underserved counterparts should be getting them, too. If anything, underserved kids should get more of them because even though they have a lot of catching up to do, they have historically been deprived not only of educational opportunities, but also of ways to associate them with the genuine pleasure of reading something great or learning something wonderful. Thinking of students as little data points and their brains as little computers that just need "inputs" strips them of their essential humanity and renders their educations moot. They obey but do not learn; they accede to our demands but have no intellectual strength by which to make their own worlds richer. To substitute one metaphor for another, students should be seen as hungering for knowledge, not waiting for data. There's a universe of difference.

Underserved Students and the Politics of the Practical

2010-01-05T13:09:00.000-06:00

One thing that's bothered me for a while is how often low-income and first generation students are steered pretty hard toward "jobs" rather than "education" when it comes to college. I can't argue with the imperative to earn money and support yourself and your family after college, not to mention paying off student loans, but I worry that with all best intentions we may be developing a laboring class to the long-term detriment of American intellectual and national life. It may be better educated than earlier working classes, but it still smacks of a division between the privileged and non-privileged.

Jonathan Kozol wrote, "Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself." His compassion for children is well-known, but what strikes me here is the phrase "utilitarian adulthood." Much is made of ensuring that students are able to get jobs when they graduate from college. That's well and good, but it seems to me that Latino, African American, and low-income/first-generation students are seen more in that "utilitarian" light than their more privileged white counterparts. Working to change that outlook is one reason I do what I do.

If you are a well-off white student from a good high school, it's relatively easy to consider a liberal arts education without thinking about post-college work. You may want to be a doctor or lawyer or CPA, but you are comfortable knowing that you can still major philosophy, anthropology or English, any of which ignite the old jokes like "What are you going to do, open a philosophy store?" as Mark Slouka writes in his Harper's essay, "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." But you still can afford to explore, take your time, or even think about going to graduate school to be an anthropologist or a historian because you're relatively sure you'll be employed at something after college. (Recent history aside.) You can major in theater because you know you'll eventually work for an investment bank anyway or if you do go into theater can rely on parents for support, at least for a little while. (I realize what a huge generalization that is, but I believe it's justified in contrast to underserved students' experiences.)

But first-generation kids get pushed toward the practical: Even if they're being encouraged to go to college, they're steered toward curricula that will end in a job right out of college. They're NOT steered toward the arts or history because the payoff isn't nearly the same. Most college advising programs I've seen advising low-income students emphasize the income-enhancing aspects of college attendance, not the intellectual stimuli or the opportunity to see well beyond one's own borders. Again, while I can't argue with more income, I can wish that we attended more to these students' minds instead of seeing them just as future laborers with BAs. Otherwise we risk their continued marginalization.

A young African American colleague recently told me about her own experience coming up through the Chicago school system. Although she is extremely good at math and was taking advanced courses at an early age, she was pushed to take a basketball scholarship at an obscure Florida college because she is also extremely tall. Even though she had demonstrated her brainpower, it was obscured by her height. Luckily she left her original college and transferred to one more appropriate to her talents, but my guess is that's more an exception than a rule. She was seen as a body, not as a mind; as a laborer, not as an intellectual.

One result of the emphasis on college as job preparation rather than life or even career development is that we continue to have a dearth of African American, Latino, and other artists and intellectuals from out of the mainstream. I've met many bright underserved students for whom the idea of "liberal arts" is a non-starter; they have to be sure they can make money right out of the gate so they can't waste time with "frills." It's hard to be comfortable studying Hispanic or Victorian literature when you feel the hot breath of necessity on your neck. But no one seems to have told them that they can live intellectual lives and have careers, and that's a shame.

Michael Roth's recent passionate defense of the liberal arts in the Huffington Post seems archaic in this context: "The cosmopolitanism of curricula at America' best liberal arts colleges is in tune with the wonderful diversity of student life. The thirst for experimentation, the ability to cross disciplinary or cultural borders, the scale of residential life -- all of these factors extend to learning outside the classroom and create vibrant communities that students remember and value throughout their lives." My guess it would leave a room full of low-income parents and students laughing bitterly--these ideas all sound like airy luxuries most people can't afford, and they'd be right. About the affordability, anyway.

But Roth (who is the president of Wesleyan University in CT) touches on some of the things that make higher education in the United States so vital and essential even without a direct link to jobs. He says "The key is that the students at these schools are developing skills, learning how to learn, in ways that will serve them for decades." They are the things that help make going to college worthwhile not just as preparation for one's working life but also for one's mindfulness of life in the world, including being a citizen in its widest sense. The differences between training for a "job" and embarking on a "career" (one implies simply laboring at a task; the other implies vocation, growth, and mobility) include developing one's ability to be imaginative, to see beyond surfaces, to make connections or see patterns among seemingly disparate things, and to be flexible. Why shouldn't underserved students be able to develop these capacities the same as their better served peers?

Of course, Americans have long been suspicious of non-practical education, going back to long before the days of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Sitting around reading just doesn't look like work (sorry, Mr. Lincoln), so what good is it? But as we move more and more into being a nation of ideas and services rather than muscular production, we need to be sure that brainpower is valued wherever it shows up. Education is a down payment on the possible: we can't know what will happen from moment to moment much less in a year or a decade. (Not to mention how many jobs will evaporate or come to be in the next few years.) All our students need encouragement to be well-educated, not just trained.

I was surprised to learn years ago that the Olympics were once confined to amateurs because that kept working class competitors out. Only the leisure class had the time and money to train for the contests, while workers had to, well, work. Colleges have been doing their best to enable "working class" students to overcome a similar barrier but current economic and social conditions are making it hard to justify college attendance as a social good in and of itself. But practicality and ratiocination (my favorite word from an undergraduate course in American literature) can coexist and even support each other. It's not an either/or situation. If we are to have a strong and multi-varied American culture now and in the future we need to create scholars, artists, and thinkers from every corner of American life. Enabling everyone who wants it to be an "amateur" for a few precious years can immeasurably expand our collective ability to live useful, thoughtful, and adaptable lives.

There Will Be Grades: Oilman's Son Goes to College

2009-12-05T12:20:00.000-06:00

I've been reading Oil! by Upton Sinclair, the book upon which the movie There Will Be Blood is based. So far, it's not much like the film. It's told in a deceptively folksy manner by a narrator who sometimes speaks directly to the reader. The main character is not John Ross, the father (in the book he's called "Dad" and in the movie he was Daniel Day Lewis), but Bunny, his son (who is John Ross, Jr.). "Dad" is an industrious oil man who ensures his success with some casual swindling and genteel bribery, while looking out for his men and his son. Unlike in The Jungle, there's nothing horrific here yet, although one man falls in an oil well and can't be pulled out in one piece. The focus isn't on the horrors of the oil field but the subtler machinations of accumulating wealth.

I'm only halfway through so I'm guessing things are going to get ugly, but I've just begun Chapter 10, "The University," and I was struck by the opening paragraphs. They seem to encapsulate very efficiently the relationship among money, power, ideology, education, and ambition that can often be seen in American higher education culture. Sinclair's voice here is very sly and indirect, but the implications are unmistakable; he describes a prominent university built on questionable foundations and seems to delight in telling us how Ross enters the picture. Here is the description of the university and its founding around the time of World War I:

Southern Pacific University had been launched by a California land baron as a Methodist Sunday school; its professors were all required to be Methodists, and it features scores of religious courses. It had grown enormous upon the money of an oil king who had bribed half a dozen successive governments in Mexico and the United States, and being therefore in doubt as to the safety of his soul gave large sums to professional soul-savers. Apparently uncertain which group had the right "dope," he gave equally to both Catholics and Protestants, and they used the money to denounce and undermine each other.

When Ross visits campus to see Bunny, he also meets the university's president:

Still more reassuring was his meeting with President Alonzo T. Cowper, D.D., Ph.D., LL.D. For Doctor Cowper was in the business of interviewing dads; he had been selected by his millionaire trustees because of his skill in interviewing trustees. Dr. Cowper knew how a scholar could be at the same time dignified and deferential. Our Dad, being thoroughly money-conscious, read the doctor's mind as completely as if he had been inside it: if this founder of Ross Consolidated is pleased with the education his son receives, he may someday donate a building for teaching oil chemistry, or at least endow a chair of research in oil geology. And that seemed to Dad exactly the proper attitude for a clergyman-educator to take; everybody in the world was in the business of getting money, and this was a very high-toned way.

The transformation of ill-gotten wealth to "high-toned" educational pursuits seems perfectly sensible to Dad and Bunny, the idea being that the ends justify the means:

Both Dad and Bunny took the university with the seriousness it expected. Neither of them doubted that money which had been gained by subsidizing political parties, and bribing legislators and executive officials and judges and juries---that such money could be turned at once into the highest type of culture, wholesale, by executive order.

Some time into his first year at SPU, however, Bunny realizes that his English course

was cruelly dull, and that the young man who taught it was bored to tears by what he was doing; that the 'Spanish' had a French accent, and that the professor was secretly patronizing bootleggers to console himself for having to live in what he considered a land of barbarians; that the 'Sociology' was an elaborate structure of classification, wholly artificial, devised by learned gentlemen in search of something to be learned about; and that the Modern History was taught from text-books which had undergone the scrutiny of thousands of sharp eyes, in order to spare the sensibilities of Mr. Pete O'Reilly [a rival oil baron], and avoid giving any student the slightest hint concerning the forces which control the modern world.

Sinclair presents university education as a veneer as well as a money-laundering scheme. But Bunny is also exposed to a professor who insists that students "think for themselves" and talks to Bunny in secret about the various aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution (on peril of losing his job). Bunny, already a character who tries to see beyond the surface, is highly influenced by these conversations, which disturbs Dad and also results in a file being kept on him by mysterious agents and informers.

In the book, nothing is pure, nothing untainted by corruption of some kind. What interesting about Dad is that he wants and respects money but doesn't seem interested in it as an end; it's great to have but his pleasure seems to be the wheeling and dealing as well as the hard work that are needed to get it. We'll see what happens as Bunny makes his way through college and brings his moral compass (already compromised) to bear on his father's life and business.

Center for Student Opportunity

2009-10-30T12:06:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of the Center for Student Opportunity, a nonprofit organization with a mission to promote college access and opportunity among first-generation and historically underserved student populations. They've produced a very fine guidebook of colleges that focuses on information particularly appropriate to these students, including what support is offered, scholarships and so on. It also has essays and tips from experts in the front. I saw the first edition last year at NACAC and bought ten copies on the spot to give to the charter school counselors I've been working with over the past two years.

CSO has also created a strong website called College Center that lets students search for college access programs, ask experts questions about the college process and search for colleges offering advising, mentoring, transition programs, and so on. I expect them to continue adding to the list as they go on.

Colleges can find out how to partner with CSO to reach underserved students by clicking here. With a contribution to CSO (based on Carnegie Classification), institutions can not only reach individual students but also community organizations. Everybody wins.

CSO's most recent addition is a blog section where ten students from minority, low-income, and first-generation backgrounds are sharing their stories or high school and college. The initial entries have the energy of a new project, projecting optimism and immediacy. Although there are only a few from each student so far, I hope they continue to record their thoughts and experiences for the benefit of their peers about to go through the process themselves.

Their situations reflect the concerns that many first-generation students have, such as having to be an example for their younger siblings and communities. They are also poignant in their forthrightness--one student blogger talks about how she discovered she was pregnant while she was applying to colleges. This forthrightness can help students who think that personal circumstances make it impossible to think about continuing their educations. (They blog as part of their having become Opportunity Scholars--see below.)

If you are a counselor or community volunteer who works with first-generation, low-income, and otherwise underserved students, the Center for Student Opportunity can be a great help. Not only does the website have excellent resources, there is also a page where you can download free guides for helping high school students, parents/families, and others. Students also have the opportunity to be nominated as Opportunity Scholars; if selected, they receive college counseling support from a network of volunteer counselors as well as a chance for a $1,000.00 renewable scholarship in college.

If you are a college and want to expand your outreach to underrepresented students, be sure to look at CSO's Colleges Partnership Program.

There's plenty more to explore on the site, and I expect it just to get better and better as more and more individuals and institutions connect to it. It is a welcome and necessary resource for the students we serve.

Creating a Self: The Facts of Fiction

2009-10-25T19:47:00.003-05:00

The reasons many colleges give for requiring essays include getting to know more about the student, giving him or her a chance to explain something in the record, or providing a writing sample. Fair enough, but do they have to be “true?” More than one student has asked me, "Is it OK to write an essay that isn't factually accurate as long as it's good?" Answering questions like "What is your most significant experience?" or "What person, real or fictional, has had a major influence on your life and why?" or "Topic of your choice" tend to frazzle students attempting to impress the mysterious admission Inquisitors they imagine gathering in dank basements to determine their futures. They’re not talking about lying, exactly, but the bare-bones facts don’t quite do it, either.

As long as you aren't claiming club presidencies or social service you haven't really done, is there anything wrong with saying Thomas Jefferson is your most influential hero instead of Bono, your real hero? Is there a problem if you exaggerate an incident that "changed your life" even if it didn't so much, really, or if the situation was more mundane than you present it? I brought this topic to my NACAC colleagues recently to get their impressions and received a dozen or so responses.

Most of us, including me, opt for "honesty" and "truth," but those are slippery concepts when you're really asking someone to essentially create a character in 500 words or less. Asking a student to include subjective narratives about relatives, experiences, or outlooks in an application introduces an element that, no matter how it turns out, I'd have to call "fiction," with the “fact” being what lies beneath that essay.

Let's distinguish between "fiction" and "falsehood," and the purpose of the essay. One colleague wrote that "If the goal of an essay is for the student to provide insight about himself or herself, and if that insight is authentic, then maybe it doesn't matter if the person didn't exist or the experience never happened." We teach novels and short stories even though they aren't factually true because they reveal important "truths" about human existence. If it works for Hemingway and Oates and David Sedaris, why not for Sally or Billy in their applications? That whale wasn’t just a whale, was it?

Some said that it was important to hear the applicants' authentic "voice" and that it wouldn't come out in a "fictional" essay. But we hear and value authors' "voices" constantly in fiction. Even when they're not writing about themselves, they are by virtue of what they choose to observe and the stance they take toward it. I tell students that constantly--no matter what you choose to write about, you're writing about yourself. (Many parents do not like to hear this: At his parents' insistence one student substituted for an excellent and fascinating essay about his Jewish grandfather, who sold mattresses in Shanghai during WW II, a boring one that was all about himself.) We draw conclusions about Hemingway from his writing, why not about Billy?

Most of the colleagues I heard from said they expected students to be "truthful" and "honest" in their essays, but I think their reasons for doing so could as easily be answered by fiction if we are willing to look below the surface of the writing: "the essay helps us get to know the student better," it "reveals something about themselves that the rest of the application doesn't," it is designed to "communicate the living breathing person to assist admissions deans in putting together a diverse class with varying personalities, interests, and accomplishments...," "it reflects his genuine beliefs," it "shows the college who you are--both in the voice of your writing and in the content. Therefore it is essential that the content be true” and so on.

Don't all these responses describe the best fictions? Poe said that every short story should focus on creating one unified effect in the reader. Isn’t that what we’re asking our students to do? No one expects “The Tell-tale Heart” to be “true” but it sure is scary, because it taps into our basic fears. Shouldn't we give our young authors the same respect we give those we expect to show us truths through "lies?"

One colleague compared non-factual essay writing to phony reporting, but there's a difference--we expect reporters to give us the facts; to do otherwise gets you fired (unless you work for Fox News). Do we expect students to meet reportorial standards? I don't think so.

Conversely, we can blast the author of "A Million Little Pieces," not because he had actually written fiction, but because he lied to us about what he had done. We read memoirs differently from novels, as one colleague noted, distinguishing "between fiction and deception....If you read a 'real life account' of an adventure that was later revealed to be made up, you'd feel cheated--even if you continue to acknowledge the skill of the writer."

I think we may simultaneously place too much and too little responsibility on applicants and their essays. One colleague thought of the college essay "as less of a measure of writing talent and more of a glimpse inside the applicant's soul (his judgment, his perspective, his sensitivities, and his sensibilities." I'd still have to say that a fiction can do that maybe even better than "fact.” Expecting a look into an applicant’s “soul” may be way more than the exercise will bear. [I once read an application from a student whose essays were about his suicide attempt and his recovery. (Verified by a call to his counselor.) They were well written and the student was admissible, but his truthfulness sank him. That was a glimpse into a soul I’d rather not have had.]

If we want "just the facts" how can we rely on imaginative constructs like essays? If "it is essential that the content be true" what do we mean by "true?"

I believe that whatever a student writes about reveals something about him or herself, so the factual truth is less important than the arrangement of facts to arrive at a "truth" that points to something about the author. If a student writes a touching essay about a relative who may not exist, can't I appreciate the author's ability to express compassion and empathy? Is that any less "real" or "truthful" than if the relative were real? I know the student has the capacity to express those qualities, at least. (Yes, that person may be a cold-hearted bugger in real life, but it's not the fictionalizing that makes him so.) And will I ever know the facts in any case? Probably not.

So if students "made up their feelings and included actions/results that never happened, they are lying about themselves?" I don’t think so: they're creating a reality they know to be fictional. And maybe they have a clear understanding of what needs to be said.

Let's be honest: Every college admission essay really is a creative writing assignment. We should not expect rock-hard reportorial fact from seventeen-year olds under pressure to "reveal" themselves; it's not fair. We should broaden our sensibility to understand that what we receive is the "fact" and what we do with it is the result. If we read every essay as “literature” instead of reporting we might not only encourage better writing but also enjoy it more.

One colleague put it best: "I think if the essay is a vehicle for illustrating some important value/realization/personal motto that the kid really believes in, it's okay to stretch the truth or create a scene through which to convey the message."

If we agree that some of the greatest truths can be found in fiction, why not give college applicants the same consideration?

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question on the NACAC listserv. Here are some other comments I received:

“We tell our students quite firmly that the college application essay is not a creative writing assignment!...It needs to be seen as an opportunity for the college to get to know the student more deeply than it could from a transcript and a set of test scores. How could that possibly happen if a student were to write about ‘truthy’ rather than truthful aspects of his/her life?”

“I think truthiness is where most essays fall. Does everyone have that one moment either while hiking the Grand Canyon or fishing with their grandpa where they learn some important life lesson before their 18th birthday? My life has never worked like that!”

“I have always called those fantasy essays…I simply tell my students that at some point they must clue their reader in that this is fiction.”

“The essay should all be true and real, just like when the student signs the application indicating the work is his/her own true and original work, it should also be real—otherwise what’s to stop them from adding activities and embellishing their apps in other ways?”

“Isn’t the answer relatively simple? The student must designate a fictional essay as such…”

“It would be nice if the point of the essay were more explicitly outlined on the application. If the point is to judge writing skills and creativity, I think the sky is the limit in terms of the truthiness of it all. But if the point is to learn more about the student’s life, and to gauge his thoughtfulness or self-awareness about his experiences up to now, then the actual truth is absolutely warranted.”

“The admission committee can glean information from an honest essay, regardless of topic, to help us put a student’s academic and leadership career into context…They may not be the most entertaining essays but if an essay offers insight that helps us make an informed decision it’s far more engaging. I can read good fiction on my own time.”

Never Assume

2009-10-06T15:26:00.003-05:00

A remarkable story appeared in the Chicago Tribune last Sunday. It's about a remarkable young man named Derrius Quarles and his determination to get somewhere and be somebody. A foster child whose father was stabbed to death when Derrius was four and whose mother struggled with drugs, he had the strength of character to overcome the vagaries of his life and end up winning scholarships to excellent colleges all over the country, including Morehouse, where he now attends.
Derrius's outlook can be summed up here: "You can't go around thinking you are inferior just because you didn't have parents," he says. "For me, it's about knowing where you are from and accepting it, but more important, knowing where you are going."
At 17, he was living on his own, keeping himself together and focusing on the future. He budgeted his money and when he did the grocery shopping he avoided junk food in favor of fruits and vegetables. He never took his eyes off his goal.
Derrius was fortunate to have someone see his potential. As often happens and as studies have shown, sometimes just one person can have an immense effect on a young person. For Derrius, that person was his summer biology teacher, Nivedita Nutakki, who told him he shouldn't waste his talent. Arriving as a freshman with a 2.5 GPA at Kenwood Academy, Derrius was taking three AP classes and earning a 3.6 by his junior year.
In the middle of this amazing story is a passage that made me angry: "Even his oversize ambition couldn't get Quarles past one roadblock. He dreamed of attending Harvard, until one college adviser told him his 28 ACT score was simply not high enough. He abandoned his plans."
Regardless of whether Harvard or Morehouse (or any other institution) would be the best for him, no college adviser should have told him not to bother applying to Harvard or anywhere else. It is not for that person to say. I always tell students that it is their right and privilege to apply wherever they want so long as they understand clearly what the odds are. In this case, it's a shame that someone assumed Derrius wouldn't get into Harvard on the basis of that score. And it's almost criminal that Derrius was convinced to abandon his plans as a result. Any college adviser who thinks he or she can or should make that determination suffers from a bad case of hubris.
The truth is, we cannot know what the future holds for our advisees. We don't know what colleges and universities will decide, even though we can come up with some pretty accurate guesses if we've had enough experience. We don't know how or when a student will suddenly "take off" and make us proud. But all you have to do is read Derrius's story to know that no matter where he went he'd make good, and that as a result the test scores say very little about him (and even so, they are miles above the average scores of someone from his background).
Again, I'm not saying Derrius should have gone to Harvard or anywhere else or that he's deprived as a result--clearly not. But no one should have told him it wasn't possible. Anything is possible, as this young man has already shown. While we may think we know a lot, the future always confounds us and we should always be humble in its presence.

Edit, Oct. 23: I was so taken with the story that I forgot I had met Derrius through Scholarship Chicago, a program that provides help and mentorship throughout the college process and in college as well as financial assistance during college. When I met him he had already received several admission offers from colleges and was racking up scholarships. I would never have guessed at the hurdles he was going through he was so poised, confident, and focused.

A Little Recognition

2009-09-22T09:54:00.001-05:00

I'm pleased to report that my blog entry "Elephant in the Room" was featured at the New York Times's blog, The Choice, on Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, along with several others. Times reporter Jacques Steinberg wanted to publish some observations about the many questions people asked Harvard's dean of admission Bill Fitzsimmons. These and the reactions to the reactions (and will it ever stop??) can be read there, as can many other entries about college admission issues.

I'd be happy to hear your reactions and comments.

Class of Luxury

2009-09-17T13:39:00.002-05:00

Have I just become an old crab or does the thought of a college dorm (sorry, residence hall) with a "heated pool, a hot tub, a sand volleyball court and four tanning booths" make you kind of cranky? Today's Chicago Tribune reports on several luxe facilities featuring everything from walk-in closets to maid service, "communal" 47-inch flat-screen TVs to computer-linked washers and dryers. (The tanning beds, inexplicably, are at Arizona State.)

Not too many years ago I visited a college in Massachusetts that had just built a residence hall of six-person suites where each student had his own room, there were two bathrooms, and a kitchenette. Purdue's $52 million (yes you read that right) facility also comes with a meal plan. Many living facilities are built with single rooms (some even come with private bathrooms), since most kids have grown up without having to share a room or even a bathroom, and why would they want to start now? My thought on seeing that dorm was, Why would I want to make my own food in college?

Although many of these luxurious accommodations come with a hefty premium tacked on to the regular room and board charge, they are being snapped up even in this economy. Nothing, apparently, is too good for current college students. As the Trib writes, "Tom Cheesman, architect of Purdue's $52 million First Street Towers, said the residence hall is 'essentially a hotel.' He said it is especially attractive to 'helicopter parents who want to send their son or daughter to college campus but give them all the luxuries of home.'"

It's certainly a far cry from my freshman dorm at Amherst. I lived on the 4th floor (no elevator) with two roommates, neither of whom bathed much, in a room meant for one or maybe two. The fireplace and woodbox revealed the building's early 20th-century origins, but the former had been blocked up so we relied on the inadequate steam heat that barely reached us in the winter and blasted us finally when it started to get warm. In the depths of a New England January we had an eighth of an inch of ice on the inside of our bedroom window. At least we didn't have to cart our own wood for the fire.

Somehow, though, we managed to survive and do well. I had bought a new "record player" to bring (it also had an eight track player!) as well as an area rug, a desk lamp, and an electric typewriter I had gotten for graduation. A clock radio, too. Some books, and clothes, as well as some records came in a few boxes. My roommates brought even less. There were students who had a lot more than I did. One of my dorm mates had a huge stereo and a water bed; so I suppose those who had, brought. (One of the Purdue students has been "keeping 30 pairs of shoes at the ready and jamming the bookshelf with every episode of "The O.C." and "Dawson's Creek."" Really? For what?)

But then I suppose we had less to bring and fewer, or at least different, expectations, about what to bring and what to expect about living in a dorm. As a kid I remember thinking that a "dorm" meant I'd be in a barracks with a lot of other people, a prospect that scared me. But I did like the idea of living with a few other guys. We didn't share a lot but we co-existed pretty well. My living situations got slightly better over the years, but I wasn't in it for the amenities, and reading the Trib article I felt glutted, overwhelmed by the presence of things in an environment where ideas and relationships should be dominant.

Colleges have been in an amenities race for some time now, building massive "fitness centers" and other facilities to attract students, and new dorms are no exception. I wonder, though, what it means to try to replicate what students have at home rather than having them experience communal or semi-communal living. Negotiating a bathroom with 30 other hallmates can be exasperating, but it can also teach patience and, well, negotiation; having to clean up after yourself (or, more likely, not) gives you a sense of who you are and a taste of living on your own. Trying as hard as you can to stay in your individual bubble seems sad to me--like going to Paris and never leaving your hotel.

Everyone romanticizes their college experiences so I won't go on, but I do wonder what might have happened if Purdue had spent $52 million dollars on their labs and on faculty. Or if ASU had bought textbooks for low-income students instead of tanning beds. This kind of reckless consumption doesn't bode well for the future.

Elephant in the Room

2009-09-11T11:14:00.008-05:00

The Choice, a New York Times blog about college admission, has begun a series of answers to questions posed to Harvard’s Dean of Admission, Bill Fitzsimmons. Those of us who have worked in the field for more than a few days will probably know how to answer the questions from nearly 900 respondents. What’s remarkable is that even though there are dozens of books, articles, websites, counselors, and other methods purporting to reveal the “secrets” of college admission, the questions and assumptions are the same as they have always been.

The admission process is the elephant being discussed by the blind men: each one “knows” what he’s feeling—a tail, an ear, a leg—but no one knows the whole thing. Some insist that most spots in a Harvard class are reserved for wealthy donors or legacies; others believe that the deck is stacked against public school students (Interestingly, Fitzsimmons, himself a Harvard alum, is from a blue collar background). Another demands to know that applying for financial aid will have no impact on a student’s chances, yet another asks how Harvard’s process can “reward diversity without committing a type of reverse discrimination.” The tone of the questions ranges from Harvard-induced bliss at having been accepted to outright skepticism, with some dark rumblings from fringy types about why Harvard “gives away” so many seats to “foreign born” students.

Underneath all these comments are two questions that vary according to whether you have a child of college-going age or not: “How can my child reach the inner circles of wealth, connection and power?” and “Why can’t Harvard [or other appropriately big and powerful school] fix everything that’s wrong with our social system?” These are both unanswerable and mutually exclusive, which is what makes college admission so much fun.

Ultimately, however, the pleas to Fitzsimmons add up to what used to be addressed to philosophers: “How shall we live our lives?” Parents of second graders want to know how to plan lives that will result in Harvard attainment; a high schooler worries that if she leads an “authentic” life she may be disadvantaged by someone who has polished and “created” hers; those without Harvard genes lambaste a policy that seems automatically to reward those who have them. We want answers that will assure us that life isn’t random but has some direction and meaning. But in expecting “Harvard” to provide those answers, we avoid the more difficult task of wrestling with them ourselves, which is why philosophy is so hard.

Of course, one big mistake is to assume that only Harvard can address those questions. As college counselors and admission officers never tire of saying, the “best” college is the one that will challenge you appropriately, open your eyes to new ways of thinking, and help you develop and broaden your talents as you take your place in the world ahead. Plunging full-on into college life will be rewarding no matter where you are.

A true story: While I was in the Amherst admission office, one of our tour guides told us that her parents had pressured her mercilessly to apply to Harvard even though she wanted to attend Amherst. They had never heard of Amherst and insisted that Harvard was the place she’d go. After much haranguing, they finally prevailed upon her to visit Harvard and take the tour. At the end, a visitor asked the tour guide, “Is there anything you’d change about your Harvard experience?” The guide replied, “I would have gone to Amherst.” The rest, as they say, is history; hers, anyway.

Despite our best efforts, college admission remains an enigma wrapped in a mystery stuffed in an elephant. We just need to remember that we’re dealing with flawed human beings and human systems. But Americans expect answers, not more questions: Socrates was executed for being annoying, remember--he wouldn’t last ten minutes in an admission office. And no matter what answers Fitzsimmons gives, they won’t be the ones questioners are looking for. Even Harvard can’t supply those.

A version of this essay appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Some National Press

2009-08-30T09:51:00.003-05:00

You'll find me quoted in the Fall 2009 issue of Newsweek/Kaplan's Finding the Right College for You issue. Reporter Catharine Skipp interviewed me back in the spring about the College Board's new "Score Choice" option. She wanted to know how it would affect the population I work with-- low-income and first generation students. Of course, it's irrelevant to them, and I said so: "It's a silly, ridiculous thing for the College Board to do." One more way to tweak its earnings and look like it's doing kids a favor. You can read the article here or buy the whole issue for $11.95. I found it in the checkout line at the grocery store. (It's also available on the web here.)

If you're one of my friends or relatives and don't need any help with colleges, you can find me on page 29, bottom of the second column and into the third. By the time you read it your groceries will have been bagged and you'll have avoided any more "news" about the Gossleins. Enjoy!

Random Pleasures

2009-08-20T10:52:00.007-05:00

Surprise! Harvard, Princeton, and Yale top the U.S. News university listings again, with Williams atop the liberal arts college list. I’ve suggested for a number of years that the perennial “winners” simply be retired and let the rest duke it out each year (no offense to Duke) so we can get a real contest going.

If we’re stuck with the rankings, let’s make a cage match out of ‘em! Instead of a constant set of characteristics that give rise to virtually identical hierarchies each year, change things up so there’s some real suspense, like there is on the WWF or American Gladiators. Forget all this genteel bickering, or “reputation rankings” filled out more or less at random, let’s get some chairs, boards, barbed wire, and beer and get a real contest going. If you’ve seen Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, you know what I mean. Have colleges clash over stuff that matters: the square footage of their student centers; the pounds of tomatoes served in the dining hall; the average height of the faculty; the most expensive textbooks; the acreage per student. These are all concrete elements that can be objectively measured. For that matter, let’s include the amount of concrete on each campus. Have college presidents batter each other with rolled-up copies of The Chronicle of Higher Education until there’s only one left standing (presumably the one who used the issue with the Almanac tucked inside).

Whether or not people actually use the rankings in any biblical way, the main impulse seems to be to eliminate randomness from the college selection process: If you look at all the factors and set them up rationally, you’ll have the “perfect” match!

This, we know, is totally impossible. Any time college counselors get together, we talk about how we came to our alma maters more or less by accident, not design. We took our tests, sent in some applications, and chose one of the ones that chose us. We seldom did doctorate level research before deciding where to apply; yet we managed to emerge as decent human beings.

I applied to Amherst because my counselor tossed out the name in passing one day. I’d never heard of it but since it was a bus ride from New Jersey I went up and fell in love with it: it looked like what I thought college should look like. And luckily, they accepted me. (Another story.) When an Amherst professor once challenged me about why I had chosen Amherst, I couldn’t say anything that he didn’t counter with a variation of, “But plenty of other schools have good teachers and classes. What makes Amherst unique?” I was annoyed at the time but the exchange has stayed with me because the reality is I could have been just as happy anywhere else.

We fool ourselves if we think we can eliminate randomness from college choice, or, indeed, from many of the choices we make. Today’s Chicago Tribune has a story on how some colleges are trying to use social networking to match up roommates. Students can see their future roomies and make decisions accordingly. But jettisoning randomness can make life duller and bring out our lesser instincts. One girl said she asked for a change when she saw the “shabby” house her prospective roommate lived in. Another college stopped using extensive matching questionnaires because it just led to people’s being more disappointed when things didn’t work out.

So if we’re not going to have collegiate cage matches anytime soon, I suggest taking the rankings and getting some darts. You know where I’m going with that…

A version of this blog entry appears in the NACAC blog Admitted.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

2009-08-17T20:33:00.003-05:00

On the El recently I saw a woman reading a Kindle. It was sleek and cool. She had strapped it into a pink leather case and she looked sleek and cool reading it. I tried to see what she was reading but the gray screen and dark gray letters were too dark to figure out in the bright light of the train. I was curious, but not about the book she was reading, as I often am. I was curious about the device. Sleekness and coolness were what drew me to it.

I thought of Nicholson Baker's article in a recent New Yorker. He talks about the Kindle. It gave me chills: "Here's what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon." Even worse: "You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don't fare so well on the little gray screen." This doesn't sound like "reading," but more of a "content acquisition" where everything is sacrificed to the pragmatic task of "accessing" the "content provider's" words in order to "process" them.

Stripped of its pleasures, including the tactile and visual, reading becomes a task, something to be gotten through as opposed to something that can offer real satisfactions. Pragmatism trumps delight. The same can be said for schools and school systems where standardized testing has become the yardstick for "progress" and the stand-in for "education. Students in grade school are drilled on test-taking skills instead of reading and writing; they are molded into good "units" so their schools can do well on their own tests. Is it any wonder they hate school?

As we try to get students from disadvantaged backgrounds to look ahead to college, it's important to remember not to "process" them but to "educate" them. That means giving their minds something to expand into and grow on. Stripping education down to its pragmatics, the right answers on the test sheet, makes students passive consumers of data, not thinkers or doers. As with the Kindle, the pleasures of thought, of ideas, of detours, of visual imagery and inference, of "what ifs?" seem all to have been drained away so students face a gray screen designed just to deliver the basics so they can "perform." I can't imagine how dreary that must be to anyone with the slightest spark of intelligence and I can see why students are bored to death.

Recently I gave a talk to a grade school faculty about ways to engage students in the college process. The school is located in a poor section of town, with groups of young men hanging out on nearby street corners. The student body is nearly all poor and African American; the school hopes to set them on a path away from poverty and crime into a successful life. They already take their 4th to 8th graders to a different college campus each year to give them an idea about what college can be like and what they can have if they try.

Although these experiences may be impressive for the kids, I spoke to the faculty about creating an imaginative environment as well so they could ingest the spirit of college, not just the bricks and mortar. It's not enough simply to carry 4th graders to a college campus, they need a reason to be there. As a rule, 4th graders don't plan ahead ten years, but they can react to stories and ideas. I suggested teachers talk about their alma maters' mascots and have students write stories about them. I asked them to use their students' imaginative capacities as a way to plant seeds for college rather than focus on the pragmatics of how much more they'll earn with a B.A. Without a wishful, idealized basis, students won't get the pragmatics later on.

Imagination precedes pragmatics, as anyone who was read to as a child knows. We imagine things before we understand them; we fantasize before we realize the reality that surrounds us. But these early constructs sustain us even after we discover that fairy tales aren't real or Wilbur wasn't a live pig. To grow up without fantasy is to grow up in a poverty much longer-lasting and brutal than physical poverty because it cannot be recovered later in life. For students who are growing up in the depths of poverty, imaginative and exciting schooling may be the difference between success and mere survival. We need to fantasize in order to think about creating a world that can suit us. Out of this comes the motivation to invent, challenge, go beyond "right now" to the future.

Trying to help schools orient their low-income, first-generation students toward college, I want to add complexity, not strip it away. The Kindle, along with test prep, online education, and more-but-less activities like emailing and twittering, strips words and concepts of their beauty and elegance, impoverishing them. We make words just units of data, and that is a great shame. We need to set our students' minds on fire, not tame them, and I believe any student of any background can be brought to the liveliness of mind that will support him through college and beyond. But it can't be done if authors are merely "content providers" and teachers are merely "data processors."

The more I work with underserved students and their teachers and counselors, the more I see that education without imagination is deadening, not enlivening. Only by addressing the ineffable can we help our students rise above their daily lives to conquer the world in their own ways.

College Access Counseling

2009-08-03T19:02:00.000-05:00

To see what I've been doing over the last two years, follow this link to my newly designed website: College Access Counseling. I've had the pleasure of developing a comprehensive college counseling curriculum (say that three times fast) for Scholarship Chicago and creating a professional development series for college counselors in Chicago area charter schools. The big challenge has been to take what I've learned from my days at Amherst and as a college counselor and make it accessible to the adults who work with students from low-income and first generation college backgrounds.

Working for myself has also been a challenge, really, but so far it's been rewarding. I keep saying I've been more lucky than smart, but as I've learned how to present myself I've started to create my own luck. That includes promoting my work more! So if you're a school or community organization that works with underserved kids and wants to help them think about college, you know where to reach me.

Busman's Holiday Reading

2009-07-24T13:04:00.003-05:00

This entry also appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Heading for the hills at last, speeding to the shore or dashing to your dacha for a few blissful weeks away from the office? Feeling guilty that you haven’t begun writing recommendations or finished your fall travel planning? Worried about not answering your BlackBerry or iPhone or being away from your laptop? (You are going to be away from your laptop, aren’t you?) Have no fear—here are some books about college and the college admission process you can take with you so you won’t suffer too much withdrawal. The best thing—you can read them when you want to.

First off is Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel, Admission, which has Portia Nathan, a Princeton admission officer, dealing with the double helix of university admissions and admissions about her own past. It’s a well-written and sympathetic book that gets to the heart of the dilemmas admission officers face while also getting to the heart of its main character. And you’ll wonder about her final decision for a long time.

Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is breezy and archly critical as he tends to be, but it’s a sharp, funny novel about a girl from the other side of the tracks and her experiences at a Duke-like university down south. On the pre-college side, try Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Its premise is similar—a girl from Indiana receives a scholarship to attend a prestigious East Coast boarding school, with all the transitions and awkward moments that entails. Both have some funny and poignant moments, with great characters all around.

For a nonfiction look at being odd man out, try Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, a memoir by Alfred Lubrano, a kid from Bensonhurst who ends up attending Columbia University, where his bricklayer father had helped build some of its buildings.

Some hefty but eye-opening reading comes with Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This exhaustively researched and well-written book weighs in at 711 pages but its revelations about how these universities conducted admission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will curl your hair if sun and surf haven’t done that already. It’s less an indictment than a reality check: “golden age” of college admission? Not so fast! Who knew that the Ivies once tried very hard not to have too many smart kids?

It’s been out for a while but it’s worth reading Jacques Steinberg’s The Gatekeepers, if you haven’t already. Reportorial but empathetic (Steinberg writes about college admission topics for the New York Times), it provides a behind-the-scenes look at the admission process by focusing on one admission dean, Ralph Figueroa, at Wesleyan as he goes through an admission year.

Thomas Hine’s The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience helps answer the question, Where the heck did all these kids we work with come from? Hine provides a fascinating contextual narrative that illustrates the evolution of the creature we now call a “teenager.” While teens once were expected to take on adult roles very quickly, they are today both courted and feared as a group, and, as Hine puts it, “School and university are simply a convenient place [sic] to store them until their talents are required.” Discuss! His final chapters ask us to perhaps redefine what being a teen means in our changing culture, and you may wonder a bit less about why they behave the way they do now. Or not—the book was written before the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

So have fun wherever you go (or stay) and leave the guilt behind. Reading at least one of these books should inoculate you against out-of-office queasiness. See you in the fall!

More Follies of the Striving Class

2009-07-19T15:12:00.003-05:00

Jacques Steinberg's New York Times article and blog entry about overpriced "independent college counselors" hit the paper/blogosphere recently. Although he's a day late and a dollar short, (they've been in business for quite a while) it's good to have his voice out there again about the absurdities of paying tens of thousands of dollars for college counseling.

While it's fine, I guess, for rich people to spend their money any way they see fit, it does seem to belong in a category all by itself, especially when it gets to the point of putting on a fashion show to demonstrate what one counselor (who clearly believes Princeton is still living in Fitzgerald's Jazz Age) thinks students should wear to college interviews. It has an almost Borat-ish feel to it: Are these ambitious students being set up by an artful impostor?

Not just cluelessness but arrogance are on display in the articles:

“It’s annoying when people complain about the money,” the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez says. “I’m at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, don’t hire me.”

I'm not sure what she means by being "at the top of her field" because as far as I know we don't have any ranking system that would quantify that, nor is there anything like the rigorous testing and qualifying hurdles that neurosurgeons go through. Kind of an insult to neurosurgeons, really. If she means she charges the most, well, that seems like a given. If she means because she gets her counselees into "top" schools, that's relatively easy when you can pick your clients, they can afford your fee (and presumably full tuition afterwards), and your definition of "top" covers a rather wide range of institutions.

Some claims put forward by these independents are tenuous at best. One who says she worked in the Cornell admission office, had in fact been simply an alumni interviewer; another was an outside reader for Yale, which means that she helped with the overflow of applications but probably had little or no decision-making power. But these slight qualifications, exaggerated claims, and sometimes wildly inaccurate information don't seem to put people off.

When I lived in Baton Rouge in 1989 there was a woman who called herself an independent counselor by virtue of having sent her own daughter to college. She told one of my students that the SAT was easier in Texas than Louisiana, and the student, despite evidence to the contrary (including a letter from the president of the College Board), rose at 4AM to drive to Houston and took the test there because the woman "cost $800.00" so she must be right. Perhaps we're dealing with that kind of psychology here. More recently, I knew whenever my students in Chicago were using one particular woman when their college lists were geared more to their egos than reality.

Hopefully, the vast majority of independent counselors are decent people who provide a decent service at a decent cost. They take up the slack when students have no good school counselor or can't see one easily. I think things have improved since my days in Cajun country, but still, some people don't seem to mind that they're spending a fortune to get something they could get just as well if not better for far less.

My question is, Why not? I could vent all day about independents, but what really interests me now is, Who the hell are the people paying the price? Can I assume that they're the same ones who pay $6,000. 00 for a handbag or $5,000.00 for a shower curtain? I'd really like to know who they are and what they hope to gain. I assume we're dealing with parents, of course; my guess is that their kids suffer through all the poking and prodding and planning and preening and strategizing, looking forward to the day they can get out of the house and be themselves, if they know who that is by then. The parents, meanwhile, get to brag about their new servant, uh, counselor, and how precious Gwen will get to Exlibris University as a result.

I'd love to study this group and find out what motivates them, how they treat their children, how they themselves got to college, and why they'd try to buy something so dubious as an easy path to the Ivy League or similar. Have they read the dreadful guidebooks of Elizabeth Wissner-Gross? Do they contact all their Ivy friends to make contacts for Junior? Do they try to call the Dean of Admission themselves or do they just let the servant do that? Just wondering. As a former anthropologist I'd give a lot to study this culture and try to figure out how it all intersects with American education and class anxiety.

In the long run, it doesn't really matter because we're talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of applicants each year, a number so negligible that when you step back it seems a waste to even bother writing about it. The huge majority of students are doing quite well without gilding their applications for the effect. But, like $64,000.00 commodes, $40,000.00 advice fascinates us. While 99.44% of the US gets along fine without the unnecessaries, the freakish .56% still exerts its power over those of us in the cheap seats.

Keeping Secrets

2009-07-14T16:04:00.003-05:00

I’m not a sociable traveler. When I’m on a plane or a train I would really rather read or sleep than chat with the person next to me. It’s not that I’m antisocial generally, it’s just that these are times when I can focus on catching up on that biography of Edison or back issues of The Atlantic I’ve been meaning to read. I relish being out of touch. But even more, to be honest, I usually just can’t work up any interest in a stranger’s life, and can’t imagine why someone else would be interested in mine.

This posture became particularly important when I was an associate dean of admission at Amherst and then a college counselor. Telling someone you’re a college admission officer is like revealing you’re a doctor—the other person always has something for you to diagnose right there in public.

“Oh really?” he says, “My kid has a 3.2 GPA and a 28 ACT score. Where should he go to college?” He might as well ask to have his appendix taken out right in the exit row. And of course it doesn’t stop there:

“What do you think about Gabbler College?”
“Should my kid use that Common Application? What is that, anyway?”
“Can a middle class family get financial aid anymore?”
“If my kid plays women’s soccer, will that help her get into Bigbucks University? My uncle-in-law went there, will that help?”
“I heard that Pyrex College is a real party school. Is that true?”

Personally, I’d rather take out my own appendix than have one of these interactions. I found a kindred spirit while on vacation recently. In her excellent novel, Admission, Jean Hanff Korelitz puts her main character, Portia Nathan, through an excruciating dinner party where she has to defend the college admission process to a particularly aggressive and disbelieving guest (who, of course, has a child soon to be applying to college).

Portia has been introduced as an associate dean of admission at Princeton, so there’s no escaping the grasp of her clueless fellow guest:

Obviously tipped off, [Diana] made for Portia immediately, taking the other half of a too-small sofa in the living room and leaning right in. Within moments, Portia was in possession of Diana Halsey Bennet’s entire resume, and John’s sister was already moving on to the unnaturally engorged resume of her daughter, Kelsey (field hockey captain, class secretary, treasurer of the literary magazine), who sat on the other side of the living room, looking—to her credit—horribly embarrassed.

The evening goes on like this for Portia as she tries to enjoy the meal with her lover’s family. Finally, she more or less gives up:

“Oh I’m sure your job is very hard.” Diana shrugged, looking as if she were sure of no such thing. She was also looking peevishly at her daughter, as if the looming social diminishment she anticipated were all the girl’s fault. “But let me ask you something. Why do you even ask, on the application, where parents have gone to college? I mean, if you’re going to penalize the kids for having parents who read the newspaper and take them to Europe. Isn’t it better not to ask at all? I mean,” she said, utterly missing the point, “the less you know, the more level the playing field. That’s what I think.”

Portia looked sadly at the now empty wineglass in her hand. She could not remember, really, drinking it, let alone how it had tasted, but she saw that it had been red, and she very much wanted more of it….

How many times have we as admission officers or college counselors looked into that wineglass, hoping for a hailstorm or sudden pyroclastic flow to interrupt the moment? Particularly painful is the fact that we can see the other person’s point but realize that no matter how we respond he or she will be convinced we’re keeping the secrets to ourselves. The truth is out there, says our Mulderian seatmate...Better to say you’re a ventriloquist or a shepherd or a Mafia hit man. Then you can read in peace.

A slightly different version of this blog entry appears in Admitted, the blog of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Fun Fashions in the News

2009-06-15T11:23:00.005-05:00

The only thing funnier than Dolce & Gabbana fur hats and white pants for men are the "fashions" recommended for college interviewing by a private college counselor in New York . The show couldn't be more hilarious, not the least for featuring fashions that The Preppy Handbook loved to mock. It personified the fever dream of those who wish they could "summer" on the Vineyard drinking 'tinis and discussing their plans for the new yacht. Education? Not an issue; just the label, please.

The show was featured in Jacques Steinberg's NY Times blog, The Source, and you can read the whole thing here. He's already made fun of it, as have the two admission deans he asked about it, so I won't pile on too much here. You have to read it to believe it.

But it does once again demonstrate the insecurity and credulity of a certain group of people for whom designer labels mean something, even in college education. They are to be pitied more than scorned, I suppose, because in their desperation they deform their children to fit the mold they think will get them into Elitist University. They read all the "How to get in" and "Secrets of" books and then do everything they say, no matter what their children want or are capable of. I imagine grasping parents poring over those books and planning out little Heather's day from the time she's in kindergarten. They are like the nouveau riche capitalists in the late 19th century who married their daughters to penniless European aristocrats for the titles and the lands (which were mortgaged, of course--the aristocrats were no fools). Henry James would have a field day.

Finally, it all shows how anyone with even a tangential relationship to college admission can make a fortune (up to $15K at a time, not counting the DVDs--$45.00) soaking rich rubes. We can complain about them but as long as people have too much money (hard to believe these days) and not enough sense, these independent counselors will continue to embarrass themselves and their "clients." Shannon Duff enters the Hall of College Admission Indignities with this foray into ridiculous fakery.

Just a few recommendations

2009-06-09T16:13:00.004-05:00

No fire and/or brimstone about anything or anyone this time, just some credit where credit is due. (A slightly different version of this entry can also be found on NACAC's website at Admitted Blog)

Coming from the college side of college admission, I didn’t realize how much counseling was involved in college counseling until I started meeting with students and their parents, their divorced parents, and/or their divorced and remarried parents; with students who refused to meet with their parents in the room, with parents who refused to meet with each other, and with children who refused to speak in their parents’ presence. (I won’t mention the times I had to ask parents, as politely as possible, to let their children get a word in edgewise or to review their records a bit more objectively as they considered college possibilities.)

I quickly realized I had stepped into a cultural maelstrom, especially at my very highly competitive school. “College” affected everyone day to day, so knowing the mechanics of the process was only the beginning. Attending to psyches and personalities in the throes of college selection kept me plenty busy.

Now that I work with adults who counsel low-income and first-generation students, I’m in a whole different arena, but the goals are the same. As a result, I often rely on two organizations that have significantly shaped my college-counseling outlook: the National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) and the American School Counselors Association (ASCA). NRS taught me how to listen actively and enable students to express themselves; ASCA has provided an essential framework for joining counseling and college counseling.

I’ve volunteered at NRS, a teen crisis line, for over ten years. “Liners” complete an extensive training that teaches them to listen actively, help callers develop options, and, most important, put callers in the “driver’s seat” as they talk through the reasons they ran away or want to. As a result I’m committed to “guiding without steering.” (I didn’t know how much I’d incorporated this methodology until one of my students who had been through the NRS training came in and asked I thought about his college list. “Well,” I replied, “What do you think about it?” He laughed and said, “Aww, Mr. Dix, you don’t have to do that NRS stuff with me!”)

The ASCA addresses primary and secondary school counseling topics. Its “strengths-based” perspective means being alive to students’ potential and reaching out to students, especially valuable in first-generation contexts. It informs my sessions with counselors and teachers.

Two ASCA publications are important reading: ASCA School Counselor magazine and the Professional School Counseling Journal. The former is for a generalized readership; the latter is “research” oriented (not always rigorous) but full of excellent commentary from practitioners and academics. (Here is one particularly helpful article. For the full publications you need to be an ASCA member.)

The ASCA also has just published two new reports in conjunction with the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) and the College Board: "A Closer Look at the Principal-Counselor Relationship" and "Finding a Way: Practical Examples of How an Effective Principal-Counselor Relationship Can Lead to Success for All Students" that are worth taking a look at. They are publicly available for download here.

My college counseling, as well as my professional development opportunities for colleagues, has benefited immensely from these resources. I highly recommend them.

System of a Downer

2009-05-23T12:26:00.002-05:00

Those of us in the admission profession tend to think about what we do fairly narrowly when we talk about issues like testing, essays, financial aid, and other aspects of the college process. We focus on how we perceive them as elements of what we do, how they are related to the Standards of Principles and Good Practice (SPGP) and how they affect our bottom lines, whatever those might be for a high school or a college.

We forget sometimes that the college admission process is not an isolated thing--it is part of a system, or rather several systems. It doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it's not merely a neutral end result of twelve years of education. Among other things, it exists at the choke point between high school and post-secondary education, at a moment the late great MIT admission officer B. Alden Thresher called "the great sorting." When requirements are changed they reverberate through the educational system before it and alter the makeup of student bodies following it; when iconic universities decide to do something, it affects what others do as well.

Ripples from college admission intersect with major themes and threads of American culture. Class and status affect (or distort) how families are able to think about post-secondary opportunities for their children; educational philosophies affect how high schools articulate with colleges; economics determines the relationships that exist among families, colleges, endowments, and so on; the economy itself determines how many graduates the workforce can handle, and so on and on. In this light, the seemingly one-to-one relationship of good acadedmic performance and college admission seems almost comically small, although it takes up most of the reporting about it and should really be the centerpiece of the whole process.

Examples of these interrelations can be seen almost every day: How will "Score Choice" affect how students report their testing to colleges? How do private counselors affect the "integrity" of students applications? Why do people who can afford it feel compelled to use them in the first place? What's at stake? If a high school decides to use a unique grading system, how will that affect its students? When colleges change their admission requirements, how does that affect high schools? If financial aid becomes more restricted, how will families educate their children?

Some of these questions seem trivial, but if you listen to counselors and college people enough you'll see they reverberate as the system tries to adjust to maintain its equilibrium. But outside forces are always impinging on it and we don't always see that. What about those class and status issues? What about the growth of test prep as high schools decide scores are critical to college admission even as more and more colleges go test optional or treat scores with more latitude? Is the divide between low-income and upper-income students being addressed in regard to college access beyond now-traditional "multi-cultural recruitment" programs? Are those enough?

Not enough has been done to consider college admission and what surrounds it in the larger context of American culture. One problem is that it is such a vast and complex phenomenon it's difficult to know where to begin. But more should be done to study it in that context so we can try to create a genuinely equitable system that will motivate, accept, and educate all students to the best of their abilities no matter what their backgrounds. Until we have a comprehensive view of college admission, we will be talking too much to ourselves.

Looking Backwards

2009-05-19T08:31:00.005-05:00

The release of NACAC's report on the effects of test prep (see article here) reminds me that many people have been saying for a long time that test prep mania is one more unintended consequence of the reliance on testing in college admission. At one time, the College Board itself said that there was no point in "studying" for the test because it wasn't that kind of test--it measured "aptitude," whatever that is, so it would be as if you were studying for a future you couldn't foresee.

Now, of course, the College Board has gotten on the meatwagon with all the other dogs and is gobbling up money like a Rottweiler after a raw steak. Even better, it makes money coming, going, and standing still as people scramble to figure out what the hell they're supposed to do with yet another option (Score Choice) that is so simple you need an instructional video to figure it out. (Go figure...)

But that's not the topic for today. I've said before that I think the issues surrounding college admission testing are pretty well decided: they have very little predictive value that can't be found elsewhere, and they are more a measure of a student's zip code than his or her "aptitude" or "abilities" or whatever. The real issue now is the amount of time worrying about, prepping for, and taking these tests is taking away from real academic endeavors and other activities that have substance and meaning. I think it would be wise for colleges to consider how they use testing in light of the effect it has on prospective students, especially those from low-income, underserved schools and neighborhoods.

In some of those schools I've seen hallway charts documenting the struggle to gain a few points on the ACT. I've seen college process classes that are mostly test prep. I've heard in other schools how students are forced to take summer-long test prep courses to bring up their scores. (All this doesn't even begin to cover the vast amounts of time spent prepping students for state and NCLB tests.) If any students need test prep, they aren't kids from urban schools--they need education, experience with real ideas, literature, art, chemistry and physics, and all the other things that make becoming educated worthwhile. Drilling for tests would make anyone hate school, and I think in most cases it makes teachers hate school, too. (See this article by Jeremy Miller in Harper's)

The College Board says it's all about "Inspiring Minds" (the latest tag line) but testing is not education and test prep isn't about inspiration, no matter what anyone says; it's about performance. At best, test prep and testing are post-educative. All you want to do is fill in the right oval; there's nothing there that contributes to a student's further development. As the various ancillaries to testing grow like kudzu on a Southern highway, students' genuine motivation and need for a good education get choked further and further until they get cynical and dulled.

More to the point, as I've often said, colleges consider test scores important unless they don't. In other words, if an applicant's scores are even within shouting distance of decent, and that applicant is a desired student from an underrepresented background (or talent group--read athlete), the scores become much less significant. I happen to think this is the right thing to do (although I remember how horrified I was when I first saw low scores, thinking they were something real), but the point is that colleges can ignore them at their pleasure, so why require them at all?

My suggestion to colleges and universities is: Think how your admission policies affect the careers of your prospective applicants and the high schools they attend. Think how requiring standardized testing influences the ways schools allocate their time, especially committed but perhaps unsophisticated schools who see those scores as pathways to college more important than any other. Look backwards into early high school and see how an increasing emphasis on testing and test prep distorts the educational progress of all students, no matter what their backgrounds. Perhaps that will be reason enough to significantly lower a reliance on the tests.

Being Someone Else

2009-05-15T11:43:00.003-05:00

I read "Being and Nothingness" one summer for a theater course at Northwestern (Sartre wrote "No Exit") and was fascinated with his image of a servant looking through a keyhole at some unspecified but vaguely naughty activity going on behind the door. While he's focusing on that activity, Sartre says, he's totally in a state of "being," simply "himself." Suddenly, however, he hears footsteps in the hall and becomes a self-conscious "actor," not truly himself.

We've all had the experience of being caught at something we shouldn't be doing. The more we try to behave "normally," the more we twist ourselves into behavioral knots. The same is true when we ask high school students to write their college application essays. We're asking them to "act" and not "be." More often than not, we get essays that are weird fun house mirror images of the applicant as he or she tries to be "authentic." and we complain that the essays end up being artificial.

In trying to help students, we often advise them to "relax" or "have fun" with the essays, which they hear as "I'm lulling you into a false sense of security before we reject you." So they frantically try to suss out what colleges really want, losing themselves in the process. The most often prescribed advice is "Just be yourself," which, as far as I can tell after reading thousands of them for Amherst College in the 90s, has no appreciable effect on the essays but doesn't stop us from giving it out.

Believe it or not, I don’t blame the applicants; I blame the advice. After years of prescribing "Be yourself" myself I think it’s probably the worst thing you can tell a kid under pressure to write for an unknown audience. It requires a self-understanding beyond even a 40-year olds’ and is most often interpreted as “Talk about yourself,” which, if you’ve ever been stuck in a conversation like that, quickly makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a pencil. But it also requires the writer to run smack into himself as he tears himself away from the keyhole and tries to "be himself."

I've never known what else to say but the other day I thought, well, why not have them write about what's going on beyond the keyhole instead of having them try to explain what they're doing looking through it? We should really say, “Be somebody else.” Placing the focus overtly outside themselves can free them from having to construct a "self" for us, acting instead of being. We can see how this works when we ask students to introduce each other rather than themselves; it's always easier to talk about another person than feel exposed yourself. (Of course, some can do it without problem or effort, but most can't, especially not in writing.)

The things we do tell as much about us (and may even be more revealing) than what we say we do. I might say I love the opera and Russian novels, but I may actually watch "The Real Housewives of Orange County" religiously and have a shelf full of Danielle Steele. But even if we ask an applicant to, say, write in a voice other than her own, we can learn a lot about whom she chooses and how the essay goes. Over the years I’ve advised a lot of students that their essays about other people or books or events are very good, but they’ve been brainwashed to think that unless they talk explicitly about themselves the essays won’t help them get into college or tell the admission people about themselves.

One of my students several years ago wrote about his Jewish grandfather, who spent World War II selling mattresses in Shanghai. It was wonderful, memorable (see?), and gave me a glimpse not only into a part of history I had never heard about but also revealed how much he cared for this man, who had survived the war and made it to the United States. (Unfortunately, his parents were horrified that he wasn’t “being himself” and vetoed the good essay in favor of a tedious one.)

I’ve written elsewhere about the existential issues surrounding the college application process, including the problem of imposing an overwhelming self-consciousness on 17-year old applicants. But asking students to be or focus on someone or something else can relieve them of that burden. If application readers are careful readers they sense the writer’s personality no matter what he or she writes about. A focus on an external person, object, or concept without worrying about "being yourself" might actually accomplish the thing we want most--creation of a window into the applicant.

A shorter version of this essay (as well as other entries) originally appeared on the Admitted Blog at the NACAC website.

What $40,000 gets you

2009-05-08T16:12:00.004-05:00

If you think the amount I've listed in the title is what a year of college costs these days, guess again. It's the price that Michele Hernandez charges for a full-bore course of college admission preparation. On her website she indicates what this includes, starting in 8th grade:

All packages include unlimited time for parents and students from start (collecting materials and writing an in-depth evaluative report) to finish, culminating with completion of college applications and acceptance letters. Dr. Hernandez oversees everything from a customized reading list, help with all writing assignments in high school to course selection, testing schedule, summer activities, etc., all designed towards giving students that critical edge in the competitive admissions process.

From her comfortable perch in Weybridge, VT, Hernandez has managed to parlay a measly four years in the Dartmouth admission office into books and a ridiculous parody of college guidance, aimed at the well-heeled and foolish. One has to wonder who can afford this nonsense, especially now. Among other things, Hernandez says her counseling packages include "unlimited" personal college counseling, but I doubt this means she's going to turn up at your villa to cozy up to your future collegian and stay the week. Even more oddly, I have to wonder why anyone who could afford her services would bother--I imagine that most of those people are already sending their young Elis and Tigers, already as genetically engineered as collies, to the kinds of private schools that cost enough to have a decent college counselor or ten on staff. So what's the deal?

It seems beyond rational, frankly. I suppose part of me wishes I'd thought of this way to soak the rich first--it's a no-brainer, a very high-end version of hucksterism. And with twice her experience on the college side (Amherst) and six more on the high school side, I could easily charge three times as much, right? But can anyone really justify that price tag for advice and counseling that you can get rather easily with a little energy and self-determination, even without a college counselor at your high school? (But of course we're not talking about those kinds of people, the ones who have to rely on their high schools, public libraries, and other dreary prole resources...)

Well, let's face it, she's drawing on the same psychic insecurity that leads people of a certain income level to buy $8,000.00 handbags or $35,000.00 commodes (not a toilet in this instance, by the way, but the money's flushed away just the same). Her clients are "needy" all right, but in the pathetically insecure way that leads them to focus on name brands and price as substitutes for authenticity, quality, and, in college admission parlance, "fit."

Hernandez foregrounds as fact that she has "the highest success rate of any college admissions consultant in the country. Last year 100% of my clients were accepted to the Ivy League Schools or top colleges like Stanford and Middlebury." This is like shooting fish in a barrel--when you can pick and choose your clients and charge them a year's college tuition in advance to boot just for your handholding, what are the chances they won't get into so-called "top" schools?

The phrasing here is also somewhat misleading. It implies that all her clients were accepted to "top colleges" and also implies (read: baits clients' status-driven lust) that she can make a Gatsby out of a Gatz. Not so fast, I say. Her list of where clients have been accepted is far broader than the "Ivy League" statement implies. It includes:

Amherst College
Boston College (Honors program)
Boston University
Brandeis
Bucknell
Carnegie Mellon
Citadel
Clark
Colgate
Columbia
Connecticut College
Dartmouth
Dickinson
Duke
Emory
Georgetown (Foreign Service)
Hamilton (Bristol scholarship $20K 50%)
Lafayette
Marquette
Miami of Ohio, Honors College
MIT
Mt. Holyoke
Northwestern
Notre Dame
NYU:Tisch School
Oxford University (England)
Rice
Rollins
Rutgers (full scholarship)
Skidmore Honors Program
St. Andrews University (Scotland)
Stanford
Swarthmore
Syracuse
Tufts (Neubauer Scholar $10,000 stipend over four years)
Tulane
University of California University of Chicago
University of Maryland (College Park Scholar)
University of Miami

Now you may say that all of these schools are "top colleges" and I say, fair enough. But I suspect that anyone who ponies up the dough expects to be able to slap an Ivy sticker on the car tout de suite. After my years in high school college counseling I can claim at least as good a list if not better, and I did it for 70 kids at a time on a decent salary (But I also worked with kids who for the most part had two-PhD parents or lawyer/doctor parents, etc.). Now I'm really ticked as I calculate what I might have earned if I'd counseled the Hernandez way.

Well, there's no real point in fulminating any more. If you're rich enough and stupid enough and pathetically status-conscious enough to hire Hernandez, I suppose you're going to, whatever a rational person might say. But I pity your kid, who is probably yearning to escape your clutches and spend four years hiding from you his or her search for true, authentic experience in the forms of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, just to feel a little less like a robot. My idea of a true college advising horror show would be to have Hernandez and Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, harridan of high schools, work on your kid together.

Why am I so cranky about this? Why do I care what Hernandez can get away with? Perhaps because there are so many amazingly talented and worthy kids who could really use a shot at decent colleges but have trouble getting access to the kinds of resources that middle-class kids take for granted or that Hernandez puts out of reach. Maybe because I work with wonderful counselors who work for peanuts trying to help poor and underserved students from urban schools get into "top schools" so they can enter the mainstream of American society. Maybe this kind of conspicuous consumption has always ticked me off. Ultimately, it offends my sense that attending college is a way to lift yourself up by your own efforts and feel that you earned something; it's not something that can be bought. But that's just me.

I know that the web is ideal for links but I'm not going to provide them here; if you want to see Hernandez's website you'll have to find it yourself.

Our Modern Choices: Engineered or Free-Range Kids?

2009-04-25T17:03:00.005-05:00

A recent post on the NACAC listserv was shocking in its obtuseness and demonstrates how blind many of us have become as we supposedly try to be of service to students. The request to fellow listers was as follows:

I am working on college planning with two intellectually bright high school juniors who are very unmotivated about preparing for an SAT test. They come from very high income families and their parents have hired very expensive individual SAT tutors. I personally know that their tutors relate well to high school students and have remarkable records for helping students to significantly improve their SAT scores. These two students are extremely resistant about seeing the tutors on a regular basis and doing outside practice assignments. I have reviewed the student’s PSAT scores with each student and their parents, and the students have ideas about colleges they would like to apply to—and could easily be realistic--with SAT scores that are somewhat higher than their PSAT scores. Learning and emotional disabilities, and ADD have been ruled out. I see the above situation as more of a parent/discipline issue rather than a college planning issue, but at the same time would be most appreciative of any suggestions for getting these students more motivated.

To summarize: Two "intellectually bright" juniors from "high income" families are "unmotivated" about spending time prepping for the SAT with "very expensive" tutors. This resistance led initially to worries that they had "learning or emotional disabilities" or attention deficit disorder. The family is desperately seeking ways to get these non-conformists to submit to SAT prep.

Has it come to this? Are students who prefer not to waste their time on SAT prep now threatened, like refuseniks, with being branded as mentally unstable? Are they to be diagnosed by "experts" who classify them as unbalanced because of their refusal to submit to the idiocy of test prep? Has the execrable advice of writers like Judith Wissner-Gross, which basically demands that students be engineered by their parents for college (and not just any college, damn it!) from the time they can fill in a test bubble, finally taken over the college process? Will we start sending these nonconformists to testing gulags where they are re-educated to embrace the charms of the College Board?

I cheer these "intellectually bright" students and hope they get some support from the testing underground, which will provide them with safe haven and copies of "The Origin of Species," "Huckleberry Finn," Mozart's piano concertos, and "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," to get them through this trying period in their lives. (To find out more about the testing underground, go to any public library and get lost in the stacks near the Byzantine history section. They'll find you.) If I were a college, I'd admit them right now simply for their audacity.

Contrast this insidious effort to "re-educate" these smart kids with an amazing story that appeared in today's Chicago Tribune. It is the story of two parents who sent six kids to Northern Illinois University, all of whom went on to receive Ph.D.s and all of whom are now leaders in their fields. How did this happen? What music did Mrs. Sereno (for that is her name) play to those babies in her womb? What tapes or tutors or special schools did she drive her kids to so that they would rise into the world of genius? How often did she drill them in their cribs to know their timestables and the capitals of the world? How many summer programs did she enroll them in? Did she write a book telling me how to do it all? Most important, how did she teach them to get past all the stupid kids who stood in their way to success? (One child, Paul, is a world-famous paleontologist at the University of Chicago who has contributed vast amounts of knowledge to the field; his brothers and sisters are all neurological researchers working for universities in England, Scotland, Oregon, Texas, and Kansas.)

Mrs. Sereno's diabolical plan amounts to this: "We encouraged the idea that learning was exciting...I know how butterflies have sex, because we made a mating chamber for them so the kids could see all the stages of moth and butterfly life. We had slime mold growing upstairs. We had art in the house and a kiln for firing pottery. They all played instruments, though only two of them had any talent. I wanted my kids to go out and have their own adventures, to learn to fly on their own." So, her children were what we might call "free-range" kids, with plenty of support from mom and dad. There was lots of give and take, plenty of love, and what sounds like a happy chaos encircling the family.

Paul did not do well in high school and in elementary school teachers wanted to hold him back. Perhaps he was like one of those intelligent kids who know instinctively that SAT prep, endless worksheets and things like them are gigantic wastes of time and antithetical to everything that makes education interesting. As he says in the article, "I didn't do well with the structured way things are taught in school. I liked the more free-form, hands-on way of learning, like we did at home." Imagine that! Kids trying to learn on their own! Running around as their curiosity and interest lead them!

It scares people now when kids are like that--there's no way to measure "outcomes," no number that can be used to sum up progress, no "metrics" to gauge how each step is evaluated. You sort of have to leave things to chance, inspiration, and a love of learning (which test prep decidedly is not) and that's never going to get your kids into the Ivy League! They might end up at Northern Illinois, for God's sake! And then what would happen to them!!!!!

Thinking Admission

2009-04-18T15:18:00.003-05:00

This week I attended a two-day conference at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. It was called "Rethinking Admission" and had an exceptional slate of speakers, from Yale's dean of admission to some leading sociologists, economists, and others who have studied or thought seriously about the phenomenon we call college admission. Bringing the perspective of other fields to the discussion of college admission is exactly the right idea, but as much as I enjoyed the event, it fell well short of "rethinking" admission, settling instead for thinking more intently about what already exists without really rethinking or reimagining it.

Rather than reviewing the whole two days, I'll focus on a few things and recommend you click on the link above if you'd like to see conference details, including podcasts and photos. The two best presentations were by Scott Highhouse, Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Bowling Green State University, and Bruce Walker, Vice Provost and Director of Admission at UT--Austin. The other speakers brought depth of expertise and experience as well as passion and drive, for the most part, to the conference, but, again, presentations focused mostly on where admission IS, not really where it's going or should be going.

An initial session on the SAT (and by extension ACT) focused on whether or not it really predicts college success well enough to be used in admission. Heavy doses of statistics were provided, and surprisingly there was some support for the tests as accurate and necessary tools for college admission. Most valuable here were results of extensive studies that at least provided data for discussions that can rise above anecdote and personal views.

However, as far as I'm concerned, the effective debate is no longer interesting or useful. I oppose use of the tests but believe there's a much more compelling reason to eliminate them. As we have seen over the years, test prep has become a larger and larger phenomenon, eating up time and energy that could be better used elsewhere. When this was mostly the province of the overprivileged, it seemed crass but tolerable, but what we're finding now is that schools serving students who need education most--first-generation and minority students--have succumbed to a felt need to prep their students in order to compete with their better-off peers.

It is well-known that high stakes testing has many negative effects on students and teachers, who are pressured to perform (I include NCLB standards in this group). With scores as the perceived gateway to college, many of these underserved schools are taking vast amounts of time and money to prep kids for the tests, on which they generally don't do so well anyway. Time that could be spent learning something is wasted and everyone learns to hate school because it's an endless round of memorization and robotic performance. What's particularly ironic is that colleges often forgive poor test scores of talented minority students as long as everything else looks promising, so all that test prep is doubly wasted. (As a former admission officer at Amherst College I can tell you that scores are important unless they're not.)

Prof. Highhouse challenged our assumption that "holistic review" of applications is somehow more accurate than simply running the numbers and making a decision. He cited studies showing that hiring decisions made "holistically" or, what seems closer to his intent, by hunch, are nearly always inaccurate. In fact, when added to statistical decisions regarding hiring, the "holistic" factors actually lessened the accuracy of the decision. Although he didn't link these findings specifically to college admission, the implications were clear.

Frustratingly, however, the implications of this view were never discussed. It's highly unlikely colleges would ever give up holistic review, but what are its defects and can they or should they be corrected? Is there a new method of reviewing applications being implied? And what is greater accuracy in college admission, anyway? Most people would define that as admitting only the people who "deserve" to be admitted, but as others mentioned, that term, along with "merit," has enormous elasticity.

The speaker closest to suggesting an actual way of rethinking admission was Bruce Walker of the University of Texas at Austin. He spoke about Texas's Top 10% program and demonstrated that, when given a chance, good students from high schools all over the map, when given the chance, can do well in college. He had studied the GPAs of students from poor & wealthy families and from poor to excellent high schools and showed us how these students, when properly challenged, can truly rise to the occasion. Skeptics of the program should look at the data and rethink how to challenge students even earlier so they can be even better in the future.

Walker's real contribution to the discussion was his observation that colleges need to "deliver social capital to families who have never had it before." He spent some time talking about the efforts of colleges to reach affluent students who are likely to enroll versus their efforts regarding poor students. He said that colleges should start thinking more about these latter students but not simply by showering them with recruitment information. They need to think about how to bring poor and underserved students into the world of college so they can be motivated throughout high school and prepared for college socially as well as academically. In terms of "rethinking" college admission, this was probably the most important presentation, but, again, there was far too little time to actually do the rethinking. Perhaps it can be a touchstone for a future conference.

In my own work I talk a lot about creating the social and cultural capital students need for college success. It has to start early for first-generation students because they have not been surrounded by "college" the way their better-off peers have been. So Walker's observations were particularly exciting. But to carry them out colleges will have to think backwards as well as forwards. They will have to reach back to middle school to help counselors and teachers motivate students, instead of just waiting around for those students to reach senior year in high school and them skimming off whoever has made it to the top. This would indeed be a major rethinking of the college admission process.

Thinking backwards also means considering what effects testing and other admission policies have on schools' curricula, family and student behavior, and a host of other phenomena. As I mentioned above, high stakes tests as entrance requirements have actually come to stifle real education, the opposite of what one would want. Adopting this view of things instead of simply looking out for the institution's self-interest would be more labor intensive and expensive, but in the end institutions would be served by having a stronger pool of students to draw from when the time came.

Ultimately, while I believe the conference failed to live up to the idea of rethinking admission, it did serve to bring together people from different arenas who can have useful and important things to say about the process. I believe that, for better or worse, the college admission process has become a real locus for American culture and it deserves to be studied in greater depth by sociologists, psychologists, economists, and others. With luck, the Wake Forest conference will spark more and deeper discussions to come.

Metaphors 'R' Us

2009-04-06T16:56:00.002-05:00

Whether we articulate it or not, we all organize our understanding of the world around certain concepts and ideas. Doing so enables us to get a handle, however tenuous, on our experiences and feel that life isn't totally random or meaningless. Whether you think of the universe as a clockwork or life as a treadmill or your spouse as a "ball and chain" you're indulging in metaphorical thinking that helps you deal with any of those phenomena. The metaphor you use is an organizing principle and you tend to behave accordingly.

As you can see from my examples, we use metaphor at many levels in our personal lives because they help make us comfortable. But sometimes they can prevent us from acting appropriately or even, at a higher level, prevent us from seeing what's in front of us. Metaphors can be so powerful that they cause us to reject reality--consider the pre-Copernican view of the Earth as the center of the universe, or the inability of pre-modern "doctors" to consider experimentation as a way to get to truth, relying instead on the "wisdom" of Aristotle and others who simply worked what they observed into their own world views. (Take the concept of bloodletting, related to the system of the four "humors" in the body--despite being more harmful than helpful, the concept was so powerful it took many years and many deaths before anyone thought to see if it actually worked.)

One of the most powerful recent metaphors has been of the mind as a computer. The mind has been compared to many things but the brain-computer link seems almost perfect in its conceptual mapping. Both "compute" by taking data, combining and comparing it, then coming up with new "ideas" and "concepts"; both work vary fast (although even the fastest computer can't approach the brain at its fundamental best); both are almost infinitely capacious in their potential for storing and retrieving data; and bother even are susceptible to viruses and damage that can impair their ability to "think."

As a result of our infatuation with the computer, we've actually allowed the metaphor to overtake what we know about the brain, and in doing so we have done enormous damage to education. While it makes some explanatory sense to think of the brain as a computer, it makes no real sense at all to treat children as live computers. Yet this seems to be what we've done in the last twenty or thirty years--roughly parallel to the rise of the computer itself. The language of education has changed, adopting from computers ways to think about thinking and how to teach children. We think of classroom learning as "information" and "data" to be "programmed" for students; we evaluate schools on the basis of "inputs" and "outcomes"; and we rely more and more on numbers from tests and surveys to tell us whether we're doing a good job educating our children.

But this metaphor could not be more wrong, surpassing even the idea of students as factory parts embodied in the massive old high schools built in the early twentieth century. The metaphor of student brains as computers that need to be loaded with "software" shears away all the messiness and individuality of students (ironically even as we get better and better accommodating different ways of learning), and causes us to think of them as "units" or memory boards. We believe that by drilling students for high stakes tests we can make them smarter (or really, make ourselves look smarter), yet we also notice that kids hate to come to school and are bored and restless in class. But our image of them as little laptops, overt or otherwise, gets in the way and we find it hard to change course.

This idea comes to me as college admission letters go out and students make decisions about where to attend. So often students find college either a blessed relief from the straitjacket of high school or a puzzling and unpredictable maze of expectations--isn't it time for a new way of looking at school, a new metaphor? For me, the metaphor is food.

Education has never really been a technical issue. The greatest educators, from Socrates to Dewey to everyone in between, have been passionate individuals with great swaths of messy inconsistencies in their makeups. The greatest students have been equally devoted to the life of the mind, and I don't just mean graduate students, I mean everyone who's ever rejoiced in a wonderful class or great book. We already use food metaphors for education, but they seem most often to turn up in recommendation letters: Johnny's a "voracious" reader; Jackie "devours" ideas in science. It's no accident we talk about "food for thought." But they've taken a back seat to the techno images.

It would be more fruitful (see?) if we thought of ideas, experiments, field trips, and all the other things that make up schooling as rich, high-calorie food for the brain. If we did that, we'd have to re-evaluate the place of standardized testing in school; we'd have to re-think grades, too, because they are "data points," not true evaluations of idiosyncratic individuals. I'm not suggesting we abolish these things wholesale but I am suggesting, with college preparation and eventual admission in mind, that a system that has become practically inert rediscover the pleasures that learning can provide, pleasures that are remarkably similar to what we get from a terrific meal. If the computer metaphor has resulted in the aridity of test-prep classes, couldn't a food metaphor bring us back to the luxury of reading great literature and interacting with brilliant scientists? If we insisted on providing our children healthful intellectual meals instead of empty techno calories, wouldn't we be laying a table second to none and feeding students instead of programming them?

Whatever is, is so-so

2009-03-11T15:04:00.004-05:00

This request came to the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC)'s listserv the other day:

Recently, two students have approached me with concerns about their classes (AB Calc; AP Chem). Both are strong students with rigorous course schedules; they've applied to some selective colleges. The math student had some [learning] issues so AB Calc was always a struggle; last semester he was able to pull a B- in the course. The other barely earned a C in AP Chem last semester and continues to struggle this semester. Both currently have an F right now. They've spoken to their teachers who think it's still possible for them to pull a C- by the end of the semester--but a passing grade isn't guaranteed.
Here are the students questions; should they:
1. Stick with the class and try to get a C or higher, which I am sure is the best possible scenario but is still risky.
2. Drop the class soon, contact all the colleges I have applied to BEFORE the get the decisions back.
3. Wait until I hear back from the colleges and then contact those I am admitted to about dropping the course.

This situation is neither recent nor unusual, especially in the realm of the super-conscious when it comes to college admission. It is part of the gamesmanship that seems to dominate the college process of the overprivileged, where tackling a tough course and sticking it out are not ends in themselves. Instead, the courses are there just to grace a transcript; unless they serve the goal of college admission, they're not worth the struggle.

The counselor is right to suggest that choice #1 is correct, but his/her hesitation and need to ask the college advising community demonstrate why it's so tough to be a college counselor these days. The true answer is, "You chose these courses and need to stick with them. Try to learn as much as you can. You both struggled last year but opted to keep going. Good for you! I admire your determination." The idea is to honor their willingness to challenge themselves by taking the tough road instead of the easy path. (Getting Fs seems to belie that statement, but one has to wonder these days if they simply haven't already given up.)

But, like telling the truth, taking the tough course doesn't always get you the reward you want. Trying to prove yourself in AP calc or AP chem doesn't mean you'll get an A; it means, if nothing else, that if you do all the work and try your hardest, you'll get what you earn. There are no guarantees, so unless you're really in it to try to learn the subject and not simply try to impress college admission officers, your effort is "wasted." (Many times I've heard a rejected candidate say, "What was the point of my taking all those APs if they didn't get me into Patrician University?") So which to reward, the effort or the grade?

Colleges put students in this double bind. There's a standard admission officer response to the student who asks, "Is it better to take a regular course and get an A or an AP course and get a lesser grade?" The answer, you can guess, is "It's better to get an A in the AP course!" Ha ha. At the same time, however, colleges tell students they should always be challenging themselves and not falling back on comfortable courses they can easily ace. So students push themselves into AP courses even if there's a good chance they'll do poorly. It's a calculated risk, with the AP label outweighing the rest. And classes become means to an end, which means if they're not serving that end, there's no reason to take them, and you can see where that's going (see F above).

So which part of the equation should a college honor more? In a world where there are plenty of students who DO get As in AP courses, there's no real dilemma for them. But for me there's always that nagging doubt: What if the student with the lower AP grade is actually a much more interesting student? There are many straight-A students who are more boring than an extra inning baseball game, and not a few others who offer compelling raw material for colleges to work with.

Luckily, many colleges out there are more than willing to forgive a C in calculus or AP chem if the student is clearly doing well otherwise and if there's clear evidence of effort and determination. As long as that student doesn't plan to be an engineer or a chemist, shouldn't his/her willingness to take the risk outweigh the grade in this case? Don't we hear a lot about students being afraid to do that (and college complaints that students don't take risks)? It's here that the most competitive colleges sometimes fall on their own sharp swords: It's difficult for them to take a chance on a student who really has taken chances and is intellectually alive because their own statistics would be affected.

It becomes a Mobius strip of logic and calculation rather than a humane and individualized decision. For that reason, perhaps the college admission community should try to untwist the connections between risk and achievement/gamesmanship and academic integrity. Maybe it's time to revisit why, in an age where so many colleges don't even require math, they still require it to be accepted, and so on. I'm not saying they shouldn't (and I can argue reasons why they should), but I am saying that a discussion of what being well-educated means at the high school level might do us some good. There's enough blather about it and enough testing; maybe we should step back to see where the current requirements have gotten us.

Back to the Future

2009-03-01T09:25:00.004-06:00

Those of us who applied to college thirty or so years ago seem mostly to have tossed out a few applications, taken the SAT or ACT once, and then gotten on with the rest of our high school lives. We waited and hoped for the best. Some of us were lucky enough to have a counselor who casually mentioned a college or two we'd never heard of and encouraged us to apply, which we did. That was certainly my experience. Mr. Boulhouwer, counselor at West Morris Regional H.S. in Chester NJ is responsible for my applying to and eventually attending Amherst College in Amherst MA. He suggested I try a "liberal arts" college. After explaining to me what that was, he tossed out Amherst and I said I'd give it a shot. The rest, as they say, is history. (To this day I'm convinced that I didn't even know Amherst was all-male until I got there; I probably would have been a Williams alum if he'd said "Williams" instead.)

I've joked with any number of adults of about my age who have similar stories about how they got to their alma maters: the chance remark, the off-hand suggestion by a math teacher, or the casual observation by a respected neighbor or relative. There was no strategizing, no long-term planning, no multiple testing, no weighing the pros and cons of every school. At some level, we knew we'd be fine anywhere we went and we trusted that the schools would make good decisions (although not necessarily the ones we wanted). Once the applications were done we went about our business. And in fact we did turn out pretty well, most of us.

Having made the transition from working with the uber-strategic to the underserved, I've discovered many similarities between the latter and my generation of college-goers. Low-income and first generation students interested in going to college tend to be hard workers fully involved in their schools and communities, out of choice and necessity. They're not strategizers, they're young people who hope their talents and experiences will be enough to get them admitted to college; that is to say, they haven't been good students and participants in order to get into college, they're going to get into college because they're good students and participants. They're not multi-testers trying to break 2200, they're test takers because they have to be, and let it go at that. Most of them can't afford, literally or figuratively, to spend hours and hours parsing essay questions; they've got real things to do.

In these ways and others, I'm finding that the low-income and first-generation students I work with are very much like we were many years ago when it comes to college admission. Without romanticizing too much, I'd say that they have an authenticity that colleges and universities say they want, an openness to and desire for new experiences that can make them exceptional students in any classroom. Yes, many of them are rough around the edges and many have gone through things we wouldn't wish on anyone, but they have a resilience and even an optimism that make them wonderful to work with. They believe that college is going to help them live better lives and learn important things; they are honored to be chosen and pleased to have the opportunities to advance; they are grateful to be able to fulfill their hopes and dreams and those of their families. They don't see college acceptance as a right or a mark of innate privilege; they see it as the result of hard work and determination. And they're willing to bring these qualities to campus.

For these students, applying to college is an adjunct to their lives, not their purpose in life, as it seems to be for so many of their overprivileged peers. And in that way, they avoid the largely self-created stress we hear way too much about. Their lives are their own and if a college accepts them, that's great; if not, they'll try again. It makes me hopeful for the future.

The Counselor's Dilemma

2009-02-27T18:35:00.003-06:00

In early February I spoke to a group of low-income/first-generation college students about how to interpret their admission and financial aid letters. I began by asking if anyone had received an acceptance letter yet (assuming that few had). To my surprise, about a third to a half of the group raised their hands. After congratulating them I asked if anyone had any questions, and that's when the whole thing started.

One student said she'd been given until March 1 to respond and several others said the same thing. I asked if she meant May 1, the universal reply date. She said, no, it was March 1. (Another student said she had to respond by the week after our meeting.) Others nodded emphatically. I asked if they were being asked to make a housing deposit and whether it was refundable (the conditions that allow colleges to ask for money before May 1.) Not everyone was sure, but some were certain they were being asked to make a commitment by March 1. In my mind, even asking a student without a sophisticated knowledge of the college admission world is asking too much, but that's not the end of it.

After the initial flurry of questions, another student raised his hand and said that he'd been offered admission with a full, four-year scholarship but only if he committed to the institution by March 1. I wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't shown me the letter and the dayglo pink sheet full of legalese he was supposed to return by March 1 if he wanted the full scholarship. To put it bluntly, the institution was bribing him to commit to it. I call that unconscionable.

Now here's the dilemma, which would be more of one if I were still counselor at a school, especially one that depends on ingratiating itself with top colleges: Reporting the school to NACAC is crucial, since there is a clear violation of the SPGP, on top of which the institution is browbeating a student the way a used car salesman would ("This deal is only good today!"). While anonymity is promised, that's a risk. If a counselor's name is revealed, he or she can be accused by cowardly administrators of "damaging the relationship" between school and college. Even if the violation is clear, colleges can often get away with outrageous tactics because schools often feel they have to play ball no matter what. No matter how egregious the violation may be, the high school counselor is under a great deal of pressure to let it go in the interests of getting students into college.

I happen to believe that the vast majority of colleges and universities neither flout the rules nor punish schools who report SPGP violations. Often, violations are minor and easily cleared up with a phone call or an email. But not always. Several years ago it was brought to my attention that a certain midwestern school was encouraging students to apply as juniors. I thought this was wrong and tried to discuss it with the school, where I got only vague answers and evasion. I persisted until I evidently annoyed the director of admission enough that she wrote to the school's principal announcing that her school would no longer accept applications from my school's students. And of course I was called on the carpet for having the audacity to challenge what I thought was a clear violation not only of NACAC policy but also good educational practice. The fatwa against my students was lifted, but not before damage had been done to my position, even though I was acting in the overall interests not only of my students but others'.(Although I won't mention the name of the university, if I say "wait list" almost anyone on the high shcool side of the desk will know which one I'm talking about.)

This fight was not even mine, in that I had no students affected; it was brought to my attention by other counselors, for whom I was acting. Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut. But to do so is to cut the legs out from under the SPGP. If no one reports violations, then what? We have lofty ethics, but is that only while anyone is looking or only as long as colleges agree to abide by them? What to say to the lowly high school counselor who sees something that needs correcting? And what to tell his or her principal, who cares more about the year's scorecard than some wispy ethics? NACAC has no power to protect a counselor at school, so what's he or she to do? These are questions that have yet to be confronted.

Kick in the Pants

2009-02-17T14:25:00.002-06:00

I've just read some responses on the NACAC listserv to a question about how to motivate unmotivated kids (mostly boys) to do well in high school so they can go to college. Many of the responses were about the economics of a college degree (over a lifetime the college grad earns a lot more), the terror of working at McDonald's, having some self-respect, and so on. People suggested that students get therapy for their sluggishness or that counselors read students the riot act, so to speak, let them know what's good for them. I found it all depressing although I can't say I haven't felt the same way in dealing with some of my own students in the past.

But here's the thing: Not a single response (of the ones given) said anything about the possibility that these unmotivated students see no meaning in their lives or in going to college, so why should they be motivated? While it's fine to focus on the pragmatics of going to college or even getting a job, most people, at some level, are also hungry for their lives to be worth something, even if they may not recognize it. Perhaps these kids have been marched through a school system that spends more time testing them and preparing to test them than in presenting them with ideas and asking them to have thoughts. Perhaps they have become numbed by shallow textbooks or uncreative lessons, or been warehoused in classes of 32 students and have figured out that the only way to survive is to hunker down and do only what's needed to get by. Yelling at them to shape up isn't going to do it.

And forget about the economic argument, at least for now. Surely even the most willfully ignorant student knows that the economy is in the tank and that college costs more than ever. At least one parent is probably out of a job or about to be---who are we kidding? Trying to get out of college with a reasonable amount of debt is a job in itself, so don't expect the idea of an eventual six-figure income somewhere, sometime in the distant future to mean much, especially to kids who are used to immediate gratification. (Not, at least this time, a criticism, just a fact.) The ant doesn't beat the grasshopper here, and why should it given the headlines and the breadlines?

Forgotten, are the more esoteric, but primary reasons for going to college. It might be nice to hear someone say that going to college exposes you to ideas and situations that can rattle your cage and make you think about and connect you to something larger than yourself, or that reading great things and talking about them with great teachers and students can set your brain abuzz with thoughts that could help you change yourself and change your neighborhood or city or who knows what. It would be inspiring to hear that going to college can inspire you, even when you think there's not much to be inspired by. That reading The Culture of Narcissism or Sister Carrie or dissecting a mouse can literally change the way you think. Really, it can and does happen.

Are we reduced to seeing college only as an economic "value added" proposition or as an alternative to something worse? Is the idea of college as a place for thought and experimentation only for those who can afford the luxury of thought untethered to the need to make a living? Surely even in the most career-oriented education there has to be a little room for some independent thinking; it's what makes having a brain worthwhile. Perhaps if we reached these unmotivated kids sooner with something that sparks their interest, we might do better by them. Studies have shown (and I've seen it in my own experience) that just a few supportive words from a genuinely interested adult can make an immense difference to a kid. Being noticed, realizing that you mean something to someone, can tip the scales toward accomplishment. Whether it's giving kids something real to think on or noticing what they already have that is worth developing, perhaps we need to motivate more by treating kids as prospective thinkers instead of prospective drones.

If our new stock in trade is mental not metal (and I don't mean just information but knowledge), then we should be trying to stir up our kids' synapses with stuff to make them think. Perhaps then they might feel motivated enough to get where they could do a lot of it.

Curse of the Striving Class

2009-02-10T20:37:00.002-06:00

Ella: Nobody's staying here forever. We're all leaving.
Emma: We are?
Ella: Yes. We're going to Europe.
Emma: Who is?
Ella: All of us.
Emma: Pop too?
Ella: No. Probably not.
Emma: How come? He'd like it in Europe, wouldn't he?
Ella: I don't know.
Emma: You mean just you, me, and Wes are going to Europe? That sounds awful.
Ella: Why? What's so awful about that? It could be a vacation.
Emma: It'd be the same as it is here.
Ella: No it wouldn't! We'd be in Europe. A whole new place.
Emma: But we'd all be the same people.

---Curse of the Starving Class, Act I, by Sam Shepard

Ella's vision of selling the family's burned-out, fallow Texas farm and moving the family to Europe in the hope of transforming themselves is brought quickly to earth by her daughter, who realizes that no matter where they go and what they surround themselves with, they're still going to be the same feral, unhappy, directionless people they are now. Immersing yourself in high culture doesn't change the essential "you" formed long before you even knew where Europe is, whether you're Shepard's cursed family or Daisy Miller.

This passage reminds me of the way so many people ache to scale the ivy walls separating them from colleges and universities considered to be the ne plus ultra of life. So much is attached to achieving this goal that it becomes a genuinely transformative experience: anyone who enters changes fundamentally simply by virtue of being among the elect. It is Ella's dream to go to Europe and be surrounded by culture, art, and all the blessings of the Old World. She believes in a kind of transubstantiation that will literally erase the past and ensure the ease and comfort of the future while the individual is purified into something better.

But Emma is more realistic. She senses that no matter where you go, there you are. We take our "selves" with us: no matter what we surround ourselves with, we are essentially the same people. In that sense, no experience can be truly transformative, it can only be an accretion on the personality we already have. While this may sound overly deterministic, I think it says a lot about the passion for elite admission.

All of this yearning for the Ivies has much more to do with class and status than with academics. They are seen as annealing furnaces where the dross of one's own background can be burned away and a new person can be formed. Aspirations to these institutions are seldom about their academic challenges; they are about social and cultural needs: "making contacts," "meeting the best and the brightest," "assuring one's future," and so on. We see who comes out of these institutions and think our kids can do that if only we had the access, forgetting that before there was college, there was a person and a personality.

At certain levels, the need to attend certain colleges is almost palpable, with parents lamenting that their child might have to attend Tufts instead of Brown. It's that kind of hair splitting among strivers that would drive Emma crazy; there's no real difference and the essentials of the individual are the same and will be, regardless. This doesn't mean that individuals can't change in a general sense. They can become moody or be inspired by a great teacher, but the basics of their personalities are set well before college; the institution can only claim to have provided the externals. They are accidentals, not essentials; necessary but not sufficient. What students do and where they go with what they have is largely up to them.

However, in our insecurity, our supposedly classless society, we continue striving to be purified into the realms of gold. This condition characterizes certain strata more than others, including academics, who suffer from an almost crippling status anxiety when confronted with extra-academic situations, especially regarding their children; the newly rich, who doubt their own positions and who need validation (Henry James and Edith Wharton would recognize them instantly); and ambitious new arrivals who see acceptance as a shortcut to the American upper class.

But Emma's right: They'll still be the same people. That is, their essential personalities will not be transformed, just the externalities, the accidentals that accrete to us as we move through life. Students/children may try on new roles, take risks, and change from the person we knew before, but at a fundamental level, character stays constant. It may be covered with layers of new behaviors, but the core persists. Con artists are not made any more honest by attending Yale, nor are the truly devout plunged into profanity by Cornell. And no one institution can claim to be better or worse than any other on those terms.

Those who think that only certain colleges and universities can effect elemental changes in their children and in the process vault them into the upper classes labor in vain. All colleges change their students, but none can truly transform them. Releasing oneself from this fallacy is the first step toward a greater equanimity.

Objective Subjectivity

2009-02-02T13:04:00.002-06:00

Swirling around discussions about admission testing are issues of accuracy and trust. Even though the SAT and ACT are notoriously coachable, they're often defended as the closest things we have to national standards. There's "objectivity" in them that can be relied on to counter the vagaries of grading and labeling that affect our national educational system. As college admission deans read applications from far and wide, they can establish a relatively consistent yardstick for evaluation. It's not apples to apples, exactly, but it serves the purpose.

I submit, however, that what's needed in college admission isn't more objectivity, but more subjective evaluation of student applications. With more and more applications, colleges may tend to rely more on numbers to make decisions, but those that use a "holistic" system of admission--that is, reading folders in detail, including essays and other student-supplied information--have an obligation to be subjective as they build a class. Being engaged in a form of social engineering requires attention to many details. As a dean at Amherst College I read many, many applications each year with an eye toward what made each student unique, interesting and ready for Amherst. Frustratingly, however, some of the most interesting students were those with uncompelling test scores. The "objective" standard often trumped my subjective reading of the application. And as a "scientific" measure, it was difficult to argue against in committee, so we often took talented but less compelling students because by objective measurements they were "better" than those with lower scorews.

Now, this is not another test-bashing column. Let's accept for the moment that testing is indeed a decent yardstick of measurement in college admission, especially in light of an increasing mistrust of high school transcripts, one that thinks grade inflation and wildly different standards make them hard to take at face value unless you know the school producing them very well. While some may then say there is a real need for more uniform, "scientific" ways to measure students' abilities, I'm going to argue instead for more subjectivity in the college admission process. Since this is an exercise in human assessment, it seems to me that any attempt to make it "fair" by making it "objective" is doomed to fail. (For most people, anyway, "fairness" in the college process means "I got what I wanted.") And in the end, at least in my experience, objective measures tell a lot less about a student than subjective observations.

At Amherst, at least, applications were read by pairs of deans, who often complemented each other in what they looked for and noted. For example, I was notorious for undervaluing sports achievements and despising tennis essays while looking favorably on singers, actors, and artists generally. Having two readers ensured that what I missed or disliked could be balanced by another's views. Once in committee, an application was then subjected to the scrutiny of several deans, who could add their own observations and ask questions. Sometimes, an applicant who had looked terrific in early readings faded as she was considered in the context of other candidates. At other times, someone who had seemed modest zoomed out in front because another dean noticed her extensive but only modestly presented community service record. Our discussions hinged on what we as individuals brought to the table, not on any automatic formulae. And frankly, that's what made the whole process interesting--trying to create a three-dimensional person out of pieces of paper and data then supporting that person to your peers.

At least at smaller colleges, subjectivity really is the name of the game. The general public's disappointment at college admission "unfairness" comes because there's an assumption that the process was, has been, and should be "objective," that is, that college admission should be based on a kind of absolute value of "merit" that everyone can be happy with. But, as I said to one board member at my former school once, "That's never going to happen." Ideally, an admission committee is composed of intelligent, empathetic, and committed people who have the best interests of their institution and its applicants at heart. By being "subjective," then, I don't mean relying on blind prejudice or knee-jerk likes/dislikes (despite my confession above I was able to appreciate a good tennis player), I mean bringing to bear some empathy for applicants while at the same time considering the institution's goals and needs. As a former high school teacher, I fancied that I was able to appreciate what students were going through and brought that to my reading; recent graduates in our office brought their still-fresh experiences of undergraduate life to their assessments. Somehow, it all worked out, and the proof was in the fizziness of each class that arrived on campus in the fall.

The best book that's ever been written about college admission is no longer in print, but it should be. Originally published in 1966, College Admissions and the Public Interest by B. Alden Thresher, onetime director of admission at MIT, takes a fully rounded look at college admission, acknowledging the vast areas of social and cultural knowledge that need to be brought to bear during the "great sorting" that occurs during this time. He outlines some of the necessary subjectives that come into play: "As entrance requirements in the older sense have diminished in importance, efforts have increased to select students on broad grounds of intellectual promise and aptitude, to understand the dynamics of personality as it affects motives and energy, and to trace the dimensions of human excellence beyond such deceptively simple, unidimensional quantities as school marks and test scores."

Even forty years ago, Thresher was advocating a subjective approach to college admission that takes into account non-quantifiable qualities that can make a student exceptional. Note, too, that he uses words like "promise" and "aptitude," words that have slid into some disfavor as colleges try to find applicants who seem already to have accomplished as much as one could ask rather than looking for those who could most benefit from what the college teaches. Unfortunately, subjectivity is much more labor-intensive than objectivity. It takes time and effort to sift through piles of folders, teasing out the subtleties of an applicant's "promise," such an ephemeral thing to begin with. So going into each application in depth may be a luxury that many institutions can't sustain. But it is the thing that can not only find proverbial "diamonds in the rough" who will blossom on campus, but also inspire admission deans at every level to stay in the field. While it's important to know how to read and interpret scores and grades, it is also important to develop the sensibility that can bring an enlightened subjectivity to college admission.

Idol Worship

2009-01-12T16:51:00.004-06:00

Today's online Chronicle of Higher Education had an article about the chancellor of Texas A & M's idea to give faculty members bonuses of up to $10,000, but there's a catch: They're based on student evaluations. As he put it, “This is customer satisfaction. It doesn’t have to do with tenure, promotion, status. It has to do with students’ having the opportunity to recognize good teachers and reward them with some money.” It's hard to know where to begin with such a ridiculous concept, although it's certainly not the first time "students" have been transformed into "customers" and "professors" into "salesmen" or, rather, "monkeys," who simply need to know how to perform to win the approbation of their audience.

Here's another instance where the collapse of linguistic categories does more harm than good. In the academic world, a "student" is someone who agrees to be taught by and learn from someone who has more knowledge, experience, and understanding of a subject than the student does. In the course of this interaction, there may be difficulties, false starts, and other thorny issues that impede the way to understanding. In fact, in good education that's more likely than not to be the case. Our expectation is that the professor is a knowledgeable and compassionate person who helps the student through those difficulties with clear explanations, engaged discussion, and all the other things that make good teachers.

A "customer," however, is someone in an extremely different relationship with a person or institution. The "customer" wishes to purchase something, and for some unit of exchange, the "seller" is willing to give it to him. No other interaction is expected except that the "customer" get what he pays for, whether it's a car, a watch, or a houseboat. The "customer's" satisfaction is based on how well the product lives up to its billing. (When I ride the CTA here in Chicago I cringe a bit every time I'm called a "customer" instead of a "passenger." The latter has a dignity that is lost when I'm treated simply as a source of $2.25 per trip.) It's a simple quid pro quo, not a lengthy interaction.

A "customer"-based relationship is really impossible in any but the most basic teaching situations, such as when someone pays for an insurance licensing course: You get the rules, you learn them, you take the test. But even that depends on your own abilities, motivation, and outlook. Students are not passive receptacles just needing to be filled with inert facts, and whatever happens in a classroom can have radically different effects on them. A particularly rigid yet wildly knowledgeable professor can be excruciating during a course but fondly remembered for inspiring students to hold high standards; a hip, chatty, and easy-to-please professor can be a pal, but often not a memorable teacher. And the same professor can be a literary lion to some and a turgid windbag to others.

The teacher/student relationship embodies complexities that are all stripped away in this lame attempt to become the Wal-Mart of universities. Putting professors at the mercy of student satisfaction guarantees that teaching will get worse and students will feel more entitled to get what they want, not what they should have. Peter Sacks wrote a book a while ago about his experience with this sort of thing called Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America (Open Court). In it he chronicles how he turned his low student evaluations into high marks by slacking off the tough grading, lowering his demands, and generally playing to the crowd, thus reaping the rewards that came with them at the institution he worked at. It's a depressing read, but while it may say something about Generation X, I think it says even more about the inverted structure of the teacher/student relationship, the "seller"/"customer" model of education, if you will.

The Texas A & M chancellor has divorced this scheme from anything to do with scholarly effort. But it also reflects a shift in child rearing and studenthood that has been going on for some time and that upends the traditional hierarchy. Where once parents and professors were authorities at the top helping to mold and educate feral and ignorant children, who had to learn and sometimes struggle for entry into society or the world of educated persons, now children and students are the golden calves who are revered for just being themselves, no matter how wild or insipid they may be. If they're lazy and ignorant, well, professors will just have to go with that because they've been taught all their lives that it's just who they are. And parents have spent countless hours making sure that nothing will spoil junior's day, so you'd better not, either, Ms. Professor.

This is not to say that every student would react as a "customer" at Texas A & M. I'm sure there will be many who take the enterprise seriously and evaluate professors based not on their willingness to give As or let homework slide, perhaps, but on their high expectations and low tolerance for stupidity. There may be some who relish the idea that their teachers won't put up with nonsense in class or in a paper. But even that insight may not come right away. It may be only years later that a student is thankful that Professor Hardgrade made him rewrite a paper four times before accepting it. Will there be a retroactive evaluation and bonus in that case?

Mr. McKinney's thuddingly ignorant take on the student/teacher transaction should be swept into the dustbin of history (will Texas students know that reference? And who will teach it to them?). He should not turn Texas A & M students into "customers" because that makes his professors simply performers grasping for shiny pennies. The idea is an insult to everyone involved in education.

Taming the Testing Dragon

2009-01-05T12:18:00.004-06:00

The coming new year for the Chinese is the Year of the Ox, so I'm going to go with that spirit and suggest it's time to tell students applying to college that they can take the ACT or SAT once and that's it. The current discussion about "score choice" and what colleges want versus what the College Board wants them to want versus what ACT is doing and how all the test prep companies figure into all this mess cries out for a Gordian knot solution (sorry to mix cultural references). I've said many times that the admission process is far too complicated, overgrowing students' educations and becoming more important than what they're learning in high school. So, to repeat: Limit students to taking the SAT or ACT once. Period. We'll all be better off.

I know many will shriek at this limitation of students' right to flay themselves in the quest for collegiate Valhalla, but let's think about some of the issues (and for the sake of argument I'll try to limit my own abhorrence of these tests):

Argument: Students should have the right to take the test as many times as they wish and report their best scores to enhance their applications. It's a free country!
Response: Many may see a one-time testing approach as too similar to the European all or nothing tests (and many people still think of the tests as the be-all-and-end-all for college admission). But a test score in the U.S. is not determinative; it can be considered, downplayed, or lauded by any college to whom it is reported. And it doesn't limit where students can apply. Hundreds of institutions don't even use the scores or are score optional, with little effect on the quality of their student bodies. And even those who use scores often downplay them when necessary to enroll athletes, legacies, talented minority students, and so on. In other words, scores are fungible, not fixed; one set of scores or six doesn't really make that much of a difference.

Argument: Students should have the opportunity to get their best scores to indicate their true abilities.
Response: The College Board, which produces the SAT, long ago gave up the myth they themselves originated that the test can't be coached since it was an indicator of innate abilities. It even offers its own prep courses to subvert (sorry, prepare for) the test. And companies like Princeton Review and others, whatever one might think of them, have demonstrated that it is possible to raise scores not by knowing more about geometry or American history, but by knowing how the test is structured. How this adds to a student's academic qualities has yet to be determined. Ironically, students who take the test again and raise their scores significantly can be accused of cheating, and a very high test score coupled with low or mediocre grades can brand an applicant a slug in class. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and whatever "true ability" is is certainly not being measured by the ACT or SAT.

Argument: Taking the test several times is just a good way to get a better score; it's not unfair or anything.
Response: Practice tests already exist for the SAT and the ACT, namely, the PSAT and the PLAN. Administered at students' schools, they come back with detailed explanations of what students got right and wrong and what concepts they need to work on for when they take the test for real. In fact, students can take the PLAN and the PSAT in their sophomore and junior years, without scores being reported anywhere, so they have plenty of time to see what they need to improve when the time comes.

Argument: If students want to take the test multiple times, what's wrong with that?
Response: Well, nothing, really, if you think that going through hours of test prep, anxiety, and craziness, not to mention hundreds if not thousands of dollars somehow are positive educational developments. Testing already crowds out actual academic subjects as early as third grade, and drilling for college entrance exams is the most tedious, boring, and retrograde activity a school can indulge in. No wonder students hate it. Students are already idiotically overtested and as to whether it's always the students' choice to take and retakes the tests, I'd look more closely at parental influence.

Argument: Test prep and multiple testing give students a taste of what's expected of them in college.
Response: I for one wouldn't attend an institution that focused on testing like that as an evaluative measure. Does it introduce concepts to think about, encourage intellectual development, accurately measure what a student knows? No. Testing is something to be gotten through, not embraced. It is intellectually deadening and as welcome as plague. Most students will find that, except for huge institutions with classes of hundreds, they will rarely see SAT-like tests.

Argument: A student can have an "off" day on the one day that the test is given, leading to a "false negative" score.
Response: A student's score is always considered in the context of high school strength and GPA; an "off" day could easily be seen as that in the admission process when so-so scores accompany an otherwise strong record. Scores (as well as every other application element) are subject to the sense and good judgment of the individuals reading applications, so there is every reason to believe that a sense of who's "off" can be developed with a one-test limit even as it is now with multi-test scores being reported.

Argument: Colleges need to be able to put the best scores of their applicants together so they can put together the best profiles possible, so allowing students to take the tests multiple times is to their advantage.
Response: This is a college issue, not a student or educational issue. In my experience we spent much more time talking about students' activities, courses, and achievements than their test scores in committee. One argument is that no college wants to have poorer scores to report than its competitors do. But if everyone has only the one score to report, a deflation will occur across the board and equilibrium should be maintained.

Argument: Multiple scores enable colleges to get the best bond ratings and rankings.
Response: Aside from the insidiousness of these methods of rating colleges, the same principle applies as in the answer above: If all institutions have the same one-test figures, it seems likely that everything will reach an equilibrium that would merely lead to a recalibration of the ratings and the rankings.

Argument: A single test date would put more pressure on students because there would be no "safety valve" if the results weren't good.
Response: Probably, but it would be up to colleges and universities to put the test in a more enlightened context by showing how they use it and where it actually stands in the admission hierarchy. In fact, adopting the one-time test might cause colleges to rethink how they use it because it would be a rawer picture of the test-taker, more "authentic," so to speak. A single date would be intense, but knowing it would all be over afterwards might be liberating. If the date were at the end of junior year, results received in the summer might provide motivation for doing better in courses senior year to make up for a poor score.

There are many reasons to support a one-time only test:

1. The hours and dollars spent on test prep seriously distract from more useful activities like homework and true academic development, whether they're sponsored through schools as classtime sessions or after school. Especially in areas with a high percent of first-generation or poor students, it is critical that time and dollars not be sacrificed for something as ephemeral and uncertain as test prep. I know of one school that has spent nearly $60,000.00 on test prep for students who could have better been served by spending that money on academic enhancement, tutoring, equipment, and so on. A recent article in Harper's magazine (September 2008) documenting a year of test prep in a New York City school is illuminating. Click on this entry's title to go to the article.

2. Test prep as a part of schooling is a kind of regression to the days of rote learning, which has long since been abandoned in this country. It kills motivation, deadens intellectual curiosity, and makes education look like a hoop to jump through rather that an ongoing source of personal development. It makes students and teachers cynical; no good teacher I know will sacrifice a classroom discussion about "Death of a Salesman" for an SAT vocabulary drill. And no student would willingly attend. He may not care for Arthur Miller, either, but at least there's the possibility that something interesting might come up. (Furthermore, it most disadvantages those who can least afford it: First-generation and other underserved students who most need to learn the basics of English, math, and so on to do well in college.)

3. Multiple testing opportunities favor those already privileged; a one-time test date can even the playing field to a certain extent. While privileged students can still afford the books and testing that non-privileged students can't, the one-time test means that what you see is what you get on the other end. Will non-privileged students suffer because they can't afford test prep or the ability to try again? Those students already have extra consideration for their backgrounds and lack of educational support, so test scores will continue to be seen that way. (Remember, test scores have been shown definitiely to have cultural biases.) It will affect privileged students more, because they'll have to live with their scores without being able to tinker with them over and over. (Idea: After adopting the one-test only policy, schools can ask "Estimate how much preparation you received or paid for before the test." The more that's reported, the less credible the test. Fantasy I know, but still...)

4. Multiple testing is a financial bonanza that offers little real improvement in educational environment, siphoning off money from individuals and school systems that could be put to better use. While test prep companies and the College Board get rich coming and going, that money doesn't go to enhancing educational opportunity (although the companies do provide their services pro bono in many circumstances). And schools that can't really afford it are led to chase the ephemara of scores as a way to getting their students into college rather than focusing on building their academic programs.

5. The ability to take the test multiple times fosters the idea that testing is more crucial than it really is. Like Sysiphus, rolling the stone up the hill only to have it roll down again so he has to start all over again, multiple testing really accomplishes very little while creating great strain and anxiety. Nothing gets learned, nothing is accomplished, other more fruitful opportunities are passed up, and in the end, an admission decision can be made in spite of scores as much as because of them. Consistently, according to NACAC, a student's GPA and course strength are the most compelling parts of the application; the scores are really more window dressing. They're easy to look at and mess with; they have acquired a magical quality; and they play into our love of lists and bests/worsts. So while admission officers tend to drool over big scores, they also can see the proverbial "diamonds in the rough" that shine in class without the burnishing of high test scores.

Adopting a one-time only testing policy may be seen as radical, but it would help to simplify and equalize the whole testing universe. Colleges and universities should consider cutting back the testing underbrush while at the same time promoting the importance of academic achievement more forcefully.

College Counselor: Servant or Teacher?

2008-12-23T10:42:00.006-06:00

More than once when I was counseling private school students, a parent would warn me that "you'll have to chase after Johnny during the application process, keep on him" to get him through it. Well, I don't do chasing and for the most part I never did, which may be one reason I don't work with them any more. Nevertheless, it raises a question about what the college counselor's role is. After a certain point, how much is the student's responsibility, and isn't the willingness to take it on one sign that a student is ready for college? When I did reach out to recalcitrant students (usually boys, by the way), I would often say, "Look, I've already gone to college so I don't need to do any of this, but you do." Sometimes that would be enough to get them moving, and sometimes not. Although I don't remember anyone ever falling through the cracks or not getting into college because of not filing an application, it still gave me pause. Is this like pushing kids to get their homework done, or am I on the verge of ruining their lives because I won't haul them in, sit them in front of my computer and make them fill out their applications while I watch?

Personally, I think that students who don't do their research, information requests, recommendation requests, and applications (despite hours of workshops, class meetings, and individual appointments) aren't really ready to face the end of high school. They're saying that they have other priorities and are willing to let college wait until the last minute. Fine, I say. Why should I spend energy on you if you're not going to spend it on yourself? I can help any number of students who are really grappling with the process while also doing their homework and keeping up with their extracurriculars. When you're ready to fill out applications, let me know. In this respect, I believe that a college counselor is also a teacher, and one of the lessons is learning to plan ahead, make choices, and accept the consequences of those choices. In other words, to help them mature.

Now don't get me wrong--I don't wish for someone not to get into college or suffer for mistakes. I simply believe that "babysitting" is not part of the college counselor's job description, especially if all the necessary information is presented many times over the course of several years and students come from college-educated families. The "chase after my kid" request is the same as the "why didn't he get an A?" challenge to a teacher when the student has been AWOL in class--it's not my responsibility to do his work for him. Besides, isn't chasing after your kid part of the parent's job description? (Although I would argue that by the time they're high school seniors that should be only in extreme situations.)

When the current head of my former school first came on board a few years ago, we had a conversation in which he emphasized that college counseling was a "service" the school provided. While I agreed in principle with the statement, I also said, "But I am not a servant," meaning that I was not at anyone's beck and call and would not, in fact, could not, always accommodate every wish and whim of parents or students. Providing all the facts, deadlines, encouragement, and so on to those who will take advantage of them was often enjoyable and energizing. But making the rest of the horses drink was low on my priority list. As a teacher, I believed it was like doing students' homework for them, and that doesn't help them at all.

This distinction is important, I think, because while college counseling isn't rocket science, it does have a complexity that makes it at times extremely difficult. Not only are there all the mechanistic elements to worry about, we also have to deal with the emotional, intellectual, developmental, and even financial issues that surround each student. As a servant, I would be obliged simply to do what was necessary if a parent insisted that her child should apply to an Ivy League school, even if that child didn't have the record for it (or even the inclination, as happened more than once). To a certain extent, that's fine--students in this country can apply anywhere they want. However, as a responsible teacher as well as counselor, I think it my responsibility, my duty, even, to indicate what the odds are, to be realistic about the applicant's chances and suggest alternatives, and then to step back as the student carries out those resonsibilities. I was never reluctant to give a hand when I saw a student working hard to get everything done, but I was always reluctant to do things for him.

More than once, however, a parent would become enraged when I suggested that her child wasn't "Ivy League material" or wasn't getting applications done. Who was I, I suspect the reasoning went, to imply that Precious wasn't up to snuff, despite clear indications in the transcript, test scores, and lack of activities? (Never mind the "What am I paying my money to this school for?" comments...) The expectation seemed to be that I should simply file the papers and write the support letter while holding Precious's hand over the keyboard. But I would opt for educating every time, which means respecting a student enough to expect him to do his own work.

This kind of reaction reduces the college counselor to servant status (and belittles the child, incidentally) and reduces the college admission process to a sort of quid pro quo, although what the quo was I've never fully understood. I could bring up the changing face of college admission (it's startling to learn how many parents still think "merit" is the only qualification for admission and that their child clearly has it), the imponderables, the history of admission at a particular college, the student's own preparation (or lack thereof), but it didn't matter. Just do it! they implied, don't bother us with realities.

To state things positively: I believe that a college counselor is, and in fact has to be, a teacher as well as a service provider, and should be supported as such. College counseling should be recognized as a way to help develop adolescents' maturity as well as simply a means to an end. Students aren't just pegs to be fitted into the right holes, they are developing human beings on the verge of adulthood who have a wonderful opportunity to put their own ideas, hopes, and desires to the test in the college process. Done right, it can be an exciting time of reflection and self-definition; approached merely as a utilitarian process, it deprives everyone involved of their dignity.

Raw Material or Finished Product?

2008-12-02T09:39:00.004-06:00

Eugene S. Wilson, legendary admission dean at Amherst College, believed that no matter how long he was in the business he'd never perfect the art of human evaluation, and that was OK. For him, every applicant was an opportunity to see the potential in a young person, to assess him fairly, and to render a decision that might indeed prove incorrect down the line. For him (and his immediate successor at Amherst, Ed Wall), admission was most definitely an art, not a science, and putting a class together was the delicate balancing of the college's needs with the needs and desires of young men (and later, women) as they began to enter adulthood.

When I joined the Amherst admission office in 1990 I was delighted to be part of that tradition. To this day, I believe that Dean Wall used his gut more than my numbers to admit me to Amherst in 1973, and I wanted to have a chance to combine hard numbers and humane considerations to create Amherst's next generations in a way inspired by Wilson and Wall. At the core, I think they recognized that applicants to college were still unformed persons trying on new identities and exploring different aspects of their lives and the world's offerings. A liberal arts college like Amherst was designed to help students choose well and build on their previous accomplishments as they moved into their future lives.

To me, this meant that students would apply to college as works in progress, ready for the college to exert its influence on them, and vice versa. We were looking for potential, a most elusive quality: We all know of the class presidents who burned out or the most likely to succeed students who never made it out of their hometowns. Our test as admission officers was to spot the energy, the uniqueness, the elusive qualities that infused the GPA and test scores and made the whole a great deal more than the sum of its parts.

But after a few years of helping make admission decisions, I began to feel that looking for the :diamond in the rough" or the "potentiality" of an applicant was less important that getting the numbers as high as possible. Not that it was ever fully mechanistic, but our admission process seemed to me more dependent not only on the black and white figures but also on what students had already accomplished. We celebrated (and rightly so) the applicants who had achieved some remarkable goal, like writing a novel or developing a new invention, but they began to overshadow other applicants who had "only" led a community food bank or restructured their high school's student government or did exceptional work in math or biology classes. I began to call these applicants "merely wonderful" because while they were truly exceptional in their own right, they faded in comparison to the superstars.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have taken the precocious, but it became clear to me that we were beginning to look for the already formed instead of the in progress student. Faculty members wanted to see more students who had been published or made major contributions to their fields. We wanted to see academic "heavy hitters" almost to the exclusion of anyone else. We were lucky to have plenty of them apply and we were always in a little awe of what some of our eventual freshmen had done, but some of the pleasure in putting a class together was lost as we had to turn down more and more exceptional students to make way for the super-accomplished. That pleasure had come from being able to say "yes" to someone we could see as coming into him or herself at Amherst. It was potential we wanted to see on campus as much as past accomplishment, but increasingly the process became more mechanistic and less idiosyncratic, leading to more predictable, but in many respects less satisfying results.

This situation was reflected in the change made a few years into my tenure at Amherst. Our last round of deliberations was devoted to each dean's bringing to the table one favorite candidate who hadn't made it in the regular rounds. Although the applicant had to meet basic requirements for admission, the deans could present their candidates and have them admitted. Even though this round occurred after weeks of debate over hundreds of candidates, it was often the liveliest and most interesting. We were able to exercise our judgment and reward some wonderful quirk in a wonderful student who we felt would add to the incoming Amherst class. Our choices often reflected our own personalities and interests. I remember speaking up for a kid from Arkansas who, among other things, liked to create "found poetry" by cutting up prose and putting it back together randomly, then reading it at poetry slams. Others spoke for student-athletes, mad scientists, and others who would otherwise have been overlooked, and we always ended the season on that high note.

Admission continues to be more an art than a science, especially at small liberal arts colleges, but I still wonder whether the impulse to enroll only the most over-accomplished students has crowded out a more humane imperative to identify human potential that will benefit from our institutions' educational offerings. It affects students, too: The more they see the overachievers being rewarded with college admission, they more they feel they have to stay up until two in the morning and spend every waking moment getting ahead. Perhaps we should re-examine how we look at human potential in the college admission process in order to recalibrate our expectations of students' past and future, as well as our institutions' missions.

Harvard's SAT Exceptionalism

2008-11-24T08:53:00.006-06:00

We all know that Harvard can do whatever it wants and usually does. And what it does usually sets the course for the rest of the country's colleges and universities (at least in the sense of giving them something to think about...) But this recent comment in the Boston Globe really has me steaming:

Harvard's dean of admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons, said standardized tests that are based on high school course work have proven superior to the SAT at determining college readiness and said he hoped such tests will begin to play a larger role in admissions decisions.
"Wouldn't it be better for students to study chemistry and math and language, than trying to game a somewhat esoteric set of test-taking skills?" he asked.
Yet Harvard "could never be SAT-optional," he said, because of the need for a national measure to identify top students, including those from urban or rural high schools that don't send many students to elite colleges.

Mr. Fitzsimmons recently chaired a committee that explored the use of standardized testing in college admission. It recommended that the SAT be de-emphasized in admission decisions for all the reasons that many of us have been giving for many years. Clearly, however, this recommendation is meant to apply only to lesser institutions, and not Harvard itself. Harvard couldn't possibly do what the plebes do because it needs to have a "national measure" to identify top students, unlike everyone else, who presumably only need, what, "local" measures? Or other more scurrilous ways of evaluating applications?

This smug exceptionalism not only throws the committee's study and recommendations into doubt (were you just wasting everyone's time?) it also reeks of a "Let them eat cake" mentality that makes us common folk want to grab our pitchforks and settle someone's hash. Why can de-emphasizing the SAT work for everyone else but not possibly for Harvard? Surely with its 372 years of experience it knows how to identify a talented student by now without a test that has only been in existence for 80 years or so. And surely, if it's good enough for Harvard, why should anyone else give it up, despite the fact that many colleges and universities have, without any diminution in their ability to attract and identify able applicants.

Fitzsimmons connects using the SAT with the necessity of finding "urban or rural" students who might otherwise, presumably, be overlooked without it. But this is just protective coloring, meant to reassure us that Harvard needs the scores to find talented first generation and minority students it would otherwise miss. But most of those students won't do well on the SAT, so Harvard would either have to reject them or ignore the scores. And Harvard has the resources to find anyone it wants, so why rely on the scores when it's just finished downplaying them?

So the message and value of the study become muddied and pointless. Whatever we may think about America's top university "brand," we must acknowledge that Harvard's imprimatur on anything carries great weight. Without Harvard's taking the lead by adopting a more enlightened view of admission testing (even if it stops short of de-emphasizing it), what was the point of doing the study in the first place? Of course, it's not bound to follow through on any conclusions, but wouldn't its participation suggest it was willing to lead where those conclusions might point? To say categorically that it couldn't possibly risk its reputation by de-emphasizing scores, even though that was the conclusion of the study seems arrogant at best, cynical and unilateral at worst.

If Harvard wants to avoid being the Marie Antoinette of colleges and universities, perhaps it should get out with the people a little instead of simply visiting its faux village to commune with the peasants. It might experiment with how it uses the SAT by making decisions on a sampling of students without using scores and following them through over the years. With the immense resources at its disposal, Harvard could actually perform a service rather than retreat into its opulence. Leadership on this issue would be to take the study's conclusions seriously, as if they applied to ALL institutions and not just everyone else.

One interesting irony of this situation is that the SAT was once touted specifically as a way to find otherwise hidden talents throughout the country when many colleges had narrowly specific entrance exams of their own. It was conceived of as a great leveller. But with the increasing connection of test performance with income, this seems no longer defensible; now it's as much a barrier to admission as a way into college. The idea of the SAT's being a "national standard" that is somehow equal across the country has been definitvely refuted over and over again. And being able to find talented students in out of the way places has never been easier. So what's Harvard's excuse? Apres moi, le deluge...

Rolling & Reading the Bones

2008-10-20T19:53:00.008-05:00

Humans have always wanted to know the future. We want to know whether we'll be president or get an A or marry the person of our dreams. Despite the prominence of science, horoscopes still get printed in the newspaper and tarot card readers are still in business. Not so many people plunge their hands into steaming sheep entrails any more but we still read our fortunes from the fortune cookie and scan the papers for clues to a big score or the winner of the next race. We want to minimize our risks and maximize our benefits, so if we know what's going to happen, we can all make the right choices.

College admission testing is one way of trying to know the future. It was initially designed for one purpose and one purpose only: To predict academic success in a student's freshman year in college. It's a way to feel that we're not just relying on hunches or guesses to decide who should get into a college and who shouldn't. Wearing the trappings of science, testing looks like a no-lose proposition for college admission officers. The numbers, the percentages, the graphs and charts, all point to rational and dispassionate conclusions. They tell us how the person will perform over the next year, and they make us feel good. We have seen into the future and believe we know how it will turn out.

Numerous studies, however, including an extensive 20-year longitudinal study at Bates College, have shown that college admission officers can predict a student's performance just as well with or without the use of testing. But it looks too much like tarot card reading when you do it without the numbers, so many institutions are afraid to do without. Putting students through the ritual of testing provides a superstructure for our superstition. It feels concrete, something you can really get your arms around.

It's still a prediction, though, and therefore not a certainty by any means. Unlike predictions in science, where physical laws enable scientists to tell when a planet will be where, testing predictions can't do anything similar because they attempt to rationalize the non-rational: human behavior. It might be more accurate to say that they attempt to set in stone something that flows in unknowable directions. More than any of the other elements in a student's application, testing feels more like divination than fact. At least when you look at a student's overall trajectory you can get a good picture of the possible result. With testing, all bound up in a few hours of highly stylized behavior and perhaps many more hours of self-abnegation for its sake, there's a sense of inevitability that is entirely unearned. Seeing into the future often depends on heightening present reality (think of psychic trances or Ouija board concentration), and testing is a good example of this phenomenon. It looks like we know the future when we get a number or a ghostly emanation or a particular arrangement of cards, but we're really getting only what we see.

The future remains unknowable, especially for unpredictable humans and the unpredictable world. As much as we try to get some control or even act on whatever predicting devices we consult, the future very often eludes us. And we should never be too proud to remember that even when something turns out as we intended, it's only because we were lucky, not because the world bowed to our intent.

Knowing the future has its problems, too. Let's assume for a moment that testing really can predict student success. How will that affect the behaviors not only of the student being tested, but of all those who come into contact with him or her? How often have you noticed how someone's attitude toward a student changes when his or her test scores are revealed? Glimpses into the future can alter our behavior and cause us to distort that very future. Think of Macbeth, told by the three witches that he'd eventually be King of Scotland. He's faced with a truly miserable puzzle (helped not at all by his wife): Should he just go along as he has been and assume that he'll get the throne sooner or later or should he take action to make sure it happens? Or are these the same things? Once you throw the eye of newt into the pot, you're done for because you can't not act, so what is the reality of your situation? Who controls it? Your future will arrive no matter what you do, so you just have to make the best of it.

When we predict the future with test scores, are we acting as though the future were in our power to command it or are we simply allowing it to proceed as it should? To me, scores are more akin to tarot cards than science. Tarot cards have just as complex an interpretive system surrounding them as testing does. And whether we're talking tarot or psychic readings, what the subject brings to the table is most important. The future is just extrapolation from the past coupled with wishes and expectations; isn't a student's past a better thing to base our predictions on?

Fizzy Aspirations & Constipated Dreams

2008-10-18T14:59:00.003-05:00

I've just returned from an informal session with some students participating in a mentoring program sponsored and run by 100 Black Men of Chicago. They work with African American high school boys on topics from academics to health; I was asked to do a college presentation and work individually with some of their seniors. And I have to say how inspired I am after that session.

About ten students were there (including one girl, the sister of one of the boys), with six seniors and the rest from other classes. The seniors by and large had actually done most of their applications and some had even heard back from the colleges they had applied to! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they'd really done their homework. The biggest issue I ended up illuminating for them was college costs: Most said they'd been told by their teachers that going out of state for college would cost them more than staying in state. I quickly put that myth to rest and did an impromptu college financial aid presentation, which visibly relieved not only the students but also the mentors.

The range of aspiration varied but I could tell that with enough lead time any one of the boys there could probably do well enough in high school to attend a decent college. The most prepared had actually visited Pepperdine, and knew a great deal about the process. But all the seniors except one had at least put in an application. And they seemed not to be very stressed about it.

The other concept I wish I'd had more time to talk about is "fit." The sister who was there said she'd gotten several full ride scholarship offers as well as some partial scholarships. I said that was great but that she should be sure to go to a school that met her needs, not just one that was free. I think she took that to heart because I saw her writing information down and going through the "compare colleges" pages of the College Board site that I'd steered her to.

One reason I'm so inspired by this Saturday morning meeting is that it was good to see kids and their mentors focused on college and trying to make a difference in their lives. I was impressed by the men in the room and felt that they were putting a lot of themselves out there for the good of the next generation. I confess that I don't see middle class and prosperous African American adult males in groups very often, so I was humbled and full of admiration at the same time. I realized how provincial I am despite my best intentions, but I was greeted and thanked warmly, given plenty of time to do my presentation and share in the men's desire to do something right with and for these boys.

Another reason for my excitement is the wonderful contrast between working with this group and working with the families of my former employer. The freshness and eagerness of the African American boys I saw today stood in such contrast to the constipated dreams of the parents I once worked with. These were parents for whom having to go to Tufts instead of Brown was a major tragedy; for whom not getting into a "name" school was simply "unacceptable" and a failure (of mine, not their child's); for whom any little twig of advantage had to be grabbed to give someone already supremely privileged another "edge" into Valhalla.

It's such a relief to be out of that niggardly, grasping, contentious, and status-anxious world. It feels so immensely better to be devoting my time and talents to students and parents who can really use my help and who actually appreciate it, who believe that hard work really does matter, not just who you know or how you construct yourself according to some nasty "How to Get Into College Book." I think that the kids I work with now are more authentic and actually more desirable in many ways, despite academic lacunae, and that with the right support an inspiration early enough they could do just as well as the overbred scions of the crafty elite. Let's not forget that George Bush drank and C'd his way through Yale; I'd put up any of the kids I've met in the last year against him and feel confident they could do better at running a country, never mind four years in college.

I haven't looked back at my former school with anything much more than pity since I left (not voluntarily but willingly). The endless agonizing over iotas of meaning in instructions and points on tests, the ceaseless strategizing that finally erodes any traces of interesting character traits, the fierce determination to "win" at any cost, and the sad Bataan death march that is high school for these students, even one that purports to give them so much (that's another story), left me feeling sorry for them and pity for their parents. But in the end there was no real help for them--they all wanted what they wanted and refused to accept less than that, despite the fact that they received more than they deserved in the first place. I'm glad to be with kids and adults who see the world head on and are willing to take it as it comes, rather than always trying to find a way around it; I'm glad to see the spark in a young African American boy's face when you tell him he can indeed go to college. I live for that now and feel like it's what I should have been doing before.

It takes time to learn these things--but better late than never.

High School, College Admission, and Class

2008-08-30T12:36:00.005-05:00

The following post is a book review I wrote for the NACAC online book review section. It was published in August, 2008.

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
By Peter Sacks
University of California Press
$24.95, 373 pages (incl. notes and index), hardcover

Reviewed by Willard M. Dix
Executive Director, College Access Counseling

The college admission Petri dish grows many strains of the American Dream. Mixing aspiration, class-consciousness, education, social and cultural expectations, adolescent psychology, family dynamics, and financial complexity, it produces wildly varying results. Until recently, the formula seemed simple: “merit” plus financial wherewithal plus extracurricular prowess equaled entrée into the hallowed halls. But social and cultural awareness over the last 30 years has shown that formula to be more complex than once thought, and its effects more pernicious than the Dream would dictate.

In his new book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, Peter Sacks looks at issues of class using the high school to college nexus as his laboratory. Combining solid research with portraits of young people and one educator struggling against class–bound issues, he asks us to consider that issues of class, as much as of education, have a significant impact on those striving to better their circumstances in American society.

Crashing the party
Sacks argues that “class is the grand organizing principle of American education” and as such it works against those not already in the middle- or upper-middle classes. He challenges us to rethink the simplistic assumption that education by itself is a way for non-elites to enter the middle class. Educational “standards,” for example, often cater to those already capable of meeting them, rather than encourage others’ achievement. As a reverse example, he profiles Oceanside High School’s Dayle Mazzarella, “a dangerous man,” who developed a successful program that opened advanced courses to students once considered incapable of succeeding in them. Sacks calls the San Diego teacher someone who is “crashing the exclusive party that American higher education has become” because he dares to assume that non-elites can achieve the same success of their more privileged peers if only they are challenged and supported properly.

Public and Private Commitment
Although this portrait and others in the book help bring the theme of class and education into focus, they are not as compelling as Sacks’s look at how higher education seems to be becoming more, rather than less, a bastion for elites and more adept at serving private, rather than public (read society’s) interests. He notes that “a mere three percent of the freshmen enrolled at the nation’s 146 most selective institutions came from the lowest socioeconomic quartile” in a 2004 study, while “ almost 75 percent…came from the highest…quartile.” In another, it was found that “one’s social background —particularly one’s father’s education —proved to be just as powerful as academic merit in predicting the selectivity of the college one attended,” and that, in fact, that power has doubled over the years from 1980 to 1992.

At a time when a great deal of college rhetoric focuses on serving more lower-income and first-generation students, the facts seem to indicate otherwise. Sacks quotes a recent study contrasting university endowments with the number of students receiving Pell Grants on campus: Many of those with the healthiest endowments had the fewest Pell recipients: Harvard (6.8 percent), Princeton (7.4), Washington University in St. Louis (8) and Wake Forest (7) being among them. Even more unsettling are the records of state institutions, designed specifically to provide education for the public good. He finds that the University of Michigan, for example, while increasing its overall prestige through greater selectivity and claiming to pay more attention to “socio-economic diversity” actually slashed its Pell Grant enrollment in half between 1992 and 2002. It and other similar institutions seem to be abandoning their commitment to the greater good in favor of chasing institutional prestige, a worrisome development that threatens their social role as developers of the middle class.

At the gates
Sacks believes that we should work harder to make American education the leg up to the middle class we envision it to be. He celebrates the “rabble rousers” and “gate crashers” already doing that work and in the final chapter makes a few suggestions for action that would bear much more development. Tearing Down the Gates is in fact more polite than radical, spotlighting the intersection of class, privilege, and education and prodding us to a wider consideration of how they ought to work. The battle has not yet been joined, but, as Sacks notes, “for any educational reform to really happen…America will have to confront its class problem.” By putting high school education and college admission in this context, Sacks has significantly moved that discussion forward.

What's Your Pedigree?

2008-07-28T14:39:00.003-05:00

A recent series of postings on the NACAC e-list chewed over the propriety of a white South African in the U.S. checking "African American" on the college application "ethnicity" box. It was determined that she could possibly call herself a White African American, which manages to be insulting and logically twisted on so many levels it's hard to know where to start. Further discussion revealed that counselors have also had to deal with issues of apparently white students "actually" being black (by virtue of the "one drop" rule, I suppose--seems almost medieval though). Others noted the various dilemmas of those living abroad who aren't sure what ethnic box to check, some less legit than others. I recall from my Amherst admission days the well-to-do Jewish students living in Argentina (mostly descendants of refugees from Nazi Germany) who wanted to call themselves "Hispanic."

I'm a naturally suspicious person, so I see most of these inquirers as trying to get permission to game the system, that is, presenting themselves as African American or Hispanic in order to reap the benefits colleges bestow on those groups as a result of their histories and conditions in the United States. In the ultra-competitive environment of college admission, this sneaky attempt to piggyback on well-intentioned college admission policies seems only natural if repulsive. But rather than blame the hopeful perpetrators, perhaps we should look at the system that encourages this behavior.

In 19th-century New Orleans a highly complex system of classification sorted African Americans into categories depending on the supposed ratio of white to black blood they possessed. There were quadroons (one quarter white) and octaroons (one-eighth white) and others with varying degrees on either side. This system translated into, or rather, paralleled, an equally complex social/class system that tried to assign everyone into a very specific slot within New Orleans society. (Wealthy white men often had two families--their legitimate ones, with wife and children living in the American sector of the city, and their "illegitimate" ones in the French Quarter, with perhaps an octaroon wife and their mutual children, who were often well-cared for and educated.) Naturally, this complexity created a vast web of social interaction and relation nearly impossible to sustain.

We seem to have reached a similar point in our attempt to classify the racial characteristics of an increasingly interactive population. When one has to ask a question like "How black is she?" perhaps it's time to revisit the whole concept of racial classification (at least in the area of college admission) and replace it with a social/class based system that may be more useful.

Although the question "How black/Hispanic is he?" (and its variant, "Is she black/Hispanic enough?") seems crude, it is often simply another way of asking, "Does this applicant embody the characteristics we expect to see when we see a black/Hispanic applicant?" To upack the question even more: "Is this candidate sufficiently disadvantaged/culturally different/needy to meet our criteria for creating a diverse class?" Of course, this line of questioning is based on stereotypes when you work at a highly competitive college. Even though you do it with the best of intentions, you are asking these students to conform to the idea that black and Hispanic students are disadvantaged, etc.

As long as students who have checked the box "African American" or "Hispanic" (or any other similar boxes) conform to the idea we need to have of them, there aren't usually problems. Difficulties arise when, for example, a black student raised at a New England boarding school by two black faculty members has a below average academic record and a lackluster involvement in any other activities. What should take precedence, her race or her accomplishments? Should someone who's had every advantage but not really done much with them be given a boost because of her race? Conversely, how should one respond to the comment of an (African American) admission officer who contends that a straight-A, high testing lacrosse player "isn't black enough?"

I believe these absurdities could be drastically reduced if we asked every student to live up to or exceed the best standards of his or her environment, regardless of race or ethnicity. Instead of asking for an essentially meaningless characteristic (skin color in relation to academic potential), it's far more relevant and useful to ask for a student's economic/social background. Doing so can provide much more important information when trying to assess how a student will do in the college environment. Quality of education, determination in the face of adversity, willingness to persevere, and leadership can fill out a great deal of a student's application. We already try to put students in conext, why not expand that idea? Relying on ethnicity as a prime factor only encourages us to deal in stereotypes that lead to fatuous conclusions.

So to all you "white African Americans" and others of similar ilk-- we're on to your game. Stop trying to take advantage of our colleges' good nature! And colleges, look into dropping the simplistic race/ethnicity check boxes and replacing them with deeper and farther-ranging questions that can help you better assess a student's potential membership in your community. It's more complicated but in the end will probably be more compelling. In this age of globalization and increasing interaction among races and ethnicities, there seems to be less and less justification for keeping rigid divisions in place.

Schools as Consumerist Gulags

2008-06-25T13:43:00.004-05:00

The Chicago Tribune reported the other day that a local 12-year old won a car for perfect school attendance in the past year. Aside from the absurdity of giving a car to someone not old enough to get into a PG-13 movie, there's also the insanity of rewarding students for simply showing up, not only with cars, but also with iPods, computers, and other game show prizes. But it's also the logical extension of an increasingly commercialized school culture, with students as captives programmed to be better consumers and contestants, not better or more educated citizens.

Chris Whittle began the process in earnest with Channel One, the program that gave schools new media equipment in exchange for forcing their students to watch commercial-laden "news" programs at the beginning of each day. The schools, starved for the equipment, thankfully agreed, figuring that a few minutes of Lucky Charms wouldn't hurt. But it turned out to be the camel's nose under the tent: Now we have schools (including colleges, making the line of continuity complete) with exclusive contracts with Pepsi or Coke, scoreboards funded by companies, and big ads and electronic boards in hallways extolling the "virtues" of this or that product.

More insidiously, some textbooks have begun using Oreos and other products as part of math and other exercises. Students, surrounded constantly by importunities to buy outside of school, are now constantly bombarded with similar messages in a space that should be safe from mind control, the kind that knows you have to "reach 'em young" to create brand loyalty. As a result, no matter what schools are actually teaching, they've also become accomplices in the drive to turn students into pure consumers and celebratory narcissists.

So what's wrong with giving a kid, even a 12-year old, a car (or anything else for that matter) for loving school enough to come every single day? Isn't that what we want kids to do? Well, yes and no. In the first place, CPS statistics show that school attendance is already at 91%, so how is this prize going to make a difference? Secondly, although the young lady is a good student, isn't it likely she went to school on several days when she wasn't feeling well, thereby putting others at risk? How do we know if she didn't send other kids home with a cough, destroying their dreams of a car for themselves? Third, if a reward must be awarded, shouldn't it fit the effort, just as the punishment should fit the crime? A gift certificate, maybe, or, if you want to spend the money anyway, what about something that doesn't depreciate the minute it's possessed, like, oh, a college scholarship fund? Not glamorous, and definitely not what consumers want to see.

Finally and perhaps most destructive, though, is the way that a prize like this ends up chipping away at the behavior it's designed to reward. In his book Punished by Rewards, Alfie Kohn makes a persuasive case against rewards far less odious than a car for perfect attendance. He writes, "A reward, by definition, is a desired object or event made conditional on having fulfilled some criterion: only if you do this will you get that." So there is an element of coercion even as the reward is presented. Furthermore, rewards can evolve into an inversion of their intent: Students end up saying, "I won't come to school regularly UNLESS I get a car/vacation/ iPod" and so on. The actual value of coming to school and doing well is overshadowed by the prize and what should be most important--the trip--becomes just an impediment to getting the prize.

Kohn writes that "Rewards are not actually solutions at all; they are gimmicks, shortcuts, quick fixes that mask problems and ignore reasons. They never look below the surface." Later, he writes, "Our objective is not really to succeed at the task at all (in the sense of doing it well); it is to succeed at obtaining the reward." So giving a kid a car or a vacation or an iPod doesn't really have any short or long term value except to glorify consumption at the expense of education. Going to school becomes simply the obstacle to a reward, not a reward in itself. Turning them into contestants won't make them good students or good citizens; it will simply test their ingenuity as they try to figure out how to get the most reward for the least effort. (This is not a criticism of students; it's something we all have the capacity for.) Summarizing his chapter "The Trouble with Carrots," Kohn writes: "Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards."

After a lifetime of imprisonment in a system that is no longer truly publicly supported but instead is "sponsored" by corporate interests, can we wonder why our children come out of the system focused on easy acquisition and endless consumption instead of rational choice and intelligent participation? When even colleges and universities have adopted "branding" as a way to make themselves heard, we can't be too surprised that traditional avenues of civic participation and community loyalty have fallen by the wayside. When we're taught to love a car or a shampoo more than another person, is it any wonder that those released from their long indoctrination have trouble making friends in person or creating fulfilling lives? Unless they have something to buy or consume, there's no other reason for being, is there?

Doonesbury Said It First

2008-06-20T14:52:00.004-05:00

A few years ago, Doonesbury ran a series where Walden College strove to top the U.S. News and World Report "Best Colleges" list by not accepting any of its applicants. Since it had the most exclusive acceptance rate as a result, it shot up the list and reaped the reward of having even more students want to apply.

I sometimes suspect that the Ivies and other mega-competitive colleges and universities are headed for the same zero percent admission: Every year, the acceptance rates go down, from 12 to 9 to 7 percent and who knows what's next. It's like looking at an asymptote, heading for zero. It seems to have become a perverse mark of excellence that a college or university can brag about how many students it doesn't take while at the same time sheepishly letting future prospects know that they could have filled their freshman class many times over with the high quality applicants who were ultimately shown the trap door.

And every year I wonder what the point of all that is. The competition among colleges for numbers rather than quality and appropriateness builds unabated, with everyone trying for that magical 0%. It would be so amazing--the most exclusive college in the country!!!

What's also amazing is how no one on the application side seems discouraged by those numbers. Many of my former advisees would scoff at the competitiveness, assuming that they would be among that 7, no 6, no, maybe 5%. Everyone, especially the enormously pampered and privileged, thinks that. Parents often even moreso. The lure of the club with the velvet rope and the enormous bouncer with a suspicious bulge under his left armpit continues to transfix and entrap the "bridge and tunnel" crowd, to borrow from New York City's contemptuous name for those from New Jersey and Long Island, the ones who dress up but can't disguise their essential inferiority and non-elite status. Even if they've got it, they somehow didn't get on the list. "But we know the owner!" you say. "Too bad," says Bruno, "Take a hike."

Although I never advised a student NOT to apply to the 0% club, I used to refer to the low acceptance rate as a way to inject some reality into the conversation. It almost never worked. Even at 7%, students would still think they had a fighting chance, and their parents would criticize me (sometimes to my face, but more often behind my back) for being too "negative." Well, what would a positive spin on that be? I floundered until I read a medical study that found that patients who were told they had a 10% chance of coming through an operation OK would nearly always take the chance, while those told they had a 90% chance of having something go wrong almost always passed up the opportunity.

So I changed my tactics and told kids and parents that Ivy U. had a 93% rejection rate. I can't say it worked in every case, but I did detect some sobered looks and a willingness to widen the list in more than a few instances. They still thought I was being negative, but I figured reality was better than fantasy, or at least that it was my responsibility to be realistic and not feed the fantasy. (Again, that often didn't go down well with my over-educated, under-socialized parents, who couldn't fathom that their sweethearts would be turned down by anyone.)
Now that U.S. News has deflated the importance of the acceptance rate, perhaps colleges could let up a little, not in the sense of letting more kids in (although kudos to Yale for actually planning to do just that) but perhaps by not encouraging everyone to apply no matter what the actual probability of their being accepted is. If you have a 7% acceptance rate, do you really need to keep telling kids to go ahead and apply if they have dismal grades and scores but a great backhand? Or nothing much? Are you really aiming for 5% or less? It just distorts your own reality. And where's the harm in letting an obviously unprepared student know well ahead of time that he or she might want to try another school?

A forty percent acceptance rate seems to me like a good low end figure for most colleges. Let students select themselves out more as the University of Chicago has encouraged for years by challenging students to write essays in response to wonderfully crazy essay topics. The students stopped by those essays are clearly not U of C material. The same goes for schools like St. John's, who aren't afraid to say that if you don't like the "Great Books" format, then don't apply. If colleges let students know more in advance that maybe your institution isn't for them, see if you're not happier around May 1 when the students you've chosen are more likely to have also chosen you and not hedged their bets at ten other schools. The "courtship" phase could be more reality-based instead of fantasy-based, and Walden College could return to its former comfortable obscurity.

Successful Victimology

2008-06-16T11:04:00.003-05:00

Two years ago, a student named Jian Li was rejected at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT despite stellar grades, scores, and so on. He was accepted at Yale and Cal Tech, and matriculated at Yale. But for what he says were "kind of arbitrary" reasons, he decided to sue Princeton for racial discrimination, claiming that it rejected him because he's Asian American.

Well, boo-hoo, Mr. Li. First of all, what harm have you suffered? In your own mind, perhaps you saw yourself as a Tiger and not an Eli, but that's not relevant. You claim to want to make the case for Asian Americans, but if you look at the Ivies' acceptance rates (7.2% this past year) you'll realize that everyone is "discriminated against" no matter what their makeup or grades and scores.

This is old news now, I guess, but it reminds me of the U of Michigan cases and others where students sue because they aren't accepted, basing their cases on anti-discrimination principles. But that's what college and graduate school admission is, isn't it? It's all about discrimination, if you remember to think of its basic meaning of making distinctions among many choices. And it's not the same thing as the nasty discrimination that has surrounded county clubs, board rooms and so on in ways that prevent certain groups, despite their demonstrated talents, from participating fully in society. If you don't get into Princeton and "have to" go to Yale, is that harmful?

Having been on the admission side of things at a highly competitive college, I know that admission committees bend over backwards to consider every aspect of students' lives when they apply. Unlike the bad old days of Ivy admission that Jerome Karabel describes in "The Chosen," no one sits around and worries that Jews, or balcks, or Asians are "taking over" from "decent" white kids. Just the opposite.

So Mr. Li, it seems to me, conducted a high-profile, high-gloss form of pouting, clothing it in the mantle of fighting against discrimination. By his own admission what he did was arbitrary, so what's the point? And since he wasn't really harmed in any way, he doesn't have a case. I hope by now he's accepted his fate at Yale and will be a faithful Eli in the coming years. Or will he visit Princeton occasionally to moon over the ivied walls of Nassau Hall and, Dickens-like, sit just outside the gates of the University wanting more?

Book Review: The Launching Years

2008-06-02T11:05:00.004-05:00

The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life by Laura S. Kastner, Ph.D., and Jennifer Wyatt, Ph.D.

On the heels of reading College Together (see earlier review) I picked up The Launching Years, which concerns itself with the transition from senior year to college. It makes an ideal companion to the first book, and I recommend both to anxious parents and counselors counseling them. Although the college process is the backbone of the book, its flesh and blood are observations about the changing relationship between teens and their parents during the last years of high school and the first years of college. For any parent anticipating with joy and fear the "launching" of a soon-to-be adult, this book provides perspective and reassurance. High school counselors can find some comfort in knowing more about how the college process adds to the normal stress of adolescence and why parents might tend to be pricklier than usual right around senior year.

Using a combination of clinical experience and anecdotal evidence, Kastner and Wyatt clearly limn the many factors surrounding the "launch" of a child into the world beyond the family. Specifics alternate with broader views, as in the introduction: "During a two-year period beginning with the senior year of high school, most parents find themselves confounded by unanticipated challenges. 'Why are my daughter and I fighting like cats and dogs now that she's about to leave?' a mother might ask." The broader view applies: "Vastly underrated as a complicated transition for parents and children alike, the launching years rival any two years of parenting for the formidable events they contain, the challenges and questions they raise, and their sheer emotional intensity." This balance of illustration with an encompassing wider vision makes the book accessible to everyone; its non-judgmental stance helps every reader see beyond immediate concerns to the more complex issues surrounding adolescent development.

College counselors will be pleased that the book endorses ideas of "fit" and student-centeredness in the college process. One particularly telling passage encapsulates what many of us try to communicate to our parents: "Think of the college decision as an identity decision. Throughout adolescence, young people are slowly forming and 'jelling,' a process shaping who they are, the experiences they pursue, the values they embrace, and where their passions lie--what they'll stay up after midnight to complete and what leaves them cold." The authors suggest that for parents to better understand their child at this point, relative to the college process, they might "pull out their child's school records to review messages teachers have been sending about their child as a student....Your child's record will tell you what's reasonable to expect." This exercise grounds parents' expectations and feelings about their child in external realities that can moderate unreasonable or overbearing desires. It can also enable parents to step back and see their children afresh, a significant step in successfully "launching" them. Not coincidentally, it can also relieve the counselor of seeming like an obstructionist if the parents' desires and the student's accomplishments don't match.

The book takes us through the buildup to college and through the year or so that follows. It makes clear that the relationship between young person and parents is changing, and that it takes some careful self-examination on the parents' part to understand and accept that. Particularly interesting is that Kastner and Wyatt acknowledge the emotional events on both sides of the equation: the child who becomes hostile because she's afraid to leave and the parent who becomes distant because he doesn't know how to accept the fact. College counselors will be glad to hear that they also address the issues of maintaining boundaries head on: "The ultimate challenge for many parents during the application process...is to establish firm boundaries between parents' personal feelings and responsibilities and those of the senior. Parents would be wise to deal directly with their own anxiety and to limit 'leaking' that can burden the senior's own load, which is probably overwhelming, although rarely verbalized as such."

By focusing on the family dynamic rather than the senior alone, the authors humanize the college process, providing clear, accessible descriptions of the various phases that the participants encounter as a child prepares to enter the world. The book's observations are often amusing and revelatory even if the situations themselves are common. One section notes that "parents contract senioritis, too." "The compulsion is for parents to work overtime to put finishing touches on their children before leaving home. The more their child displays the symptoms of senioritis, the more parents harp, wondering whether their child is ready to leave at all." After all, their parenting skills are on the line.

The second half of the book deals with the first year of college, discussing how to parent from afar, including how to deal with the "dump" phone call ("I hate everything...") and other issues related to fear of the unknown, loneliness, and so on. Also revealing is the chapter about when the fledgling returns to the nest after having been at college. What rules and roles are still relevant? What has to be modified? Can your college student bring home a boy/girlfriend and insist on sleeping in the same bed? What about curfews? It also talks frankly about issues like binge drinking and sexual activity in college, urging parents to be firm in their values while acknowledging their children's development of their own values. The idea now is not simply to impose or dictate, but to make parental expectations clear while leaving room for the adolescent to make his or her own decisions. This is a tough line to walk, but the book does a good job illuminating it. One passage sums up the aspects of freshman year that parents have to think about developmentally: "Many young people do an about-face in college. Teens who distanced [themselves] from parents in an exuberant way in high school may seek greater closeness; those who were under their parents' wings may push away. Whatever new trend emerges probably reflects their developmental needs, along with issues presented by the college setting."

Written for the lay person and appropriate for counselors and parents alike, The Launching Years provides plenty to think about and discuss. Its refusal to judge behaviors while outlining them clearly is one of its strengths. Kastner is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington who has lectured on adolescence and family behavior. Wyatt, a Seattle-based writer, has written numerous parenting articles. They have also collaborated on another book, The Seven Year Stretch: How Families Work Together to Grow Through Adolescence. By recognizing that everyone has a stake in the maturing process, they've provided a clear understanding of how everyone can also benefit from its sometimes troublesome phases.

Eternal College Marketing and the Consumer/Student

2008-05-10T14:40:00.004-05:00

Last week I attended the IACAC conference in Itasca IL. It was congenial as usual but one of the presentations touched on a topic I've been concerned about and writing about for a while. The session's title says it all: "From Here to Eternity: The Endless Application and Decision Process." But it doesn't really cover the issue to the depth I think it should or could have. The college process has become harmfully extended, and that's the real problem: As colleges and universities strive ever more mightily to keep their beds full, they are damaging the very resource most valuable to them and to society at large: prospective students.

Most people involved in the college process know that it seems to be getting longer and longer, starting earlier, becoming more complex, and inspiring more anxiety. On the other end, after colleges' decisions are made, students and families obsess over which college or university to choose (assuming they have a choice), trying to make a flawless decision the same way a coffee-crazed fashionista might obsess over the construction of a half-caf double shot soy milk latte with non-fat whip. The IACAC session was clear in describing the process but left me stranded when it came to reasons for it, what can be done about it, or even why it's an issue. The session looked at the college/student/high school/counselor relationship in a vacuum, concerend only with the admission and decision-making processes themselves, and didn't offer any possible cures besides adhering to NACAC guidelines and being nice to each other.

In an ever-widening search for more and more applicants, colleges have adopted marketing tools and strategies (often with the help of outside firms, one of which I am ashamed to say I once worked for) from the world of commerce. In small doses, things like glossy viewbooks, posters, helpful or imploring letters to juniors and seniors are harmless and can provide information to students just starting to learn about colleges. But as the session presenters noted, the process has stretched from perhaps a 17-month jog to a 34-month or more sprint through the psyches and aspirations of teens and their families.

In his book "Consumed" Benjamin Barber talks about how companies create "first order wants" that are not necessarily what we should want. They plant in us the feeling that we need to have a certain soda or appliance regardless of whether it harms the environment or if we really need it. ("Second order wants" are those that are really necessary or that serve a social/societal need.) Marketing is designed to rev up our first order wants because we have become a society dependent on consuming, not producing. (If you doubt that, recall that President Bush told everyone to go shopping when he finally addressed the nation after 9/11.) So we learn to "need" goods and services not because we actually need them but because we want them and we are told we want them.

College marketing works along these lines now. Glossy images, lifestyle-oriented photos, cheerful students under trees, and so on, are less about offering an education to the student than presenting a magical realm of happiness and success to the consumer. (I wrote about this a long time ago.) Inculcating that desire earlier and earlier in teens and their families creates the "need" for college as a consumer good ("first order") rather than as an eventual public good ("second order). It gears the consumer of college (I almost said "education" but more in a moment) to think that college = my personal happiness (and ideally for the college, THIS college = my personal happiness). So the relationship comes to be defined as college/consumer not college/student.

One might say that colleges have plenty to say about education in their viewbooks and brochures, and one would be right. However, it takes a great deal of parsing to draw that information out from the cheerful descriptions of comfortable residence halls, helpful professors and the massive extracurricular opportunities available on campus. None of this is in itself problematic, but it overwhelms the process of education central to any college or university like kudzu on a Georgia highway. Sure there are courses at this college, but look at the beautiful campus! The rainbow of students! The "starchitect"-designed gym!

Growing up in a consumer society, teens and their parents can hardly be blamed for looking at a college education as a consumer good like toothpaste or patio furniture. But in the process, education has been ever more surely demoted to being an option on the SUV, the second DVD player in the back seat. As college marketing intensifies to reach teens and their parents earlier and earlier, it actually pushes the work of high school to the background, replacing it with the need to "get on the college track" early in order to get into college.

But this isn't about being more educated; it's about seeming more educated so a student can be a more attractive college prospect. Students and their parents fight for AP classes not for the challenge but for the transcript enhancement. As college heighten the sense of "need" they actually hollow out the educations they claim are the central part of any applicant's record. It's no secret that many who are counseling high school students these days talk about showing students how to "package" themselves for colleges. The marketing of the college to the student/consumer and the marketing of the student/consumer to the college becomes like the snake eating its tail without a clear endpoint or purpose except to get the student/consumer to the advertiser's college and to get the college to choose the "brand" of student that appeals to it.

"Packaging" emphasizes form over substance, appearance over reality. The glorious landscapes of the campus quad or the glittering accomplishments of a 16-year old who plays violin for an old folks home (at the suggestion of her independent counselor) are triumphs of packaging. The result is an expectation of glitz over tougher realities, fun over the harder work of learning. The few colleges that refuse to bow to marketing or the lure of the "zipless" class, like St. John's, where students read the original works of great thinkers and everything is required, can be counted on one hand. The rest hide the realities of real education--it's hard--behind smooth talk about professors willing to give out their home phone numbers and be on hand, it seems, 24/7.

Extended college marketing devalues substantial educational and extracurricular achievement because those things, to be genuine, need to be learned painstakingly and often through trial and error. By creating the "need" for an early start in the college process, this marketing is essentially making hothouse plants of our students, forcing them to bloom before they're ready and as a result making them more like hothouse tomatoes--better able to travel over long distances and last on the shelf, but not something you really want to eat. Marketing in this way forces students to arrive somewhere before they're ready to travel, and in the process teaches them that you only need to look like a student in order to be thought of as one. I have to think that this phenomenon is somehow connected to the complaints professors have about how often their students are unprepared for college.

Is Free Tuition Really Free?

2008-04-16T18:39:00.005-05:00

I know you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth (and surely there's a 21st century version of that around somewhere...), and I support colleges' and universities' using more of their endowments to ease the financial burden on families with low incomes. In fact, I work with first-generation and underserved students, so anything that eases their way to college I support. But I wonder about the implications of a "free" college education: By not asking a student or family to make any financial commitment to a college education, how will that change the dynamic between them and the college or university? And how will it affect the way a student values that education?

I've worked with the Daniel Murphy Foundation here in Chicago for a number of years. They help talented 8th graders from needy families attend private schools here and elsewhere by providing a scholarship and by getting the host schools to kick in most of the resrt of the tuition. But no matter how financially needy the family is, they are asked to contribute something to their child's education. This seems proper to me because it asks the family to back up its generalized support of its son or daughter with hard cold cash, a measure of its commitment. It's a commonplace that we value most what we pay for, and I think that applies here, too.

One might say that disadvantaged families are already in enough of an economic bind but I'm not talking about asking for anything that the family can't handle. The DMSF pegs its request of the family to income and families are able to pay it. It's not about the money; it's about the commitment. Since most of the colleges and universities eliminating loans and so on are in the elite crowd, perhaps their status automatically generates commitment from the families, but I think if someone comes up to you and hands you a diamond for free, you're going to wonder about whether it's stolen or a cubic zirconium. Without a price tag it's hard to gauge the value of the item. And I don't think it's unfair to ask students to shoulder some kind of debt if they really want the kind of education that a college can give. Again, not anything crushing (save that for law school or med school) but enough to keep their eyes on the academic prize.

My other reservation about the rush to give away the store is that it only benefits a handful of students at a time and only at the very point of entry to college. All that money might be better used to strengthen the educational prospects of more students from disadvantaged backgrounds sooner, so there might be a greater number of first generation and underserved students in the application pool. Right now, colleges' and universities' largesse is passive, not active: It rewards those who have made it through the American educational system but hasn't actively affected it. In a sense it validates a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest instead of attacking many of the inequities of the system at their root.

The economic might of the Harvards, Yales, Amhersts, and so on might be better used to inject life and hope into needy schools starting at 9th grade or even earlier, helping them build strong foundations for their students as they prepare for college. By taking a more active role in education, by considering themselves part of a K-16 educational continuum rather than the beneficiaries of the results of "educational selection," colleges and universities might have a much greater and more significant effect on the education of America's least served but not undertalented students. So two cheers for spending more of their endowments, but a third cheer in reserve for when colleges and universities really take up the task of improving American education where it needs it the most.

One Good Book

2008-04-16T13:35:00.003-05:00

I've just finished a very low-key, well-adjusted book concerning the college process that is a wonderful antidote to the frantic "win-at-any-cost" college books out there. It's called College Admission Together: It Takes a Family, by Steven Roy Goodman & Andrea Leiman. Unlike nearly every other book out there, it focuses on the family dynamic as students and parents approach the college years. I think if more parents read this book they'd get what we counselors are trying to tell them when we say "Take it easy."

The authors make a point of combining college process information with observations about what's happening in teens' lives as college looms. They ask parents to take stock of their children's changes and look into their own attitudes in order to make the fact of eventual separation as smooth and productive as possible. Within the many stressors of high school and pre-college life, the authors find ways to create positive moments when parents and their children can communicate better and learn more about each other.

If you're a college counselor, you know the frustration of working with parents who seem to have no idea about what their children really want or who they are. These parents insist on particular colleges for their children, or insist that you have to "chase after" Johnny to complete his applications or evern meet with you. You'll see these parents in this book but not as caricatures or objects of derision, simply as people for whom the process can be as stressful as it is for their children. It's an understanding and even compassionate book for that.

As I read the book I heard many things I've suggested to parents over the years--take a breath, listen more than talk to you child, step back and see him/her as a developing adult, and so on. Often these suggestions fell on deaf ears. Seeing it all in print can often be helpful and this book could be a great tool to get parents to look at themselves without a counselor's being the one to deliver the sometimes unwelcome news.

The book is mercifully free of simplistic remedies for things like procrastination although abundant with simple methods for dealing with them. If putting things off is a problem with your teen, review the coming week's calendar every Sunday evening; not only can college tasks be outlined, but you and your child can think ahead about other things as well at a time that's not full of anxiety and that, perhaps, comes on the heels of a day relaxing.

It's nice to read a book that doesn't have an undercurrent of frantic striving to it. College Admissions Together takes a broad view of a turbulent time in a family's life and lets you see it's possible to ride the wave and come out nicely on the far side. I recommend it highly.

The More Things Change...

2008-04-11T12:47:00.005-05:00

Acceptance and rejection letters are out for this year and the usual articles about how it's never been harder to get into college and so on have been coming out like crocuses at the first sign of spring. As I've noted before, this isn't really news, it's just a repeat of articles from the last 10 years with different numbers, and of course we always have the details of rejected or waitlisted students being astonished that they didn't get into their "dream" schools, how much the pressure is getting to them, and so on. Focusing on colleges and universities whose acceptance rates seem to be approaching zero, the ultimate exclusivity (not may idea--see Doonesbury from a few years ago), media make it seem as though legions of rejected students will soon be roaming the streets in their ragged cardigans, homeless shades doomed to walk the earth without any cozy campus to call their own.

Of course, this is nowhere near the real picture. Just about everyone who applies to college will get in somewhere; quite a few colleges even (mid-April 2008) now are still accepting applications. The whole thing is only a problem if you care very deeply about where you attend and think that if you don't go there your life is somehow ruined, destroyed, or otherwise diverted from its true course and flowering, all of which is nonsense.

A colleague and I were talking the other evening about our own college research and application processes, laughing at our callow approach to the whole thing. She and I are contemporaries, so we're talking about the early 70s, before the whole thing got really out of hand. We were both clueless, to be honest, even though we were both good students. I was head of my class at a large public high school in Chester, NJ, which offered honors but no AP classes that I can recall (not a big thing then), and I did well in the honors track, although to this day I consider calculus my mortal enemy. I had what today would be considered so-so SAT scores (no I'm not telling, although to my chagrin I still know them), and a decent although not spectacular career in the chorus and the theater group. I also worked part-time at the local pharmacy, working the counter and making deliveries all over the area.

When college came on the horizon late in my junior year (although my family always told me I could go anywhere I wanted when the time came), we had no special seminars, no offers of essay help, no test prep, no piles of glossy viewbooks, no "college counselor." I figured I'd apply to Harvard and Yale simply because my uncle, whom I greatly admired, had attended the former and taught at the latter; I briefly considered Tufts, my father's alma mater, but since he was an engineer I thought it was a school for engineers, so I dismissed it. There was no "strategizing" to it; I was just going with what I knew.

One day, going by my guidance counselor's office, I heard him call to me and ask what I was thinking about college. I told him, and he said that was fine, but had I ever considered a small liberal arts college? I asked what that was and he said a good place to get an education but smaller than a university. That seemed fine to me so I asked him to name a few. "Well, Amherst, for example," he replied. I'd never heard of it, but I was willing to check it out.

I don't remember what I knew about Amherst (it wasn't much) before I got on the Peter Pan bus in New York for the four hour ride to Amherst, MA later in the summer, but when I got off in the town center, I swooned at the New England charm and the compact yet spacious Amherst College campus. I thought, "This is what college should look like!" I walked around by myself, coming without warning on the spectacular view of the Pioneer Valley from Memorial Hill, after which I was completely overcome with desire. I dropped in on the admission office, which at the time was tucked away in the main administration building. I was smitten without having seen a student, professor, or admission office person. I asked about interviews. I didn't need one, I was told; by the time I returned to New Jersey, I was ready to apply.

The time came and I applied to Harvard, Yale, and, at random, Ithaca College in upstate New York. I applied to Amherst early decision, still intoxicated with the thought of lounging on that hill, or simply being there, reading, surrounded by nature. Hell, even the trees seemed intelligent. I wanted to ingest it all. But once the applications were in I went on with the rest of my high school life. (I don't remember what I wrote my essays on, but I do remember that I didn't get any help that I recall. My mother may have given them a quick read, but not much else--no English teacher or counselor help.)

Ithaca accepted me almost immediately, it seems to me. Harvard and Yale turned me down, which was OK by me, especially when I recalled my "group interview" at a Yale's alum's home. A group of applicants sat around a table and an admission person spoke with us after we had each had a chance to speak with one of the Yale alums who had gathered for the occasion. The home was elegantly appointed, perhaps even lavish; it seemed like a mansion to me and it made me uncomfortable. But what I really remember is the girl who said, "I understand Yale has a burgeoning film department." I made a face, probably, groaning inside at her pretentious use of a big word to impress the dean. It was then I decided I didn't want to go to Yale, although I learned a new word that day.

Amherst deferred me, making my guidance counselor, David Boelhouwer, crazy. He couldn't understand it and called to see what had happened. Turns out, you did need an interview if you applied ED and lived within 250 miles of campus. He managed to wrangle an interview for me over the Christmas break with the Dean himself, the legendary Ed Wall. I went back to campus, courtesy of my aunt, who drove me out from Acton MA in a snowfall and waited while I had my session. I remember being disappointed that Dean Wall didn't ask me anything about my grades or accomplishments; instead he asked what I was reading and I told him The Wheel of Love, a story collection by Joyce Carol Oates. We talked about that. What was even more frustrating was that I didn't even like the book, and during the whole interview I could see the snow coming down harder and harder and the light fading and it was a long way back to Boston.

Afterwards, Dean Wall took my puny hand in his massive bear grasp and told me it was nice to meet me. Despite my disappointment, I stopped at Hastings in town and bought an Amherst sweatshirt, which I resolved not to wear unless I got in. My aunt picked me up and we drove back to the Boston suburbs.

The day I got into Amherst was the only day in my school life that I cut a class. My mother, who had been in a terrible auto accident over New Year's 1973, had needed a nurse during the day, and I would take over when I got home. Consequently I was able to have a car at school. When the letter arrived, she called the school and I got called to the office. She wanted to open it. At first I said yes, then changed my mind. I rushed out of school, hopped into our VW Bug and zoomed home, where I found the acceptance letter. I celebrated a bit with my mother, ran upstairs and put on the sweatshirt, and raced back to school, in time to catch the end of my German class. Mrs. Kerekes, a stern but fair Hungarian, started to scold me, but when she saw the sweatshirt, she started beaming, and all was forgiven.

So I got to Amherst, but here's the punchline--to this day I don't think I even knew that Amherst was all male until I actually got to campus. (It went co-end in 1976, one of the last schools of its kind to do so.) My whole experience of college search and application was a fluke arising from a casual comment by my counselor. I'm sure that if he'd said "Williams" or "Union" or "Hamilton" or "Calcutta" I'd be one of their alums today. Total chance. And I'm also convinced that I owe Joyce Carol Oates credit for my admission. Even today I feel guilty about not reading everything she writes (which would, of course, be impossible for a mortal with only 24 hours a day to read...)

So back to my colleague and me sitting in an Irish pub in downtown Chicago. Her story, in its similar lack of focus on "getting into" a particular college, is very similar to mine. And yet, here we were, laughing at our ignorance and marveling at the fact that we managed pretty well in spite of it, having survived and even prospered. Our lives are good, our work fulfills us, and we have good memories of our alma maters. Yet they were accidents! When I see today's high school students sweating, and planning, and conniving, and arranging their lives so they'll "stand out" starting even before high school, I have to wonder what it is they're really doing. It's not a bad thing to want to go to a particular place, but, let's be honest, it doesn't really matter where you go to college. The important thing is what you do once you're there.

I can already hear you saying, "Well, but what about the contacts, the smart kids who attend, the best professors, and so on?" I still say, it makes no difference, and to fret about it is a stress that's totally unnecessary. The contacts you make in one place are different but the same as in another--you find the people you need to find no matter where you are. You attend classes or not, you party or not, you start becoming an adult or not, no matter where you are. And with acceptance rates below 10 percent, those big deal colleges are doing other schools a favor by making sure they have a good supply of smart kids who end up fanning out all over the country. So do yourselves a favor and think that you could probably do just as well applying to colleges randomly as you could trying to predict and insure every element.

In the long run, we can't control what will happen no matter what we do or how much we'd like to. Why should applying to college be any different? The students with the least stress were the ones who came to my office and said, "You know, I think I'll be happy wherever I go." As the Chinese say, "Be careful how you travel or you may end up where you expected to." That's the spirit!

What About the Counselor?

2008-03-24T19:23:00.004-05:00

I'm thinking now about the high school college counselor, who seems to be the Invisible Person in any hand-wringing articles about the difficulties and complexities of the college admission process these days. The HSCC, especially one in a tony private or well-heeled public school, has many masters but no real security. He or she is beholden to parents, students, administrators, college admission deans, and the process itself and if you're an HSCC and you feel that something's wrong or you're asked to do something not quite right you're in a real jam. And out you go.

I recall when my former school head was new. He made a great noise about how we were a "service" and as such we needed to give the customers what they wanted. I probably sealed my own fate about then when I replied that I might provide a service but I wasn't a servant. There's a big difference, in my mind, between being a counselor or a teacher and being someone who simply carries out the orders of others. While a college counselor has to carry out certain functions and is expected, rightly, to support his students and so on, there are also things that a counselor should NOT do, including running after students to apply to college (at least after those who should know better), reminding people more than a few times what they need to do, and so on. I was told more than once that I'd have to "keep an eye on" Johnny because he was too lazy to do things himself. Well, I have to figure that if Johnny needs that kind of scrutiny he's not ready to go to college anyway. So I failed at that one.

My point is that the HSCC brings his/her knowledge, intelligence, and understanding of kids, families, and colleges to this process and should not be treated as a doorman. We have an understanding of the complexities of the process and frankly I got tired of having people continually second guess me when they knew so little about the whole picture. Yet there was no one to whom I could lean on, since my former school was dedicated strictly to getting its students into the schools they wanted to get into, no matter how mediocre they were in the big picture. So I probably gained a reputation for not being supportive enough, and not being sympathetic enough. But, hell, I just couldn't sympathize with the mother who cried in my office because her kid had to go to Tufts instead of Brown, and seemed to expect that I should pick up the phone and make some kind of fuss. Nor could I work myself up to answer the phone on a Sunday night when a tearful parent called to say the world seemed to be crashing in because her son hadn't gotten into Harvard (this after my cautions that that would probably be the case). It could wait, really.

So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And if you complain publicly about what you consider to be questionable practices of colleges (encouraging applications in junior year, for example), you can get hammered even if you're within your rights as a NACAC member who reads the rules and has a legitimate issue. HSCCs seem to be cowed constantly by colleges, emailing me privately when I pointed out something on the listserv, supporting my position but telling me they dare not say anything publicly. That's not right. People talk about collegiality but if one side can't really protest something the other does, then the balance of power is unbalanced. Something needs to be done about that.

HSCCs should be able to speak up about issues as well as students, and they should be able to tell pain-in-the-ass parents where to get off without having to worry about their jobs. I'm not talking about just general annoyances; I'm talking about those whose expectations are far beyond reality and who are warping their children in the process. I'm talking about the colleges that continue to sneak deadlines earlier and earlier and try to exert more and more pressure on students to apply and enroll. HSCCs should have some kind of immunity from all the swirling BS that goes on when they are doing their jobs and really trying to stand up for their students in realistic ways and for the integrity of the process. We should be able to speak plainly when we have to.

I think there should be some kind of service like Consumer Reports or some way for HSCCs to report problems or injustices in a way that enables them to speak freely and openly without fear. Schools and colleges should sign on to that. I've thought about creating something like the website Stained Apron, where waiters and waitresses gripe about customers. It's a letting-off-steam site and I'd want to try something that might get some positive results, but over the years I've heard enough that I think the position of the HSCC needs to be given a little more clout and safety. Sometimes, like teachers, we have to do things we'd rather not, like deliver bad news rather than stroking egos, and we shouldn't be punished for that.

I'm just glad to be out of the ego-stroking world and in a world that can benefit more from what I have to offer. I'm glad to be working with counselors and students who need guidance and appreciate it when they get it. I'm happy not to hear the blubbering of parents who think Tufts is so inferior to Brown it's worth blubbering over. I'm glad to be released from the straitjacketed, constipated community of self-serving egos who think they have a right to whatever they wish for. Boo hoo to you.

Random notes from the NACAC Listserv

2008-02-28T11:58:00.002-06:00

1. I noticed as long ago as the 90s when I was on the admission committee at Amherst that we seemed sometimes to be asking prospective freshmen to be graduate students rather than serious inquirers interested in continuing their educations. It seems clear that this state of affairs has only intensified. I believe, although I have no empirical evidence, that this greater intensity can be connected to the increased amount of binge drinking, drug use, and so on that provide intense experience that stands in for actual involvement with life as it happens. (Self-advertising: See the current issue of the Journal of College Admission for an article I wrote as well as several others on college admission and adolescence.)

2. Several years ago I developed and proposed a "mechanism" based on the Lending Tree concept ("When banks compete, you win"). Students would put their applications into an online information "bank" and state what colleges they'd like to be accepted at; colleges would view those applications and make decisions. Students who didn't hear anything could lower their expectations and see what happens. There's more, but I think you get the idea. To my way of thinking this would put some of the control in the students' hands and enable them to focus on other things, but I know it's a lot more complicated than that. It would also take the fun of "selectivity" out of the process, of course...

3. Much of the frenzy is based, it seems to me, not on the issue of getting into college, but on getting into a particular college. The Amherst alum who called me in 1994 wanting to find a good school for his second grader so she could get into Amherst was trying to control an outcome far narrower than anyone can reasonably expect to control. (I don't know what finally happened to her--she may be at Amherst now.) If students, children, were being educated well and encouraged to make the most of their lives, instead of being molded to have particular lives, we might all be better off. (Incidentally, Jon R. mentioned AP Frank with the 17 APs-- his mother sat in the hall of their home watching him and his brother do their homework; she also couldn't understand why the HS didn't offer AP gym; and when Frank got to Harvard, he spent a great deal of his time trying to construct a social life that had been entirely missing from his life BH. An extreme tale but cautionary nonetheless.) Trying to engineer specific life results 15 or 10 or 5 or even 2 years into the future is where we go really, really wrong. That's why I've objected so strongly to recent books that have come out showing people how to do just that.

4. As colleges have increasingly become brands instead of institutions (and this is not a new phenomenon by any means--see Paul Fussell's book Class) and as the US has increasingly become a brand-name crazed country, the phenomena have merged to create the bizarre phenomenon we see before us. In this weekend's Chicago Tribune a front page story was about how pre-K and other elementary schools are harder to get into than Harvard, statistically speaking. This follows on well-known stories from New York City about similar phenomenon. And on NPR this morning a story about how schools, trying to bring unstructured time back into kids' lives (because it's critical for children to develop their own ways of working out problems and rules), are structuring ways to do it. All told without irony.

5. I'm going to let Shakespeare have the final lines here.

After hearing his daughters Regan and Goneril lavish fulsome praise on him (telling him exactly what he wants to hear) and granting them two thirds of his kingdom, Lear turns to his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and asks her how much she loves him. Her answer will determine her inheritance, as college applicants' answers determine their own "inheritance." Poor Cordelia only has what anyone with any sense would realize was the most essential love of all. And we all know what Regan and Goneril do with Lear once they have his power...

Act I, Scene i

Lear: ...what can you say to draw
a third more opulent than your sisters? Speak
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
Cordelia: Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty
According to my bond, no more nor less.
Lear: How, how, Cordelia? Mend your speech a little,
Lest you may mar your fortunes.
Cordelia: Good my lord,
You have begot me, bred me, loved me. I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honor you.
Why have my sisters husbands if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
Lear: But goes they heart with this?
Cordelia: Ay, my good lord.
Lear: So young, and so untender?
Cordelia: So young, my lord, and true.
Lear: Let it be so, thy truth then be thy dower!
For, by the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be,
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever.
...
I loved her most, and thought to set my rest
On her kind nursery.---
So be my grave my peace as here I give
Her father's heart from her!
...
Let pride, which she calls plainness, marry her.

Footsteps in the Hall: The College Admission Process as Existential Crisis

2008-02-24T22:02:00.003-06:00

[NOTE: This essay was published in the Journal of College Admission, January, 2008)

The college admission process puts adolescents in a bind: it asks them to observe and evaluate themselves before they’ve had a chance to develop a consistent sense of who they are. At a time when they’ve been trying on personalities and exploring the world of adulthood in an effort to establish an identity, they’re suddenly asked to manufacture one to the vague yet compelling specifications that colleges impose upon them. They are evaluated, measured and sorted by mysterious strangers, and asked to be “authentic” in an entirely inauthentic situation. Just as threatening, they are asked to submit to what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “the Gaze,” a pitiless stare that tears them out of themselves and forces them to “act” instead of “be.” As a result, adolescents now go through an existential crisis of identity well before they’re ready for it or even realize it’s happening.

The existential moment may come for most of us in our forties or so. We have enough experience to look back at life and wonder if there’s been any purpose to it or if who we’ve become is the person we actually are. Usually married, well into a career, with children and possessions to anchor us, we may face a sudden death, loss of a job, or other crisis that forces us to confront how we’ve defined ourselves. We may feel directionless, hollow, and cynical, unable to hold on to the things we once thought important. The film American Beauty illustrates this condition particularly well. Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester Burnham, goes into free fall realizing that, although he’s done everything according to the rules, he’s “lost something,” even though he’s not sure what it is. He feels his life disintegrating: His marriage is cold, his job banal, and his daughter a stranger to him. The world has become artificial and he sees himself as simply an actor in a particularly bad play, not as a human being. The adolescent struggling with a college application hasn’t even voted yet, but is being asked to be an actor before having become a fully integrated self.

Role Reversal
In the past, the college admission process was primarily functional and had little to do with identity development. It was simply the mechanism to reach the next step in one’s education. Through the seventies and early to mid-80s, even as the number of students applying to and attending college rose significantly, the procedure was relatively simple: Most colleges drew from their geographic regions, most students didn’t go much farther than 250 miles or so from home, and there was less concern about competition to get into the “best” colleges. Teens took their high school courses, took their tests, and took their chances, filing a few applications and going where they were accepted. The idea of planning years ahead so one could get into a particular type of college or even a particular college was little known. An application rose or fell on one’s history, the day-to-day decisions and activities pursued in high school. Choices were made on the basis of interests and needs that had to do with the student’s immediate concerns. Those choices were “authentic” in a Sartrean sense: They were immediate and not calculated, essential to the adolescent’s “self.” Students participated fully in activities and developed their personalities and characters as they went along; college followed out of these choices.

The college process today turns adolescent development on its head, creating an existential dilemma well before high school students are prepared to handle it. Rather than resulting from authentic life decisions, it dictates them, forcing students into an “inauthenticity” that separates them from their own lives. They learn they’re supposed to take AP courses, be president of a winning Model U.N. club, and do significant community service, so that’s what they do, even if they have no genuine interest in those activities. (One current book even suggests that students who play the violin find time to play in nursing homes so they can look more compassionate.) They become cardboard cutouts and assume that others are as well.

“Authenticity” as a Challenge
Up until this point, even in today’s competitive environment, adolescents (with many precocious exceptions, of course) may see their lives as confusing and chaotic but not necessarily “inauthentic.” There’s an immediacy to what they do even if it’s a short-term commitment. They live essentially and for the moment. As adults we see this when our children do impulsive or reckless things: They’re fully in the moment, not considering the long-term consequences of their behavior. The college application process, however, asks them to reach a conclusion before they’ve had a chance to have a “being.” They’re asked to define themselves before they’re capable of doing so, bringing on a crisis that challenges their sense of who they are. When Lester Burnham is asked by a consultant to write out a job description (read “college essay”) for himself he realizes his days at the magazine are numbered. Being forced to contemplate himself sends him over the edge. Asked to do so by colleges, adolescents struggle with the same angst and see the same blankness.

The college admission process tears adolescents out of an environment of relative certainty and throws them into a confusing arena that has no clear boundaries. They are suddenly asked to sum up their lives, to construct a consistent personhood they have yet to develop, and to consider themselves in the context of a larger world they have yet to fully understand. In the process they lose the authenticity of simply “being” who they are and become “performers” of parts they have not yet fully developed. Like nearly all the characters in American Beauty, they must present artificially constructed lives to the world, rather than their own realities, in order to be “successful”: Lester’s wife Carolyn is a real estate agent who has to psych herself up to meet clients (“I will sell this house today!”) and “perform” for her biggest rival; Ricky, the boy next door, pretends to be “an upstanding young citizen with a respectable job” so he can carry on his profitable drug dealing; Ricky’s father disguises his attraction to men with a brute military bearing; and so on. Even high school girl Angela (Mina Suvari), who seems in touch with her sexual power and even her reputation as the school “slut” is only playing a role to disguise her insecurity. (Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that college freshmen are often attracted to the works of Ayn Rand. I used to wonder about that until I realized that Rand’s exaltation of individual identity and fidelity to oneself is the perfect antidote to the Sartrean dilemma.)

The Dilemma of Being Looked At
All of these characters, like our adolescent college applicant, are caught in “the Gaze” of others, another element of existential anxiety. Consciousness of the “Other” prevents us from having genuine interactions, whether those others are potential home buyers or admission officers. Becoming subject to “the Gaze,” of the college admission process, adolescents’ “personhood” is disfigured. No longer able to be “authentic,” they create a shell for those Others, becoming “objects” and not authentic persons.

Sartre illustrated this quandary in Being and Nothingness. He describes a man peering intently through a keyhole at some (presumably salacious) activity in the room beyond. His intense curiosity focuses his entire being on what he’s doing—he has no consciousness of his “self” but simply is that self. For those moments he is entirely “authentic” (think of how we feel when we are completely involved in an activity we love). Suddenly, however, the man hears footsteps in the hall. He becomes conscious of another person as well as himself spying on the room’s occupants and now sees himself acting as well as actually acting. He is embarrassed, aware of the implications of what he’s doing, worried about the other person’s reactions to what he’s doing, and so on. He stumbles as he rises, straightens his clothes and tries to act “normal” but has lost the ability to do so. Even the phrase “trying to act normal” implies that he can’t really be his normal self. To the inadvertent observer (the Gaze), the man at the keyhole is “acting,” not “being.” His equilibrium has been upset and he cannot function as “himself.” He is torn from his personhood and left in a kind of purgatory of uncertainty.

Looking for the “Genuine” Applicant
The college admission process has become those footsteps, seriously undermining adolescents’ sense of self by demanding that they “act” instead of “be.” Students submit to the Gaze and twist themselves in knots under its power. It causes adolescents (and those with a stake in their success) to forsake their “authentic” selves in order to create a persona that will be acceptable to those mysterious observers. This situation gives rise to a particularly poignant irony: Colleges, saying they want “genuine” or “authentic” students, guarantee that they will get exactly the opposite. The stage is set for the artificially enhanced super-student who feels compelled to do what’s necessary to gain admission to a particular school or group of schools instead of doing what engages him and insisting that colleges judge him accordingly. Their lives become “constructed” instead of organic, less and less in touch with a reality they can readily recognize. By the time they are accepted to college they’re living a life like Lester and Carolyn Burnham’s, “an advertisement for ourselves,” and not a reality.

Holding Yourself Together
High school students thus become “inauthentic” at an early age, a situation Sartre also calls living in “bad faith.” They not only have to develop their identities, they have to be aware of themselves doing so. Appeals to “live in the moment” and “enjoy what you’re doing” in order to be accepted by a college fall on deaf ears because they know they need to do certain things and not others to “succeed.” Is it any wonder that cynicism and ironic detachment follow? Students have succumbed to the power of the Gaze and in doing so have sacrificed their authentic lives. Worse, adolescents often end up negating their own being and desires to achieve something that may or may not be in their best interests. This is more than just doing what one’s parents want, it’s an active denial of one’s one authentic existence. Knowing all this on some level, they become like Lester at forty: cynical, sarcastic, and unable to inhabit themselves fully.
In the process of acting for others rather than being for themselves, adolescents also become dependent upon the Gaze because it’s what holds them together. Applying to college implies that there is a meaning to what they’ve done so far in life, yet dependence on the Gaze turns them into people who cannot embrace the freedom to explore, discover, and take chances. They become objects, subservient to the will of others, just as the servant at the keyhole is subservient to the one who discovers him, and therefore unable to truly “be themselves.” Lester Burnham’s slavish obsession with the adolescent Angela’s “Gaze” is an adult case in point: His attraction to her and his consciousness of her consciousness of him permanently disables his ability to act rationally, leading to his death at the end of the film.

The Process and Its Products
Students going through this process think less about authenticity than they do about being accepted and looking good to admission deans. Yet it does several things that are antithetical to healthy adolescent development: It creates a situation where one’s “self” must be defined before it has been truly developed. It also puts that “self” at the mercy of others, forcing the adolescent to create an artificial rather than authentic self, leading to a feeling of acting rather than being.

We wonder why there seem to be more problems on college campuses with binge drinking, casual sex, studying, and relationships in general. While one can’t blame the college admission process for what is largely part of a social and cultural phenomenon that crosses many boundaries, one can see the whole process as a shock to the system: Adolescents previously fully involved in creating their own being are suddenly asked to create a “being” that can be gazed at before they’re ready. This acute self-consciousness, like that of the man at the keyhole, deforms their ability to behave unselfconsciously. They arrive at college not having a sense of themselves as integrated individuals, but as constructs that hold together only as long as they are “seen.” As a result, they look for ways to assert themselves meaningfully, to fill the emptiness of that construct. Unfortunately, that includes surrendering to the intensities of sex, drinking, drugs, and dangerous “extreme” behavior, all of which can be seen as attempts to re-experience a time when each moment was unique and for them alone. Thinking again about American Beauty, one can see how the sudden realization of emptiness, of having lived for the Gaze instead of for oneself, might put adolescents on the brink of despair. Deprived of a meaningful life in high school, they try to fill the void and reestablish that meaning, a situation Sartre and Lester Burnham understood all too well.

What's Old is New Again

2008-01-28T09:02:00.000-06:00

I've said it before but I'll say it again: All the articles about how this year's admission numbers are tougher than ever could have been written (and probably have been) every year for the past 10 years. I have a WSJ article from 2001 that reads like it was written yesterday, although with smaller different numbers of course. What does it all mean? Have hordes of college-age applicants been left to forage in the countryside instead of going to college? Have the numbers of seats in colleges expanded to accommodate all those new students? (We know that the actual number of bodies as well as applications has risen.) Where IS everyone??

Access and "access"

2008-01-27T10:31:00.000-06:00

Colleges and universities, as well as the College Board, like to boast about how they've widened access to college with their recruitment and testing policies. They say that because they reach out to more students (especially those from lower-income and minority backgrounds) those students are able to attend college in greater numbers. Access is the big buzz word now, with the number of minority students growing and the ranks of the middle class struggling more and more to find ways to pay for college.

But although providing more generous financial aid packages and paying more attention to non-mainstream students are fine, what really needs to be done to improve access is to actually provide it, in other words, to open the gates wider and let more students in. Just increasing the largesse you give to the under ten percent of applicants you accept doesn't improve access, it simply makes life easier for those who managed to squeeze through the entrance. Having more Hispanic students in the pool doesn't mean you've provided them greater access, just that you're allowing them to be part of the crowd. Real access means, you're going to let them in in greater numbers.

Several years ago, when Lawrence Summers was still president of Harvard, he spoke at a College Board conference about the need for places like Harvard to provide greater access to non-majority students. After his talk he took questions, and I asked, "Who are you NOT going to take so Harvard can let more of those students in?" (Clearly, if you only have a limited number of spaces, an group that gains will do so at the expense of others.) He replied, "This is why I hate Q & A!" And of course he had no way to answer, because he would have had to talk about possibly accepting fewer athletes, or legacies, or geniuses.

There are signs that the gates might be opening slightly, though. Stanford recently revealed it was thinking about increasing the size of its freshman class. Other colleges have floated the idea as well (I should say "well-known" colleges; the ones who always have the masses mobbed outside the gates) and this is all to the good. Even though the actual number overall is minute, the discussion is a good one if it centers around how these top of the pole colleges (as in being on top of the totem, or prestige, pole) can provide true access, i.e., entry, to their campuses for non-mainstream students. The idea should not be just to reshuffle the positions among the already-privileged but how to make room for deserving students with fewer advantages. I look forward to the debate.

Mobbing the Ark

2008-01-25T09:06:00.000-06:00

The colleges and universities we always hear about (Ivys, Little Ivys, etc.) as well as lesser-known colleges are reporting record numbers of applicants this year. Amherst has a record-shattering 7,500 apps; when I was an admission officer there in the 90s we were amazed when we broke 5,000. It does seem like quite a maelstrom of people rushing to get on board.

But I can't quite figure something out. Many schools are saying that their applications are way up because Harvard and Princeton and UVa gave up their early admission plans, so all those students who would have been accepted (and presumably attended) are now flooding other schools with their applications. However, the number of students who would have been accepted early at these schools is so minute I can't see how they alone would account for the rises in applications. So we can say that all students who would have applied early at those schools are making multiple applications to many more schools. Fair enough, but I still can't see how that accounts for the mobs of applicants. Harvard and Princeton account for a tiny fraction of overall college applicants each year and an almost microscopic number of acceptances. So what's really happening?

If Johnny Jones with his 4.0, perfect SATs, and world-beating resume applies to Harvard early admission and gets in, then he's 99% likely not to apply anywhere else. Fine. Now there's no EA at Harvard, but he's still a world-beater, so is Harvard not going to take him? Well, he doesn't know, so he sends out maybe 10 applications instead of just the one that would have gotten him into Harvard early. OK. Now let's say Harvard used to take 1,000 applicants early and 900 of them committed. And let's say that without EA all those 900 submit 10 applications instead of 1; that's 9,000 more applications all around (and probably only to the other Ivys, etc.) That doesn't account for the rises at the other schools or those lower on the prestige pole.

So I still can't account for all the extra applications except to say that students must be applying to a larger number than ever before. Combined with a larger population, that could make sense, but it still doesn't feel right, because except for the truly desperate, I don't think most students submit more than 5-7 applications on average. And those are usually the ones aspiring to go to the top of the pole colleges.

So while I'm sure there are more applications being made to more schools, I'm not sure Harvard, Princeton, and UVa's getting rid of early programs has anything to do with it.

What Courses Should I Take?

2008-01-10T12:31:00.000-06:00

The question came up often when I was an admission officer and even more when I was a high school college counselor: "What courses do I need to take to get into college?" The variant of this question is, "Is it better to take AP and honors courses and get Bs or lower level courses and get As?" Every college representative has the same answer(s): Take the most challenging courses you can and do your best in them; we'd like to see you take AP courses and get As. (Cue courtesy laughs...)

As far as they go, these answers are truthful. Colleges want to see that students are challenging themselves and demonstrating how serious they are about their academics. This is really true for every school of whatever "ranking." No college wants to have layabouts on campus just taking up space in class, if they decide to attend at all. But there's more underlying those questions that complicates the answers and muddies the motivations of the questioners.

Most of the time, the courses questions come as much from parents as from students, and what they're really asking is, "What do I (or my child) have to do to get into YOUR college?" It's a question that tries to suss out the secret formula that will ensure entry into a particular college, not to just any college. In the world of strategic planning, it takes every ounce of data to put together a (hopefully) unassailable application to the Oz college.

Clearly, the jokey get-an-A-in-AP answer doesn't really cut it, nor should it. The cruel fact is that a student can fit a college's profile to a T or even better and still not be accepted for any number of reasons. Those reasons may not even have anything to do with academics. So the search for an answer to these course questions is always futile. Any answer you get begs the question and leaves you no more in the know than before.

These questions also betray a stunning misunderstanding of academic work, seeing it as simply a stepping stone to college, rather than an activity that may have intrinsic value. This attitude degrades a student's high school performance, no matter how good it is, and deflates even the best student's sense of worth. Trying to connect taking certain courses with admission to a particular school turns the whole enterprise into a scramble for position as you claw your way up the ladder of "success." It also encourages that utilitarian thinking to persist through college: Taking only the courses necessary for a good grade or for the best overall GPA.

Notice that I said admission to a particular school in the preceding paragraph. Going about things this way is a virtual guarantee of failure and frustration. However, if you can let go of the desire or need or obsession to attend a specific institution, you can immediately breathe more easily and go about your work with a lighter heart and a less worried mind. If you simply do your best where you are, all the while striving to challenge yourself and improve, you will actually have plenty of colleges to choose from and you'll be more satisfied in the long run. If you're willing to attend any school that's appropriate for you and that you believe will help you develop your talents, then you can relax and focus on the present, not on some uncontrollable future. Students I've worked with who have adopted this attitude have been immeasurably happier than those who stake their performances on getting into Oz College. Ironically, getting in often leaves those latter students feeling empty and dissipated, while the former wind up confident and happy, knowing that they'll be able to take advantage of any opportunities that come their ways.

I've often said (not to my former audience of insecure, status-anxious, controlling parents) that the best way to deal with college admission is to forget about it. Taking a Zen-like approach really makes more sense than agonizing over every detail scheming to get into the "right" school. Live in the moment, enjoy your activities, don't do anything you don't feel committed to, and ask colleges to accept you as you are, not as you think they want you to be. That makes a lot more sense than stretching yourself out on the Procrustean bed of college profiles. Take the AP course if you want the challenge! So what if you get a B or even a C! Maybe you'll realize how much there is to learn and want to go further next time. There are plenty of colleges out there who will support you in your search.

The Parental Overinvolvement Quiz

2007-12-03T09:11:00.000-06:00

It’s only natural for parents to be part of their child’s college selection and application process: You’re paying for it, after all, and this is a climactic moment in your offspring’s life. It’s also one of the visible results of primary and secondary education. With few rituals left to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood, the process enables your child to relish this significant moment in the safety of home and school, with guidance from you, teachers, and counselors. In important ways, it’s also a test run for college and life itself.

But this American walkabout often suffers from too much parental involvement. At a time when a child should be taking the reins and learning to direct his or her own life, parents can unwittingly short circuit the process. They see this moment as theirs instead of their children’s, or in the name of “helping” or “preventing mistakes” they take over, situations that can cause a great deal of conflict and ill will as a child heads into the future. Anyone who has been through it knows the signs: increased mumbling and eye rolling, dark looks, eruptions at the dinner table, and a refusal even to say the word “college” or fill out applications.

But there are ways to tell if you’re doing too much and need to back off. Below is a short quiz to see if you’re letting go or holding on.

1. Do you say, “We’re applying to college” instead of “Johnny’s applying to college”?
2. Do you insist that your child apply to your alma mater or other college of your choice regardless of his/her interest in it?
3. Do you look forward to telling friends at cocktail parties where your child is applying?
4. Do you let people know your child’s GPA, standardized test scores, and other personal information?
5. Are you planning college visits with little or no input from your child?
6. Do you ridicule your child’s college choices because he/she clearly doesn’t know what’s good for him/her?
7. Do you know more than your child’s college counselor does, even if you haven’t applied or been to a college in 20 years?
8. When you have college conversations with your child do you talk more than listen?
9. Do you insist on scouring rankings lists for “best” colleges rather than listening to what your child wants?
10. Do you lose sleep worrying that your child will go to a “no name” college?
11. Do you talk about your child’s talents/gifts/abilities or lack thereof to others with him or her present?
12. Do you (or a surrogate) do all the college research, all the calling, and all the typing of request letters and applications?
13. Do you make admission interview appointments for your child?
14. During college visits, do you ask questions for your child or otherwise take center stage?
15. Do you worry that you haven’t done enough as a parent to ensure that your child gets into a “good” college?
16. Do you prod your child, even as application deadlines approach, to join more clubs or take up exotic activities like bungee jumping or spelunking?
17. Do you insist that your child begin taking honors or AP courses even if he or she has never taken them in the past, and do you berate school officials if they think that’s not a good idea?
18. Do you see college as a reward for your efforts at raising a child?
19. Do you see college as a judgment of those efforts?
20. Do you interpret your child’s college choices as a comment on you as a parent?
21. Have you read all the college guides, getting-into-college guides, secrets-of-getting-into -college guides, and "how to" books about essays, tests, and everything else?

If you've answered "Yes" to any of these questions, it's time to pull back and take stock because you're taking control of something that should belong to your child. Allowing him or her to take the driver's seat in the college process is like, well, letting him or her take the driver's seat. You can't do it for your child; at some point your offspring has to drive alone. You may panic that he's not taking that corner properly or she's changing lanes too quickly, but true knowledge and independence, not to mention maturity, only come with experience. If your child is resisting college planning, perhaps you're pushing too much' he may want to take his own time and make his own plans.

Naturally, you need to keep an eye on things, but stay in the passenger's seat; don't try to grab the wheel. Make suggestions, keep the nagging to once or twice a week, and remember that, overall, the college process is actually a lot more forgiving than driver's ed: despite the panic over early admission and "regular" deadlines in November and December, many colleges have deadlines that run into February and even March. Now, it may be difficult, but you may want to acquaint your child with the idea of being responsible for her/his actions, if you haven't already done so: Late applications can mean being shut out of a college or being last to be considered for financial aid. But put the responsibility on your child, don't do applications for him or fill out forms for her. Be resolute and insist that your child do the work. In the long run, this will be much better for your child's development and your long-term relationship.

Remember, it’s your child’s future at stake here, not yours. Give him or her the power to make decisions, even to make mistakes, with your support and guidance, not your direction or judgment. Take a virtual vacation and “return” only when an application check needs to be signed or you’re asked for advice. Let your child feel the thrill of controlling his or her own destiny. Above all, parents, enjoy this moment of watching your child begin the process of becoming an independent, well-adjusted adult. You’ll be glad you did.

At the Edge of Two Worlds

2007-12-01T11:39:00.000-06:00

After only a few minutes, the counselor could tell that Juan1 was a bright young man. He spoke clearly and confidently about politics, current events, and his interests in writing and one day holding elective office. His energy and intelligence had the counselor thinking immediately about a wide range of colleges, some far from Juan’s Hispanic Chicago neighborhood: Here was a student who would go places. But when the topic of post-high school options finally came up, Juan was puzzled. “You mean I can go to college outside Chicago?” he said. As the oldest of three children and the first in his Mexican immigrant family to consider graduating from high school, he had other things on his mind: How his family would cope without the income from his video store job; what his siblings would do without his leadership; and how his parents would manage without his help translating and guiding them through the complex world of American life.

Poised at the edge of two worlds, Juan had to weigh his own future with his family’s, a situation not uncommon for first generation students preparing for life after high school. Unlike their counterparts from college-going families, first generation students lack many of the assumptions and supports that make attending college simply a matter of applying, being accepted and enrolling. As they enter the college application process they must deal with academic, personal, and family issues that students from more privileged backgrounds seldom need to consider in the same depth. The idea of attending college may itself be difficult to comprehend. For those students, Juan’s question is more often, “You mean I can go to college?”

The statistics are daunting: African American and Hispanic students have only a 50 percent chance of finishing high school, in contrast to White and Asian students, with 75 and 77 percent completion rates. Only 20 percent and 31 percent of college-age Hispanic and African American students are enrolled in college; corresponding percentages for White and Asians are 41 and 60. And only six percent of low-income students earn a BA, while 40 percent of high-income students do so, and in less time. (These and subsequent statistics about college attendance come from the website www.firstinthefamily.org, a project of the Lumina Foundation.) Although there have been significant improvements over the last thirty years, first generation and low-income students still must deal with skeins of cultural, social, and personal issues that are often tangled by a lack of information about the college application process, a lack of understanding and support in their communities and families, and a sense of personal responsibility that hinders their willingness to pursue their goals at the expense of family or other obligations.

The term “first generation” often indicates a great deal more than just being the first in the family to go to college. It may include coming from a low-income family in a disadvantaged or even dangerous neighborhood. It can mean having limited English skills and attending crowded, poorly funded schools with few counselors and overworked teachers. Parents may have no understanding of “college,” especially if they come from abroad: The Byzantine American system of college choice has no counterpart anywhere else in the world (in some countries, “college” actually means “high school”). In many countries, there is only one “university” worth attending; nearly all the rest are seen as inferior, and where you go may depend nearly entirely on a school leaving test that can’t be retaken multiple times. The term “liberal arts college” more often than not simply doesn’t translate into anything meaningful or useful in English or otherwise.

Being first generation affects students well after they are accepted as well. Students are suddenly overwhelmed by a sea of privilege and seemingly effortless accomplishment. Classmates talk about what they’ll do Saturday night or which courses they’ll take, not whether they can afford to go out for dinner or buy all the books on the reading list. Angel Perez, now Dean of Admission at Pitzer College, knows this experience firsthand. He says he didn’t realize he was poor until he arrived on Skidmore’s leafy campus, having left his crime-ridden South Bronx neighborhood determined to make it out of the ‘hood. He also struggled with his cultural identity: “At school I wasn’t white enough, and at home, I was no longer a real Hispanic. ‘You talk funny,’ my brother and friends would say when I came home. ‘Why you trying to be white?’ kids would tease in the projects when they would see me return from school. I remember turning down a ride [home] from my college roommate because I did not want him to see where I really lived.” As Kathleen Cushman writes in her article “Facing the Culture Shock of College,” “These cultural tensions may be one reason that almost one-fourth of first-generation students who enter four year colleges in the United States do not return for a second year.” (Educational Leadership, Vol. 64, No. 7, April 2007)

For these students and their families, financial concerns are also paramount. Where college-going families cringe and accept the need to put some kind of financing together for their children, they seldom have to consider whether they will still be able to pay the rent or car insurance. Families struggling to make ends meet see the price tag of a liberal arts college and find it hard to get beyond it, even when told about “financial aid.” To add to the confusion, they can’t be sure what that expense will get them or their child, nor do they know that they can get free help navigating the process from the federal government and colleges themselves. Plenty of scams centered around finding money for college or getting athletic scholarships prey on this ignorance, increasing their wariness. The struggle to meet everyday obligations collides with thinking about their child’s long-term success; often, there’s no room for error, making the contest that much more critical.

Regardless of these issues, first generation students can be as ambitious and bright as their more college-knowledgeable peers. Despite what seem like overwhelming odds, they want to make something of their lives. That may mean returning to their communities to help those in similar situations, or going out into the wider world battling the problems that once surrounded them. Or, like anyone else, they may simply want to do better than their forbears did, making good on the promise of the American dream. While background can affect students’ approaches to their futures, it isn’t destiny. College counselors working with first generation students find that they need to be particularly attentive to personal and family issues before, during, and after the process.

Aside from not having any assumptions about college attendance, first generation students often have no models to look to for inspiration, either adults or peers. They must create their own paths to college almost from scratch and so need good guidance as they hack through the underbrush. Some aspects of the process simply need to be noted and brought to a student’s attention. Aliza Gilbert of Highland Park H.S. says many of the first generation students she works with don’t take the strategic measures their more informed peers do. She says, “Unless you have an outside person telling you, [these students] only take the ACT once.” They don’t realize that it’s possible to take the test (or the SAT, for that matter) multiple times. Seemingly small details like this can make a difference to a student with a good record but poor scores. Students unfamiliar with the process may also not realize that they can pull themselves out of tricky situations. Dee Holohan, now with the Schuler Foundation, which supports first generation students’ efforts to attend college, tells of a young man she worked with at St. Martin de Porres School in Milwaukee several years ago. Handsome and popular, he had done poorly his freshman and sophomore years and was convinced he could never get into college. Naturally, this assumption wreaked havoc on his motivation. “I told him that if he turned things around he could go to a good school. I emphasized that it was his choice and said if I could believe in him, he could believe in himself,” Dee says. Remarkably, he “did a complete 180°, going from Ds and Fs to straight As in his classes. By senior year he was very successful” and in a position to be accepted at several colleges.

Dee’s student also greatly improved his chances of completing college. According to First in the Family, over 75 percent of students who earn an A or A plus average in high school complete college, compared to 20 percent with a C average. Additionally, over 60 percent with two or more AP courses graduate from college in four years or less as opposed to only 29 percent of those who don’t, and, most dramatically, 75 percent of students who take pre-calculus in high school earn their BA degrees in contrast to the seven percent who do so with only Algebra 1. Aliza Gilbert tells a similar story of a young woman with Bs, Cs, and Ds her first two years of high school. Approached by Adelante (“move forward”), a group within the school dedicated to identifying and developing student leaders, the student began to think of herself as a leader and improved her grades because she realized that “teachers believed in her.” Last year she earned all As and Bs, receiving a scholarship to the summer College Access Program at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently in AP Psychology and well on her way. Aliza says she “gets it” now and realizes that even though it may be a struggle she can achieve.

Working with first generation students means in part putting aside all assumptions about what a student knows or doesn’t know about college or life after high school. Gilbert says, “They don’t necessarily see college as part of their life plan.” This in itself is a major hurdle that may take a long time to overcome. Working primarily with Latino students, Gilbert notes that girls tend to think about college when they’re younger but lose that image before they get to high school as they realize they are expected to marry and have a family; boys are expected to provide either for their family of origin or the one they make, or both. For other students, the struggle to get through high school may leave them exhausted and unwilling to take the next step. If the family is not supportive, this can lead to steady deterioration in performance and a lack of motivation, a vicious circle that can be hard to break. Although these conditions can be daunting, many counselors working with first generation students find it a positive challenge. The pleasure of seeing students take tremendous strides that will ultimately benefit their families as well as themselves can be immeasurable, and the motivation to go to college affects other areas of a student’s life as well. The struggles may be tough, but that only makes the results more satisfying. Gilbert remembers counseling a pregnant student that, with a baby to support, she couldn’t afford not to get the most education she could.

Of course, first generation students need all the information that other students do to prepare for the college process: the whos, whats, wheres, and whens are the same no matter what your background, but the whys need to be addressed more thoroughly for students with non-college families. Parents in particular may want to know why they should send a child far away, spend a great deal of money and sometimes lose a babysitter or second or third income producer in order to gain an uncertain benefit. The intrinsic worth of a college education is often not apparent to many parents regardless of background, but many may respond to several specific advantages of college attendance, as presented by First in the Family:

Over a lifetime, a college graduate can earn $1 million more than a high school graduate
On average, college graduates have lower rates of unemployment than high school graduates
College graduates have more jobs to choose from
Even a little over a year of college can increase lifetime earnings 15 percent
College opens doors and introduces students to worlds and people who can make a difference to them in the long run
Higher education helps you be a leader and make better decisions
College graduates live longer

Despite these powerful advantages, first generation students still may shy away from the whole idea of college partly because of the complexity of the college process and the uncertainty of financial aid. An uncertain future doesn’t compete well with here-and-now needs. But counselors agree that several basic techniques can help these students come to terms with the next phase of their lives, all of which, of course, are linked:

Make going to college expected, not extraordinary: Schools as a whole need to establish a sense that going to college is the essential next step for their students. This expectation can be found in the courses offered, teachers’ talking about their own colleges, students being challenged and held to high performance standards, and establishing a four-year plan to support college planning. College counselors can help by being part of discussions about curriculum and being advocates for college attendance. Creating a “college going” atmosphere in the school as a whole helps and visits to local campuses let students see what they could have if they work hard.
Make it personal: Tony Seiden, college counselor at Perspectives Charter School in Chicago, says the most important thing is “developing a partnership with both the student and parent(s) early in their high school career. Developing a high level of trust…is a key initial step in helping students succeed throughout high school.” Bringing the family in on the process acknowledges the importance of family in the decision making process, something that is often particularly important for first generation students. Aliza Gilbert says it’s easier to work with kids when they can connect the name with a face.
Let students know they can do it: Angel Perez of Pitzer still remembers the teacher who observed him intently counseling a fellow student when he was a peer leader and saw something in him that he hadn’t seen in himself. She told him he had what it took to go to college and he finally believed her. Unfortunately, many first generation students internalize the idea that they aren’t “college material.” An honest, well-placed observation about a student’s writing, science grades, or acting skill can put that student on the path to high school and college success. This method can include suggesting summer programs on college or school campuses in the student’s field of interest or that will provide extra academic preparation for high school.
Say it and say it again: Even students from college-going backgrounds have to be reminded about deadlines and forms; first generation students and their families need particular attention because everything is new. Counselors say it’s important to keep tabs on the kids and communicate information again and again in different ways. Mailings, emails, phone calls, and messages through teachers and other trusted people reinforce the importance of getting things done. But don’t assume that everyone has email, for example; as they say in computerland, always have built in redundancy in case the primary system fails.
Be present for the future: Part of the counselor’s job is to encourage students to do well in their time in high school so they can have a better chance of going on to college. Students supported in and outside of class respond to positive attention and can make huge gains in a relatively short time. Actively participating in clubs and sports as well as taking on leadership roles in high school can be beneficial in the short and long term. Counselors can build a foundation for these achievements by helping students see how being involved in school, community, and even at home can have positive long-term effects.
It takes one to know one: First generation students often do not have models they can follow as they start to gain exposure to college planning. Tony Seiden has Perspectives alumni come and talk to his students and has alums’ parents talk to current parents about what it was like to send their children off to college. He says, “Parents are good at working with each other to achieve the same goal.” At Highland Park, students identified by their teachers as potential leaders visit their middle schools to talk about what to look for and avoid as when they get to high school. Having students and parents talk to each other can build the kind of community that college-going families assume. When counselors of color visit a school and talk about their own experiences as well as their colleges, students pay attention. Seiden says, “I’ve seen students who don’t care about school, or consider college a future option, make a complete 180 after visiting with a campus rep [of color].”
Keep at it: In many ways, students are students no matter what their backgrounds. With first generation students, however, simple persistence may be one of the most important factors influencing their eventual college attendance. Angel Perez says he came to trust his counselor because she was persistent. “She told me five times to visit Skidmore before I actually went.” By repeating the message that “I think you’d really be a good match for this school” over and over, she finally persuaded him to get on the bus, changing his life. Because many students may come from single parent households, a counselor’s continued faith and attention may be particularly significant. (At Urban Prep in Chicago, for example, 94 percent of students come from single parent, female-headed households.) Gilbert emphasizes that “these kids don’t have a parent or a hired person to manage the process for them” so the counselor is a real touchstone keeping them on target. Dee Holohan and the Schuler Foundation take a highly active role with students from the end of their freshman year, including requiring them to attend at least one summer program (paid for by the Foundation). Careful planning and detailed follow-up help ensure that students don’t slip through the cracks.

Although the time and energy needed to work with first generation students can be daunting, the rewards can be immense. Seeing the first sparks of talent and interest ignite into a bonfire of energy and hope may be some of the most satisfying moments in counselors’ lives. Helping students enter the gateways to American success ensures that their children, no longer first generation college goers, will be even more likely to succeed.

This article was recently published in the IACAC Newsletter, Nov. 2007.

1 Not his real name. “Juan” is a composite of two different charter school students counseled by the author.

Mommies and Me

2007-11-21T12:49:00.000-06:00

A good friend who's a college counselor at a small private school called me a few nights ago and let off some steam about some of the parents he was dealing with. Pushy, unrealistic, and completely disrespectful of his experience, dedication, and talents in the field, they were getting under his skin more than usual, it seemed. Despite his best efforts, all too many students were applying to upwards of a dozen schools for no reason other than that they could. It was getting to be all too much and he wondered how much longer he could take it.

I sympathized but inside I was gleeful no longer to be in that position. My time with the sad, desperate, and insecure mommies and daddies at my former school came to a sudden end this year and I've never looked back. I'm relieved no longer to be working with control freaks who plan out their children's lives, ignorant adults who think that because they have PhDs or law or business degrees they know everything, haughty cowards who aren't honest about their plans for their children, and emotionally fragile parents who take their children's rejections from college harder than their children do. (In my experience, kids are far more resilient than their parents unless they've let their parents do everything for them). It must be hard raising children to be helpless, but many of these parents seem to be doing their best to make it happen.

Years ago, I had a mother tell me that if her child didn't get into Harvard he'd "be a bum" but today things are subtler and more insidious. In particular I can't help thinking about the parent who came to me this year in tears because her child hadn't gotten into her first choice college. Despite the fact that the child had been admitted to every other college to which she had applied, the mommy focused on that one school. She was devastated that her child would be forced to go to a "lesser" college, despite that fact that she had an acceptance list that would be the envy of any student in any year. She visited me several times quivering and tearing up; I wondered what she expected me to do...I reminded her of the excellent choices her daughter had but to no avail. She was obsessed with the one school that was now inaccessible. I tried to be sympathetic, but clearly wasn't sympathetic or perhaps outraged enough, since this mommy ended up visiting my colleague several times for extended shoulder-to-cry-on sessions. Perhaps she expected me to call the offending college and whip them into shape, something I wouldn't have done even if I thought I could. (And for the record, I thought her daughter should have been admitted to that school. But such is life.)

I think also of the first time I sent a report of students' successful applications to the school's director. With our new Naviance program I was pleased to be able to show him in very concrete terms how excellently our seniors had fared with colleges big and small, "prestigious" and otherwise, all across the country. After looking the extensive list over for a few minutes, his first question was, "Can you do a report on where they didn't get in?" I was stunned and not a little sickened. Despite a record of incredible success, he wanted to focus on the "failures." When I returned with that list later, he had to dig the acceptance list out of the trash.

When schools and parents focus on "failure" instead of success in this area, there's something very wrong. It's one thing if no one is getting into college or procedural or systemic elements interfere with successful admissions, but it's something else entirely when in the glow of successful applications those in charge can't see anything but "failure." To those whom much is given, it seems that much more is supposed to be added. If you have a great deal, you're supposed to have it all, perhaps. Well, I pity those people and hope that one day they can revel in their children's and students' successes instead of wallowing in what didn't happen. I don't blame kids, but I do fault the parents and schools who teach them this "all or nothing" outlook and who need the imprimatur of a "prestigious" college acceptance to validate their children's lives (and by extension themselves). they should be ashamed of themselves.

Timing Might Be Everything

2007-11-21T12:21:00.000-06:00

Last week I noticed that Christmas trees had already replaced pumpkins in various corner sales lots around Chicago, where I live. Barely two weeks after Halloween, Christmas isn't just on the horizon, it seems to be here already, and I'm already tired of it. The special quality of the Christmas season has been diluted to such an extent that it makes little difference whether you pay attention to it or not. I wonder who's buying those freshly cut trees now? Won't they be just brown needles by December 25th? One of our radio stations here has been playing holiday music around the clock since Nov. 2 and the Chicago Tribune reports today that "Black Friday, typically the busiest shopping day of the year, is losing its sway as the bellwether of the holiday season. [The] day after Thanksgiving is losing some of its sizzle as stores race to be first with Black Friday-style bargains weeks before ahead of the big day..." For those of us who feel that even the day after Thanksgiving is too soon to think about Christmas, this is one more sad development in the commercialization and commodification of a perfectly decent holiday.

The same is true with our national elections, which will have lasted almost two years by the time of the actual election, and which have been characterized by states' moving their primaries earlier and earlier in order to maximize their supposed influence on the results. I'm sick of the candidates already and wondering why they aren't doing the jobs we elected them to do instead of running around the country pandering to the people they will eventually betray. And we have our students and their parents feeling more and more that if they don't get into the college race earlier and earlier, it'll be all over before they've had a chance to fill out the first application. Harvard's elimination of its early plan hasn't inspired a trend, mostly because other colleges can't afford to lose their early numbers, which is fine. Nevertheless, stories about how even so-called "second-tier" schools are now more competitive than ever (despite that story's being at least 10 years old) seem to indicate a growing panic that is also marked by the game's beginning earlier and earlier.

It's fine to plan and think ahead, and it's fine to have some goals in mind as a student begins high school, but the rising panic to get the process started makes actually doing one's homework seem too much of an obstacle to college. It's too slow!!! It all takes too long!! Other people will get my spot!! My kid will be left out in the cold!! Days when seriously starting the college process didn't begin until senior year are long gone, at least for students intent on the name brand colleges. And the idea of taking applications casually or at least as an integrated part of the end of high school are also vanishing. (Why else are there college counselors?) So the college application season, like the Christmas season, has become not only a sadly attenuated slog but also a mechanistic performance drained of its meaning or significance.

I salute those students and parents who can resist the pressures to apply somewhere before they're ready ("I want to apply somewhere ED but I don't know where yet"), and who have the imagination and creativity to look beyond brand name schools. I salute those who won't be stampeded by marketing into making decisions that may not be right for them. I rejoice when a student says to me, "I know I can be happy just about anywhere; I just want to find a college that's right for me." Now that's the spirit!

Who Gets to Have Financial Aid?

2007-10-31T14:58:00.002-05:00

I admit at the outset of this post that I do not have children. However, I do have a niece in 5th grade and a nephew in kindergarten. Several years ago I created a 529 account for their college tuitions with Wells Fargo. I put in a small sum each month through payroll deduction and have had the satisfaction of seeing that amount grow significantly. The 529 program even has an automatic adjustment: it goes for riskier (and therefore more profitable) ventures early on, then, as the child gets closer to college, it becomes more conservative to maintain the buying power of the account. I've been thrilled to be their benefactor, not to mention watch the money grow.

As a college counselor I've always been more than a bit taken aback when middle and upper middle class parents, people who should know better, ask, when their high school senior children are in my office talking about college, "Where are we going to get the money?" There's no denying that college is expensive, with several schools recently breaking the $50K mark. College costs a lot. But I have to ask these parents (in my head, usually), "You've had this child for 17 years, did you not see this coming??" Many of the parents I've worked with over the last few years have advanced degrees, many generations of college-going in the family, and even experience teaching in colleges and universities, so surely they had some idea that their children would need tuition money when they turned 18.

It's fairly ridiculous to see a prosperous adult sputtering over the cost of college as though it were an unforeseen event like an auto accident. I feel sorry for those people. I have even heard some parents who HAVE saved for college lamenting that they'll now have to use Joanie's college fund for, well, COLLEGE! (I'm not making this up...)

I also wonder whether, as with many things, financial aid, which is supposed to be sort of a stopgap measure to help people, has turned into its opposite, a reward for not planning ahead. Families who could have saved but didn't throw themselves on the mercy of colleges and ask for help. When they get it, others see how easy it is and figure they don't have to do too much to get the prize. I realize this is overstating the case, of course: Plenty of middle-class families struggle to pay their bills and keep up with day-to-day expenses, having little margin for long-term saving. But I'm not talking about those families. I'm talking about families who earn plenty and should know better. (I've also noticed that college reps talk about FA as if it's all gift money, de-emphasizing the loan part as if students or families shouldn't have to take ANY financial responsibility for their educations. This seems fair for students from low-income families, but not for those who could have planned better. Colleges should have the courage to say, "You may not be able to afford us." And THAT, of course, goes against the ideal of equal access even as it might appeal to the "up by your own bootstraps" myth.)

With the increasing focus on recruiting first generation and minority students, I'd like to make a suggestion that might help colleges make their financial aid budgets go a little farther. It would require more financial accountability from families instead of relying on a snapshot of recent income and so on and would reward those who have planned ahead instead of those who "forgot." (Steve Martin used to do a bit where he said, "You'll never have to pay taxes again if you remember two little words when the IRS comes for you--'I...FORGOT.'")

Aside from the FAFSA and CSS and any other forms, colleges should also require proof that a family has planned in some way for college over a decent period of time. I'd say from a child's birth but perhaps that's too draconian, so let's say from middle school. It wouldn't have to be a lot, but it should represent the parents' commitment to the child's future. (Remember, it's one they know is coming, like retirement.) Perhaps for parents who have 401(k) accounts some of this can be credited to the child's college, although the 529 programs seem perfectly adequate.

I'm not suggesting that this kind of long term college saving should equal the total cost of college, but it should represent a reasonable percentage of a family's income over time and, as I've said, demonstrate a significant commitment to the eventual cost of college.

This program would certainly require more paperwork for everyone, at least at first, but if the requirement were simplified to be "every child should have a 529 account or similar" in his or her background (given a certain level of income and education) then it could be simpler. Using this requirement as a yardstick, it's probable that a good number of families would not qualify for financial aid at some institutions. Therefore not only would the colleges have more money to give to those who really deserve it, they would also have more spaces to fill with qualified minority students because the undeserving (those who didn't plan) would not be able to afford the tab.

With the need to "fill beds" paramount, this kind of proposal is probably dead in the water for most colleges. However, if they adopted the idea and agreed not to begin applying it for another six years or so, they'd give people time to adjust and think ahead. Big announcements could be made, and along with information about classes and so on they could send out suggestions about long-term saving for college. Each college could decide for itself what a reasonable financial commitment over time could be (although competition might drive that expectation too low unless there was an overall agreement about a floor of some kind) and each could be flexible, especially in the first few years. Ultimately, people would get used to the idea, and, not incidentally, the savings rate in the U.S. might rise somewhat from its current miserable single-digit amount.

I don't know how a joint announcement through NACAC or ACE or whoever would go over with anti-trust people, but it seems to me this proposal isn't about setting levels of FA but about repositioning schools in relation to their applicants and families in a way that might make everyone more responsible. I think this idea is worth debating so the vast amounts now spent on financial aid can be rewards for those who really saved and genuine help for those who really need it.