What Courses Should I Take?

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.

Earlier and Earlier

As we suffer through the indignities of a national election process nearly a year before any primaries actually occur, I can't help thinking that this pushing back of start dates seems to be of a piece with other forms of starting things earlier and earlier. High school juniors do math that was once strictly college level; they read Anna Karenina as if they were grad students; we expect them to have an intellectual maturity that is at deep variance with their physical and emotional maturity. Yet most people see these things as good. Kids are getting smarter, they say; they don't need to dwell on the basics any more; they can go right into higher level college courses because they do well on the AP exams. And colleges themselves, especially the most competitive ones, seem to want students who are closer to being grad students than undergraduates.

There's a contradiction inherent here, I think: We try to hurry kids along so they'll be smarter, faster, more talented than anyone else sooner than anyone else, yet we also drag out their lives in intolerable ways by making them super-conscious and super-burdened about what they need to do to "get ahead" in a world that's imagined to be ultra-competitive and dog-eat-dog. Watching the Democratic and Republican candidates (I even hate to call them that now) trying to rev up for a campaign that is not even supposed to take place until next year, I can't help thinking of middle and high schoolers who are pushed into roles by their parents before they're ready for them. They're prodded to take APs, pushed to be on every team, goaded to load up their resumes for that inevitable "primary" season of college admission. They begin their campaigns so far ahead of the actual "election" that they lose their freshness well before the ballots are counted. We've arrived at a ridiculous moment when people are running for office before they've had a chance to grow into the office they currently occupy, or who run when they should be doing their jobs.

An interesting side effect of all this hurry is that some schools are finding that even with high AP scores students can't really place out of the courses AP courses were designed to place them out of. They've learned "higher-level" ideas and concepts, but never had time to master the basics that would have given them the solid foundation they need to build strong educations. It's as though they've been taught a Beethoven piano sonata before having mastered scales and other musical basics. Now perhaps one can memorize a Beethoven piano sonata without knowing these basics, but even if that were the case, it would not make that person a musician. So what does it mean when a high school student can go through AP calculus BC but has to return to pre-calculus in college or has to take calculus all over again? Students become performers, not students; they memorize the tricks that will get them through school and win the approbation of parents and teachers, but then they come loose at the seams in college, wondering why they feel so empty.

Colleges, expecting students to arrive fully formed, drive some of this hurry, but at the same time lament its results. Professors increasingly do not want to teach survey courses or dinky underclassmen; they want to teach their fields and specialties to older students who presumably already have the skills they need to write and think well. But such is not the case and again we see the contradiction: colleges want to admit those who are already spectacular, but professors treat those students as annoyances once they're there. I applaud Tulane University in this regard: Radically rethinking their structure in the aftermath of the hurricanes, Tulane's president decided that full professors should teach underclassmen so those who needed that kind of contact the most would get it. It's still an experiment, but a worthy one and I hope it works.

As brain science increasingly tells us that adolescent brains are not fully formed and lack rational controls and logical thought centers, we are forcing them to be more rational and logical. We are piling on academic hard labor and wondering why we have epidemics of teen suicide and depression. The ambition (of parents, teachers, and others) doesn't fit the reality. How strange that even as we learn more about what makes teens tick, we seem to be ignoring it more and more.