Keeping Secrets

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.

What $40,000 gets you

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.

College Counselor: Servant or Teacher?

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.

Eternal College Marketing and the Consumer/Student

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.

One Good Book

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.

What About the Counselor?

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.