Last night, an old high school buddy called to catch up. She related horror tales from the private school rat race in Washington, DC. All four of her children attend elite, private schools in DC. Think college prices. The oldest is getting ready for college and has been preparing his applications for the Ivies.
Sue said that the admissions standards for Ivy League schools are much higher than when she went to Harvard. Not only do you have to a perfect GPA and be the president of some club, you also need to be a varsity athlete, president of the class, and do some sanitized charity work. She said that her son's classmates hire a $400 per hour college consultant, who had a three year waiting list. Private tutors for academics.
Behind each applicant to Harvard is a team of stylists, who create an image of effortless perfection. Canned creativity. Canned generosity. Crammed full of key words that are statistically shown to appear on the SATs.
The new essays for college are predictable in their creativity. Here's a sample from the University of Chicago, "Don’t write about reverse psychology." “What does Play-Doh™ have to do with Plato?” You know what would be really creative? If these kids tore up their college essays and learned how to fly a helicopter for a year.
Sue said that a psychologist found that 30% of kids at Ivy League colleges were depressed. In part their depression came from working for no reason. At some point, every Type A kid has to wonder if itmatters if they get an A on test rather than a B+. Kids are working their asses off without a goal.
As Sue related the drama of private school, I kept thinking about the families that I know who are struggling to pay their mortgage. It would be nice if the Occupy people got their acts together and started to make a stink.
Apt. 11d 
The high school friend’s report matches my experience (although I am not sure that depression among college students is either significant or any greater than it ever has been). Maybe we should redistribute some of Harvard’s endowment income to community colleges.
I was thinking this morning, for those who wonder why people in the 80th to 98th percentiles of income (or even those lower down) generally don’t favor income redistribution, consider if professors at, say, BU (or even those at community colleges) would favor my scheme. Obviously they would not.
LikeLike
Income redistribution is very different from wealth distribution and a very large number of people favor only the former regardless of the setting.
LikeLike
This kind of crazy focus on college admissions is certainly true among a significant minority of students who apply to elite universities, but not true for the majority of admits at those schools. Hired help is by no means necessary. I used to work in the admissions office of an elite liberal arts college, and admissions officers have amazingly detailed understandings of the conditions at the schools they service. They expect less polish from students applying from schools where there is one guidance counselor for 200 students; less detailed letters of recommendation when class loads for faculty are hire, they know how much grade inflation occurs at different schools, and so on. Furthermore, these professionally styled applications look just like that – professionally styled. The people reading the applications can tell.
Admissions counselors keep asking parents and students to not treat college admissions like training for the olympics, but they are often dismissed. Let’s not perpetuate the panic.
LikeLike
When people zig, I zag. I refuse to get involved in the whole college admission game. However, by the time my kids go to college, it seems like everyone will be zagging too, so it won’t look like zagging to anyone but me. 🙂
LikeLike
Okay, when people say ivies, I know they usually mean Harvard, Princeton, Yale, but Cornell and U of Pennsylvania don’t require these extremes yet. And you can still pay in-state tuition at Cornell, although your majors are limited.
(But then, MIT has insane necessary qualifications, so it’s not so much the sports league and more a certain type of place.)
LikeLike
So, okay, go read: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/how_elite_firms.html
and when you come back, you’ll have an enhanced view of why they are working so hard. I would be surprised if any of my kids could get into a Top Four school, even if he worked that hard, so I’m not worrying so much. My guess is, we pop for SLACs and have baristas in the family. Oh well, the future is hard to know.
LikeLike
Here’s a question–isn’t part of the problem that with the standard basket of uppper middle class experiences, it really is hard to stand out? These kids are going to sound very similar, unless parents (and consultants) work very hard to tweak them and make them sound like actual unique human beings.
LikeLike
“It would be nice if the Occupy people got their acts together and started to make a stink.”
I’m not saying it, but I’m thinking it.
LikeLike
I’ve been doing some alumni interviews of applicants for my alma mater (an elite West Coast university), and I do have to say that the standards seem awfully high. Not only do you have to be smart and successful and well-rounded, but they expect students to show “intellectual rigor” and dedication to something. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been able to get in now, with my high school record. It’s hard, as an interviewer, to do writeups that say “this kid is great and has done a lot – X University would be a great place for them, but I don’t know that they’ve done that extra 105% that you are looking for.”
But then, part of the problem is that students are applying to so many schools these days. When I was applying to colleges, 4 was considered plenty, so you had to gauge carefully where you might fit in best, scores and grades-wise. You might apply to one school that was a “stretch”. Now, students may apply to 10 or 12 colleges, so it seems like EVERYONE applies to one or more of the top-tier schools.
LikeLike
Isn’t the goal of college to prepare you for adult life? People seem to think college is a goal in and of itself, that it’s somehow the only road to a productive and successful life. (The subtext being, if you don’t go to the right school you’ll never accomplish anything.) I just strenuously disagree with this thinking.
Some of the most together and successful kids I work with in technology went to a state school and have demonstrated what my volleyball coach used to call hustle. They have learned that college is just one step, and not even the most important one. They have also learned to persist, to constantly continue acquiring skills, to learn from your mistakes.
Perhaps the college admission folks who are looking for authenticity in these kids’ applications are in fact looking for someone who doesn’t totally buy what the colleges are selling. (AKA, they’re looking for someone with enough brains and backbone to question the whole setup.)
LikeLike
I work at one of those schools. I actually don’t think that many of our students hire people to write their essays. Some do hire tutors of various kinds for classes, the SATs, etc. I’ve heard from enough seniors to know that they are writing their own; however, they do all do things like be in fifty clubs, play 40 sports, etc. I sometimes think they’re doing too much. If Geeky Girl is there when she’s in application mode, I hope she doesn’t get caught up in the hype. It might mean no Ivies, but hey.
LikeLike
These are times when I’m happy to be raising my kids in Canada. Eldest is applying to one (maybe two) schools in the states that have caught her fancy but we’ve warned her that it is an irrational crapshoot. She knows she has an excellent chance of getting into an inexpensive and world-renowned university or two, right here in Canada. In any case, she’s a shoo-in for a tuition-free spot at my employing institution. Since she’s already planning to continue past a bachelor’s, any of those could be more than good enough. Maybe if she was aiming to go into high-flying areas of law, government or finance, the pay-off of an Ivy League education might be worth it, but it certainly doesn’t seem like that to any of us.
Poor kids: it’s stressful enough going through the high school years. Try doing that with “application coaches” and a checklist of clubs and extra-curriculars! No thanks!
LikeLike
She knows she has an excellent chance of getting into an inexpensive and world-renowned university or two, right here in Canada.
If only Canada had three world-renowned universities.
LikeLike
“If only Canada had three world-renowned universities.”
That was a little mean, but yeah. A Jeopardy category on “Major Canadian Universities” would be brutal for 99.9% of Americans.
LikeLike
MH,
So what would the one or two be? University of Toronto? McGill? Those are really only names to me. I have no idea what they are supposed to be good at, and I’m married to a Canadian.
LikeLike
Those were what I was thinking of but apparently British Columbia is good.
LikeLike
I actually love the University of Chicago questions. I had lots of fun with my essay to them when I was applying there a few years ago. They really are much more creative than any of the other essays I had to write, although you seem to think that they’re bland for some reason.
And although you kind of lumped it with places like Harvard, if you sound like an actual human being who would be interesting to talk to, UChicago will take you. I had a good GPA, but not perfect, and was never a leader in clubs or a big community service person, but they accepted me. Didn’t actually go there though, so this isn’t a school pride thing.
I don’t know I kind of feel the need to defend UChicago. They are actually a relaxed school, unlike a lot of the Ivies.
LikeLike
Now that I think of it, one of my Canadian relatives got into University of Toronto in the past 5-10 years without being anything very special academically (but she did have one very serious extracurricular).
LikeLike
I think the problems aren’t the schools — uchicago — specifically but the process they’ve developed to try to find “authentic” students, combined with the gaming of the process by those who want access.
Megan McArtle has a riff on Dave’s link that points to the problem. Roughly, subsequent levels in the process — elite firms– have decided it’s easier to use admissions screening of 17 year olds as a stand in for more rigorous screening of their own. It’s cheaper to let the universities do it, than to look for the “nest” themselves.
If true, the study does show the fear of the “1%” that underlies the admissions process. They’re to do what they can to transmit their status to their offspring.
LikeLike
“I think the problems aren’t the schools — uchicago — specifically but the process they’ve developed to try to find “authentic” students, combined with the gaming of the process by those who want access.”
As one of my husband’s mentors used to say, sincerity is everything–if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
That was a very good post by Megan McArdle. It occurs to me that it is actually rather dangerous for the American NE/national elite to depend on such a shallow academic and intellectual gene pool. It increases the chances of everybody knowing stuff that isn’t so and being hermetically sealed off from information that would challenge conventional wisdom, and hence increasing the chance of catastrophic failure. In fact, I wonder if that’s exactly what we’ve been experiencing the past couple years.
LikeLike
“It occurs to me that it is actually rather dangerous for the American NE/national elite to depend on such a shallow academic and intellectual gene pool. It increases the chances of everybody knowing stuff that isn’t so and being hermetically sealed off from information that would challenge conventional wisdom, and hence increasing the chance of catastrophic failure.”
I can’t agree more.
LikeLike
Wow, Amy P., Wendy, and I agree totally. That doesn’t happen very often.
I was thinking this morning, if you take the 200 most powerful people in government (President, Supreme Court justices, Congressional leadership, cabinet secretaries, etc.) and compare them to the 200 most powerful people in Hanoverian England, which is higher: the percentage of people with Ivy League credentials in today’s group, or the percentage of those with titled ancestry in that world?
LikeLike
Here’s something related (via Joanne Jacobs):
“When you look at poor 4th graders today they are doing better than poor 4th graders 30 years ago. But rich 4th graders are doing much, much better than rich 4th graders (over the same time period). Most of the growth has been because kids at the high end of the family income distribution level have pulled away from middle income kids, not because kids at the low end have fallen away from middle income kids.”
“The income gap between the richest and poorest families has grown over the past 40 years;
“High income families invest more time and resources into promoting their children’s “cognitive development” than lower income families;
“High income families increasingly “have greater socioeconomic and social resources that may benefit their children;”
“Income inequality has led to more residential segregation by income level rather than race, which in turns means that high income children have access to higher quality schools and other resources.”
http://www.edsource.org/extra/2011/income-achievement-gap-twice-as-large-as-black-white-achievement-gap/3257
Interestingly, according to these findings, income differences swamp racial differences and the gap does not increase during school years, but is mainly the product of the years before school. (I’m finding this a bit puzzling, because my previous understanding was that the gap snowballs during the school years.)
I’d add to the list–bright, high income people today tend to marry each other and have bright children, which would explain why the school years are relatively unimportant.
LikeLike
Because of daughter middle school issues, my mom and I got talking this morning about my HS rival, and my mom wondered what’s up with her. So I googled her and found that she graduated Yale and has a Harvard MBA and married a hedge fund manager. Can find no info on kids even though her husband has a Wikipedia entry. She’s really the only person from my school who was ambitious for that kind of life, though.
LikeLike
I haven’t clicked Amy P’s link, but the income gap finding is from Sean Reardon’s contribution to Whither Opportunity?; amazingly, nobody had bothered to try and find this out before. The achievement gap between black and white kids has halved in 40 years, whereas the gap between the richest and poorest quintiles has doubled, sharply increasing as income inequality increased. And that is the raw black/white gap, not controlling for SES.
Maria, early in the thread, is right though; my sense from talking to people in admissions at elite places is that they are pretty wise to the gaming.
That said, I bet that Katie F was admitted to University of Chicago a number of years ago under Ted O Neill, who is no longer admissions dean. It is gradually becoming more like the others.
If anyone’s interested, the Education Conservancy is at the forefront of trying to make the admissions system less insane:
http://www.educationconservancy.org/
LikeLike
AmyP, I saw the Jacobs post, too. Here we go! “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”
LikeLike
“…my sense from talking to people in admissions at elite places is that they are pretty wise to the gaming.”
Or they think they are. Isn’t it typical a con artist to make the mark feel street smart and sophisticated?
dave s.,
Indeed.
LikeLike
I know the admissions officers think they can spot gaming. On the other hand, the extended career of Adam B. Wheeler leads me to believe that they’re either deluding themselves or terminally lazy:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/9/adam-wheeler-harvard-returned-to-jail/.
He was accepted to Harvard as a transfer student in 2007, based on his application, which claimed he had earned a perfect SAT score and perfect grades as a high school student at the elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and as a freshman at MIT. In fact, he had been a good but unremarkable student at a public high school in Delaware. He had then attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was suspended in his second year for academic dishonesty.
At Harvard, Wheeler won a Hoopes Prize as a junior, English department awards, and a David Rockefeller International Experience Grant—all using plagiarized essays. His deceits were uncovered in the fall of his senior year at Harvard, when he applied for Harvard’s nomination for the Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships and was caught turning in an essay plagiarized from English Professor Stephen Greenblatt as his own work.
You would think they might have made the effort to check some of his claims, which were outlandish.
If they couldn’t determine that Mr. Wheeler was not a freshman at MIT, why should I believe they can determine who wrote the college essays? (By the way, I’d bet he stole his college essays, too.)
LikeLike
I love Adam B. Wheeler. They should put up a monument to him right in front of the Harvard admissions office, so they have to look at him every day.
“Click here for a PDF of his rather remarkable two-page resume, in which he claims that (a) he’s contracted to write several books; (b) he can speak French, Old English, Classical Armenian, and Old Persian; and (c) he’s in demand on the lecture circuit.”
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75025/adam-wheelers-resume
LikeLike
I have assisted two nieces in the past 2 years with college essays for Ivy league colleges or State Ivy colleges (I don’t edit or revise, I just write comments or questions). The essay questions are the most idiotic questions I’ve ever heard. One of Stanford’s big ones this year is about intellectual vitality. WTF is that? Seriously. I’m 38 years old and I couldn’t come up with a definition even if you handed me a dictionary.
These colleges have become so pretentious and full of themselves– they’re driving high school students and their parents mad with their requirements. I don’t look forward to going through the process with my own kids at all.
LikeLike
“married a hedge fund manager”
Was that her actual ambition, or is that what happens to ambitious women who go to Yale & Harvard? I went to a private all girls school, filled with ambitious young women. A woman, a strident feminist, once gave us a presentation in chapel (i.e. assembly, but with generic hymns, at least back then) in which she told us that we needed to learn about art and music and all that stuff, because although we probably wouldn’t have any power, we’d sleep with power and be able to support the arts.
Our mouths drop, but it has unfortunately been more true than we thought it was at the time.
LikeLike
“If they couldn’t determine that Mr. Wheeler was not a freshman at MIT, why should I believe they can determine who wrote the college essays? ”
In fact, there’s no reason he couldn’t have effectively faked an MIT transcript (which he must have done — they must require a transcript, no?). The system presumes that someone isn’t going to great lengths to fake documentation.
Plagiarizing an essay, on the other hand and I’m questioning the honor system on that one. It seems like schools have to start accepting that they can’t award honors based on work that can so easily be done by others, relying on ones own ability to detect the cheats. I think school need to bring back short format, monitored evaluations (even though I know that puts some at a disadvantage and doesn’t replicate the real world).
LikeLike
we’d sleep with power
Electric blankets?
The system presumes that someone isn’t going to great lengths to fake documentation.
So far as I’ve seen from the applicant end of things, you have to get one university to send it directly to another university. I assume taking a valid transcript would be very hard.
LikeLike
dave s.,
Now that I think of it, one difference between us and Brave New World is that in BNW, they were actually dumbing down fetuses in the hatcheries.
LikeLike
“I think school need to bring back short format, monitored evaluations”
Thank you! I spent much of the last week fielding complaints from students over our short-format, monitored evaluations of their writing (in-class exit exam) because it puts some at a disadvantage and doesn’t replicate the real world. And the reason we do it that way is because of plagiarism.
LikeLike
Blog commenting would be good practice for short-format, monitored evaluations.
LikeLike
“Blog commenting would be good practice for short-format, monitored evaluations.”
Step 1: Set your Caps Lock key to stun.
LikeLike
Has anyone been following the Long Island SAT cheating inquiry?
Why spend thousands on a prep course, when you can spend thousands on a ringer?
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/11/18/exclusive-6-students-implicated-in-sat-cheating-scandal-to-turn-themselves-in/
LikeLike
Cranberry, that case is so fascinating, in part because of the schools involved. These are the kids whose parents are ambitious for them. Failure is not an option. I wish we knew more about the kids themselves.
Just looking at the articles again, one of them says that the cheaters’ identities cannot be made known to the universities they applied to because they were underage when it happened and by law the DA can’t make their names public. So basically, these kids get away with it? Wow.
LikeLike
I would hope the teens wouldn’t be able to spend $2,500 without their parents’ knowledge. As I consider the matter, I’m not certain why it makes a difference. It’s not as if parental approval makes it any less wrong to hire an SAT ringer.
I don’t think it’s the only town in the US which has this problem. I don’t know how widespread it is, but as the parent of a kid who will take the SATs this spring, I’d like to be able to believe such arrangements are rare.
LikeLike
If you want to facilitate your own kid cheating, make damn sure he doesn’t take the PSAT, because scores are so closely tied that a big increase will ring all their bells.
And – buddy of mine went to Harvard. Said, ‘we knew who didn’t belong there’. Sounds like it was no fun what-so-ever to be out of your depth. So I kind of think it’s a poisoned chalice if you do cheat your way in.
LikeLike
It is particularly supportive scientific information for me. Thank you for taking the time to talk about this.Keep sharing such an awesome information with us.
LikeLike