I have a lot of sympathies to Suzy Lee Weiss, who's op-ed about the artificiality of the college admissions racket is still getting lots of attention.
Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.
Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.
Although there aren't enough activities for kids like Ian, there never seems to be enough teenagers volunteering to help out. His swimming class is so packed with volunteers that sometimes there are more volunteers than diabled kids in the pool. Same goes with his art classes and bowling league. At the library, there are always more volunteer tutors than kids who need help.
Why? Because teenagers need stuff to put on the college resume. Some of the volunteers genuinely want to help and are awesome kids; others not so much.
Suzy doesn't want to do fake-volunteering and doesn't have a Tiger Mom to push her to do this stuff. Does she deserve a spot at Penn anyway?
Apt. 11d 
I’m dying for someone who is thoughtful about race and class issues to step up and express in the mainstream press the frustration I often feel that the college admissions and affirmative-action debate fails to take into account how the conventional “merit-based” criteria that we assume to be fair systematically exclude poor and working-class people of every racial group, including whites.
But alas, if such a person is not the younger sister of a former editor, and if that person’s childhood home was not previously featured in the paper, I guess they simply need not apply.
Here’s me on why Ms. Weiss does not deserve a spot at Penn:
http://husheveryone.blogspot.com/2013/04/you-say-satire-i-say-grow-up.html
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I don’t approve of the leg up that Penn gets you. I also kind of expect it won’t last long. Too many kids who worked tirelessly to get into second tier schools (and by that I mean schools which rank in the USNWR hierarchy just below the Golden Ticket Harvard-Yale-Dartmouth-Stanford-Princeton level) are finding that the laws of gravity actually apply to them, and they need to take jobs which they don’t actually like very much and may not even get those jobs. This is feeding back into the willingness of parents to pay for those schools, or to applaud their children’s choices to take loans (‘No, Cortney, I do NOT think you should borrow hundred-thousand dollars for a NYU Religious and Women’s Studies degree’).
The system is fairly fragile. It depends on parents’ and students’ willingness to pay huge amounts, both in tuition and in high school striving, for a Golden Ticket (Harvard-Yale-Dartmouth-Stanford-Princeton) or at least a Silver Ticket (Penn-Haverford-NYU-Reed-William&Mary). That’s partly been for best splendid education and personal growth, and partly for what had been an escalator into the swellest jobs.
Both pillars are in trouble. The escalator part is in trouble partly because there aren’t enough swellest jobs for all the Silver&Gold ticket holders. The best splendid education part is in trouble partly because a lot of parents and students had mostly wanted the escalator, and without confidence that it’s working they won’t dig deep for best & splendid, partly because it is so damn hard for good college teachers to get jobs these days that you will find people who years ago would have been scooped up by S&G schools teaching at places like Virginia Commonwealth and Chico State and Mary Washington – so best & splendid is not as much better than the rest as it used to be.
So my guess is that Suzy Weiss will do okay at her Bronze Ticket school and will go on to a life not too different from what she would have had had she gone to Penn.
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And one more thing: the kids educate each other. They do – for me, the late night sessions in the student coops at Berkeley were really formative, the S&G kids uniformly talk about their fellows as central in their college experience. The vicious hierarchical USNWR sorting which has taken root in the last 40 years has I think dis-enriched the late night sessions kids at Bridgeport and Humboldt State get, as the tiger cubs have all gotten siphoned off to the S&G schools. Well, think about Alcove No. 1 in the 1938 CCNY lunchroom, where the happy band of Trots polished their skills. Those were the days when intellectual ferment was a subway ride away! and I think those days will come again, as tiger cubs get dispersed more broadly.
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I think a lot of the volunteering is driven by school service hours, not (just) college apps, where it doesn’t count for much unless it’s deeper than just showing up. I too have always been deeply uncomfortable with “fake” volunteering (to teach children or to develop their personalities independent of the value they are providing), but the problem is deeper than just college apps. The problem with service to benefit yourself and not the community.
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This was annoying in several ways. I was pretty clueless about the value of affirmative action and diversity when I was 18 too, so I’m inclined to be a little more charitable towards her (not her adult supporters) than others may be. The whole “I was lied to!” thing is probably the worst. Unless her WSJ-editor sister was a completely moron, what she was told is, “Be yourself to have the *best chance* of getting in.” These elite schools sometimes reject 90 percent of their applicants, and those are just the people who were confident enough to apply in the first place. I bet a passionate essay about what it’s like to work the 6 a.m. shift at McDonald’s every day is just as likely to get you in as the passionate essay about volunteer work. But most of the smart, interesting, passionate people that apply to Harvard still won’t get in.
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Hush — great work!
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The ante’s upped even more when many scholarships and the like look to see volunteer leadership activity. It’s not enough to clock many hours in many worthy activities. Now prospects have to start a charity or lead a new volunteer initiative to stand apart.
Because there are so many chasing the spots and the scholarship dollars, it’s easy to up the expectations, rather as we’ve done with tenure at the other end!
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It’s funny that all the liberal affirmative action supporters are happy to attack a teenager named Weiss, but won’t say boo to a blonde, blue-eyed tenured Harvard professor named Warren.
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“It’s funny that all the liberal affirmative action supporters are happy to attack a teenager named Weiss, but won’t say boo to a blonde, blue-eyed tenured Harvard professor named Warren.”
It’s even more funny when someone can’t tell the difference between college admissions and full-time employment.
Because I am a liberal moonbatty fan of Tina Fey, I recently read the novel Admission, on which her most recent movie (co-starring the equally lefty/dreamy Paul Rudd) was based. Not really a good novel (and apparently not a very good movie), but really fascinating in how detailed it is about the college admissions process. (Fey plays a college admissions rep from Princeton.)
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Wrong. During her Senate race, Elizabeth Warren’s Indian identity claims were taken to task not only by the entire political right, but also by a great many progressives (especially by people of color on the left), who could not abide the fact that Warren is phenotypically Caucasian yet allegedly used her biraciality “opportunistically” – supposedly having taken job opportunities away rom “real” Indians. (Nevermind she has the same blood quantum as the leader of the Cherokee nation, so she’s as much a “real” Indian as he is.) The main problem with those criticisms, of course, is that Warren’s Harvard hiring committee believed her to be 100% Caucasian when they made the offer and continued to believe this for years after – therefore no material benefits actually accrued to her on the basis of her Indian identity claims.
But let’s not allow the truth to get in the way of a good old fashioned rant by folks who feel their entitlements slipping away.
Why can’t overprivileged teenagers named Weiss write anything they want to in the press without any consequences? It’s just not fair!
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While scholars like Annette Lareau and Pierre Bourdieu have shown that meritocracy is not actually such, some half-hearted formalized attempt at it is better than just naked privilege. An otherwise unremarkable Weiss deserves to go to Penn because…she’s upper middle class? Her parents are professionals? Well-connected? The question would be then, for what qualities, or by what criteria, should Suzy Weiss be admitted over someone with top grades and SAT scores and extra-curriculars and varsity sports? Why should she be admitted to Penn over a similarly unremarkable student from small-town Texas, or inner city LA? The problem is there are far more qualified applicants than spots at top universities, which means some sort of selection process is required. As it stands, the system is already vastly weighted in favor of the wealthy, and requiring high performance is one of the few ways the system is at least theoretically accessible to non elites.
I agree though, that the amount of pressure and stress on teenagers has ratcheted up, and that this should be changed. The problem, though, is structural and can’t be solved by changing admissions criteria. We don’t have enough decent jobs for college graduates, and this problem has gotten worse with the collapse of many traditional white collar industries. Shuffling around who goes to Harvard doesn’t fix this.
Also, a tangential pet peeve: even though black and latino students (i.e. recipients of affirmative action) are underrepresented at elite schools, why do complaints of affirmative action always target them, instead of slotted athletes or legacy admits, who take up far more spots?
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I bet a passionate essay about what it’s like to work the 6 a.m. shift at McDonald’s every day is just as likely to get you in as the passionate essay about volunteer work.
I had a friend who was an ok but not great student at a mediocre high school in a lower-middle class suburb in CA. She didn’t do well on the SATs, and didn’t do very many extracurriculars. She also was an Asian female, who if anything face the greatest odds of getting in to college. Yet, she went to a top school. She showed me her college essay, which she wrote about an moment of enlightenment she had dealing with her mom during an argument, and it was absolutely mind-blowing. To this day, I think it is one of the most profound things I’ve read. Doing a million extra curriculars is maybe one way to show you “have potential,” but there are also other ways that don’t cost money or require a full-time chauffeur.
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The op-Ed is pretty vacuous. There are certainly arguments to made about the craziness of the admissions process. I just went through it with a classic underachiever. And while four years ago, I thought we’d be aiming for ivies or elite SLACs, it became clear pretty quickly that we wouldn’t. And yes, it’s weird that I’m using “we”. But that’s really what the process is now. I came up with my own list, wrote my own essays. I didn’t even visit most of the schools I applied to, because that just wasn’t done then. You only visited if it was nearby or if you were having difficulty making a decision.
I took Geeky Boy to about five schools. He applied to three–the state schools. He got into one, his first choice. I’m happy with where he’s ended up. He’ll have plenty of opportunities. He’ll have great faculty and his job prospects probably won’t be any worse than many of the students coming out of the Ivies. He’ll just be aiming for different things. He’ll take the crap entry level job and won’t complain, because kids at state schools sort of expect that.
And many of my students aiming for the Ivies are sincere about their volunteering and their extracurriculars. They are sometimes worn down by all the work and pressure, which worries me. And yes, most are aware that they’re doing it for college admission, but most (90%?) like what they’re doing. I think they wish they had more time, especially down time. Some will flame out in college. Some will settle for lesser schools and that will be good for them. I do think something will give at some point. I wish the ranking system would go away, so students would simply find the best place for them and not just look at some supposedly objective criteria of what the best schools are. They’re all quite different.
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“It’s even more funny when someone can’t tell the difference between college admissions and full-time employment.”
Huh? It’s okay to lie when you are seeking a job, but not to get into college?
BTW, let us note, the original piece is intended to be humorous. But it’s been a long time–starting about the time I lost interest in the Movement–since anyone on the left had a sense of humor. Make a joke about diversity, expect to be hysterically denounced as a racist.
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“It’s okay to lie”
When did you say anything about lying? In fact, what *were* you trying to say? It’s like you’re having entire separate conversations with the Wendys, bjs, Amys, and Lauras in your head instead of the ones actually being posted.
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“Make a joke about diversity, expect to be hysterically denounced as a racist.”
Fail to think someone’s joke is funny, expect to be hysterically denounced as lacking a sense of humor. (This is true everywhere on the political spectrum, I think.
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There’s an interview you can find somewhere online with the president of Brown University where she says “We don’t have enough diverse-looking people on campus and we need more kids with dreadlocks and green hair” that kind of typifies the insanity of the lottery schools quest. I just gave up an entire day of my Spring Break to drive four hours each way to have work done on my son’s incredibly expensive violin. A significant portion of our income goes on his music lessons, and the kid practices all the time. And yet ultimately it’s going to come down to this crap shoot where somebody else gets picked because they have green hair — as though somehow or other winning a concerto competition and having green hair were equally impressive “accomplishments.”
I think the point the kid was making in the essay is that half the stuff that gets weighted in admissions is stuff that no one has any control over anyway — the kid who had lesbian parents didn’t do anything to end up in that family instead of a different one, so it’s kind of odd that it’s being treated as an ‘accomplishment.’ And by the same token, a lot of other people might not have paid for the music lessons my kid takes and my kid, had he been born in a different family, would have spent a lot more time watching tv and playing video games. He’s only accomplished because the whole family is making sacrifices towards that end.
I think part of her reaction is to the current system where it’s more like a corporation that’s applying to the college, including Mom the chauffeur and dad the banker, and the tutor and the college consultant. How does one kid go up against another kid who has been bred since birth for one goal? I’m not sure they can.
I thought her essay was hysterical because she more or less said all the stuff that my kid and his friends say to their parents, stuff like “Is it too late for you to divorce dad and commit a crime so I can write about how you’re in jail?” Somewhere there’s probably a helicopter mom who would be onboard with doing that if it would get Junior into Harvard.
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I interviewed 4 kids this year for admission to my alma mater. 3 were rejected, 1 was wait-listed. The interesting thing to me is that the one who was wait-listed was a little quiet and non-nervous, but I felt like she was the only one I felt “got” it, what you truly get out of going to a school like mine. She was applying in a non-traditional major that she wanted to do because she was genuinely interested in it. She also had started a small non-profit to do some work in a developing country (deliberately vague–it’s nothing too intense, but it reflects what I think is sincere concern). Maybe that’s it–she came across to me as genuinely sincere and thoughtful as opposed to ambitious.
I don’t know the test scores of any of the applicants (I am not given that info, and I am not allowed to ask). For all I know she had a gajillion extracurriculars and perfect scores on the SATs, and maybe it was all an act. Or maybe the admissions department knows what it’s doing, somehow. Or maybe colleges are like cats; the less interested you appear to be in them, the more they want you.
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Tens of thousands of students posted better SAT scores than Suzy Lee Weiss. Most of them apply to the Ivy League. http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2012.pdf
Why should she get a spot at Penn? If admission were based purely on grades and test scores, she’d have had no shot at all at admission. If you look up the Common Data Set for Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt, her test scores would be rather low for any of them.
She’s apparently been accepted to three colleges. She’ll enroll at the University of Michigan.
No one is telling this generation of students “just be yourself, and you’ll have your pick of colleges.” Many people are telling students they need an array of colleges, including reach–match–safety. If the college list on the Today Show article is accurate, it looks to me as if she (and her adult advisors) made the typical mistake of not building a good college list. If the list was, Princeton, Yale, The University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, University of Michigan, Wisconsin, Penn State, 4 out of 7 of her colleges were reaches. As an out of state student, the public universities may be very expensive. There are many great colleges in Pennsylvania at which her SAT scores would have been very competitive. She needed more matches. Off the top of my head, where were Lehigh, Bryn Mawr, Lafayette, or Dickinson?
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My last year in high school (junior year), my mom had cancer. I can’t remember what happened with my extracurriculars, but I definitely didn’t do track that year as I needed to get home from school with my younger siblings, run laundry, make dinner, and have a fight with my 12-year-old sister about who was going to do the dishes. Then I’d spend the evening grinding away at my homework and SAT prep books. Did it ever cross my mind to turn my sad tale of woe into admissions bait? Heck no. That was absolutely the farthest thing from my mind. When you’re actually in the suck, you’re not composing flowery essays about it.
(The situation did come up around financial aid time, I believe. The family had had a $30,000 timber sale windfall, which all went to pay medical bills, and the college needed to know that.)
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And another thing–standardized tests are actually very friendly to people in my situation. You just sit down with a $20 prep book and do tests until you can solve all of the problems (I had a 750 verbal SAT score, pre-recentering, if I’m remembering correctly).
Music lessons, travel sports, and founding charities (???) are much less accessible to high school kids with limited resources.
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The race and AA comment aside, I thought that Suzy’s essay was very good, because it perfectly captured the insanity and pressure and perfection and artificiality and grooming behind a middle-class teenager.
My parents did absolutely nothing to prepare me for college. My mom signed me up for one SAT class, but I did everything else. I researched which colleges would be right for me. I typed up all the info. I wrote the essay on an old typewriter in the basement. Nobody drove me to look at schools. The only input that I got from them was at the end of the whole process when they told that they couldn’t afford anything but the state schools and not the nice private school that sent me a hand written acceptance letter.
Now we have the opposition extreme.
My kid is only 13 and a disturbing number of his friends already have anxiety disorders.
I don’t have a problem with the smartest kids in the country going to the elite colleges. That seems fair to me. I do have a problem with fake nice and interesting people going to elite colleges. Because I hate fake.
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“The only input that I got from them was at the end of the whole process when they told that they couldn’t afford anything but the state schools and not the nice private school that sent me a hand written acceptance letter.”
That’s so terrible. It sounds like it turned out OK for you, but why couldn’t they give you a budget to begin with?
I think my mental budget for the kids is “whatever UT Austin costs,” although less would be good, too.
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“Because I hate fake.”
See, I’m half Southern/half Midwestern, and I’d take a fake nice person who respects other people’s boundaries any day over a painfully honest yet tone deaf, boundary-crossing hater like Ms. Weiss.
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“I don’t have a problem with the smartest kids in the country going to the elite colleges. ”
That’s not the way it works, though. It’s not that playing great concertos (incidentally, not winning concerto competitions, though those might be correlated with one another) is an equal accomplishment to having green hair. It’s that people (other people) want both kinds of people on campus. That’s diversity as a community good.
Having Amy’s experience as a HS senior changes a child and makes them a different person than I was as a senior (never having had anyone I cared about sick, let alone a mother; never having cared for anyone, not even myself). It’s not having a other with cancer that adds to your contribution in a community of freshman in a college; it’s the person you become after having had those life experience (presuming that you haven’t somehow been left unchanged by them, which would be remarkable).
My college roommate was a child of a holocaust survivor. Her parents had always protected her, but it was a part of her story and influenced her world view; I learned of it while reading a Newsweek article about the symphony at Auschwitz, and casually remarking “I cannot imagine what it would have been like.” We didn’t know each other all that well; she hesitated before telling me that her mom had been in Auschwitz. Next, we had a discussion about posters on our walls; I had one picturing a scene from the country I’m from; she explained why she couldn’t think of a similar nation (except, maybe, Israel, but, that was a country she nor her parents had ever lived in). Another memorable conversation was a heated argument with a friend in which we argued about whether it was more difficult to come to this country with $30,000 (back in the 80’s, so it was worth more) or with a BS degree.
A school full of people like me would never have offered me these conversations and the more complex world view I developed because of them.
That’s what the elite schools are aiming for; people who are diverse and share that diversity with the community (be it through green hair, or speaking their mind, or playing amazing concertos, or running faster than anyone else in the country, or running the school newspaper).
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I agree that the real problem isn’t college admissions but life and the tournament model we’re all perceiving in our children’s future. It makes us struggle to make them (one-percenters, and, actually, .001 percenters) in everything, and at the same time, trying to argue that the 1% should be defined by how our kids get a leg up.
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I guess I just keep wondering what people like Suzy Weiss and her parents expect will happen differently for her if she gets to go to Penn. Are they thinking it will result in wealth? I was one of three kids. I had good grades and average SATs and went to a decent SLAC. My brother had terrible grades and amazing SATs and went to really artsy SLAC. My sister had mediocre grades and mediocre SATs and went to the average state university. She married a guy who went to the same state university. They’re the rich ones, the financially successful ones, in my family.
I look at fellow parents at my kids’ public schools. The dad who went to Chico State is a bigwig lawyer and the mom who went to San Jose State is a successful landscaper. The dad who went to Stanford works in tech but doesn’t make enough money to stop renting and buy a house. I look at my high school peers who went to Harvard: one teaches history at the high school we all graduated from, one makes and sells jewelry. My colleagues who went to Ivies as undergrads or Stanford as grads are no different, no smarter, no more successful than me and my other colleagues who went to state unis for grad school.
So this seems like a false premise and promise to begin with, that getting into an Ivy, or an elite school, or your dream school, is actually going to translate into some later utopia of success or wealth or happiness, or even a better life than you might have had otherwise. The data around me, anyway, just don’t indicate that.
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Even nowadays, you can leave the whole college application process to your kids. I think it’s even easier now for kids to do it entirely on their own, because of the internet. My daughter did it alone two years ago and it was a great experience for her. She knew what she wanted to study and found the programs that matched her needs and handled everything on her own.
We gave her many opportunities during her teen years, but when it came time to apply to college she was ready to figure out where she wanted to go and how to make it happen. Now that she’s in college I know I can trust her to use her advantages wisely and she is achieving even more than I expected her to.
I think too many parents are over-involved in it, and that’s why it has become such a circus. You can opt out of the drama and just sit back and enjoy watching your kid take another step towards independence. It can be very satisfying.
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Sandra, I love this comment and am printing it out to save. I have very much enjoyed sitting back and watching my kids become these incredibly interesting people, and I know that if I had been overly involved they would not have become these same interesting people — because I had overinvolved parents and it definitely colored my outlook.
The comments about having a mom with cancer are very interesting as well. My sister’s ex-husband went to jail for assault and her kids are divided over whether it’s something you don’t mention or whether it’s something you work into an admissions essay. You’re right that it has definitely colored their outlooks and made them the people they are today and probably given them insights into the drug problem, and the prison system and the state of marriage today that my kids don’t have. (My sister’s kids are older and wiser — and also nicer and less spoiled in many ways. I find myself thinking that they probably would ultimately contribute more to a college environment than my cheerleading white girl daughter would — but I’m not sure what to do with that. Do I tell my kid not to study because then she’ll just be a cheerleading white girl with good grades? And now you know why my kids want me to go out and commit a crime so they’ll have a leg up in admissions . .. )
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Here’s another item that didn’t go into my essay.
That last year in high school I got massive varicose veins, no doubt from all the long hours on my feet I was putting in (but also unfavorable genetics). Being 15 years old, I felt so very sorry for me and was terribly embarrassed about it.
They eventually went away, thank goodness.
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