When I was working my way through the obstacles to getting my PhD, I had to sit for two written exams and one oral exam. I created binders of information that had to be crushed into my brain in preparation for any question that might come my way. Theories of property from Plato to Durkheim to Nozick. Competing models of federalism. How FDR expanded the powers of the presidency. Lincoln’s arguments about the federal government in the Lincoln/Douglas debates.
It took months to prepare these binders and to memorize all that material in order to pass the exams. I came away from that insanity with the awareness that my brain was a very finite instrument. If one piece of random information entered my brain, like the proper method of roasting chicken or the sale price of a pair of shoes at Macy’s, it might push out an essential fact that I might need for the upcoming exam. So, in the few weeks leading up to the exam, I would keep myself in the exam bubble and keep any outside information to a minimum.
I have applied that wisdom to parenting. I only deal with the issues that are right in front of my face at that moment. That included all topics related to getting my kid into college.
I understand the internal dynamics of colleges, because I was a part of that world for many years. I did a lot of research on student loan debt for various articles. Student loan debt is also a personal topic, since we’re still repaying our graduate school for the torture involved in taking those pointless exams. But whenever neighbors and friends talked about getting their own kids into college, I tuned them out. I figured that I would learn more about that process when the time came.
Well, the time is here. I have a high school sophomore. He took the practice PSATs a couple of weeks ago. The morning of the exam, I couldn’t remember if kids were penalized for guessing on the test or not. I had to google it, five minutes before he left the house.
That moment of awesome parenting made me realize that it was time to figure out the college admissions game. So, I’ve been talking with other parents and reading articles on the topic.
Wow. It’s an entirely different game than when I applied.
When I applied to college, my parents did very little. My mom signed me for an SAT class, because other parents told her to do it, but that was about it. My parents, first generation college graduates, ended up in college mostly because of accident and luck, so they couldn’t tell me what to do. I wrote my college essay on an electric typewriter in the basement. Nobody proofed my work. I chose the colleges on my own and filled out the applications. I visited colleges on a weekend trip to upstate New York with friends. I arranged for the interviews. They had very little input in the whole process, until it was time to figure out the finances at the very end.
Today, the parental involvement in the college application process is jaw dropping.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking about colleges with a friend, who is more connected with the rich folks in town than I am. She said that a number of her friends were hiring college consultants. I went into a rant. “Why do people need college consultants? All that information is available in books and online. You just line up your kids’ GPA, SAT scores, and your ability to pay with the lists of colleges and then you pick ten or so. You apply and see what happens.”
My friend chuckled at my naivety and said, “no, no, no, Laura. People decide which college they want their child to attend and then they hire a college consultant to make that happen.”
What else have I learned in the past two weeks?
Kids don’t just take the SATs once, like I did. They take the SATs and the ACTs many times. One girl took both tests four times. Then you piece together the best scores. Some colleges let you take the verbal score from one test and the math score from another test.
A bad high school record? Well, you can go to a great state school as an out-of-state student and pay the equivalent of a private school tuition.
You can’t just show that you belonged to clubs anymore. You have to show LEADERSHIP. So, your child should create an exercise club for autistic kids or send money for clean drinking water to Africa. There are websites to keep track of all your child’s leadership activities.
High schools offer seminars for parents to help them navigate this process.
People pay consultants to work with the child to create the perfect admissions essay. There are very fuzzy lines on the authorship of the final essay.
The cost of college isn’t the only obstacle to getting working class and poor students into higher ed.
Apt. 11d 
Jaw-dropping is right. I’m so damned glad it’s behind me now.
For what it’s worth, the crazy behavior you are hearing about is driven by people obsessed with their kid going to an Ivy or other super-competitive college. You don’t have to engage in most of it, if your kid’s grades and scores and interests fit elsewhere or if he’s a good fit for a public school.
My typical kid had good grades and a strong athletic record that made him unlikely, if not impossible, for that set of schools. And we aren’t rich. So instead of killing ourselves trying to get him into a “reach school,” we mostly concentrated on fit and financial aid. We shelled out for SAT prep and sweated through the essay with him, but otherwise backed off. He ended up at a good liberal arts school with a killer scholarship and is super happy.
The SPED college admissions process is a entirely different kettle of fish.
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“You add the foreign immigrants whose worlds were literally changed by their educational prowess to the native born families who went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford . . . . and loved it, and you get a competitive mix with everyone vying for the same goal.”
Also, native-born parents that did NOT go to elite colleges but have done well financially and are sure their kids will go the Ivy/super-elite route. As far I’ve seen, they are some of the biggest investors in college counselors and extra tutoring. Same delusions and snobbery as BI describes.
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I’ve been lurking on your college threads with a mixture of fascination, horror and revulsion. My daughter isn’t going to go through any of that rigamarole; she’s going to graduate from high school, do two years at the local community college, and go from there. (shrug). I can’t even begin to think of what is talked about as standard college prices as even being remotely affordable. My kid is smart, but she’s also learning disabled; merit-based scholarships are just not going to happen for her. I’ve told her that her secret weapon is going to be hard work and tenacity, and taking advantage of any practical community-based educational and/or volunteer opportunities. And that considering military service isn’t a bad idea either (veterans points are a Big Deal for a lot of public-sector jobs).
What you describe is a Different World. To be blunt, it’s not a world that I can respect. It’s about distancing yourself from any hands-on work and practicable applicability as much as possible. “Leadership”? Please. It’s about jockeying for position—not ability. Don’t we have enough morons with a title but little to no ability?
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It doesn’t really matter whether you respect it or not. In certain professions, professions that are required for society to function, it is basically impossible for a twenty-year old to learn anything practically applicable because they are still getting the background. The current system has some serious failings, but nothing can really change that it takes ten or more years post high school to get good enough at some tasks that you aren’t more of a hindrance than a help.
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Well sure, medical school for an example. But most professions? Nope. Look, people who’ve been journeymen for a decade or more are more knowledgeable and more efficient than the freshly topped out. Even so, we expect the freshly topped out to be able to take a set of blueprints and work relatively independently. It’s skilled work, but it ain’t brain surgery. Most work isn’t brain surgery.
I have a hard time understanding what the advantage is of having an application process that is (a) irrelevant to the educational goals, and (b) so arduous that most of the applicants are unable to do it themselves and still get accepted. WTF is being measured, exactly? This is nothing more than the extension of grade-school projects where the child’s grade is based primarily on the crafting ability of his or her mother.
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The problem is that college has become the entry criteria for lot of jobs that it isn’t needed for, not that the application process (except at a few schools) is out of relation to the educational goals. If you can’t jump through the hoops to get into an ordinarily competitive university (e.g. not Ivy) without more than a some advice and proofreading from you parents, you will have trouble with the work.
I went to a school with open admission for any graduate of a high school in that state. I had a roommate who was constantly complaining about how hard the work was. The work was too hard for him because not literate enough to function at a university. I didn’t know of a good way to point it out to him without seeming rude. He eventually dropped out and became an exterminator.
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If it’s ADHD your daughter has, one of the possibilities is that she won’t be able to make it through 4-year college, at least without a lot of hand-holding and helicoptering on your part.
One of my younger relatives had late-diagnosed ADHD and she was in college for 7 years before her parents gave up on the project. I think she was no closer to finishing at the end than she had been three years previously, due to changing colleges and programs repeatedly. (Of course, the short-term memory brain damage she got from the relationship with her abusive boyfriend that nobody knew about didn’t help, either.) In retrospect, young relative should have gone to college closer to home rather than on the opposite end of the country and perhaps her parents should have pulled the plug at the 4 or 5 year point. They were, without knowing it, subsidizing her abusive live-in boyfriend.
Not to scare you, but if your daughter has trouble academically in high school, I suspect that getting her into college will be the least of your troubles.
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She doesn’t have trouble with her grades; she does have some processing problems (math-related) and short-term memory issues (which aren’t as evident the older she gets, as more bedrock knowledge and skills are embedded in her long-term files. It’s hard to explain; only other parents of preemies really know what I’m talking about).
I’m not worried about her motivation; she has many interests and isn’t afraid of working hard. (Plus, she’s keenly aware of what happens to women who don’t go to college—she does not want to end up there!)
I worry about paying for it.
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I don’t know the details, but I know there are scholarships and even universities for learning disabilities. We have family friends whose son has a pretty major LD but got a full ride to a university in one of the Carolinas I think that specialized in LDs. It’s worth at least looking into, there are all sorts of crazy scholarships out there.
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Strange game, Professor. The only winning move is not to play.
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Is it possible that this is more of an east-coast thing? I’ve had lots of friends go through this process here in WI, and I haven’t heard of anyone describing anything even remotely like this. I have a freshman, so we aren’t there yet, ourselves. But most of my friends don’t even start the process until junior year. I have never heard of anyone hiring a college consultant. The school-of-thought among most of my friends seems to be that their kids can probably get a great education at just about any college, so don’t stress too much about finding the “perfect” one.
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Yes, as usual, this is colored by Laura’s proximity to NYC, which in many ways is another planet, even here on the east coast.
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I was going to make the same comment, that this is an east, and parts of the west, coast thing. The process here in MN is probably a bit more intense than when I was applying to college a couple of decades ago, but it is really nothing like what you are describing. College-bound kids apply to the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and maybe a couple of Midwestern liberal arts school if their parents can swing the bill. Some kids do attend schools outside the Midwest, of course, but I think even for those kids there is not this frenzied sense of “my life is over if I don’t go to the right school!!!” that there seems to be on the east coast, among UMC parents and teenagers alike.
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The overachievers go to St Olafs, and everyone else goes to Luther or PLU 😛
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How about Carleton and Macalester?
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Yes, I’m not freaked out, either. We’re in TX, and our options are:
1. faculty brat rate (which will be free tuition but lots of fees–maybe around $5k a year plus living expenses)
2. UT Austin or similar ($20k a year including living expenses)
3. the college fairy swoops down and gives the kids a reasonable deal to the fancy pants out-of-state college of the kids’ choice, say MIT or Caltech or Yale or Catholic University of America or whatever
I am not counting on #3, but either #1 or #2 is a pretty sure thing.
I also would expect a liberal arts kid to work at least summers, which should defray costs, and might make #1 essentially free for us. (I understand that this is not possible in all majors, as the course load can be huge and unpaid and underpaid internships are expensive and make it difficult to work an actual job, but are very important.) My only problem with #1 is that I fear that it puts the child on a trajectory for living in their childhood bedroom in our home for the next 20 odd years.
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There are subsets of folks in every community that are playing this game (or at least almost every community). My kids attend private school, and, I guess we’re on the west coast, but I think the determining factor is whether the community is made up of folks who went to elite colleges themselves. Communities with a lot of immigration (and, not just from other countries, though that plays a role) probably fall in that category. You add the foreign immigrants whose worlds were literally changed by their educational prowess to the native born families who went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford . . . . and loved it, and you get a competitive mix with everyone vying for the same goal.
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My kids are fond of pointing out that the neighbors who got BA’s from state schools live in exactly the same kind of house that we do with our fancy degrees from places like Oxford. And they drive nicer cars.
THis has colored my perspective on the college search somewhat. I don’t think there’s a direct correlation between where you go to college and how successful you will be in life — however you define that — money, professional recognition, a fulfilling life. I also don’t think that your life is over when you’re seventeen if you get into the wrong college. Life is long and lots of people poop out at some point, while others keep on going.
We sent our kid to the highest ranked college that matched my husband’s GI bill funds that he got into. Our daughter is going somewhere on a faculty tuition waiver. Our third child’s choice will probably have something to do with medical admission rates since that’s the path she wants to be pursue.
What makes the process crazy-making is, however,
1. the fact that the landscape has changed so drastically since we went to school, what with international admissions and all. It’s really difficult to predict where your kid will get in once you start looking at tippy-top schools. That’s where the consultants come in.
2. THe essay thing is a joke. I think people probably pay the consultants to write them, and I think there are all sorts of elements that play into whether or not the admissions committee ‘likes’ your essay. I suspect they probably like it better if you are cool and funny — which a lot of smart people are not, necessarily. It helps to have a sob story. Lots of introverted, aspie types are not comfortable with self-revelations, and they aren’t real good at picturing someone on the other end reading the essay, no matter how often you talk to them, saying things like “How do you think someone might feel reading that?”
3. The fact that there is truly no rhyme or reason to the issue of merit scholarships, etc. Nor does your child understand what it means when you say, “this school is giving you twenty thousand dollars more a year. Do you have any idea how much eighty thousand dollars is?” No, he doesn’t. He makes nine dollars an hour as a lifeguard and spends most of his money at Taco Bell. How could he possibly understand what it means to be in debt? To not be able to buy a house? Interest rates on student loans? Forget about it.
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“Nor does your child understand what it means when you say, “this school is giving you twenty thousand dollars more a year. Do you have any idea how much eighty thousand dollars is?” No, he doesn’t. He makes nine dollars an hour as a lifeguard and spends most of his money at Taco Bell. How could he possibly understand what it means to be in debt? To not be able to buy a house? Interest rates on student loans? Forget about it.”
Then you have to understand for him and explain what decisions you are unwilling to participate in.
Alternately, I’m planning on dragging the kids to Dave Ramsey’s FPU sometime in the next several years. By the time I’m done with them, they will understand what $80k in debt means to a person making $30-40K a year.
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Taco Bell isn’t as cheap as it used to be. At least not the one we have on campus.
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“I have applied that wisdom to parenting. I only deal with the issues that are right in front of my face at that moment. That included all topics related to getting my kid into college.”
When I read this, I realized that I’m the opposite. It appears that I spend all my time facing issues that aren’t in front of my face.
I think the take home lesson is this: “Wow. It’s an entirely different game than when I applied.”
But, after you realize that, and start doing your own research, you also have to realize that most of the craziness is for a specific subgroup of people, aiming for top 20 colleges (and colleges one used to think of as safeties, like U Chicago, Northwestern, Harvey Mudd) are now in the top 20, or vying for them. In the issues that face me, I do have children who are vying for elites, went to an elite myself, and can afford to pay for them. So, we are part of the rat race of admissions and in a different world from those for whom money is a concern or whose kids aren’t academically/otherwise vying for the elite schools. What I worry about doesn’t apply to lots of others, and the fact that I’m worrying about it shouldn’t make other people start worrying about it (even though it is a worry for us).
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AmyP: Where we live, a lot of parents have figured out that the kid can still be pretty easily manipulated — as in “Go to the cheaper school and we’ll get you an iPhone, or a used car.” You can get the kid a car that costs around 8,000 dollars if he goes to the cheaper school and you still come out ahead by about 72,000 dollars. At my son’s high school, lots of kids took the merit aid and got the iPhone or the car.
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As my grandpa would say when demonstrating some particularly clever piece of know-how, “Now there’s the value of a college education!” (Grandpa was actually a college drop-out circa 1940-something, but it’s one of his catch-phrases.)
Your fellow parents are being sneaky, but I salute them.
On a similar note, I’ve been floating the idea of just handing over $10k at wedding time and telling the kids to do whatever they want with it, rather than paying for a wedding.
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I applied to college even longer ago than most of you; I don’t remember writing an essay and don’t think they were part of the process for NY State schools way back when. But reading about the essays here, I wonder if anyone has made the connection between these highly-personal pieces required to get into the “best” schools — and therefore, supposedly absolutely necessary to have a successful life — and David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, and his most famous quote, described here by Diane Ravitch:
“In a speech last year, David Coleman, the new president of the College Board, who was one of the chief creators of the Common Core, worried about students’ focusing on opinion over analysis in their writing. “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s— about what you feel or what you think.” ”
It sounds like college application committees really DO give a sh*t about what high school students feel and think!
Doubly ironic when you consider what his job is: president of the College Board. If anyone should be aware of the role these highly personal essays play in determining a student’s life course, it ought to be him. That is, if you take what he says at face value. I mean, either doesn’t realize the contradictions in his statement, or he knows perfectly well that if his vision is fully realized, an awful lot of kids will be very unprepared for those essays.
Disclaimer: my actual, real life whole view of the college application process most closely Libiddu’s.
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There are about 5,000 slots in the first year class for Yale/Harvard/Princeton/MIT combined. There are about 3 million high school graduates every year. So EVEN IF your child is in the top 1%, odds are against getting in to one of the best colleges.
I have to agree with the other Midwestern parents posting above: we don’t sweat the process nearly as much as the families on the coasts do. And once you start exploring the SLAC, you realize that their sticker price will be heavily discounted for above-average students, and you’ll pay the same, or a little less, than the in-state university (and get nicer housing).
My son started & finished his essay last Saturday afternoon because we (I) wanted to apply to one institution with a November 1 deadline. No one proofed it, much to the consternation of his junior in college sister. I’m sure I could have improved it, but ultimately I don’t believe it’s going to matter much in his admission, aid package, or decision.
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PS: Yes, an important difference is to talk about money first. Your kids, specifically, seem to be fairly well inoculated against the demands of elite consumerism (in spite of being in a wealthy community), but there are lots of threads on kids not understanding that their middle-class families can’t support 60K/year college costs.
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I think that’s a parenting failure.
Bigger kids should have a general idea of what stuff costs and what their parents can afford.
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Have I mentioned that in my neck of the woods, folks are apparently hiring consultants for middle school admissions? But, think people who are hiring the consultants with the idea that the consultant is going to get their kid into the school of their choice are deluding themselves.
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Eh, I’m kind of of the opinion that if your kid is an interesting thoughtful person, you don’t need to spend $$$ on some college consultant to fake it. The problem is is that interesting and thoughtful is often inversely correlated with wealth, so I think that SAT prep classes and consultants are mostly just a form of skimming from the rich. The reason why kids don’t get into a school writing about volunteering in a Haitian orphanage isn’t because it’s not impressive. It’s because it’s transparently obvious the kid did it to write about it for her college essay. A good college friend of mine is from a working class Asian immigrant family, got below a 1200 on the SATs, had few extracurricular activities, and went to a mediocre high school in a big city in CA. She told me about her college essay, which was about having a fight with her mom, and while I don’t remember the details but I remember it being jaw-droppingly profound. She got into several Ivy Leagues + our school, because you can’t fake being profound in the way my friend was. The people I know who’ve gone to elite schools have written about written about eating peanut butter out of a jar, or about having siblings. I have a friend who drew a comic strip about Greek gods and got into Brown. If you’re an interesting person, you can write an interesting essay on any topic. If you’re not, then you need a college consultant and thousands of dollars in “enriching activities.”
Legacy admissions are a real form of discrimination for the wealthy and well-connected. Information asymmetry is also a problem. There’s a wealth of resources out there for working class kids who do well in school, but most people don’t know about them. I do think that you’ll be fine if you tune out the insanity and don’t cave into parental peer pressure, because I really don’t think it helps.
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“Eh, I’m kind of of the opinion that if your kid is an interesting thoughtful person, you don’t need to spend $$$ on some college consultant to fake it. ”
I choose to believe this. 🙂
I refuse to hire a consultant for my kids because when I was at an “elite” school, I didn’t want to have classmates whose parents bought their way in to college.
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The stats suggest that this ship has sailed, unless one thinks that *only* paying for a consultant constitutes “buying their way”. If consultants really provided a way to buy your way in, we might want to target this expense particularly, but in reality, I think they’re just one more service provider (like tutors, coaches, nannies, etc.) that help parents manage UMC lives.
For some, they might ad value by providing a buffer or information to address the knowledge asymmetry.
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I’m less confident of the ability of college admissions officers to detect fake “profundity” from real profundity. And, not everyone who is profound writes about it really well. I don’t think consultants are the solution to this problem, though, just a recognition that it exists.
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I read somewhere that a lot of times it’s the mom who hires the college consultant cuz she’s married to some macho guy who thinks that because he’s wealthy his kid is a shoo-in at Princeton, and he’s likely to blame the mom when the kid doesn’t get in. The mom really hires the consultant to manage the dad and his expectations. It can sometimes be about therapy — the consultant’s job is to calm everybody down and get them to be realistic about what’s possible.
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I can see that. I am very grateful that my friends have a paid counselor, because that person can tell them SUNY Stony Brook is a huge reach and UW Madison is really out of his league, instead of me.
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Sorry to hog the comments, but I want to vent a little on this topic. I just helped a close friend’s son cram for the SATs, which he took Saturday. The son is pleasant enough (at least to people not his parents), but is basically the definition of “Little Emperor Syndrome.” He’s been indulged in every way his entire life, and now he wants to go to school in the US. Life plans include joining the CIA, the marines, or the NYPD. He’s a totally mediocre student, has no work ethic to speak of, and has decent oral English skills but his reading and writing are not at an advanced high school level. His parents are wealthy by local standards, but not by Beijing/Shanghai standards, and certainly not compared to US salaries, so they will have to sell their house and go heavily in to debt to fund out of state tuition. He got a 70 on the toefl the first time he took it, and a 66 the second time, which is bad news because most schools take the most recent, not the highest. 80 is the cut off at the top SUNYs, which is where he is looking to go. On the practice SATs he was averaging between a 220 and a 270 on the reading section, and he needs above a 450 to be competitive,* especially with a weaker TOEFL score. His parents spent $5,000 on a six week TOEFL course this summer and have hired a college counselor. He has to take the SAT in HK, which costs about $800 in travel costs, not including the price of the tests. I wrote him his LOR and edited his essay, which was definitely written by him, but about a hobby AFAIK he has no interest in. I think his parents should sit him down and say he’s wasted enough money but if he can’t get the scores necessary, he’s gonna have to buckle down and prepare for the gaokao. He throws tantrums if he doesn’t get his way, so this might be an epic showdown. Even if they don’t, I can’t see him getting accepted at the schools he wants to attend.**
*Stony Brook has conditional admissions for students with a toefl of 70-79 and SAT between 410 and 450, provided they do a summer language course.
**His counselor has steered him more in the right direction, but Chinese snobbiness + profound ignorance of the American college admissions process and university system can create some serious delusions. At one point he told me he thought he had a good chance of getting into Duke, and I had to try to tell him he was out of his mind without being a total jerk.
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I think for kids and parents like that, the only solution might be to get rejected. It’s too bad that they spend so much money on the path, but that’s where it goes. Now, on the other hand, I think the US education system is fostering an industry of accepting some of those students and looking the other way while taking people’s money, convincing themselves that they are offering something of value. And, maybe they are, in providing the visa and the opportunity to live in an English speaking country.
Oregon State University, for example (in a joint venture with a private company).
It’s interesting to think about how such efforts affect students already in America, in different ranges of the college admissions/attendance spectrum.
International students affect the american students aiming for the tippy-top by widening the applicant pool to the entire world. But, I think those who come are eminently qualified. But, at some of the state schools, I worry that the influx of students who are underprepared (especially in English, but you’re describing someone who is more underprepared than that), but who can pay will undermine the education for in state students. I’ve heard discussion of the difficulty faculty members are facing in discussion courses at our state U, as an example.
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By the way, one of my aunties teaches at a community college in WA (convenient West Coast commuting from China!) and one of her gigs is to board Asian students who come from the Far East to study English at the community college and prep for a 4-year-college. My auntie has had a number of success stories among her boarders.
Out-of-state tuition for community college is pretty fierce, but it’s a good set-up for the kids.
You might suggest to the parents that the kid gets an AA at a community college, and if his grades are good, they can revisit the issue of a 4-year US college.
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Thanks, that sounds like a good idea if he really wants to be in the US. I’m worried they still think CCs are ‘beneath’ them, but maybe when they realize that’s their only option they’ll be more amenable. Do you have a link to the CC or program?
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BI,
Contact me via the contact me feature at xantippesblog.blogspot.com and I will provide details.
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BI,
I just remembered something really important.
If your friends’ kid does go to the US, encourage your friends to keep him on a short enough financial leash to make sure he can’t get a car, at least not until he’s gone through a good US driving course.
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I think I sent you a message, it’s possible it didn’t go through. If you got it 6 times, apologies. If you didn’t get it at all, I will try again.
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BI,
It’s not coming through yet, but I will be watching for it.
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“My friend chuckled at my naivety and said, “no, no, no, Laura. People decide which college they want their child to attend and then they hire a college consultant to make that happen.””
I don’t think it works that way. I know people who’ve hired consultants. My cousin hired a consultant to do the sort of stuff her under-resourced public school should have done, such as, lay out the schedule for applying to college, and helping the family build a reasonable list of colleges to visit (reach, match, safety).
A friend hired a college consultant for two children so far. The name of the game there seems to be 1) managing parental expectations, and 2) encouraging kids to apply early decision to the best fits. (No need for financial aid, in that family.)
The most selective colleges require the SAT 1 or the ACT with writing. The colleges can download copies of the essays. Both exams include essays written under exam conditions, i.e., without massaging editors at hand.
Novel written by long-time SAT coach: _Early Decision_, by Lacy Crawford. Fun, and light.
Nonfiction guide to college admissions: _College Admission: From Application to Acceptance, Step by Step_, by Robin Mamlet and Christine VanDeVelde. I highly recommend it. R. Mamlet has worked all levels of admission.
Other good books. The Fiske Guide to Colleges. The iPad version has updated automatically so far to the latest version. It’s much easier to carry on road trips than a bulky paper book. Most useful features? The map of colleges, so you can add colleges you might not have heard of while you’re on the road. (Let’s say, your son declares his loathing of a college you drove 9 hours to reach, upon driving through the gates of said college. Hmm. What other colleges are nearby?) And, the overlap feature is useful too; “students applying to this college also apply to…”
I have to say, I’ve never seen the “foreign community service” gambit pay off. Maybe it did in earlier years?
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I think Laura’s summary is overstated. We are UMC parents in NYC. We didn’t hire a college consultant. Our daughter had a tutor for her Chemistry SAT II, but other than that, she just used study guides for the various standardized tests. She wrote her own essays, although I proofread some of them. She pretty much scheduled her own college visits, although we took her to most of them. (Neither my wife nor I could stomach a trip to Ithaca, so she went with a friend.) She got wait listed at Emory, BC and Wash U., and got into Wake Forest, which she accepted, although she was unhappy and eventually transferred to Emory. (She also got into several colleges a little lower in the pecking order.)
I do have to admit a few things. The private school she attended did a lot of things, maybe more than even an upscale public school would do, in terms of helping with essays, test prep, recommendations etc. She did really well on her ACTs, and therefore didn’t need to worry too much about standardized tests: we certainly would have gotten her a course or a tutor if it had seemed necessary. We didn’t have to worry about the financial aid process. Still, I wouldn’t gauge my effort by reference to the most neurotic mother you meet; try to be average on this issue.
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“Neither my wife nor I could stomach a trip to Ithaca, so she went with a friend.”
Wendy, did you hear that?
“Still, I wouldn’t gauge my effort by reference to the most neurotic mother you meet; try to be average on this issue.”
That’s good advice.
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I’ve already had my shock of the day. A friend of mine told me she hates Bob Dylan. Literally dropped my spoon when she said that. Then I told her I didn’t know if I could be friends with her any more. It was all very painful and I’m trying to forget.
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I wonder if we underestimate how much our parents helped us because like typical teenagers we took so much for granted. I always thought my blue collar parents did not do that much but reading all this made me realize that I had no idea what I was doing at that age. My mother quietly did some research and helped me narrow down my options to a few public schools. She took me to visit a few, and I accompanied my friends on a visit or two. I applied to 2 schools, neither one a “reach” and got into both.of course, things were less competitive then. Miami of Ohio, where I went, might now be considered a reach.
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I recently learned how hard my mom worked to get me access to the private high school I went to (which mostly involved finances). It took a lot of gumption, and I haven’t needed to face that particular challenge for my own kids. I think part of it is we do what we need to do, for our time, and our kids.
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For me, the misleading thing here is the very title of the blog post. The scenario you’re describing here is not “middle class” families, but instead, a distinct subset of upper-upper-middle to upper-class families, and it’s important to note the difference. The middle class–average $70K for a family of 4–is not hiring college admissions consultants.
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I may be describing a NE mentality towards college, but high parental involvement in college admission is pretty much universal around here, regardless of where you fall on the middle class scale. Many of my friends are renters and in blue collar jobs. They are also going to the seminars at the high school about college admissions. The college consultant is a UMC to UC thing. One of my unemployed PhD friends has a side gig writing the essays for hs kids; I think that’s more common.
I’m just describing what I see and hear. Shrug. We’ll probably opt out of most of it and aim for an affordable, competitive state school.
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You might just know too many Italians. The Irish side of my family just sort of kicks the kids out the door.
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Or probably the Irish side is just quieter about it.
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(clears throat) The Irish don’t have a phrase that translates to mammone.
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My boyfriend’s mother and her friends were talking about a boy who was from Palermo but went to college in Padua, and his mother mailed him home cooked meals every week. They all sniffed, “Of course I would cook for my son and do his laundry, but that was in the same city. Mailing food across the country, now that’s really spoiling him. Only Southern Italian mothers would do that.” 😛
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Class is not solely based on money. This is a very class driven issue. I certainly didn’t spens this much time and effort on getting my kids into college.
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I used to work for a university admissions committee charged with awarding merit-based scholarships. Here are 3 pieces of advice for students applying for admission:
1) Do not say in your essay that the person you admire most in the world/your role model is: a) your mom; b) your dad; c) Jesus. It may be true, but admissions committees are looking for an unusual answer that tells us something about you. We’re not trying to admit your wonderful, inspirational parent. Or God. (Although God would be a great alumnus.)
2) If you don’t like the amount you are awarded, if your parent/guardian calls, s/he may be able to wrangle a coupla grand more out of the Director of Admissions, but you’ve got to get that individual on the phone. NJ/NY mothers excel in this arena.
3) Go to where you will be a big fish in a small (small can be size or reputation) pond. Competitive opportunities at the school as well as postgrad opportunities are more likely to be had if your professor/dean/advisor recommender can say, “This student is in the top 3% of students I have encountered in my years at College, and here’s why.” That’s really hard to say if you’re at Yale.
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“We’re not trying to admit your wonderful, inspirational parent.”
Eh, then why ask who the person admires, rather than asking about the person’s own experiences?
Ask the question you actually want to hear the answer to.
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Asking a teenager who s/he admires can show you a lot about their personality, character, values. Also, it’s an equal opportunity question–no “rich kid” easy answer that a poorer kid can’t access, like questions that ask about experiences where rich kids can talk about all their travel abroad.
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“The person I most admire is the shaman I met on my 6 week trek through the Amazon basin in search of a sustainable replacement for Pop Rocks.”
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MH said:
“The person I most admire is the shaman I met on my 6 week trek through the Amazon basin in search of a sustainable replacement for Pop Rocks.”
That actually sounds great.
I was talking to my husband about the expensive volunteer trip issue in college admissions, and while I think that the “OMG, my parents forked over $5k for a trip and I discovered 3rd world poverty!” essays do not suggest a very creative mind, a tweak or two can radically improve them. One of my husbands suggestions was, “While visiting an impoverished 3rd world village, I realized that 1/3 of the villagers had the talent to be accomplished programmers. I immediately set to creating an inexpensive phone-based programming platform.” Or something along those lines.
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“If one piece of random information entered my brain, like the proper method of roasting chicken or the sale price of a pair of shoes at Macy’s, it might push out an essential fact that I might need for the upcoming exam. So, in the few weeks leading up to the exam, I would keep myself in the exam bubble and keep any outside information to a minimum.”
One of my favorite Married With Children clips. OK, it’s from the only episode I ever watched.
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I think it would be interesting to think of which parts of this discussion is actually news one can use — for example, it’s useless to me to know that there are people out there who “write” essays for kids (and, I still want to believe that doesn’t happen, though I’m cool with parents outsourcing editing). The book cranberry mentioned seemed like a realistic depiction of the essay help (which is extensive, but not writing the essay for the kid). I’m guessing it’s useless for 11D, too, since, if your kid wasn’t going to write his essay, you could do it (rather than pay someone).
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There’s a webinar on tomorrow and Thursday on merit aid and how schools award it. You might be interested?
“Who deserves money for college more: students whose test scores and grades qualify them for “merit aid” or students with greater financial need who might be unable to afford college otherwise? New research suggests that colleges might increasingly be favoring less-needy students, in a quest to boost their schools’ rankings and help their bottom lines. Does that finding hold up to scrutiny? And how do colleges’ decisions on need-based versus merit aid affect college enrollment and completion?
EWA invites you to join us for “Merit System?” a special two-part webinar that is the first in the new EWA University webinar series.”
http://www.ewa.org/webinar/merit-system-covering-colleges-choices-financial-aid
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My previous comment got eaten. I blame the iPad. Geeky Girl is the same age as Jonah, and we are surrounded by the same type of parents you are. Consultants abound. Tutors for the SAT, check. Enrichment activities and volunteer activities to make the application look good, check. I am not participating in that rat race. Geeky Girl will have the grades and test scores to get into a decent school. For us, it’s going to come down to money and whether we can afford where she gets in. Geeky Boy didn’t have the grades to consider anything but state schools or community college. SAT scores were through the roof, but paired with a 2.0ish GPA, he couldn’t aim too high.
We are going to start casually looking this summer, and ramp it up next year. Things we have to think about: SAT II’s. Since we don’t do APs at my school, those are the tests students take to get into the higher level schools. Some require them, especially pre-med, engineering, and other science programs. She’s not interested in those fields, but she’ll probably take the French and/or History one just to put one of those schools on the list.
It is a different ballgame than it was 20 years ago. I had zero help. I ended up at my parents’ alma mater, which was a great choice for me. But the other schools I applied to were random: Duke, Dartmouth (waitlisted at both), University of Georgia, Furman (I think). I thought about early decision as a junior because I was dating someone at UVA. Once we broke up, that was off the table. I went to a concert the night before the SAT (The Police) and didn’t study one bit. I did fine.
It’s going to be an interesting ride. 🙂
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Interesting to read the comments. Now that I think about it, I can’t think of a truly local couple in our town, nor in our kids’ schools. Some friends grew up in town, but very few; all of their spouses come from further away, a fair number from other countries. That doesn’t even include all the international students at the kids’ schools.
So it’s a different frame of reference. There isn’t a family loyalty to the state football team. If they follow a team, it might be Barcelona or Manchester United. Tying your future to the state you landed in at 12, due to a parent’s job, isn’t automatic. And if you have enough kids in the pool with that frame of reference, things change.
I would not worry too much about the whole selectivity thing. Really. I admit, I used to. If you research online, you’ll find many stories about how difficult the process is these days. The Atlantic and the New York Times are good sources. (Although I do recommend the Times’ “The Choice” blog, sadly discontinued.) After a while, I decided that any small liberal arts college’s director of admissions who allows the news media to observe the admissions process is attempting to appeal to the sort of parent who’s attracted by selectivity.
IMHO, as a result of the Common App, colleges have had to resort to using what’s called the Tufts Effect to enroll a class of students which will yield the right number of students. When 40,000 students are applying, a small error in acceptances could lead to enormous headaches. Most colleges, except for the most selective, pay attention to “demonstrated interest”. See: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/09/22/students-are-asked-demonstrate-more-interest-colleges-just-applying
Not to ratchet up the paranoia, but colleges can tell if your child opens the emails they send. They send a lot. So it’s a good idea to set up a college spam email account. Choose a neutral email address–not partyboy@whatever, and set up a system to open the emails. In my opinion, it’s a good idea for this address to be shared between parents and child, so that important emails don’t get ignored. After a while, your son will have his list, and will start ignoring all college email ads.
Also, you can set up a “cc” function at the College board to receive copies of important emails. That’s a good thing to set up. Admissions tickets for the SAT are printed copies of a “ticket” received through email. you will need to upload a picture of the student to the College Board’s site. It’s good to have two email accounts available to print out a ticket the morning of the exam, if the student can’t find the first copy you printed out.
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I went to Tufts….but have never heard of the Tufts effect. Off to Google for me. Interesting point on the local family effect. We are east coast transplants living in the Midwest and I am shocked every time I hear of a family wanting their kid to go to UW because of the Badgers (football team). Seriously, they want to tailgate with their kids. I don’t get it. (but we, .like many of your neighbors, route for ManU and Liverpool and Barcelona when it comes to football, so we are outliers here)
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What would colleges do if there were no football (/basketball/hockey) teams to root for? They might actually have to demonstrate worth in academics!
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Our child was just accepted to a school where she was borderline. We visited — twice — once in spring of junior year and once in fall of senior year. We demonstrated interest. But I do remember feeling like “I can afford to drive to a school 200 miles away and stay in a hotel overnight to visit this school. Twice. And someone else can’t.” It feels a bit like we bought her way in. (And of course now she doesn’t want to go there anyway!) This is our second time through the college admissions carnival and the more I learn every time, the less I like it, nor do I feel like it has anything to do with your actual child’s actual qualifications.
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“We demonstrated interest. But I do remember feeling like “I can afford to drive to a school 200 miles away and stay in a hotel overnight to visit this school. Twice. And someone else can’t.””
When I went to University of Southern California as a freshman, I had never set foot on the campus before. During my college years, I flew home to Washington State for Christmas and for the summer, but I only went home for Thanksgiving once and did a spring break trip with family once. I think my parents visited USC twice during those 4 years, one of the visits being when I graduated.
It all worked out OK.
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Oh, and a family like your family paid for my college (at least for the first three years).
Thanks!
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Demonstrated interest doesn’t necessarily include a visit to campus. Parents entering the process should search for the term online. It can include, to my understanding, opening the college’s emails, visiting the website from the links in the emails, attending local admissions events. Making contact with the regional rep for the school can put your name & face into the category of “interested student.”
Friends’ children (very strong STEM students) each applied to more than a dozen colleges; they got into most of them. Even they can only attend one college. That means more than a dozen colleges (for each child) did not “yield” those students. It’s nuts. It becomes a numbers game.
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I am so struck by how different my world is. I am a little past this stage—my youngest graduated from college in 2011. I never heard the hyper-competitive talk Laura describes. Here in the rural Midwest, I had to deal with regular commentary from people who thought we were crazy for allowing our children to pick distant, reasonably selective schools rather than the state school 30 miles away. More importantly, my head exploded from WHY people carped at us. I could have dealt with people who boggled at the cost (they got good financial aid packages, thankfully). Rather, people were uncomfortable with the distance, perceived dangers of the larger, more remote instructions or the thought that the eastern liberals would corrupt them. But our involvement was much more limited than what Laura describes, and the fact that 2 of the 3 went to eastern schools is that that’s what *they* wanted. We took them on college visits and set some limits on what we could pay, but that’s about it. Yet we did more than the norm by some standards. One of our kids took the ACT more than once, and I drove her to another town about 70 miles to take the SAT because her first choice school preferred it. The fact that it wasn’t offered locally says a lot about my community. I used my knowledge base as community college employee help one child transfer in a math course from our CC rather than take it at her destination university because it she disliked math and wanted to get it out of the way, and I negotiated with the financial aid office to get a better offer. I guess it all depends on local context.
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I was the only person in my high school class to take the SAT also. I drove myself, but it was only 20 miles. I have an old friend who was worried about how hard it would be to raise in a family in the corrupting and dangerous city. The city he was talking about is Lincoln.
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Also, NUD is a really good name.
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We experience that from relatives. They don’t understand why’d we’d even consider a school besides the state school and no, it’s not about the cost entirely. I think if we lived in the midwest still, we’d be looking at the same types of schools we’re thinking about now because we have had some experience with people who’ve come out of those schools or who work in those schools and we like what we see. The only difference really would be that I wouldn’t have to deal with the crazy parents who are bending over backwards to get Sally into Princeton when she should probably go to Penn State.
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I think part of the reason we think things are different now is that we hear about everyone’s craziness (including the craziness of people in different parts of the world where the rules/goals/consequences are hugely different).
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I think the regional issues in play are that in the NE, not getting into an Ivy League school sounds like failure to a lot of people, whereas in much of the non-NE, the Ivy League is impressive, but as far away and exotic as Oz. If you live in Arizona, unless you’re a very unusual critter, you’re not going to feel like failure for not getting into Yale.
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You guys are disgusted by UMC NE college preparations? Maybe I’ll do a sports post at some point. What happens to kids who don’t finish sports practice until 8 at night and do sports all weekend? 3 hours per day, 7 day, 12 months. Squeeze in homework. Tutors. College counselors.
Kids are being destoyed.
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Approach it from this angle: http://time.com/3578603/unc-academic-fraud-mcadoo-lawsuit/
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Is that sports, or is it poor coaching? I ask because my kids in boarding schools have classmates who’ve been recruited to play sports at NESCAC and Ivy League, etc. colleges. The athletes spend lots of time on training, but not THAT much time. The coaches are usually teachers, not “professional” coaches, but the schools have fully educated trainers on staff.
So my question is, is this sports, or is it coaches without an adequate support system? A support system should include sports trainers, who’ve (I presume) completed degrees in the field, and know how much training is enough for a young, growing body, and how much is too much.
A parent warned me years ago that (in her opinion) the coaches she knew at our local high school wanted to create winning records to burnish their own careers as coaches. So they had incentives to burn out the kids, if it led to better results for the team they’re coaching _this_ year.
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We know four sports kids. The are also all UMC college prepping kids. Three are in 8th grade, so we don’t know if they’ll be destroyed later, but right now, they are managing the ’til 8 practices & doing sports all weekend and travel tournaments pretty well (along with homework). The other is a senior, and is also doing fine.
It works for that group (I can only presume they have good coaching), but they do have parents whose main goal is their children’s interest (they don’t need the scholarships, aren’t living out their own dreams and draw back if they kid asks. They also all make sacrifices (they miss parties and social time and downtime and can’t do anything else, like music, or drama, . . .). They all love their sports. They are also all extremely talented, both athletically and academically and thus can maintain rigorous schedules in both sports and athletics.
I think (aside from poor coaching, which I know exists, with coach’s goals not matching the child’s needs and goals), I think the groups that struggle are the ones who have to give up the academics in order to pursue the sport (either because they aren’t talented enough in the sport, or because they have to work harder in academics to keep up).
I’m not a sports fan, but I think one-size-fits all rules don’t work for child raising. Some of kids can just do more and be healthy than other kids.
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Sports kids are also a UMC phenomenon. It takes money to pay for the equipment and coaches and travel teams.
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I heard a Dave Ramsey call a few years back where the mom was spending $1,000 a month on horse activity stuff for a kid and hadn’t quite gotten around to informing dad of the fact.
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bj, the injuries often show up around sophomore year of high school, just late enough to make it difficult to reorient the kid to academic subjects. After a certain point for many athlete students, it’s an all or nothing gamble. There isn’t enough time in the day to perform at a high level in class, on the playing field, and in other activities.
If you choose to specialize in athletics, an injury after freshman year’s really tough. The kid’s often not in honors classes, there’s often a lighter schedule to allow for study halls and practices, and sometimes the coach insists on the injured player attending practices and games. To top it off, the kids who’ve spent time working towards leadership roles in extracurriculars, such as the newspaper or chorus, aren’t inclined to step aside for the athlete with a torn hamstring.
It’s thought that student athletes are more prone to injury now because they’ve specialized at such young ages, they’ve over-trained certain body parts and under-trained others.
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“After a certain point for many athlete students, it’s an all or nothing gamble. There isn’t enough time in the day to perform at a high level in class, on the playing field, and in other activities.”
Yes, I’m sure there are many athlete students who are making the all or non gamble, but that’s not true for the 3 we know personally. They are doing both and have extreme levels of talent in both academics and athletics. I think the harder question for them will be the commitment that comes later, when time makes it impossible to commit to both at the highest level, and how they’ll chose.
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I’ve also seen the phenomenon of the one incredibly talented sports kid sucking up all of the family’s resources, including money and time. the other kids in the family mostly get hauled around on weekends since they’re too young to leave alone and the talented one is playing in a tournament across the state. I wonder what happens to those siblings when they apply to college.
There are a lot of hidden costs in these decisions — including the decision to have the parents never spend any time together while the kids are in high school because each one has a separate schedule of driving different kids different places. not great for a marriage. I’ve heard a couple of stories about affairs between the sports parents. . .
In these cases, the decision is tough because the sports player may be doing great but everyone else is actually suffering.
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“I’ve also seen the phenomenon of the one incredibly talented sports kid sucking up all of the family’s resources, including money and time. the other kids in the family mostly get hauled around on weekends since they’re too young to leave alone and the talented one is playing in a tournament across the state. I wonder what happens to those siblings when they apply to college.”
!!!!
That is a question.
We’ve kind of shorted our middle kid on activity funding, but that’s partly a function of him being 1) younger and 2) didn’t need as many inputs as mildly autistic oldest does 3) him not being as eager to do stuff as his big sister is.
I think there’s also a financial trade off between 1) activities now and 2) college savings. Of course, if you don’t do the activities now, won’t you need more college savings? It’s a puzzlement.
“There are a lot of hidden costs in these decisions — including the decision to have the parents never spend any time together while the kids are in high school because each one has a separate schedule of driving different kids different places. not great for a marriage. I’ve heard a couple of stories about affairs between the sports parents. . .”
Ay yay yay.
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Worst kids’ sport story ever:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/11/13/outside_magazine_s_story_on_sexual_abuse_in_competitive_swimming_is_devastating.html
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