What $40,000 gets you

If you think the amount I've listed in the title is what a year of college costs these days, guess again. It's the price that Michele Hernandez charges for a full-bore course of college admission preparation. On her website she indicates what this includes, starting in 8th grade:

All packages include unlimited time for parents and students from start (collecting materials and writing an in-depth evaluative report) to finish, culminating with completion of college applications and acceptance letters. Dr. Hernandez oversees everything from a customized reading list, help with all writing assignments in high school to course selection, testing schedule, summer activities, etc., all designed towards giving students that critical edge in the competitive admissions process.

From her comfortable perch in Weybridge, VT, Hernandez has managed to parlay a measly four years in the Dartmouth admission office into books and a ridiculous parody of college guidance, aimed at the well-heeled and foolish. One has to wonder who can afford this nonsense, especially now. Among other things, Hernandez says her counseling packages include "unlimited" personal college counseling, but I doubt this means she's going to turn up at your villa to cozy up to your future collegian and stay the week. Even more oddly, I have to wonder why anyone who could afford her services would bother--I imagine that most of those people are already sending their young Elis and Tigers, already as genetically engineered as collies, to the kinds of private schools that cost enough to have a decent college counselor or ten on staff. So what's the deal?

It seems beyond rational, frankly. I suppose part of me wishes I'd thought of this way to soak the rich first--it's a no-brainer, a very high-end version of hucksterism. And with twice her experience on the college side (Amherst) and six more on the high school side, I could easily charge three times as much, right? But can anyone really justify that price tag for advice and counseling that you can get rather easily with a little energy and self-determination, even without a college counselor at your high school? (But of course we're not talking about those kinds of people, the ones who have to rely on their high schools, public libraries, and other dreary prole resources...)

Well, let's face it, she's drawing on the same psychic insecurity that leads people of a certain income level to buy $8,000.00 handbags or $35,000.00 commodes (not a toilet in this instance, by the way, but the money's flushed away just the same). Her clients are "needy" all right, but in the pathetically insecure way that leads them to focus on name brands and price as substitutes for authenticity, quality, and, in college admission parlance, "fit."

Hernandez foregrounds as fact that she has "the highest success rate of any college admissions consultant in the country. Last year 100% of my clients were accepted to the Ivy League Schools or top colleges like Stanford and Middlebury." This is like shooting fish in a barrel--when you can pick and choose your clients and charge them a year's college tuition in advance to boot just for your handholding, what are the chances they won't get into so-called "top" schools?

The phrasing here is also somewhat misleading. It implies that all her clients were accepted to "top colleges" and also implies (read: baits clients' status-driven lust) that she can make a Gatsby out of a Gatz. Not so fast, I say. Her list of where clients have been accepted is far broader than the "Ivy League" statement implies. It includes:

Amherst College
Boston College (Honors program)
Boston University
Brandeis
Bucknell
Carnegie Mellon
Citadel
Clark
Colgate
Columbia
Connecticut College
Dartmouth
Dickinson
Duke
Emory
Georgetown (Foreign Service)
Hamilton (Bristol scholarship $20K 50%)
Lafayette
Marquette
Miami of Ohio, Honors College
MIT
Mt. Holyoke
Northwestern
Notre Dame
NYU:Tisch School
Oxford University (England)
Rice
Rollins
Rutgers (full scholarship)
Skidmore Honors Program
St. Andrews University (Scotland)
Stanford
Swarthmore
Syracuse
Tufts (Neubauer Scholar $10,000 stipend over four years)
Tulane
University of California University of Chicago
University of Maryland (College Park Scholar)
University of Miami

Now you may say that all of these schools are "top colleges" and I say, fair enough. But I suspect that anyone who ponies up the dough expects to be able to slap an Ivy sticker on the car tout de suite. After my years in high school college counseling I can claim at least as good a list if not better, and I did it for 70 kids at a time on a decent salary (But I also worked with kids who for the most part had two-PhD parents or lawyer/doctor parents, etc.). Now I'm really ticked as I calculate what I might have earned if I'd counseled the Hernandez way.

Well, there's no real point in fulminating any more. If you're rich enough and stupid enough and pathetically status-conscious enough to hire Hernandez, I suppose you're going to, whatever a rational person might say. But I pity your kid, who is probably yearning to escape your clutches and spend four years hiding from you his or her search for true, authentic experience in the forms of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, just to feel a little less like a robot. My idea of a true college advising horror show would be to have Hernandez and Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, harridan of high schools, work on your kid together.

Why am I so cranky about this? Why do I care what Hernandez can get away with? Perhaps because there are so many amazingly talented and worthy kids who could really use a shot at decent colleges but have trouble getting access to the kinds of resources that middle-class kids take for granted or that Hernandez puts out of reach. Maybe because I work with wonderful counselors who work for peanuts trying to help poor and underserved students from urban schools get into "top schools" so they can enter the mainstream of American society. Maybe this kind of conspicuous consumption has always ticked me off. Ultimately, it offends my sense that attending college is a way to lift yourself up by your own efforts and feel that you earned something; it's not something that can be bought. But that's just me.

I know that the web is ideal for links but I'm not going to provide them here; if you want to see Hernandez's website you'll have to find it yourself.

The Counselor's Dilemma

In early February I spoke to a group of low-income/first-generation college students about how to interpret their admission and financial aid letters. I began by asking if anyone had received an acceptance letter yet (assuming that few had). To my surprise, about a third to a half of the group raised their hands. After congratulating them I asked if anyone had any questions, and that's when the whole thing started.

One student said she'd been given until March 1 to respond and several others said the same thing. I asked if she meant May 1, the universal reply date. She said, no, it was March 1. (Another student said she had to respond by the week after our meeting.) Others nodded emphatically. I asked if they were being asked to make a housing deposit and whether it was refundable (the conditions that allow colleges to ask for money before May 1.) Not everyone was sure, but some were certain they were being asked to make a commitment by March 1. In my mind, even asking a student without a sophisticated knowledge of the college admission world is asking too much, but that's not the end of it.

After the initial flurry of questions, another student raised his hand and said that he'd been offered admission with a full, four-year scholarship but only if he committed to the institution by March 1. I wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't shown me the letter and the dayglo pink sheet full of legalese he was supposed to return by March 1 if he wanted the full scholarship. To put it bluntly, the institution was bribing him to commit to it. I call that unconscionable.

Now here's the dilemma, which would be more of one if I were still counselor at a school, especially one that depends on ingratiating itself with top colleges: Reporting the school to NACAC is crucial, since there is a clear violation of the SPGP, on top of which the institution is browbeating a student the way a used car salesman would ("This deal is only good today!"). While anonymity is promised, that's a risk. If a counselor's name is revealed, he or she can be accused by cowardly administrators of "damaging the relationship" between school and college. Even if the violation is clear, colleges can often get away with outrageous tactics because schools often feel they have to play ball no matter what. No matter how egregious the violation may be, the high school counselor is under a great deal of pressure to let it go in the interests of getting students into college.

I happen to believe that the vast majority of colleges and universities neither flout the rules nor punish schools who report SPGP violations. Often, violations are minor and easily cleared up with a phone call or an email. But not always. Several years ago it was brought to my attention that a certain midwestern school was encouraging students to apply as juniors. I thought this was wrong and tried to discuss it with the school, where I got only vague answers and evasion. I persisted until I evidently annoyed the director of admission enough that she wrote to the school's principal announcing that her school would no longer accept applications from my school's students. And of course I was called on the carpet for having the audacity to challenge what I thought was a clear violation not only of NACAC policy but also good educational practice. The fatwa against my students was lifted, but not before damage had been done to my position, even though I was acting in the overall interests not only of my students but others'.(Although I won't mention the name of the university, if I say "wait list" almost anyone on the high shcool side of the desk will know which one I'm talking about.)

This fight was not even mine, in that I had no students affected; it was brought to my attention by other counselors, for whom I was acting. Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut. But to do so is to cut the legs out from under the SPGP. If no one reports violations, then what? We have lofty ethics, but is that only while anyone is looking or only as long as colleges agree to abide by them? What to say to the lowly high school counselor who sees something that needs correcting? And what to tell his or her principal, who cares more about the year's scorecard than some wispy ethics? NACAC has no power to protect a counselor at school, so what's he or she to do? These are questions that have yet to be confronted.

Taming the Testing Dragon

The coming new year for the Chinese is the Year of the Ox, so I'm going to go with that spirit and suggest it's time to tell students applying to college that they can take the ACT or SAT once and that's it. The current discussion about "score choice" and what colleges want versus what the College Board wants them to want versus what ACT is doing and how all the test prep companies figure into all this mess cries out for a Gordian knot solution (sorry to mix cultural references). I've said many times that the admission process is far too complicated, overgrowing students' educations and becoming more important than what they're learning in high school. So, to repeat: Limit students to taking the SAT or ACT once. Period. We'll all be better off.

I know many will shriek at this limitation of students' right to flay themselves in the quest for collegiate Valhalla, but let's think about some of the issues (and for the sake of argument I'll try to limit my own abhorrence of these tests):

Argument: Students should have the right to take the test as many times as they wish and report their best scores to enhance their applications. It's a free country!
Response: Many may see a one-time testing approach as too similar to the European all or nothing tests (and many people still think of the tests as the be-all-and-end-all for college admission). But a test score in the U.S. is not determinative; it can be considered, downplayed, or lauded by any college to whom it is reported. And it doesn't limit where students can apply. Hundreds of institutions don't even use the scores or are score optional, with little effect on the quality of their student bodies. And even those who use scores often downplay them when necessary to enroll athletes, legacies, talented minority students, and so on. In other words, scores are fungible, not fixed; one set of scores or six doesn't really make that much of a difference.

Argument: Students should have the opportunity to get their best scores to indicate their true abilities.
Response: The College Board, which produces the SAT, long ago gave up the myth they themselves originated that the test can't be coached since it was an indicator of innate abilities. It even offers its own prep courses to subvert (sorry, prepare for) the test. And companies like Princeton Review and others, whatever one might think of them, have demonstrated that it is possible to raise scores not by knowing more about geometry or American history, but by knowing how the test is structured. How this adds to a student's academic qualities has yet to be determined. Ironically, students who take the test again and raise their scores significantly can be accused of cheating, and a very high test score coupled with low or mediocre grades can brand an applicant a slug in class. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't, and whatever "true ability" is is certainly not being measured by the ACT or SAT.

Argument: Taking the test several times is just a good way to get a better score; it's not unfair or anything.
Response: Practice tests already exist for the SAT and the ACT, namely, the PSAT and the PLAN. Administered at students' schools, they come back with detailed explanations of what students got right and wrong and what concepts they need to work on for when they take the test for real. In fact, students can take the PLAN and the PSAT in their sophomore and junior years, without scores being reported anywhere, so they have plenty of time to see what they need to improve when the time comes.

Argument: If students want to take the test multiple times, what's wrong with that?
Response: Well, nothing, really, if you think that going through hours of test prep, anxiety, and craziness, not to mention hundreds if not thousands of dollars somehow are positive educational developments. Testing already crowds out actual academic subjects as early as third grade, and drilling for college entrance exams is the most tedious, boring, and retrograde activity a school can indulge in. No wonder students hate it. Students are already idiotically overtested and as to whether it's always the students' choice to take and retakes the tests, I'd look more closely at parental influence.

Argument: Test prep and multiple testing give students a taste of what's expected of them in college.
Response: I for one wouldn't attend an institution that focused on testing like that as an evaluative measure. Does it introduce concepts to think about, encourage intellectual development, accurately measure what a student knows? No. Testing is something to be gotten through, not embraced. It is intellectually deadening and as welcome as plague. Most students will find that, except for huge institutions with classes of hundreds, they will rarely see SAT-like tests.

Argument: A student can have an "off" day on the one day that the test is given, leading to a "false negative" score.
Response: A student's score is always considered in the context of high school strength and GPA; an "off" day could easily be seen as that in the admission process when so-so scores accompany an otherwise strong record. Scores (as well as every other application element) are subject to the sense and good judgment of the individuals reading applications, so there is every reason to believe that a sense of who's "off" can be developed with a one-test limit even as it is now with multi-test scores being reported.

Argument: Colleges need to be able to put the best scores of their applicants together so they can put together the best profiles possible, so allowing students to take the tests multiple times is to their advantage.
Response: This is a college issue, not a student or educational issue. In my experience we spent much more time talking about students' activities, courses, and achievements than their test scores in committee. One argument is that no college wants to have poorer scores to report than its competitors do. But if everyone has only the one score to report, a deflation will occur across the board and equilibrium should be maintained.

Argument: Multiple scores enable colleges to get the best bond ratings and rankings.
Response: Aside from the insidiousness of these methods of rating colleges, the same principle applies as in the answer above: If all institutions have the same one-test figures, it seems likely that everything will reach an equilibrium that would merely lead to a recalibration of the ratings and the rankings.

Argument: A single test date would put more pressure on students because there would be no "safety valve" if the results weren't good.
Response: Probably, but it would be up to colleges and universities to put the test in a more enlightened context by showing how they use it and where it actually stands in the admission hierarchy. In fact, adopting the one-time test might cause colleges to rethink how they use it because it would be a rawer picture of the test-taker, more "authentic," so to speak. A single date would be intense, but knowing it would all be over afterwards might be liberating. If the date were at the end of junior year, results received in the summer might provide motivation for doing better in courses senior year to make up for a poor score.

There are many reasons to support a one-time only test:

1. The hours and dollars spent on test prep seriously distract from more useful activities like homework and true academic development, whether they're sponsored through schools as classtime sessions or after school. Especially in areas with a high percent of first-generation or poor students, it is critical that time and dollars not be sacrificed for something as ephemeral and uncertain as test prep. I know of one school that has spent nearly $60,000.00 on test prep for students who could have better been served by spending that money on academic enhancement, tutoring, equipment, and so on. A recent article in Harper's magazine (September 2008) documenting a year of test prep in a New York City school is illuminating. Click on this entry's title to go to the article.

2. Test prep as a part of schooling is a kind of regression to the days of rote learning, which has long since been abandoned in this country. It kills motivation, deadens intellectual curiosity, and makes education look like a hoop to jump through rather that an ongoing source of personal development. It makes students and teachers cynical; no good teacher I know will sacrifice a classroom discussion about "Death of a Salesman" for an SAT vocabulary drill. And no student would willingly attend. He may not care for Arthur Miller, either, but at least there's the possibility that something interesting might come up. (Furthermore, it most disadvantages those who can least afford it: First-generation and other underserved students who most need to learn the basics of English, math, and so on to do well in college.)

3. Multiple testing opportunities favor those already privileged; a one-time test date can even the playing field to a certain extent. While privileged students can still afford the books and testing that non-privileged students can't, the one-time test means that what you see is what you get on the other end. Will non-privileged students suffer because they can't afford test prep or the ability to try again? Those students already have extra consideration for their backgrounds and lack of educational support, so test scores will continue to be seen that way. (Remember, test scores have been shown definitiely to have cultural biases.) It will affect privileged students more, because they'll have to live with their scores without being able to tinker with them over and over. (Idea: After adopting the one-test only policy, schools can ask "Estimate how much preparation you received or paid for before the test." The more that's reported, the less credible the test. Fantasy I know, but still...)

4. Multiple testing is a financial bonanza that offers little real improvement in educational environment, siphoning off money from individuals and school systems that could be put to better use. While test prep companies and the College Board get rich coming and going, that money doesn't go to enhancing educational opportunity (although the companies do provide their services pro bono in many circumstances). And schools that can't really afford it are led to chase the ephemara of scores as a way to getting their students into college rather than focusing on building their academic programs.

5. The ability to take the test multiple times fosters the idea that testing is more crucial than it really is. Like Sysiphus, rolling the stone up the hill only to have it roll down again so he has to start all over again, multiple testing really accomplishes very little while creating great strain and anxiety. Nothing gets learned, nothing is accomplished, other more fruitful opportunities are passed up, and in the end, an admission decision can be made in spite of scores as much as because of them. Consistently, according to NACAC, a student's GPA and course strength are the most compelling parts of the application; the scores are really more window dressing. They're easy to look at and mess with; they have acquired a magical quality; and they play into our love of lists and bests/worsts. So while admission officers tend to drool over big scores, they also can see the proverbial "diamonds in the rough" that shine in class without the burnishing of high test scores.

Adopting a one-time only testing policy may be seen as radical, but it would help to simplify and equalize the whole testing universe. Colleges and universities should consider cutting back the testing underbrush while at the same time promoting the importance of academic achievement more forcefully.

Harvard's SAT Exceptionalism

We all know that Harvard can do whatever it wants and usually does. And what it does usually sets the course for the rest of the country's colleges and universities (at least in the sense of giving them something to think about...) But this recent comment in the Boston Globe really has me steaming:

Harvard's dean of admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons, said standardized tests that are based on high school course work have proven superior to the SAT at determining college readiness and said he hoped such tests will begin to play a larger role in admissions decisions.
"Wouldn't it be better for students to study chemistry and math and language, than trying to game a somewhat esoteric set of test-taking skills?" he asked.
Yet Harvard "could never be SAT-optional," he said, because of the need for a national measure to identify top students, including those from urban or rural high schools that don't send many students to elite colleges.

Mr. Fitzsimmons recently chaired a committee that explored the use of standardized testing in college admission. It recommended that the SAT be de-emphasized in admission decisions for all the reasons that many of us have been giving for many years. Clearly, however, this recommendation is meant to apply only to lesser institutions, and not Harvard itself. Harvard couldn't possibly do what the plebes do because it needs to have a "national measure" to identify top students, unlike everyone else, who presumably only need, what, "local" measures? Or other more scurrilous ways of evaluating applications?

This smug exceptionalism not only throws the committee's study and recommendations into doubt (were you just wasting everyone's time?) it also reeks of a "Let them eat cake" mentality that makes us common folk want to grab our pitchforks and settle someone's hash. Why can de-emphasizing the SAT work for everyone else but not possibly for Harvard? Surely with its 372 years of experience it knows how to identify a talented student by now without a test that has only been in existence for 80 years or so. And surely, if it's good enough for Harvard, why should anyone else give it up, despite the fact that many colleges and universities have, without any diminution in their ability to attract and identify able applicants.

Fitzsimmons connects using the SAT with the necessity of finding "urban or rural" students who might otherwise, presumably, be overlooked without it. But this is just protective coloring, meant to reassure us that Harvard needs the scores to find talented first generation and minority students it would otherwise miss. But most of those students won't do well on the SAT, so Harvard would either have to reject them or ignore the scores. And Harvard has the resources to find anyone it wants, so why rely on the scores when it's just finished downplaying them?

So the message and value of the study become muddied and pointless. Whatever we may think about America's top university "brand," we must acknowledge that Harvard's imprimatur on anything carries great weight. Without Harvard's taking the lead by adopting a more enlightened view of admission testing (even if it stops short of de-emphasizing it), what was the point of doing the study in the first place? Of course, it's not bound to follow through on any conclusions, but wouldn't its participation suggest it was willing to lead where those conclusions might point? To say categorically that it couldn't possibly risk its reputation by de-emphasizing scores, even though that was the conclusion of the study seems arrogant at best, cynical and unilateral at worst.

If Harvard wants to avoid being the Marie Antoinette of colleges and universities, perhaps it should get out with the people a little instead of simply visiting its faux village to commune with the peasants. It might experiment with how it uses the SAT by making decisions on a sampling of students without using scores and following them through over the years. With the immense resources at its disposal, Harvard could actually perform a service rather than retreat into its opulence. Leadership on this issue would be to take the study's conclusions seriously, as if they applied to ALL institutions and not just everyone else.

One interesting irony of this situation is that the SAT was once touted specifically as a way to find otherwise hidden talents throughout the country when many colleges had narrowly specific entrance exams of their own. It was conceived of as a great leveller. But with the increasing connection of test performance with income, this seems no longer defensible; now it's as much a barrier to admission as a way into college. The idea of the SAT's being a "national standard" that is somehow equal across the country has been definitvely refuted over and over again. And being able to find talented students in out of the way places has never been easier. So what's Harvard's excuse? Apres moi, le deluge...

High School, College Admission, and Class

The following post is a book review I wrote for the NACAC online book review section. It was published in August, 2008.

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education
By Peter Sacks
University of California Press
$24.95, 373 pages (incl. notes and index), hardcover

Reviewed by Willard M. Dix
Executive Director, College Access Counseling

The college admission Petri dish grows many strains of the American Dream. Mixing aspiration, class-consciousness, education, social and cultural expectations, adolescent psychology, family dynamics, and financial complexity, it produces wildly varying results. Until recently, the formula seemed simple: ӀmeritԀ plus financial wherewithal plus extracurricular prowess equaled entr退e into the hallowed halls. But social and cultural awareness over the last 30 years has shown that formula to be more complex than once thought, and its effects more pernicious than the Dream would dictate.

In his new book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, Peter Sacks looks at issues of class using the high school to college nexus as his laboratory. Combining solid research with portraits of young people and one educator struggling against classրbound issues, he asks us to consider that issues of class, as much as of education, have a significant impact on those striving to better their circumstances in American society.

Crashing the party
Sacks argues that Ӏclass is the grand organizing principle of American educationԀ and as such it works against those not already in the middle- or upper-middle classes. He challenges us to rethink the simplistic assumption that education by itself is a way for non-elites to enter the middle class. Educational Ӏstandards,Ԁ for example, often cater to those already capable of meeting them, rather than encourage othersҀ achievement. As a reverse example, he profiles Oceanside High SchoolҀs Dayle Mazzarella, Ӏa dangerous man,Ԁ who developed a successful program that opened advanced courses to students once considered incapable of succeeding in them. Sacks calls the San Diego teacher someone who is Ӏcrashing the exclusive party that American higher education has becomeԀ because he dares to assume that non-elites can achieve the same success of their more privileged peers if only they are challenged and supported properly.

Public and Private Commitment
Although this portrait and others in the book help bring the theme of class and education into focus, they are not as compelling as SacksҀs look at how higher education seems to be becoming more, rather than less, a bastion for elites and more adept at serving private, rather than public (read societyҀs) interests. He notes that Ӏa mere three percent of the freshmen enrolled at the nationҀs 146 most selective institutions came from the lowest socioeconomic quartileԀ in a 2004 study, while Ӏ almost 75 percentŀcame from the highestŀquartile.Ԁ In another, it was found that ӀoneҀs social background ׀particularly oneҀs fatherҀs education ׀proved to be just as powerful as academic merit in predicting the selectivity of the college one attended,Ԁ and that, in fact, that power has doubled over the years from 1980 to 1992.

At a time when a great deal of college rhetoric focuses on serving more lower-income and first-generation students, the facts seem to indicate otherwise. Sacks quotes a recent study contrasting university endowments with the number of students receiving Pell Grants on campus: Many of those with the healthiest endowments had the fewest Pell recipients: Harvard (6.8 percent), Princeton (7.4), Washington University in St. Louis (8) and Wake Forest (7) being among them. Even more unsettling are the records of state institutions, designed specifically to provide education for the public good. He finds that the University of Michigan, for example, while increasing its overall prestige through greater selectivity and claiming to pay more attention to Ӏsocio-economic diversityԀ actually slashed its Pell Grant enrollment in half between 1992 and 2002. It and other similar institutions seem to be abandoning their commitment to the greater good in favor of chasing institutional prestige, a worrisome development that threatens their social role as developers of the middle class.

At the gates
Sacks believes that we should work harder to make American education the leg up to the middle class we envision it to be. He celebrates the Ӏrabble rousersԀ and Ӏgate crashersԀ already doing that work and in the final chapter makes a few suggestions for action that would bear much more development. Tearing Down the Gates is in fact more polite than radical, spotlighting the intersection of class, privilege, and education and prodding us to a wider consideration of how they ought to work. The battle has not yet been joined, but, as Sacks notes, Ӏfor any educational reform to really happenŀAmerica will have to confront its class problem.Ԁ By putting high school education and college admission in this context, Sacks has significantly moved that discussion forward.