Busman's Holiday Reading

This entry also appears on the NACAC blog, Admitted.

Heading for the hills at last, speeding to the shore or dashing to your dacha for a few blissful weeks away from the office? Feeling guilty that you havenҀt begun writing recommendations or finished your fall travel planning? Worried about not answering your BlackBerry or iPhone or being away from your laptop? (You are going to be away from your laptop, arenҀt you?) Have no fear׀here are some books about college and the college admission process you can take with you so you wonҀt suffer too much withdrawal. The best thing׀you can read them when you want to.

First off is Jean Hanff KorelitzҀs novel, Admission, which has Portia Nathan, a Princeton admission officer, dealing with the double helix of university admissions and admissions about her own past. ItҀs a well-written and sympathetic book that gets to the heart of the dilemmas admission officers face while also getting to the heart of its main character. And youҀll wonder about her final decision for a long time.

Tom WolfeҀs I Am Charlotte Simmons is breezy and archly critical as he tends to be, but itҀs a sharp, funny novel about a girl from the other side of the tracks and her experiences at a Duke-like university down south. On the pre-college side, try Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Its premise is similar׀a girl from Indiana receives a scholarship to attend a prestigious East Coast boarding school, with all the transitions and awkward moments that entails. Both have some funny and poignant moments, with great characters all around.

For a nonfiction look at being odd man out, try Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams, a memoir by Alfred Lubrano, a kid from Bensonhurst who ends up attending Columbia University, where his bricklayer father had helped build some of its buildings.

Some hefty but eye-opening reading comes with Jerome KarabelҀs The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This exhaustively researched and well-written book weighs in at 711 pages but its revelations about how these universities conducted admission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will curl your hair if sun and surf havenҀt done that already. ItҀs less an indictment than a reality check: Ӏgolden ageԀ of college admission? Not so fast! Who knew that the Ivies once tried very hard not to have too many smart kids?

ItҀs been out for a while but itҀs worth reading Jacques SteinbergҀs The Gatekeepers, if you havenҀt already. Reportorial but empathetic (Steinberg writes about college admission topics for the New York Times), it provides a behind-the-scenes look at the admission process by focusing on one admission dean, Ralph Figueroa, at Wesleyan as he goes through an admission year.

Thomas HineҀs The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience helps answer the question, Where the heck did all these kids we work with come from? Hine provides a fascinating contextual narrative that illustrates the evolution of the creature we now call a Ӏteenager.Ԁ While teens once were expected to take on adult roles very quickly, they are today both courted and feared as a group, and, as Hine puts it, ӀSchool and university are simply a convenient place [sic] to store them until their talents are required.Ԁ Discuss! His final chapters ask us to perhaps redefine what being a teen means in our changing culture, and you may wonder a bit less about why they behave the way they do now. Or not׀the book was written before the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

So have fun wherever you go (or stay) and leave the guilt behind. Reading at least one of these books should inoculate you against out-of-office queasiness. See you in the fall!

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.

Back to the Future

Those of us who applied to college thirty or so years ago seem mostly to have tossed out a few applications, taken the SAT or ACT once, and then gotten on with the rest of our high school lives. We waited and hoped for the best. Some of us were lucky enough to have a counselor who casually mentioned a college or two we'd never heard of and encouraged us to apply, which we did. That was certainly my experience. Mr. Boulhouwer, counselor at West Morris Regional H.S. in Chester NJ is responsible for my applying to and eventually attending Amherst College in Amherst MA. He suggested I try a "liberal arts" college. After explaining to me what that was, he tossed out Amherst and I said I'd give it a shot. The rest, as they say, is history. (To this day I'm convinced that I didn't even know Amherst was all-male until I got there; I probably would have been a Williams alum if he'd said "Williams" instead.)

I've joked with any number of adults of about my age who have similar stories about how they got to their alma maters: the chance remark, the off-hand suggestion by a math teacher, or the casual observation by a respected neighbor or relative. There was no strategizing, no long-term planning, no multiple testing, no weighing the pros and cons of every school. At some level, we knew we'd be fine anywhere we went and we trusted that the schools would make good decisions (although not necessarily the ones we wanted). Once the applications were done we went about our business. And in fact we did turn out pretty well, most of us.

Having made the transition from working with the uber-strategic to the underserved, I've discovered many similarities between the latter and my generation of college-goers. Low-income and first generation students interested in going to college tend to be hard workers fully involved in their schools and communities, out of choice and necessity. They're not strategizers, they're young people who hope their talents and experiences will be enough to get them admitted to college; that is to say, they haven't been good students and participants in order to get into college, they're going to get into college because they're good students and participants. They're not multi-testers trying to break 2200, they're test takers because they have to be, and let it go at that. Most of them can't afford, literally or figuratively, to spend hours and hours parsing essay questions; they've got real things to do.

In these ways and others, I'm finding that the low-income and first-generation students I work with are very much like we were many years ago when it comes to college admission. Without romanticizing too much, I'd say that they have an authenticity that colleges and universities say they want, an openness to and desire for new experiences that can make them exceptional students in any classroom. Yes, many of them are rough around the edges and many have gone through things we wouldn't wish on anyone, but they have a resilience and even an optimism that make them wonderful to work with. They believe that college is going to help them live better lives and learn important things; they are honored to be chosen and pleased to have the opportunities to advance; they are grateful to be able to fulfill their hopes and dreams and those of their families. They don't see college acceptance as a right or a mark of innate privilege; they see it as the result of hard work and determination. And they're willing to bring these qualities to campus.

For these students, applying to college is an adjunct to their lives, not their purpose in life, as it seems to be for so many of their overprivileged peers. And in that way, they avoid the largely self-created stress we hear way too much about. Their lives are their own and if a college accepts them, that's great; if not, they'll try again. It makes me hopeful for the future.

The More Things Change...

Acceptance and rejection letters are out for this year and the usual articles about how it's never been harder to get into college and so on have been coming out like crocuses at the first sign of spring. As I've noted before, this isn't really news, it's just a repeat of articles from the last 10 years with different numbers, and of course we always have the details of rejected or waitlisted students being astonished that they didn't get into their "dream" schools, how much the pressure is getting to them, and so on. Focusing on colleges and universities whose acceptance rates seem to be approaching zero, the ultimate exclusivity (not may idea--see Doonesbury from a few years ago), media make it seem as though legions of rejected students will soon be roaming the streets in their ragged cardigans, homeless shades doomed to walk the earth without any cozy campus to call their own.

Of course, this is nowhere near the real picture. Just about everyone who applies to college will get in somewhere; quite a few colleges even (mid-April 2008) now are still accepting applications. The whole thing is only a problem if you care very deeply about where you attend and think that if you don't go there your life is somehow ruined, destroyed, or otherwise diverted from its true course and flowering, all of which is nonsense.

A colleague and I were talking the other evening about our own college research and application processes, laughing at our callow approach to the whole thing. She and I are contemporaries, so we're talking about the early 70s, before the whole thing got really out of hand. We were both clueless, to be honest, even though we were both good students. I was head of my class at a large public high school in Chester, NJ, which offered honors but no AP classes that I can recall (not a big thing then), and I did well in the honors track, although to this day I consider calculus my mortal enemy. I had what today would be considered so-so SAT scores (no I'm not telling, although to my chagrin I still know them), and a decent although not spectacular career in the chorus and the theater group. I also worked part-time at the local pharmacy, working the counter and making deliveries all over the area.

When college came on the horizon late in my junior year (although my family always told me I could go anywhere I wanted when the time came), we had no special seminars, no offers of essay help, no test prep, no piles of glossy viewbooks, no "college counselor." I figured I'd apply to Harvard and Yale simply because my uncle, whom I greatly admired, had attended the former and taught at the latter; I briefly considered Tufts, my father's alma mater, but since he was an engineer I thought it was a school for engineers, so I dismissed it. There was no "strategizing" to it; I was just going with what I knew.

One day, going by my guidance counselor's office, I heard him call to me and ask what I was thinking about college. I told him, and he said that was fine, but had I ever considered a small liberal arts college? I asked what that was and he said a good place to get an education but smaller than a university. That seemed fine to me so I asked him to name a few. "Well, Amherst, for example," he replied. I'd never heard of it, but I was willing to check it out.

I don't remember what I knew about Amherst (it wasn't much) before I got on the Peter Pan bus in New York for the four hour ride to Amherst, MA later in the summer, but when I got off in the town center, I swooned at the New England charm and the compact yet spacious Amherst College campus. I thought, "This is what college should look like!" I walked around by myself, coming without warning on the spectacular view of the Pioneer Valley from Memorial Hill, after which I was completely overcome with desire. I dropped in on the admission office, which at the time was tucked away in the main administration building. I was smitten without having seen a student, professor, or admission office person. I asked about interviews. I didn't need one, I was told; by the time I returned to New Jersey, I was ready to apply.

The time came and I applied to Harvard, Yale, and, at random, Ithaca College in upstate New York. I applied to Amherst early decision, still intoxicated with the thought of lounging on that hill, or simply being there, reading, surrounded by nature. Hell, even the trees seemed intelligent. I wanted to ingest it all. But once the applications were in I went on with the rest of my high school life. (I don't remember what I wrote my essays on, but I do remember that I didn't get any help that I recall. My mother may have given them a quick read, but not much else--no English teacher or counselor help.)

Ithaca accepted me almost immediately, it seems to me. Harvard and Yale turned me down, which was OK by me, especially when I recalled my "group interview" at a Yale's alum's home. A group of applicants sat around a table and an admission person spoke with us after we had each had a chance to speak with one of the Yale alums who had gathered for the occasion. The home was elegantly appointed, perhaps even lavish; it seemed like a mansion to me and it made me uncomfortable. But what I really remember is the girl who said, "I understand Yale has a burgeoning film department." I made a face, probably, groaning inside at her pretentious use of a big word to impress the dean. It was then I decided I didn't want to go to Yale, although I learned a new word that day.

Amherst deferred me, making my guidance counselor, David Boelhouwer, crazy. He couldn't understand it and called to see what had happened. Turns out, you did need an interview if you applied ED and lived within 250 miles of campus. He managed to wrangle an interview for me over the Christmas break with the Dean himself, the legendary Ed Wall. I went back to campus, courtesy of my aunt, who drove me out from Acton MA in a snowfall and waited while I had my session. I remember being disappointed that Dean Wall didn't ask me anything about my grades or accomplishments; instead he asked what I was reading and I told him The Wheel of Love, a story collection by Joyce Carol Oates. We talked about that. What was even more frustrating was that I didn't even like the book, and during the whole interview I could see the snow coming down harder and harder and the light fading and it was a long way back to Boston.

Afterwards, Dean Wall took my puny hand in his massive bear grasp and told me it was nice to meet me. Despite my disappointment, I stopped at Hastings in town and bought an Amherst sweatshirt, which I resolved not to wear unless I got in. My aunt picked me up and we drove back to the Boston suburbs.

The day I got into Amherst was the only day in my school life that I cut a class. My mother, who had been in a terrible auto accident over New Year's 1973, had needed a nurse during the day, and I would take over when I got home. Consequently I was able to have a car at school. When the letter arrived, she called the school and I got called to the office. She wanted to open it. At first I said yes, then changed my mind. I rushed out of school, hopped into our VW Bug and zoomed home, where I found the acceptance letter. I celebrated a bit with my mother, ran upstairs and put on the sweatshirt, and raced back to school, in time to catch the end of my German class. Mrs. Kerekes, a stern but fair Hungarian, started to scold me, but when she saw the sweatshirt, she started beaming, and all was forgiven.

So I got to Amherst, but here's the punchline--to this day I don't think I even knew that Amherst was all male until I actually got to campus. (It went co-end in 1976, one of the last schools of its kind to do so.) My whole experience of college search and application was a fluke arising from a casual comment by my counselor. I'm sure that if he'd said "Williams" or "Union" or "Hamilton" or "Calcutta" I'd be one of their alums today. Total chance. And I'm also convinced that I owe Joyce Carol Oates credit for my admission. Even today I feel guilty about not reading everything she writes (which would, of course, be impossible for a mortal with only 24 hours a day to read...)

So back to my colleague and me sitting in an Irish pub in downtown Chicago. Her story, in its similar lack of focus on "getting into" a particular college, is very similar to mine. And yet, here we were, laughing at our ignorance and marveling at the fact that we managed pretty well in spite of it, having survived and even prospered. Our lives are good, our work fulfills us, and we have good memories of our alma maters. Yet they were accidents! When I see today's high school students sweating, and planning, and conniving, and arranging their lives so they'll "stand out" starting even before high school, I have to wonder what it is they're really doing. It's not a bad thing to want to go to a particular place, but, let's be honest, it doesn't really matter where you go to college. The important thing is what you do once you're there.

I can already hear you saying, "Well, but what about the contacts, the smart kids who attend, the best professors, and so on?" I still say, it makes no difference, and to fret about it is a stress that's totally unnecessary. The contacts you make in one place are different but the same as in another--you find the people you need to find no matter where you are. You attend classes or not, you party or not, you start becoming an adult or not, no matter where you are. And with acceptance rates below 10 percent, those big deal colleges are doing other schools a favor by making sure they have a good supply of smart kids who end up fanning out all over the country. So do yourselves a favor and think that you could probably do just as well applying to colleges randomly as you could trying to predict and insure every element.

In the long run, we can't control what will happen no matter what we do or how much we'd like to. Why should applying to college be any different? The students with the least stress were the ones who came to my office and said, "You know, I think I'll be happy wherever I go." As the Chinese say, "Be careful how you travel or you may end up where you expected to." That's the spirit!