Essential Parent Reading: How To Survive the College Admission Madness
With well over 40 years of combined experience in the college admission cycle among the three college counselors at CA, there are some basic truths we have come to know about making college decisions and the potential impacts of this rite of passage on our students. This commentary by Frank Bruni in the New York Times touches on some of the most essential of those truths.
Back
As Bruni points out,
There’s no single juncture, no one crossroads, on which everything hinges. So why do so many Americans — anxious parents, addled children — treat the period in late March and early April, when elite colleges deliver disappointing news to anywhere from 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, as if it’s precisely that?
There’s no single juncture, no one crossroads, on which everything hinges. So why do so many Americans — anxious parents, addled children — treat the period in late March and early April, when elite colleges deliver disappointing news to anywhere from 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, as if it’s precisely that?
We are often asked in the springtime if it’s a “good” year, or how our students are doing in the college process. What is often really being asked is how many prestigious names are represented among the fat envelopes arriving in our students’ mailboxes. As college counselors, we know that those decisions represent assessments of personal stories and institutional priorities at the colleges. Every class is different and every student is different—our goal is for each of our students to have good and accessible options to choose from in April--that’s a good year. The presence of a student in the class whose personal story and background happen to line up with the enrollment goals of a particular college in a given cycle is not a reflection of CA or all the ongoing work in and out of classrooms done by all the students and all the faculty. To view any college’s decision, affirmative or not, as a value judgment on the school or a high school senior is to misunderstand the process, and to unfairly diminish the student and all the pieces and experiences that make up their identity.
Bruni writes:
A yes or no from Amherst or the University of Virginia or the University of Chicago is seen as the conclusive measure of a young person’s worth, an uncontestable harbinger of the accomplishments or disappointments to come. Winner or loser: This is when the judgment is made. This is the great, brutal culling.
What madness. And what nonsense.
As much as we focus our energy at CA on the value of education itself, and as healthy as our culture is and strives to be, at schools like ours there is often a temptation to sum up a complex experience and personal growth story with a tally of college admission “wins” and “losses.” Fed by media and our national culture of status anxiety, this view of young people’s transition out of high school distorts, as Bruni says, the point and meaning of education… and can lead to unnecessary and even toxic stress for the student who feel they must be judged by a standard that, in fact, is outside of their control.
…there’s a frenzy to get into the Stanfords of the world, and it seems to grow ever crazier and more corrosive. It’s fed by many factors, including contemporary America’s exaltation of brands and an economic pessimism that has parents determined to find and give their kids any and every possible leg up.
And it yields some bitter fruits, among them a perversion of higher education’s purpose and potential. College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that’s lost in the admissions mania, which sends the message that college is a sanctum to be breached — a border to be crossed — rather than a land to be inhabited and tilled for all that it’s worth.
Any student who graduates from CA possesses a toolkit of skills to make the most of any college they attend. The really good news is that the raw material for a transformative four-year educational experience is not stockpiled among a few colleges that deny more than 90 out of every 100 applicants in their global pools of applications. The reality of the very competitive and overfull academic job market of the last decade means that any college that our students attend will offer access to outstanding faculty. Some of the best scholars and teachers in their fields are found in colleges that none of our students apply to—and those professors are probably grateful to have a full-time academic position. And, since around 1980, research funding has been distributed much more widely. Many once-regional small liberal arts colleges provide opportunity for research, top-notch facilities, and guidance by esteemed scholars that was once only available at a small number of universities. Our state universities also provide fantastic opportunity for engaged and proactive students. There’s also a lot to be said, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in David and Goliath, for going somewhere you have the opportunity to be a standout student—and having great accomplishments to point to, as well as a defined sense of self and some confidence, will go a long way in the job search after college.
As Bruni says:
the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it.
Shouldn’t an education be entirely about the meat (the experience,) and not the packaging (the name and bumper sticker prestige)? That’s where we hope our students will focus their energy.
CA’s community efforts and conversation around the practice of mindfulness bear their fruit in the college application process and in life beyond our campus. Resiliency, adaptability, the ability to let go of unnecessary anxiety over things beyond our control, and the ability to stay rooted in what really is important are key life skills. The ability to shift to a growth mindset will impact success in all its definitions; a college admission decision will not.
For every person whose contentment comes from faithfully executing a predetermined script, there are at least 10 if not 100 who had to rearrange the pages and play a part they hadn’t expected to, in a theater they hadn’t envisioned. Besides, life is defined by setbacks, and success is determined by the ability to rebound from them.
For every person whose contentment comes from faithfully executing a predetermined script, there are at least 10 if not 100 who had to rearrange the pages and play a part they hadn’t expected to, in a theater they hadn’t envisioned. Besides, life is defined by setbacks, and success is determined by the ability to rebound from them.
Here at CA our office works closely with students to get to know them, to help them know themselves, and to point them in the direction of options that will be attainable and financially viable. Attending CA or any other school, no matter how competitive it is to enter or how prestigious it is, doesn’t itself influence outcomes. Students are assessed on their accomplishments relative to the opportunities they had, and also relative to each institutions’ own priorities and needs... and the exciting reality is, there are far more colleges out there looking to admit our students than the handful who mostly deny applicants. As we often point out, there is no objective, universal definition of “merit” in college admission, and the word “deserve” doesn’t apply. Yet the “admissions madness” can be easily sidestepped with an honest look at what the experience of college consists in after admission, and a thoughtful assessment of a student’s true needs versus their “wants.” Just like high school, college is a journey and a daily lived experience, not just a name on a sweatshirt.
We hope this article resonates with parents at any stage, but particularly those parents of students in their junior or senior years. Like the parents in this story, let your students know that your love and acceptance is unconditional, not dependent on an unpredictable and sometimes almost arbitrary process. Let them pursue their dreams and interests, and help them develop the ability to learn and recover from failure and disappointment, and to use those experiences to grow. Let the college search and application processes be led by the students and allow them to land at the colleges that value them for who they are. In sum, keep an eye on the big picture and help your student maintain that perspective. We’re here to guide and support along the way, to celebrate each student’s individual, authentic story, and to help them tell it honestly to the admission offices that will be eager to listen... from there, our students can move on and "inhabit and till" the fertile land of their college, taking full advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime privilege to explore, learn and grow that college life presents.
© 2023 Colorado Academy
