The New College Try
During the Spring Break of my daughter’s junior year, she, her father and I embarked on the decidedly American ritual of the college-selection process. Just as high school seniors tore open their acceptance or rejection letters, we joined the next year’s applicants and their parents in their descent down the rabbit hole. We made a college pilgrimage to the Northeast. We were not alone. Everywhere we visited, we sat in auditoriums filled to capacity, listening to admissions officers and taking campus tours in what I soon realized was the kick-off of the new season.
My husband and I are veterans, having earned our stripes in the L.A. private school admission wars, but this was our first foray into the college arena. What was notable in the information sessions and tours were not the numbers; we expected that. It was the selling. The marketing. In school after school, it became clear that what we were being presented with was the good old American sales pitch. Some were slicker than others, some speakers earnest, others smooth. But the goal of every one was to market their product--a college education--to the parents and students who were their targeted consumers.
Although each school touted its uniqueness, they sounded remarkably the same. Size differed, and the settings ran the gamut from concrete jungle to bucolic college green, but the consumer features were startlingly identical, as if each school had held the same focus groups. Small class size, low teacher-to-student ratios, extensive community service and internship opportunities and far-flung study-abroad programs abounded.
After the first half-dozen schools, my husband and I became convinced that every college junior is overseas, studying tribal economies in Tanzania, botany in Nepal or standard issue art history in a Florentine villa. Students could single major, double major with a minor or, if the course offerings were wanting, create majors of their own, with the ease of ordering “mix-ins” at Cold Stone.
The campus tours even addressed the basic needs of food and shelter with an eye toward a consumer culture’s desires. Delivered in a manner reminiscent of scripted tours of former Eastern bloc countries, students led groups on tours seemingly programmed to answer, What do these kids want? Food courts? Vegan food stations? Got it. Apartment-style living not good enough? Not to worry. One college offered maid service. Another, transgender dorms.
Toward the end of each information session, a brave parent would raise a hand and ask, “What are you looking for in a student?” This was code, we all knew, for “Can my kid get in?” The admissions officer then reluctantly addressed the elephant in the room: the admissions process. Careful not to dampen the consumer desire he or she had just spent the past half hour creating, the officer would profile the school’s sought-after student: well-rounded, took rigorous courses, someone whose extracurricular activities displayed consistent rather than dilettantish interests. Lest anyone unduly focus on GPAs or SAT scores, “We’re looking at the whole student,” they’d warmly inform us. Like the schools themselves, the students they sought all sounded alike, and could be just about every kid seated there.
By mid-trip, my husband, daughter and I had the pitch down pat. All these colleges seemed to want to please us. Suddenly they were competing for us instead of the reverse. And that’s where the really shrewd marketing comes in. The more attractive the product, the greater the number of applicants. When one college tour took us to its neon-lit food court, noting its “second busiest Starbucks on the Northeastern corridor,” my daughter was sold. At that same school’s athletic center (the space formerly known as a gym), the phalanxes of up-to-the-minute exercise equipment convinced my husband he wanted to attend.
But we all know what happens next. Like in “Alice in Wonderland,” where the Queen of Hearts shouts, “Off with their heads,” a bait and switch as absolute as the Red Queen’s rule kicks in. It’s the law of supply and demand. While a college’s goal is to gain the greatest number of applicants, the number of spaces in any freshman class remains fixed. Suddenly, a place in this college’s incoming class becomes a luxury item, like real estate in New York or L.A. The more applicants the school can lure, the more selective it can become. And the more selective it is, the closer it is to achieving the Holy Grail of High Yield.
There’s a cultural paradox at work here. The college admissions process has become increasingly democratized, fashioning meritocracies rather than remaining the exclusive province of the Old Guard. But with today’s high-achieving parents producing high-achieving kids--great numbers of them--the meritocracy falls victim to the brute indifference of market forces, and even the best and the brightest are mowed down in a scene that calls to mind Gallipoli. And though the college gods smiled upon my daughter, the path was not without lightning bolts that struck along the way.
It didn’t matter that I knew better, that I could spell “perspective.” As parents, we’re confronted with the primacy of our feelings toward our children colliding with the realpolitik of life. When we watch our children open a rejection letter, or worse yet, read it in the unforgiving glare of a computer screen, the illusion of control that we all conjure when our kids are born in order to allow them out into the messy world is resoundingly broken. We’re forced to admit to ourselves that though we knew the numerical probabilities, “we” still succumbed to the sales pitch, and convinced ourselves that our child would not be cast upon the shoals of rejection.
And with our kids still at an age when they should be able to believe working hard and doing well is enough, the admissions process forces us to introduce them to that cruelest of phrases, “It’s nothing personal.” No matter how sophisticated they seem, to them it is.
A college education today requires such a daunting financial investment that families can’t be faulted for wanting to get their money’s worth. But it wasn’t the parents seated in the auditoriums who reduced their children’s education to a commodity. We were ready to make that investment in our belief in the power of education, not the bottom line. What I expected to hear about on our school tours was the intellectual experience of college, the intoxication that awaits students in the life of the mind. I expected educators, not a sales force. How 20th century of me.
