Opinion: To get into the ‘right’ college, get a life, not a ‘summer planner’

Going to college has never been a more expensive endeavor: Tuition fees are up, student debt is up and youth unemployment is back up too.

So why, then, are some parents shelling out for a “summer planner” to tell their kids how to spend their vacations?

A recent story in the New York Post introduced readers to “professional summer planner” Jill Tipograph, who charges about $300 an hour to help plan teens’ summer vacations so that they will look impressive on college applications.

Forget going to stay with your grandparents in Boca Raton. Your “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay will chart your adventures as the Indiana Jones of the Facebook generation, recounting all the growth and learning you did after being dispatched to China, or India or whichever far-flung destination was deemed worthy. One overnight flight and a selfie or two with an endangered animal and presto, that spot at Harvard is yours.

But here’s the problem. If going to college is the first step in one’s adult life, writing the application is surely its precursor. Deciding which college you want to go to, and why, and perhaps most crucially, why it should accept you, is the first truly independent step a lot of teenagers take in becoming their own person. Why take that opportunity away from them?

Although going to exotic climes and experiencing different cultures are certainly huge parts of enhancing one’s understanding of the world, that only means something if you choose to do it yourself. As Shawn Abbott, NYU’s dean of admissions, says:

“If one can’t figure out how to spend his or her summer in a meaningful way, I worry about what is in store for that person when they arrive on a college campus, when they will be faced with far more opportunities and choices that require independent thinking.”

Not to mention, the idea that an outside party can offer the best chance of giving a person’s application an “authentic” voice is, frankly, absurd. It’s another victory for the anti-higher-education brigade; another example of how a university degree is rapidly losing its value (and yet dramatically increasing in cost), another chance to check boxes on millennials’ behalf and then decry how easy they have it nowadays.

The essay one submits to prospective colleges is the only real piece of you the admission panels get to see — everything else is just a jumble of numbers in the form of test results and school grades — and to believe that spending a month on a different side of the ocean will have a hand in which institutions decide to take you is just misguided. Schools want to read about passion, and experience, and what you’ve learned, and there are a million and one ways to show them that without paying top dollar for someone to orchestrate it for you.

So enjoy your vacation, kids. Be free. And never let any “summer expert” school you on being authentic — because nothing can be more genuine than writing about the months you spent pursuing the things you truly care about.

Charlotte Lytton is a London-based journalist and has written for CNN, the Daily Telegraph and the New York Observer. Follow her on Twitter @charlottelytton