I wrecked my back while camping over Memorial Day weekend and had more time than usual on my phone while sitting very still trying not to tweak it. So I decided to try an experiment. Given that I am pretty much 24/7/365 reading stuff about college, I have a fair amount of algorithmically placed content in my social (Facebook and InstaGram; I’m SO not cool enough for TikTok) feeds that I usually ignore. I decided instead to engage.
So I knowingly took the bait and clicked on one ad to see what would happen. Oh man, if algorithms could shout with joy, you would have heard them like the shot heard round the world at Lexington and Concord. It wasn’t long until I was being bombarded with ads, and I noticed that as they proliferated, they became more and more strident and increasingly directed at parents of younger and younger students. No doubt about it, they were not appealing to logic and reason; strictly lizard brain stuff designed to capitalize on the ancient brain system’s “protect the organism” response rather than the more advanced structures that characterize homo sapiens’ cerebral cortex. Go back and take a look…
The implications were crystal clear:
A) The only acceptable placement for your kid is an Ivy/Highly Selective school
B) You are a failure as a parent if you don’t empty your wallets in service of getting your kid into an Ivy//Highly Selective school
C) Run, don’t walk, to sign up your 5th grader for one of these programs to GUARANTEE acceptance into an Ivy/Highly Selective school
If it wasn’t so destructive it would be laughable.
No reasonable person would expect that qualifying for the Olympics would be the metric by which we evaluate every kid who plays sports, or an appearance on American Idol for kids who make music. But this idea that in order to “make it” as a college student you need to be admitted to a school with a sub 5% admission rate somehow continues to be a standard we accept.
I have come to characterize the hype surrounding selective college admissions as F.O.N.I. (Fear Of No Ivy) with the very deliberate play on words with the other phony–being fake, fraudulent, or inauthentic. Because there’s nothing about this fear mongering that encourages you/your kid to develop organically as their own path unfolds in their own time; it’s all about packaging a kid to meet an external standard–so that they “look good” to selective colleges. It’s about appearance rather than substance. And it is harmful to those that it targets, kids and adults alike.
In fact, the madness that the college admissions process has become was called out by the Harvard Director of Admissions and Financial Aid William Fitzsimmons back in 2000:
“Many of us are concerned that the pressures on today’s students seem far more intense than those placed on previous generations. College admission—the chance to position oneself for “success” through the acquisition of the “right” college degree—looms large for increasing numbers of students. Particularly because selective colleges are perceived to be part of the problem, we want to do everything possible to help the students we enroll make the most of their opportunities, avoiding the much-reported “burnout” phenomenon that can keep them from reaching their full potential.”
This was a self serving missive. Students were arriving at Harvard so exhausted, burned out, and jaded from everything that they had to do to get into Harvard that they were incapable of engaging once they got in. The solution suggested at the time was to take a GAP year to recover from the intense admissions experience so that students were ready to begin their academic experience. It was a pivotal moment in the history of GAP year programs, which are far more commonplace today (in large measure due to this nod from Harvard) despite Gen X parents’ fears (inherited from Boomer parents) that a student who does not go to college immediately after high school will never go.
The article also suggested some remedies that are just as relevant as today:
Families should allow for “down-time” during vacations, weekends, and during the week at mealtimes or at any other break in the action.
Bring summer back. Summer need not be totally consumed by highly structured programs, such as summer schools, travel programs, or athletic camps. While such activities can be wonderful in many ways, they can also add to stress by assembling “super peers” who set nearly impossible standards. Activities in which one can develop at one’s own pace can be much more pleasant and helpful. An old-fashioned summer job that provides a contrast to the school year or allows students to meet others of differing backgrounds, ages, and life experiences is often invaluable in providing psychological downtime and a window on future possibilities. Students need ample free time to reflect, to recreate (i.e. to “re-create” themselves without the driving pressure to achieve as an influence), and to gather strength for the school year ahead.
Choose (a college) not simply by “brand name” or reputation but because it is the best fit. A school with a slower pace or a different academic or extracurricular focus can be a better match for certain students in the long run.
I think much of the present state of affairs comes back to the false premise–usually unconscious and unspoken–that parents are failures if they don’t do everything in their sphere of influence to get their kid into an Ivy, and kids are failures if they don’t capitalize on all that their parents provide them and get in. Likely there are other factors as well–societal forces are complex and nuanced–but this narrative of the Ivy league as the measure of success as a parent and worth as a kid is both unmistakable and insidious, like a fog that creeps into the crevices of the mind and imperceptibly wields destructive influence.
The selective college admissions process has become a game–rigged, unfair, and biased–but a game nonetheless. As someone who understands the rules by which kids must play (articulated very clearly in Who Gets In and Why), I struggle between my role to support kids in reaching their goals and helping them step off the treadmill when it gets to be too much. I’m not immune to these pressures, either. I have to consciously check myself if one of my kids somehow breaks through the gauntlet and gets accepted at an Ivy. My ego gets caught up in the mix, as if it somehow reflects on me that my student had the specific set of characteristics that the school was looking for in the particular admission season in which they applied. The tractor beam pull of Ivy predominance is powerful, and it takes the strength and cunning of a Jedi to neutralize it.
There is absolutely no way that a small high school on the coast of Maine is going to shift this narrative nationally, but we can at least try to rewrite the script for our five towns, for our kids and their well being. I think that it starts by redefining success. Rather than lauding Ivy acceptances as the gold standard, for example, we could focus on the retention rate of our students after graduation–the percentage of kids who stick with whatever choice they made when they graduated–and if they stay through to completion of whatever they choose. These are very common metrics for colleges that might be usefully applied to high school as well. Or how about a metric that gauges how “good” our kids are, the percentage that contribute in some way in the community after graduation perhaps. Surely we can be more creative and humane in how we gauge outcomes.
A case in point… when I arrived as Guidance Department Chair at the newly incorporated High School in 1999 (the final year that we were at the old facility, while the new locale was still under construction) an intercom announcement was made for EVERY college acceptance. Every one. Just college-not employment or military service or postgraduate study at our regional CTE or any of the other choices our kids make upon graduation. It was not difficult for me to imagine being a student who was undecided or planning to go to work or start a family being barraged with a daily litany of what was valued more than your choice, so I knew that we had to make a change in the new facility. Thus our “new” practice of posting a photo of each graduate with their postgraduate plans (now 20+ years and counting) on the windows of the Administrative Offices was conceived.
This was better, but still imperfect; college was still clearly valued above other choices, the Ivies especially. COVID offered an interesting twist; the kids took over and created a “virtual administrative office window” on Instagram, a practice that has since continued. Administratively, we had to honestly look at consistent reports of “postsecondary plan anxiety”--kids feeling pressured to choose an impressive plan or outcome given that they would be on display for the entire community, or feeling that their choice was somehow less than.
So last year we gave kids control of their narrative: go the traditional way of sharing your post grad plan or choose something else: a favorite saying, or congratulate you peers, or thank a teacher, or thank your parents. Very few kids took advantage of that change last year, but check for yourself this year. It’s starting to catch on. Just like any new thing, it may take some time, but the change is at least underway.
Maya Angelou comes to mind: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
Thoughtful, intentful, empathic actions can make a difference. One thing is for sure, the youth mental health crisis calls upon us to make some additional changes. Kids (and their parents) are not served well by this impossible Ivy standard.