The moral wages of the college admissions mania

Thu, Mar 21, 2019 (2 a.m.)

I once asked a longtime guidance counselor about her least favorite part of the college admissions season, when students learn if they’ve been accepted by the schools of their dreams.

She said that what pains her aren’t the rejections: There are so many of those, they’re an inevitable part of the process and the kids get into other colleges that are plenty terrific.

What pains her is a reaction that some of those kids have.

“I did all of this for nothing,” they’ll say, meaning the homework, the sports, the other extracurricular activities.

And she’s kind of blown away by that.

Getting an A in biology — and being awakened, in the process, to the wonders of the natural world — doesn’t matter if a committee of strangers at Stanford isn’t sufficiently impressed?

Being student body president — and reaping valuable lessons in leadership and teamwork — is a waste if it can’t be translated into a ticket to Cambridge, Mass.?

For these kids, education isn’t an opportunity to wring more meaning from life and make a more constructive impact on the world. It’s transactional. It’s a performance. If the right audience doesn’t clap, there was no point in even taking the stage.

This is what the modern madness of attributing magical, make-or-break powers to a school with an acceptance rate of 15 percent or 10 percent or even 5 has wrought.

We saw that madness in the recent arrests of dozens of wealthy parents, including corporate titans and famous actresses, for paying bribes and engaging in fraud to secure places for their pampered progeny at Yale, Georgetown and USC. But their cheating was merely an extreme, illegal version of lesser scheming on a broader scale. There’s nothing unusual about using big sums of money — for private tutors, for application whisperers, for “donations” — to get a leg up on the competition.

Winners and losers are often sorted not by merit but by privilege (or subterfuge). And even the winners lose. Actually, all of us do, because through this overwrought culling, we’re teaching a generation of children values that stink. There are moral wages to the admissions mania, and we need to wrestle with those.

At its worst, it “corrodes the development of core aspects of young people’s ethical character, often fueling their self-interest, compromising their integrity and depleting their capacity to either know themselves deeply or to authentically articulate their identity,” reads a draft of a new report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project, which for the past few years has been a leading advocate for a less calculated and cutthroat process. “Many young people become cynical both about a system that seems unfair and divorced from their interests, and about the adults who created it.”

Although it was written before the bribery and fraud arrests, it almost seems to have anticipated them. And it articulates the concerns that many of us have long had about the road that kids frequently travel toward the country’s most venerated and selective schools: the plotting of every major and minor step in terms of how it will look on an application; the lavish expenditures, by affluent families, on a veritable pit crew of tutors and trainers and admissions strategists; the gross overselling of accomplishments; the parental micromanaging; the working of any conceivable angle and pulling of any reachable strings.

It makes a particular plea to parents, “who are focusing on the wrong things, with big consequences for their kids,” said Richard Weissbourd, a renowned development psychologist who is the report’s principal author. They’re not encouraging curiosity, empathy, gratitude. “Parents are trying to give their kids ‘everything’ but they’re not giving them what counts,” he told me.

The report includes the important acknowledgment that only a fraction of American children are educated at the elite institutions in question or have any hope to be, and that “the biggest problem in college admissions is that huge numbers of young people, especially low-income and first-generation students, struggle to access or simply can’t afford college, or land in colleges that aren’t committed to their success.” In fact, about two-thirds of Americans over 24 never started or completed a four-year college.

But more than a few of those young people are aware of a gilded track with different rules. “It’s just not fair,” Nicholas Burgess, a 17-year-old 11th-grader at an inner-city school in Jacksonville, Fla., said Thursday. He had heard about the just-revealed admissions scam, and it hardened his belief that the deck was stacked against kids like him. “We work hard, but I feel like it’s not made for us,” he told me. He’s not aiming for an Ivy. He’s hoping for Florida State.

And while the children immersed in the elite-admissions obstacle course aren’t the norm, many of them will — by dint of their backgrounds, ambitions and, yes, talents — be tomorrow’s leaders. Their character counts. And the admissions madness leaves a dubious imprint on it.

Here, boiled down, are just a few of the stories about college applicants’ behaviors that I gathered for my 2015 book, “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be.”

A boy submits an essay to Yale about how he overcame his worries that he wasn’t, um, well endowed. A couple become the primary funders of an orphanage in Africa so that it can be named for their kids, who then do some token work there and use that material for college applications. Parents — no tiny number of them — end up spending upward of $1 million on a child’s private schooling from K though 12, on enrichment trips and on expert advice about the precise number of AP classes to take, the least clichéd volunteer work to do and the most strategic sport to master.

The principles instilled in these children? That nothing in your life is too sacred to be used for gain. That you do what it takes and spend what you must to get what you want. That packaging matters more than substance. That assessments made by outsiders trump any inner voice.

“My self-worth was based on where I went to school,” said a young woman who, rattled by this admissions scandal, emailed me. I followed up with her on the phone. She graduated less than a decade ago from one of the most selective colleges in the country, but was haunted by her knowledge that it accepted her partly — and maybe largely — because her parents are big donors.

“I felt like a fraud,” she said. She suffered a sort of breakdown and had to take a leave. While she ultimately graduated, she still hasn’t found her professional bearings. “This whole process can either leave you entitled or it can leave your self-esteem shot,” she said. Is either of those outcomes what parents, or society, really wants?

I also got an email last week from Ellora Sen, 19, who graduated from St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., and now goes to college in the Netherlands. She volunteered that so much of her secondary-school experience was dedicated to how colleges would judge it that there was almost no room for self-discovery.

“I look back on things I should have done, memories I should have created,” she told me.

Improvisation is verboten; pursuing a hobby or taking an elective outside your proven strengths could create an imperfect transcript. So could the failure to schedule and maximize your every last minute.

“They don’t know how to fill time with their own creative ideas, because they’re so overly programmed,” Catharine Bond Hill, the former president of Vassar, told me. “We’re telling kids, ‘Don’t try anything you might fail at.’ So they’re afraid to fail. That’s going to create students who are risk-averse — or incredibly fragile when they do fail.”

We’re sending the message that success is about precise allegiance to a painstaking script, when just as often it’s about a nimble response to an unforeseen opportunity.

Barry Schwartz, who taught psychology at Swarthmore from 1971 to 2016, said in an interview just before he retired that his current students “want to be given a clear and unambiguous path to success.”

“They want a recipe,” he told me. “And that’s the wrong thing to be wanting. Recipes create cooks. They don’t produce chefs.”

I spoke with him again a few days ago, when he added that “the gyrations that kids have to do to get in” to schools like Swarthmore has taught them that “the measure of success is the badge you get. The last thing we do is to teach them to care about community, collaboration, love of truth. All the values that are supposed to be at the core of a liberal arts education go by the wayside.”

I thought back to my experience in 2014, when I taught a journalism seminar at Princeton. More than 45 students applied for it, each submitting an essay of sorts; I had to choose 16. Midway through the semester, I realized that many of them hadn’t turned in an assignment with as much polish and energy as that essay.

I mentioned this to a few full-time professors there, who weren’t surprised. They explained that what many students glean from the admissions madness is that the supreme achievement — for which you tap your fiercest energy and summon your best self — is breaching an exclusive sanctum, getting through a narrow door. What you do inside the room pales in importance.

What a disservice we’ve done them.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.

Back to top

SHARE