What People Think Will Get Your Child Into a Top College

I wrote a first draft of this essay about two months ago, but postponed posting it because I was waiting on my second-oldest daughter’s results in her quest to get into Berklee School of Music. Now that I feel justified after two successful quests (my oldest daughter is at MIT), I have decided to share my thoughts on the college application process. This will be a 3-part series over the next several days.

Here is the list of what my children were told in junior high and high school would get them into a good college:

1.4.0 GPA.

2. Good scores on standardized tests like ACT or SAT.

3.Extracurricular activities that showed they were “well-rounded” (including sports and music in particular)

4. Service activities.

5. A college essay written with an elevated style, using lots of twenty-five cent words.

6. CE (concurrent enrollment) classes. (I don’t know how common these are in other states, but in Utah, all the academically minded students are pushed toward these classes, as if it will prove they are college-ready. It is also supposed to help kids graduate earlier from colleges. Ha!)

7. IB (International Baccalaureate).

8. Student government involvement.

9. Focusing on school rather than a job.

10. Graduation from high school with all the requirements that state governments have begun to impose, leaving no wiggle room and no way for principals to exempt academically minded students from classes that are truly a waste of their time.

11. Being valedictorian.

In my opinion, these are all bunk. I kept telling my kids that a completely different set of things mattered to the actual committees of real people (not computers) who were going to look through their applications.I’ll go into that tomorrow.

But I want to talk a little bit about why people think that the above are going to get you into a top college. It’s because of our current obsession with standardized tests and the need to quantize everything. Because we imagine that our schools can be given a score that says something about how much learning is going on, we have begun to imagine that students can also be given a score to decide how valuable they would be at certain colleges.

Parents, teachers, and students think that everything can be distilled into a “formula.” And perhaps in some sense, there are schools who give points for each item in a checklist, and hand out acceptances and scholarships that way. It may be true that the best schools have done this on occasion, in order to justify admitting who they admit.

But my guess is that the points given are almost always used as a justification for admitting the students who they want to admit, rather than the other way around. I think that the best schools (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkley, Yale, and others) have become quite canny about being gamed as a system and have learned how to see past the paper student.

One way they’ve tried to do this is by having interviews with students. Both of my daughters went through these interviews, one with an officer sent to our state and one after we flew her to the college of her choice. You can imagine the stress that an interview like this causes for people who want a checklist. They want to be able to prepare answers for all the questions they might be asked. And with my oldest daughter, we did do some mock interviews at home to help her know what to expect. I’m not sure these mock interviews were of any use at all. Because the interviewers are purposely trying to get past the preparation and to the real person.

Padding your application with lots of extracurricular activities that are utterly meaningless to your child is not going to make a bit of difference in an interview like this. Nor do service activities that are unrelated or that don’t matter to your child. The best schools want real children, not academic Pinnochios who have no idea what to do when they get to college and no longer have Mommy and Daddy telling them what to do. They also want students who accept that they may not get an “A” in every class and who can accept less than perfection and move on with life, without harassing teachers into giving them better grades than the ones they earned.

I have always told my children that I wasn’t paying for college because they were perfectly capable of getting good enough grades to get into a state college with a full-ride scholarship. I have said many times that I didn’t believe that the truly expensive schools were worth the money. I also didn’t believe that they would make any effort to help middle class kids financially. I have been happily proven to be wrong in this.

MIT, where my oldest daughter is, claims to accept students need-blind, and then make sure everyone accepted has the means to go. They really did this for us. My daughter now works part-time and pays for the small amount of tuition she was asked to pay, and then earns enough for her own room and board on the side. Berklee School of Music does not make the same guarantee, but it looks as if my second daughter will manage the tuition portion and room and board if she is also willing to work part-time and through the summer. I believe that this will be good for her, and that it will help her to value her education more.

It isn’t impossible to get into the top schools in the country and it isn’t impossible to get a scholarship for them. But it isn’t by following the rules above that are so frequently handed out as the answers. It’s both more complicated than that, and more simple.The one mistake, if I can call it that, that I feel my two daughters both made, was in setting their sights for one particular school and not making broad enough application. I’m not sure I believe that you can will yourself into one specific school. It can be painful if you don’t get into your top choice if your only other option is the sure-pick your mother made you apply to, so you would definitely get in somewhere.

That said, it can be expensive to apply to ten different universities at $100 each, not to mention the expense of sending scores to all those schools and the energy expenditure in writing different essays for each of them. So maybe some middle ground would be useful to find. I haven’t done a great job of that so far.

Tune in tomorrow for more.