Prepping for College:
Does it Really Start Now?
By Kim Pleticha
Parent:Wise Magazine, March 2012
The woman who answers the phone in the admissions office at Harvard sounds friendly, but harried. That’s understandable: it’s February, which means it’s reading season, that time of year when admissions officers at colleges throughout the country review applications to decide whom to admit. And at Harvard, there’s a lot of reading to be done. Last year, the venerable institution received 34,950 applications.
The woman admits that it’s a crazy time of year, made even crazier by some of the calls she receives. The worst are the ones she routinely fields from parents of kids as young as two. They always want to know the same thing: what do they need to do to make sure their child gets into Harvard someday?
She sighs and tells them the same thing:
“Be careful of sacrificing the present for the future.”
***
The admissions representative declined to give her name, saying she’s not the official voice of Harvard. But she highlights a growing concern among admissions officers at colleges throughout the country: that kids are under increased pressure, at ever-younger ages, to prepare for college.
“We certainly get those same calls, like Harvard, and it’s crazy,” says Valerie Schwartz, Duke University’s assistant director of admissions for the Texas region. “It has just become such a rat race.”
The Rat Race
Over the past generation, the admissions process at the nation’s most selective universities has become much more competitive. A decade ago, Harvard admitted 10% of its applicants; last year it admitted just 6%, its lowest admissions rate ever. For the rest of the schools in the Ivy League, the admission rate for the class of 2015 varied between 7% (Yale and Columbia) and 18% (Cornell). Meantime, California powerhouse Stanford sat at 7% and technology giant MIT at 9.6%.
Much of this competitiveness stems from the vast increase in applications to these schools. Three decades ago, when many of today’s parents were applying for college, students had to fill out a separate application for each university. Something called The Common Application was available, but only 100 universities accepted it and few students knew about it. By 2006, however, The Common Application had gone online, allowing students to apply to 298 colleges at the push of a button. Today, students can use the application to apply to 456 colleges worldwide.
And apply they have! Between 2003 and 2011, the number of applications to Brown, Columbia, and Dartmouth doubled — the biggest gains coming after 2008, when The Common Application launched a “next generation” online application system. That year, Brown received 20,630 applications; last year it received 30,946.
Compounding this competitiveness is the annual publication of America’s Best Colleges by U.S. News & World Report magazine. First published in 1983 and run annually since 1985, the list has become the go-to source for many students (and their parents) when planning for college. In 2007, the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that works to overcome commercialism in college admissions, became alarmed at the authority the list had achieved with parents — and, subsequently, the gamesmanship colleges were employing to achieve a higher ranking. That year, Conservency sent a letter to college presidents throughout the U.S. asking them not to participate in the portion of the questionnaire that asks their opinion of other universities. Eighty college presidents agreed, which forced the magazine to assign greater weight to other statistical information when ranking schools. This resulted in some colleges reporting inflated data: in January of this year, Claremont McKenna College made national news when it admitted exaggerating its SAT scores to U.S. News & World Report to achieve a higher ranking. It ranks #9 amongst liberal arts colleges on this year’s list.
Given this, it’s perhaps no surprise that parents feel the pressure to prep their kids for college beginning in preschool. The trouble is, such preparation is unnecessary — because it’s based on bad information.
False Impression
Parents today have a false impression about the competitiveness of the college admissions process, says Dr. Caroline M. Hoxby, an economics professor at Stanford. In fact, according to her 2009 report The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges, 90% of universities are less selective today than they were 50 years ago — and 50% are “substantially less selective”.
So why do parents believe competition for admission is so fierce? Because the top 10% of colleges have become grossly more competitive, Dr. Hoxby says. This leaves people with the idea that all colleges have the same stringent statistics, when that’s absolutely not the case.
A quick review of the U.S. News & World Report list bears this out: if you remove the Top 10 colleges on the National University List, nearly every other university has an acceptance rate of 20-50%. It might be comforting for parents to note that #13 Johns Hopkins accepts one in five applicants, while #23 Carnegie Mellon accepts one third and #38 Case Western accepts two thirds.
Parents, however, seem unwilling to believe these numbers. As a result, those with the means to do so have turned to private college admissions consultants to strategize their children’s admissions process — and, in some cases, their entire high school career. Many private consultants now accept students in the 8th grade so that they can plan high school classes, extracurriculars, and summer activities to maximize the student’s college acceptance rate. The price tag for such planning can be mind numbing: up to $40,000 for full-time consulting beginning in middle school.
By and large, college admissions offices frown on such consulting — chiefly, because it rigs the game. Admissions offices at the nation’s most elite colleges claim they spot and discard “consulted” applicants, but the best consulting firms in the country boast that 92-95% of their clients are accepted to their first-choice schools. Clearly, one side isn’t being honest.
“[Parents and students] should recognize and accept that [college admissions] is a game,” says Sam Hooper, a 2011 graduate of Westlake High School and a current freshman at Rice University. “Play the game because you have to, but don’t lose yourself in it.”
Understanding the Game
Comparing the college admissions process to a game is an apt analogy — except that games generally have a clear set of rules and don’t require the players to offer a compelling story in order to win.
“The system is just rigged these days,” says Jeff Pilchiek, the director of guidance and career counseling at Westlake High School and a 26-year veteran of helping students apply to college. “The high schools have started producing cookie cutter kids: they pretty much all have high grades and high test scores….so the kids need to have a story, they need to have passion.”
What Pilchiek means is that kids today must do everything they can to separate themselves from the pack. The best way to do that, he says, is to focus on doing one thing well rather than mindlessly pursuing a host of academics and activities for the sole purpose of bolstering a college application.
This is exactly what he advised Sam Hooper to do. Although Hooper was an outstanding student —he took 12 AP classes in high school and graduated in the top 5% of his class— his real passion was music. When Pilchiek realized this, he encouraged Hooper to take music electives, including an independent study composition class with a UT music professor. In 2010, Hooper’s “Seaborne” composition won the Austin Symphony Young Composers Contest, and his “Preparation” composition for English horn and strings won the Orlando Philharmonic’s Young Composers Challenge. This focus on music, and the resulting success he found with it, likely played a strong role in Hooper’s acceptance at Rice (#17 on the U.S. News & World Report list) — even though he did not enroll as a music major.
“In our day that subjective stuff didn’t matter, but today I believe the colleges want that,” Pilchiek says. “But it must be genuine…. [students] should be doing things they love to do, not doing things because it looks good on a resume.”
Belly Up to the Buffet
The problem, as Pilchiek and many others see it, is that too many parents aren’t allowing their kids the freedom to develop a passion.
Instead, parents with the money to do so enroll their kids in myriad structured activities beginning in preschool, then move on to talent identification programs and academic camps in elementary, middle and high schools. Admissions directors not-so-jokingly call this “following the herd”: doing what all of the other parents are doing in a mistaken attempt to prepare kids for college. But the reality is that colleges aren’t looking for those kinds of kids anymore.
“Colleges don’t just want the dutiful plugger who has done things because their parents have told them to do those things,” says Dr. Michele Hernandez, author of A is for Admission and owner of Hernandez College Consulting, arguably the most successful —and most expensive— private college consulting firm in the country. She concurs with Pilchiek that colleges want kids with passion, but she says it’s ridiculous to demand that kids act altruistically rather than strategically.
“Yes, theoretically, you have to love what you’re doing,” she says, “[but] you can love what you’re doing while you’re preparing to get into college.”
She says this preparation should start early, by providing preschoolers and elementary-aged kids with what she calls a “buffet of learning opportunities”: ample experiences for kids to figure out what inspires or excites them. This can include music lessons or participating in sports, but above all it should stress reading, which Hernandez calls the “gateway to a love of learning”. She strongly advises against encouraging kids to specialize in any one activity before high school.
Duke’s Valerie Schwartz, however, cautions parents not to go overboard in stocking the buffet, saying kids should have ample downtime to explore on their own.
“Let them dabble!” she says. “That’s really the greatest service parents can provide: allowing for freedom of exploration and not feeling like every moment of the child’s life should be programmed.”
As for pressuring your kids to find a passion: forget it. It not only doesn’t work, it’s a surefire way to doom their future college application.
“The kids should be doing their own pressure, so parents do need to take the backseat and get off of the ledge,” Hernandez says. “As soon as you say the phrase ‘because it will look good for college’, well, colleges are going to spot that. You can’t fake love of learning.”
The “Right” School?
Every college admissions professional interviewed for this article stressed that college applicants must display a genuine love of learning. By and large, the best way for kids to develop that is to have parents who themselves love and encourage learning. Beyond that, kids should attend the right school.
And this is where parents often become frantic.
Here’s a reality check: college admissions offices don’t rank high schools — in fact, they really don’t care one whit about them. Instead, they measure each applicant based on how well he or she did within the scope of their individual high school. This allows students who attend weaker schools to complete favorably with those who attend academic dynamos. For this reason, attending a school that offers 40 AP classes can put a student at a distinct disadvantage if he’s not inclined to avail himself of those offerings.
Given that, it’s important for parents to consider their children’s strengths and weaknesses when looking for schools, says Sandra Dowdy, founder of Successful Schools Match, an Austin company that helps parents find good educational matches for their children. Dowdy worked for 35 years in K-12 education, 25 of which as the director, executive director and assistant superintendent of curriculum for AISD, so she knows a thing or two about how to get kids interested in learning. She’s saddened by the fact that so many parents today look at schools with an eye to college rather than to their child’s individual needs.
“Parents are feeling all of this pressure already to help their child [prepare for college],” she says. “You have to ask what success means for your child — being happy and well rounded, or going to a prestigious school? Are you going to allow them to find their talent?”
When doing a school consultation, Dowdy and her partner, Bernard Blanchard, learn as much as they can about the child —her personality, interests, academic aptitude and aspirations— as well as the parents’ goals for the child’s education. Only after they have a complete picture of the child and her family will they offer recommendations based on the hundreds of schools they personally have visited. The cost of such counseling generally runs $50-100; in rare cases, when extensive travel to potential schools is required, the price can increase to $400.
College admissions professionals overwhelmingly embrace this idea of selecting schools based on a child’s unique needs, rather than on how vigorously the school will prepare a child to compete in the college admissions process. The dificulty is getting parents on board with the idea.
“School and education are more like a game of golf than a track meet,” says David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “The idea is that you are competing against the course, not the guy next to you. It can and it should be very different from a zero sum game.”
The Bottom Line
Which brings us back to Harvard’s admonition not to sacrifice the present for the future.
It may seem disingenuous for an institution that accepts only 6% of its applicants to advise parents not to concern themselves with prepping their toddlers for college. But William Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, stands by the advice. In an article entitled “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation”, which appears on the admissions page of the college’s website, Fitzsimmons and his colleagues caution parents against today’s über-competitiveness, saying “…the pressures placed on many children probably have the unintended effect of delaying a child's finding herself and succeeding on her own terms.”
In other words: focus on providing your kids with a childhood rich in experience, with plenty of time for exploration. In the end, that may be the best preparation you can give them for college — and for life.
“Not every kid is going to be able to succeed at the same level,” says Sandra Dowdy. “So you have to help guide them to help them succeed on their own.”