If we could harness anxiety as an alternate power source, the lights in the New York Times' auditorium would have been ablaze last week, as hundreds of fretful parents of high schoolers convened for an expert panel on the proximate cause of their angst: the college admissions process. The Times had gathered together two reporters, an editor, and the young winner of the paper's college essay contest, and had quickly sold out the hall to people who clearly hoped for some kind of insider information that would give their seniors an edge.
The evening's central lesson was more a Zen challenge than a recipe for success: the college application process is not a meritocracy. Bad things happen to good people - and even worse, on the envy scale, good things happen to students whose SAT scores and GPA are lower than your kid's. The naïve notion of a causal link between high school performance and college reward takes a beating every year, with no end in sight. The echo boomers are going to continue to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as long as they insist on focusing on only two dozen of the nation's over-2,000 colleges and universities.
The panelists strove for reason, a losing battle in a room full of parents who fairly vibrated with ambition. They pointed out that the top two dozen schools admit fewer kids than they reject, while the other 1,976-plus accept more than they reject - which would make applying to some of the others a nice salve against despair if people didn't convince themselves, year in and year out, that settling for less was something only other families had to do. For that matter, the very concept of what qualifies as a top school is suspect, since those two dozen schools are ranked as elite institutions by the vaunted U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, whose methodology seems to be as full of holes as is our current foreign policy.
For ninety minutes, the panelists tried to map out a more reasonable landscape. They had plenty of supporting materials: Rueful anecdotes about legacies that didn't pan out, a poll of recent graduates who admitted that the importance of schools' rankings diminished over the years, statistics showing high satisfaction levels even at schools that failed to make the two-dozen cut. They had cautionary tales about how easily things can get out of hand, as well, like the story of the sixth-graders who had already surfed Harvard University's admissions web site.
They saw the crapshoot for what it was. They were as smart as Joshua the computer in the movie War Games: when dealing with the threat of thermonuclear meltdown, whether globally or collegiately, "The only winning move is not to play."
This was emphatically not what the can-do generation wanted to hear. Audience members had expected tactical advice for their $15, and they would not be denied. As soon as the moderator asked for questions, some fairly exasperated people jumped to the microphones and tried to tease out a nugget of practical information. Were a dozen applications enough, and were twenty too many? What should the student essay be about - and what topics should a senior avoid? SAT tutors - pro or con, and for how long, and when, and by the way, what about those pesky rumors of score cut-offs at the best schools? Was an arcane extracurricular - someone mentioned the tuba - a better bet than something lots of people did - say, tennis? Was the very act of living in New York City a disadvantage?
Probably, came the reply, since achieving geographical diversity is a big trend these days. Forget that private consultant. A really committed parent would have moved the family to Wyoming years ago.
The implication behind all of the parental prodding was that the panelists must be holding back the good stuff, the secrets they unearthed when they interviewed those college admissions counselors. It was as though the preceding hour's presentation, with its redefinition of elite and its footnoted path to sanity, had never happened. Or, worse, it was as though each parent in the audience was more intent on besting the competition than on making a reasonable choice. An unspoken question floated in the air, the real query behind all the specifics: what if I take the panel's suggestions, and relax a little bit, and focus on some of the less-than-top-tier schools - but then nobody else backs down, and their kids all end up going to better schools than mine does? Parents don't get bragging rights for being sensible, these days; what's the point of slapping a school decal on the back window of the car, if not to impress the driver who's sitting behind you in traffic.
A more level-headed college application process is the educational equivalent of a cease-fire or a nuclear stand-down: It only works if everyone does it, and that never happens, or it never happens for long enough to become the status quo. No one wants to risk being vulnerable. We stay locked and loaded because we want to win - because we still believe it is possible to win, despite formidable evidence to the contrary, despite growing skepticism about what constitutes victory in the first place.