Awesome Parent
I think I’ve been pretty consistent in showing my immense frustration and disgust at the amount of pressure high school students are under these days to get into The Ultimate Ivory Tower College of Academic Wonderfulness. The hoop-jumping is endless: the AP classes, the SATs, the ACTs, the transcript padding, the private college counselors being hired, blah blah blah. It’s a freak show.
Along with my consistent crankiness with regards to the undue pressure adults feel compelled to bury their offspring under, I have also tended to blame the parents and the media for telling the kids the house is on fire when clearly it isn’t. There are plenty of schools out there; the chances are excellent that any graduating senior that wants to will get into at least one college.
And no, not everyone gets to go to Harvard and Yale. As an undergrad, why would you want to? Do you know how busy the faculty at those schools are? They want to teach there more than you want to get your degree there. Managing to get tenure anywhere is difficult. Getting tenure at an Ivy is almost a mathematical impossibility (much like getting into the NBA, being struck by lightning, or winning the lottery). They have to publish or perish, and lecturing to an auditorium full of undergrads is incredibly low on their list of priorities. A lot of the time grad student TAs are giving the lectures.
Much better to go to a smaller school with a viable instructor/student ratio, learn from actual faculty, be a name not a number, and learn how to learn instead of how to cut through the bureaucratic red tape that is large universities. Then go to the school with the name that will impress people at parties for your graduate degree, become a TA, and teach all the lowly undergrads so the professor can get his/her research done. It’s like some effed-up version of the circle of life.
Enough. I started this post to apologize and instead I completely digressed into another adult-bashing rant. What I had intended to write about was this post Melissa Lafsky over at Freakonomics put up a while ago. It somehow managed to escape my notice until now. I do actually know (somewhere deep inside) that not every adult is hellbent on crushing the souls of our children. I apologize profusely to Mr. John B. Gilmour, who is clearly a good parent. He wrote this to the NY Times:
To the Editor:
I have noticed several articles in The Times on how difficult it is to get into college. I assume that your goal in publishing them is to drive my daughter, a high school sophomore already worried about college admissions, over the edge.You have succeeded. Now you can stop. John B. Gilmour
Williamsburg, Va., May 16, 2007
Posted by Alexa Harrington
Alexa,
It’s important to note that the demand for private admissions counselors results from, generally, two things:
1. Overwhelming paranoia and misunderstanding of the college process;
2. Inadequate/ineffective high school guidance counselors.
As I’ve written in the past, The New York Times misunderstands the college process quite badly. Not only do they contribute a great deal to condition #1, but they often consult those #2′s for support. It’s a cruddy cycle.
What a nice rational well thought out post. Thank you for sanity.