The High-Stakes Game of Writing About College Admissions
by Julia Lipman

Jane Gross was struggling for the right words, the words that would make her essay stand out from a crowded pack. The competition was fierce this year. In a high-pressure field where judgments often seem arbitrary, she was determined to distinguish herself.

Welcome to the fast-paced world of articles about college admissions. Gross' series "Getting In," appearing this week in The New York Times, is only the latest salvo in the annual rush to paint the college admissions process as grueling, somewhat random and usually not very nice. Newsweek, the Atlantic Monthly and the Times itself have of late run similar pieces about the academic travails of high school seniors. It's become a spring ritual. Visit a couple campuses, follow a few prospective students around, shake your head bemusedly about it all and you've got yourself a news feature — or do you?

If there were a guide to the game of writing about college admissions, it might go something like this:

Put hysterical parents on display. "Did he take the wrong classes?" a mother in Gross' article was said to have "wailed" after learning of her son's rejection. "My parents have been getting me ready for this since like seventh grade," says a student quoted in Barbara Kantrowitz' April Newsweek article. Jane Gordon, in a Times piece that ran in mid-April, quotes a college counselor on one of her students: "He said his mother would love him less if he didn't get into the Ivy League schools she wanted him to get into."

The idea here is to show that, left to their own devices, these kids would be much happier playing pick-up games of soccer after school and hanging out with their friends at the local community college after graduation. "I worry that these students have given up all their summers," says Mark Kelly, a Santa Monica co-principal on an April "CNN Presents." "It concerns me that they're not having the opportunity to play." So what should students be doing instead of forensics competitions and AP calculus? Going to pep rallies and "painting [oneself] green in honor of school spirit," according to CNN's voiceover. Don't be fooled into thinking that some high school students might be weird enough actually to prefer forensics; no doubt there's an overbearing parent hovering somewhere in the background bent on vicariously fulfilling her own thwarted Ivy League ambitions.

Never simply refer to "college admissions." Call it a "game," "frenzy," "puzzle" or even "derby." And remember to put words like "good," "right" and "best" in assumption-challenging quotes. Is what a student thinks of as the "best" college really the "right" college for him, or even a "good" college? Now there's something to think about!

Find a college counselor who can provide some much-needed perspective on this out-of-control scramble. Kindly Mr. Breimer, in Gross' series, tries to "get them all to think beyond the 'right sweatshirt to wear on Park Avenue.'" In Gordon's piece, counselor Phyllis Steinbrecher takes a bold stand against discussing college with eighth-graders, saying "I won't do it." Flanagan, a former college counselor herself, concludes that "none of it is good for 17-year-olds just taking their first tentative steps into adult life."

Wrap up by deciding that the whole thing isn't really all that important anyway. Toor, in another Chronicle of Higher Education article, concedes that different schools have different cultures, but decides that none of it matters. "At Duke they may wear Abercrombie, drink beer, and go to basketball games, while at Chicago they may dress in black and smoke endless cigarettes, but the result is not much different. They have been acculturated." In other words, it doesn't matter what culture you're going to be part of — it's still a culture. "There's no evidence that a name-brand degree guarantees anything except a steady stream of requests for alumni donations," writes Kantrowitz.

The overall effect of this kind of journalism is to make working hard to get into college seem something like getting Botox injections or taking melatonin — a mostly frivolous but vaguely troubling yuppie craze, to which the only appropriate response is an arched brow (especially with the Botox) and sad chuckle. A not-so-subtle anti-academic thread runs through most of these articles. Absent in almost all of them is the idea that there is any difference between colleges besides which is the best "fit" for a particular student, that one college might actually be better than another. The only writer who even makes a stab at this is Flanagan, who wonders why the world-class University of Chicago isn't more popular among applicants; she decides it's "too intellectual" for them, an assessment that may be right on if CNN is correct that students would rather paint themselves green than read Kierkegaard. Its status as the 300th most fun school in the U.S. can't have been a big draw, in any case.

By examining Chicago's unpopularity, Flanagan draws attention to one of the less discussed, and more legitimately preposterous, college-search trends — the tendency of students to flock to certain hot schools for reasons other than superior academics or even the promise of superior academics. Duke, despite its many excellent departments, is a school that high schoolers aspire to without really knowing why, Flanagan argues. There's just a general sense that it's the place to go. Schools like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she says, command no such attention. But most of the other college-search writers see the very fact that students greatly prefer some colleges to others as evidence that the process is inherently flawed and don't bother to examine which schools are worth the hype.

Another trend that's come in for much-deserved scrutiny lately is early-decision admissions, under which high-school seniors apply early to a school with a binding promise to go if they are accepted. James Fallows, writing in the same issue of the Atlantic as Flanagan, calls it a "racket" that makes colleges appear more selective at the expense of students, whose options become artificially constrained if they apply early and whose odds plummet if they don't. Early decision has become one item in a laundry list of complaints that the college-search writers find with the admissions process. Such a system, says Gordon, "press[es] top-performing students to make a final decision in the first semester of senior year." It raises "the odds of acceptance for upper-middle-class achievers," says Gross. But by grouping a genuinely questionable practice like early decision in with such indignities as 16-year-olds taking — brace yourselves — college-level Advanced Placement classes, they squander their credibility as careful critics.

You have to wonder what the results would be like if these writers took on the arguably more random process of applying for a job. We could expect breathless accounts of employment-seekers preparing the right action verbs for their resumes and accumulating the right experience. Applicants who sent out many resumes at once would be seen as overeager, too willing to succumb to frenzied competition, while those who aimed lower would be praised for their appealing level-headedness. We might even find out that an applicant's socioeconomic background has something to do with his eventual level of success in the process. The "high-stakes job search game" would become a disturbing enigma, a symbol of all that is wrong with our society. But there would be no rejection letters on which to end the stories neatly; in keeping with current human resources trends, there would be total silence.

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Carl Durbridge (carl@fuzzynet.co.uk)