On the college admissions process

Today I learned that high school students and their parents ask entirely the wrong questions about the college admissions process. Not stupid questions, mind. Just the wrong ones.

Their questions betray that they just don't get the point of the whole thing. A highly typical example: "My son has a 3.7 GPA and plays lacrosse. How many hours of community service does he need for Harvard?" This reflects a student-centered concept of the process that is inaccurate and counter-productive.

Admissions committees are not awarding prizes in a scavenger hunt. They're crafting a college class. Maybe it's different at less prestigious, more ranking-conscious schools, and they really do tick off a list of GPA/SAT/AP attributes. But the good places only care about those numbers inasmuch as they are shorthand for the attributes of Real Actual People. No one cares about your 1600 2400 if you aren't also special.

Maybe that's the first filter to the whole process - the first test of your Harvardiness is whether you can grok the reason for the admissions committee's existence. Which of course means this is yet another way in which disadvantaged kids are further disadvantaged... Understanding the motivations of the man behind the curtain, when everyone around you is an idiot, is a pretty sophisticated cognitive task.

There's just so much mis-information and bad advice - often coming from professional advice-givers, which is what sparked this blog post - that it makes me sad. And for many kids who don't have ivy-level parents or friends, the first way they learn about college admissions is through television. In my case, that meant seeing Zach Morris get a 1507 or some such impossible score on his SAT, and then watching the rest of the Saved By The Bell kids scheme to make the Hahvahd recruiter at the college fair notice Jessie Spano, as though those college fairs matter in the slightest.

Or just last week on LOST, that entire sideways-world subplot where Alex so desperately wanted a letter of recommendation for Yale from the asshole principal, and not from her mentor Dr. Linus, because the asshole principal was a Yale alum. NO ONE CARES IF HE WENT TO YALE. Ben Linus would have written a far better letter. Or at least manipulated Yale into doing his bidding, whatever. Ugh.

Maybe I should just write a tv show about kids applying to college, and do some good in the world.