As college application season hits its height, the nation’s top high school seniors are assembling packages that show their grades and test scores to be phenomenal, their volunteer work noble, their athletic prowess remarkable, their summer experiences transcendent.
But increasingly, and some might say hypocritically, admissions officers at the most selective colleges say they worry that the process has spun out of control and become such a high-stress exercise in resume padding that students are arriving on their campuses on the brink of burnout.
The colleges say they are searching for ways to cool the competition but so far have taken few concrete steps.
At gatherings around the country, admissions officers are bemoaning the slick packaging of applicants and discussing ways they might encourage high school students to be truer to themselves rather than aspire to some model they think will get them into the Ivy League.
At Harvard, the admissions office has written a paper lamenting that students “seem like dazed survivors of some bewildering life-long boot camp.” And at a meeting of the College Board in New York recently, admissions officers packed shoulder to shoulder into a discussion group about how to make sure students get more sleep.
“We think this generation is wonderful in every way, but we worry that unless something changes, we’re going to lose a lot of them,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, who has been reading applications there since 1972. “Too many of them are going to experience one form or another of burnout, and that would be a tragedy.”
The admissions officers say they are troubled that the process they were trying to manage has spawned consultants for everything from preschool to college admissions, students who pursue elaborate summer programs or good deeds aimed solely at impressing colleges, and parents pushing for the most prestigious window decal instead of the best education for their children. Staring at what they have wrought, the officials say they have an obligation to speak up before they do more damage.
Fitzsimmons said he began thinking about writing something this summer after listening to parents complain that their childrens’ hectic schedules made “summer vacation” an oxymoron.
“The fabric of family life has just been destroyed,” he said. “The possibility of taking a week or even a few days or in a few cases, an evening away from the soccer schedule or the academic enrichment schedule is just gone.”
But the colleges say they can do little beyond talking to guidance counselors, students and parents about their concerns, and hope that people take them to heart. The paper from Harvard, the institution to which others look to set a tone, calls for students to take a timeout literally and figuratively, for a year, a summer or even just an evening, not to add to their credentials but “to develop into a complete human being.”
The paper that Harvard hopes will generate interest nationwide, suggests that students can get invaluable psychological benefits and see a different side of life by taking “an old-fashioned summer job.”
Officials from Georgetown, Harvard, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania, who travel in groups to high schools across the country, are refocusing their message, hoping to reassure students they don’t have to be the perfect Renaissance person — or take a lot of Advanced Placement courses — to get in, and encouraging them to pursue things they really enjoy.
There are other strategies, too. At the College Board meeting, Karl M. Furstenberg, the dean of admissions at Dartmouth, spoke with only half-mocking seriousness when he called for a new round of SALT — changing the acronym to Strategic Admissions Limitations Talks –to deal with the pressure created by increasing numbers of students applying under early action programs.
Duke rewrote its application this year, giving students less room to list the number of their extracurricular activities, and more room, instead, to describe why those activities mean something to them.
“My biggest worry is, the ages of 15 through 18 are critical years for kids to have a balance,” said Charles A. Deacon III, dean of admissions at Georgetown. “The ones who are driven into these top schools and are in certain top prep schools or affluent public schools don’t have it.”
The Harvard paper chronicles parents hiring consultants to teach 3-year-olds to make eye contact and demonstrate “both leadership and sharing” in play sessions where preschool directors judge them for admission, and others hiring college consultants for their middle school students. Rod Skinner, a college counselor at Milton Academy, a highly competitive preparatory school outside of Boston, tells of a father who took a year’s sabbatical from his job to manage his daughter’s college application process.
The fear is that the process has grown increasingly inequitable, with the advantage accruing to those students able to afford tutors, test preparation courses, elaborate summer camps, or consultants to help shape their college essays. And admissions officers say applicants seem to have become less genuine; at Penn, Dean of Admissions Willis J. Stetson Jr. tells of a father calling to ask if 500 hours of volunteer service is enough.
Pressure has always existed, the colleges say. But now they see it wearing through more on students when they arrive on campus. Harvard, among other places, increased its provision of mental health services last year, prompted by concerns about student stress, often resulting in binge drinking or eating disorders.
“We don’t imagine this as a new phenomenon,” said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions at Harvard. “It’s just that we see more of this clearly articulated stress, pressure, feelings of inadequacy, comparing oneself to all these other extraordinary people.”
Colleges advising high school students to relax, of course, is a little like the fox telling the hens to quit their nervous clucking.
While the pressure has increased in the past few years, its seeds were planted in the 1980s, as colleges saw a trough of the number of high school seniors. Small colleges feared that they would be forced to close, and even the most prestigious universities worried that they would not be able to attract enough top students.
Statistically, it should have become easier to get into college starting about that time. But colleges went drumming up applicants and invested heavily in marketing, and ended up with more applicants then ever. That meant that they rejected more students, making themselves look more selective. Students, worried about the numbers of rejections, began applying to 10 institutions instead of two or three, making the cycle of competition all the more fierce.
Even though demographics have rebounded, the colleges have discovered that they can make themselves much more visible — in rankings, in discussions between parents at cocktail parties — if they can claim high selectivity.
“Each place is trying to look for an edge, and within the Ivys it’s as ferocious as any group around,” said Furstenberg. “It has gone too far in the direction of institutional self-interest.”
How to reverse that, though, is a difficult question.
At Harvard, Fitzsimmons and Lewis said they hoped that their paper would get parents and guidance counselors talking about the stresses, and some remedies.
“We’re not expecting that people will suddenly stop in their tracks and reorder their priorities,” Lewis said. “What we’re hoping to do is lend some legitimacy to the notion that a college does not make its decision based merely on who is the busiest. We are, of course, as interested as we always have been in ambition and motivation. We are at the same time just as concerned about the application of those qualities imprudently, unchecked by humanity, values, reflection, relationships, all the things that make one human.”
The colleges say they are trying to emphasize that winning admission to a top college does not determine life success.
“We see this as, at the grass-roots level, a calming down mission, a humanitarian mission, if you will,” said Deacon, at Georgetown. “We are trying to get people to see this as an experience you go through, not a game you win or lose.”
Still, some say the colleges could do more.
Christoff Guttentag, director of admissions at Duke, said they need to be more honest with students about whether they have a realistic chance of getting in, rather than just being happy with more and more applications.
“We are in the position that, if 100 students say, `I’m better suited to another school,’ that’s not going to hurt us,” he said.
Given the level of savvy among students and consultants, however, there are dangers in any move. There will only be a reduction in stress, one high school guidance counselor noted cynically at the College Board meeting, when someone finds a way to make money off it.
And Lewis worries that applicants will only comb through the new paper trying to divine what they think is some new code for admission.
“The question isn’t how you get to be a better candidate,” she cautioned, “The question is how one might be a better, and dare one say it, happier, person.”
