Amazing Girls

It is admission season at American colleges. The New York Times ran two front page articles about college admissions last week. On April 1st it ran "For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too," by Sara Rimer. It followed this up on April 4th by "A Great Year for Ivy League Schools, but Not So Good for Applicants to Them, by Sam Dillon.

The first is about the "amazing girls" of Newton North High School, taking four AP courses, running track, studying philosophy, playing classical music at the level of concert artists, taking SAT cram courses and competing in the dating and mating game. They are being packaged, or are packaging themselves, for the nation's top colleges. They do five hours of homework every night. They are stretched to the breaking point. And despite their amazing achievements, they are not getting admitted to their top college choices. The message: you have to be a wonder woman -- brilliant, persistent, incredibly talented, malleable and packagable . . . and 'hot' . . . and it just may not be enough.

The second is about the admissions statistics for the colleges so eagerly sought by these amazing girls. Sure enough, each of the colleges is receiving more applications than ever, and accepting a smaller percentage of applicants. Harvard turned down 1,100 student applicants with perfect 800 scores on the SAT math exam. Yale rejected several applicants with perfect 2400 scores on the three-part SAT, and Princeton turned away thousands of high school applicants with 4.0 grade point averages. That's right -- perfect may not be good enough.

What does all of this intense competition for the top colleges -- competition that is tearing these amazing girls apart -- mean?

It means that the k-16 system is collapsing. There is plenty of room for your daughter (or son) in college. But there is simply not enough room in the top colleges for even the most amazing kids. When I was applying for college in 1960, only about 20% of the high school graduates were considered "college material". And this was more a matter of expectations than achievements. I don't remember many of my classmates as being all that amazing. When we went to college and graduated we immediately distinguished themselves from more than 80% of our age cohort. Add in a few years of post-college training or an advanced degree and our pathway to the professional class was clear.

Working class kids at that time still got jobs, or went into apprenticeship programs if they had the right connections. They could still enter the secure middle class.

But there are very few high skilled industrial jobs in today's post-industrial society. Since the 1970s more and more working class graduates have been going to college, and the college world, both public and private, expanded to accommodate them all.

The result is that more high school graduates can go to college, but today's college graduates have to compete against their entire age cohort, not just 20% of it, to get a firm toehold in the middle class. The ones who cannot differentiate themselves from their college graduate peers face job insecurity and shrinking prospects.

So what is the solution? The only way today's high school graduates can attain what we had, without being amazing, fifty years ago, that is, a clear path ahead , is to be even more amazing than amazing, even more perfect than perfect.

This is not the life that we want for our children.