On College Admissions

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

Susan Harman forwarded this article from the Literacy for All list.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Stressed for Success?
By DAVID BROOKS

NY Times March 30, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/opinion/30BROO.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1080798705-86GW6iJW8ycuGEfTCAsn2A

Many of you high school seniors are in a panic at this time of year, coping 
with your college acceptance or rejection letters. Since the admissions 
process has gone totally insane, it's worth reminding yourself that this is 
not a particularly important moment in your life.

You are being judged according to criteria that you would never use to 
judge another person and which will never again be applied to you once you 
leave higher ed.

For example, colleges are taking a hard look at your SAT scores. But if at 
any moment in your later life you so much as mention your SAT scores in 
conversation, you will be considered a total jerk. If at age 40 you are 
still proud of your scores, you may want to contemplate a major life makeover.

More than anything else, colleges are taking a hard look at your grades. To 
achieve that marvelous G.P.A., you will have had to demonstrate excellence 
across a broad range of subjects: math, science, English, languages etc.

This will never be necessary again. Once you reach adulthood, the key to 
success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across 
fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing 
yourself passionately to them.

The traits you used getting good grades might actually hold you back. To 
get those high marks, while doing all the extracurricular activities 
colleges are also looking for, you were encouraged to develop a prudential 
attitude toward learning. You had to calculate which reading was essential 
and which was not. You could not allow yourself to be obsessed by one 
subject because if you did, your marks in the other subjects would suffer. 
You could not take outrageous risks because you might fail.

You learned to study subjects that are intrinsically boring to you; slowly, 
you may have stopped thinking about which subjects are boring and which 
exciting. You just knew that each class was a hoop you must jump through on 
your way to a first-class university. You learned to thrive in 
adult-supervised settings.

If you have done all these things and you are still an interesting person, 
congratulations, because the system has been trying to whittle you down 
into a bland, complaisant achievement machine.

But in adulthood, you'll find that a talent for regurgitating what 
superiors want to hear will take you only halfway up the ladder, and then 
you'll stop there. The people who succeed most spectacularly, on the other 
hand, often had low grades. They are not prudential. They venture out and 
thrive where there is no supervision, where there are no preset requirements.

Those admissions officers may know what office you held in school 
government, but they can make only the vaguest surmises about what matters, 
even to your worldly success: your perseverance, imagination and 
trustworthiness. Odds are you don't even know these things about yourself 
yet, and you are around you a lot more.

Even if the admissions criteria are dubious, isn't it still really 
important to get into a top school? I wonder. I spend a lot of time meeting 
with students on college campuses. If you put me in a room with 15 students 
from any of the top 100 schools in this country and asked me at the end of 
an hour whether these were Harvard kids or Penn State kids, I would not be 
able to tell you.

There are a lot of smart, lively young people in this country, and you will 
find them at whatever school you go to. The students at the really elite 
schools may have more social confidence, but students at less prestigious 
schools may learn not to let their lives be guided by other people's status 
rules ? a lesson that is worth the tuition all by itself.

As for the quality of education, that's a matter of your actually wanting 
to learn and being fortunate enough to meet a professor who electrifies 
your interest in a subject. That can happen at any school because good 
teachers are spread around, too.

So remember, the letters you get over the next few weeks don't determine 
anything. Picking a college is like picking a spouse. You don't pick the 
"top ranked" one, because that has no meaning. You pick the one with the 
personality and character that complements your own.

You may have been preparing for these letters half your life. All I can say 
is welcome to adulthood, land of the anticlimaxes.


George Sheridan