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The Guinness Book of Academic Records
For those of you that missed it, graduation was a great success despite the lack of champagne. President Gann’s speech was awful (I’m beginning to wonder if that ravenesque staccato is some sort of cruel inside joke), but that’s to be expected by now. The event was a great success, but it got me thinking about the other endpoint on the CMC experience. Acceptance into CMC was a great day in all of our lives, but looking back on the application process, it seems like a bunch of bs.
The application process seems to increasingly be just a game of surprise the administrator. Sure you got to have a baseline level of test scores and grades, but in today’s college crazed environment you need to have a hook. With so many kids with great numbers, you can’t just be brilliant intellectually; you need to have had some “wow” type experience. It’d be even better if the experience had an impact on your life so you could write an essay about it.
Of course, the admissions people make it all sound so very reasonable. Who thinks college kids shouldn’t be “well-rounded” and have “balance” in their life? But that’s not actually what they look for, is it? The admissions folk want kids who’ve done something unique and original. Putting your heart and soul into the Politics Club just isn’t the same as going to South America with your church—even if you don’t really care about clean water in Latin America. Even if the only reason you went is to get into college, and the only reason you could go is Daddy’s credit card.
The perverse effect of this is that it rewards people who are driven to get in to the point of toolishness, willing to abandon what they care about for the all-important goal of acceptance into college. As a result, we often get the pretense of having interesting students rather than the reality of having genuinely interesting people. We’ve all met people and thought, “How the hell did you get in here?” Maybe this is just me, but I often wonder how some of the CMCers I meet can be so boring having done such interesting things.
Graduate school and the slew of post-undergrad scholarships/fellowships are no better. You want to study the impact of harmonicas on the assimilation of Australian aborigines into the dominant culture? Here, take a Fulbright. I can just imagine the application committee thinking: “Wait you only saved an African village ravaged by AIDs from starvation? That was so pre-millennium. This girl nursed swine flu victims back to health in Mexico City. Now that’s edgy.” It’s like trying to break a world record; it’s easier if it’s obscure.
This obsession with absurd specialization and uniqueness recapitulates the problem with college admissions: the focus on the symbolic at the expense of the real. It’s not about the merit of what you actually did so much as its perception. New things are exciting. Foreign things are exciting. Playing on the soccer team or pushing yourself in the classroom? Not so much. Doing the latter a lot better doesn’t get you nearly as much as a little bit of the former. Academia is generally pretty awful about this, but it’s gotten particularly bad in the case of college admissions.
So in the case of college admissions, I’d like to propose a solution. Rather than letting people tell us whether they’re well rounded or not, why don’t we actually test it? We could easily have WOA-like trips for finalists over their Winter Break. Think of it as a week long interview. Although I didn’t go on a WOA trip myself, I hear they’re great bonding and character testing experiences. It’s hard to fake being interesting for a whole week. People inevitably let their guard down and show their true selves. We can find out if kids are actually well rounded or if they’ve just been good at faking interest in lots of activities. If we’re serious about getting well-rounded, interesting kids, I think this would go a long way. The current game of formative experience one-upmanship is just that: a game. Maybe its time we stopped forcing kids to play by rules better suited to an application for a Guinness world record than our young’s first entry into academia.
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Patrick Atwater
Patrick Atwater is a senior at Claremont McKenna College, pursuing a dual degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). When not playing football or slaving away at the Rose, he spends his time theorizing about the California Dream, which Abhi is foolish enough to pay him for. He enjoys theoretical politics, skiing, Russian literature, genuine people, not swimming back, happiness, the outdoors, Michael Bay movies, trying new things, island paradises, the works of Amartya Sen, traveling, and making gross overgeneralizations.
4 Comments
2009-05-31
05:24:28
I agree with most of your points. Particularly, giving people credit for going on trips that don't indicate anything except that they come from money is awful. Over-specialization is also a problem. Specialization is for grad school, undergraduates should be interested in building a breadth of knowledge. That being said, a WOA-like trip is completely unworkable. I'd posit that many of the most interesting people won't have any idea where they actually want to go to college in December. Many of these people might be looking at lots of different schools, its a huge barrier to expect them to spend a week of their time on one of the possibilities. Also, a WOA trip is great and a lot of fun, but it would probably just devolve into one-upmanship again if kids knew admission was on the line instead of just building friendships.
2009-05-31
18:56:46
Hey Patrick,
On the point of hooks, I thought I might recommend a book to you by Daniel Golden of the WSJ, titled, "The Price of Admission." If you're interested in how colleges are need blind, but not wealth blind, you might consider it.
Thanks!
2009-06-01
14:59:15
Hey Patrick, fascinating opinion. I would only contribute a couple of things:
First, I would suggest you read the Daniel Golden book that Charles suggested, and I would also suggest you read the work of Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore. Although many disagree with him, I find his work an interesting way in which to frame some debates surrounding college admissions. I certainly don't speak for the admission office, just for myself here, but it's a good question you've posed: what do you do when almost EVERYONE is qualified enough to 'get in' and you have what appear to be too many good people to admit? Well, I can tell you there are no definite admissions answers about what success looks like when it comes to individuals, but there are fairly good ways to define a probability of what success looks like when it comes to the creation of an entire freshman class. Confused? That’s good. And really, it's okay, I didn't understand this idea until I actually worked in admissions for a while. It simply means there is more value in the group than in the sum of said group’s parts, so to focus on a few particular individuals as evidence that there is no ‘quality control’ on the front end is simply to ignore the vast majority of those which you have no problems with, which I would argue supports the idea that admissions works. Unless you think the MAJORITY of your peers are boring, in which case, then you have a point. (and, if you do think the majority of your peers are boring, then I would urge you to please write another article on that topic---watching THAT post-article comment box would bring me much enjoyment indeed).
Here’s Barry Schwartz at TED in 2006.
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/paradox_of_choi.html
my second point is a little more basic: I don't think you give CMC enough credit. Admissions is based on a million things, some tangible, others not so, but at the end of the day, whether you're an over achiever or you're a slacker, you still all have to get through the same long, hard slog that is the CMC experience, and if you do it right, that process will in fact make you ‘more interesting’ no matter how you started out. Honestly, while I see your points about a WOA-style trip for admission purposes, my honest opinion is that no matter what changes you may propose on the front end, your back end problem of the gossip surrounding "how THAT guy got into CMC" will actually not go away. So instead of OUR admission process on the chopping block, it will be YOUR admission process on the chopping block. Different process : same problem.
That’s my 2 cents.
and have to say this:
Thanks for writing this piece. It was interesting and articulate. If CMC is anything, it is a place where ideas matter and where well-intentioned opinions are to be respected and tested. You’ve presented an interesting position here. Nice job.
Adam Sapp
2009-06-02
09:52:17
Thank you all for your kind words and added insight.
A couple of things in response to Adam and Tom. Adam, you say "almost EVERYONE is qualified enough to get in." The crucial distinction I would make is that everyone APPEARS to be qualified to get in. The thrust of my argument is that the current admissions process is a breeding ground for pretense. It's hard to hold that pretense up for a whole week. I've found that if you spend a whole week with someone (in say a WOA trip type experience), you get a pretty good idea of who they are and what they're about. So then, under your framework, we would have a better metric with which to gauge the group's likely success.
I actually agree with you on your second point. We are very successful. I just don't think that's any reason to "rest on our laurels," as the saying goes. I find this is especially the case here as this new admissions criteria (the week-long WOA interview) would only compliment the current process rather than substituting for it. We might never eliminate the "how'd that guy get in gossip," but we can make it less relevant. We can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good - especially when the perfect is a false utopia. Yes it would be tough logistically to implement these winter trips. Yes kids could still try and fake their way through. But the kids that play the oneupsmanship game will tend to be revealed as tools during the course of the week, and the fact that we would be the first school to do this increases the associated opportunity. No one else does this, giving us the opportunity to set the precedent and be the first in line for applicants' precious time. I think the fact remains that a week outdoors - away from the college admission game of essays, test scores, and psuedo-formative experiences - would be a great way to see which of our eager young applicants truly are "leaders in the making."