The Context

a rant on the college admissions process

Hi, everyone. By now, you’ve all heard about the statements made by the Ivy League university presidents in front of Congress. The video clips of their testimonies have gone viral and even made it into an SNL skit. Calls for genocide against Jews do not necessarily breach the codes of discipline at the represented institutions. In a coordinated and united front, each university president stated, “It depends on the context.”

Well, I’m not here to weigh in with my opinion about the resignations and non-resignations that followed. I don’t have a lot to say about that. But I’ve got plenty to say about higher education in general. My own college experience was so demoralizing, it’s practically been my lifelong obsession. So I’m dusting off an old draft of a post that I began last summer after some of you expressed interest in hearing the story of my college failure. This is not that story. I wasn’t ready to share the details then, and I haven’t changed. But thanks to the scandal created by the university presidents, it seems like a fitting time for me to address one of my biggest bugaboos: the admissions process. The original working title for this piece was “Down the Chute.”

Remember Veruca from Willy Wonka? Can’t you just hear her screaming as she falls through the garbage chute? “I want it NOWWWWWW!”

I didn’t use the Veruca graphic to convey the brattiness of pre-college youth. I feel sympathy for them. I only chose it because I couldn’t find the image I really wanted, which is from the movie “Admission.” That movie positively nailed the admissions process. A picture really is worth a thousand words, and film allows for visual metaphor like no other medium. Veruca is my stand-in, and Google supplied me with a different shot, which is just as telling:

As you see, there sits Tina Fey, star of the movie. She’s playing an admissions officer at Princeton. The gymnast on top of the desk is an applicant, but she’s only there symbolically, showing that Tina Fey reviewing her application. I don’t remember the girl’s fate, but I absolutely remember what happens to the kids who get rejected. They fall through a trap door and go down the chute, just like Veruca.

That is exactly what college rejection felt like to me when I was a teenager, and I know I can’t be the only one. The whole process seems designed to exacerbate our insecurities. Not only did we have to have high grades and SAT scores, we had to prove that we were “well-rounded” by getting involved in extracurricular activities. We also needed our teachers to vouch for us with recommendation letters - the more glowing, the better. It’s like competing in a tournament that measures your whole life, and the stakes are your future livelihood, your social status, and your happiness.

I know lots of people believe competition yields the best results. Survival of the fittest and natural selection - those are “laws of nature,” right? Well, I think it’s cruel to force young people to compete for their education. What are we? Animals in the wild fighting for sources of food? How about cultivating the human soul instead?

I’m not alone in this opinion. Greg Olear interviewed Will Bunch, author of After the Ivory Tower Falls on his podcast just last week, and he said that college education is the biggest social divider in this fractured country. If we would treat it like a public good the way the European countries do, there would be less class resentment. Then Trump and his ilk couldn’t exploit working people’s resentment of the “elites.” But the system as it stands is bad for middle class kids, too. It was best expressed by Professor William Deresiewicz in the book Excellent Sheep. “We’re not teaching to the test. We’ve living to it.”

With all that pressure, it’s no wonder so many students fall into mental health crises in college. After being sized up, judged, and rejected, you finally find a place that thinks you’re “good enough,” and end up surrounded by sex, drugs, and alcohol. Right now, we’re seeing evidence of how colleges don’t protect Jews, but how about the problem of how they don’t protect women? Campus rape has been an issue going way back before the #MeToo movement. What good is protected free speech when the students themselves aren’t protected? No wonder they’re so enraged and ready to act out.

Rick Singer, the mastermind behind the college admissions scandal of 2019, used to advise his legitimate clients to “build a personal brand.” Now, I get that education is the entry point into the capitalist system, but people aren’t brands to be sold. The universities, in contrast, are selling a brand. The brand of the Ivy League is exclusivity. The more kids they reject, the more prestigious they become. It’s a false scarcity.

Malcolm Gladwell took issue with the Ivy League in his book David and Goliath. He argued quite convincingly that the professors who teach in state universities are just as intelligent and devoted to their disciplines as the professors in the Ivy League. The only difference between them is fame. We’re all dazzled by it, and so we have an admissions process to prove we’re superstars, too. But instead of prestige, what we should be thinking about is the quality of the school environment.

I could go on and on about this, but I’ll leave off with one final point. I’ve had my beef with the admissions process for a long time, but a history podcast tracing its origins gave me a whole new perspective. It was invented as a way of excluding Jews from the WASPy Ivy League. The Jews were qualifying academically, so if the Ivies were to keep their brand, they had to set up new barriers: like sports prowess and charm in personal interviews. That podcast made me realize that my rejection from Vassar, which I always blamed on my interview, was part of a long-standing, discriminatory tradition.

In a recent anti-discrimination lawsuit against Harvard, Asian students argue that they are being rejected on the basis of the same sort of amorphous standards once used against Jews. The Ivies’ brand is more diverse than it used to be, but Asians and Jews are the wrong kind of diverse.

That is the Context. So, to hell with the Ivies. Educational success has nothing to do with prestige. It has everything to do with being around peers and teachers who won’t abuse or neglect you.