What’s good in arts and culture: College admissions edition
A Frank Bruni piece in Friday’s NYTimes – “How to Survive the College Admissions Process” – encapsulates the pressure-cooker, winner-take-all, high-stakes, make-or-break world that the college application process has become. And, Bruni bemoans this world:
What madness. And what nonsense.
FOR one thing, the admissions game is too flawed to be given so much credit. For another, the nature of a student’s college experience — the work that he or she puts into it, the self-examination that’s undertaken, the resourcefulness that’s honed — matters more than the name of the institution attended. In fact students at institutions with less hallowed names sometimes demand more of those places and of themselves. Freed from a focus on the packaging of their education, they get to the meat of it.
The op-ed profiles a few students, most from well-to-do backgrounds, who persevered through the adversity of landing on their second, third, or fourth choice institutions. Bruni argues that the ‘quality’ of college that accepts you says nothing about your value as a person, nor about the heights you can reach, “Education happens across a spectrum of settings and in infinite ways, and college has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional achievement or a life well lived.”
Nevertheless, our culture’s praise, its hagiography, of the ‘elite’ institutions subverts the very purpose of higher education. “College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that’s lost in the admissions mania, which sends the message that college is a sanctum to be breached — a border to be crossed — rather than a land to be inhabited and tilled for all that it’s worth.”
The piece ultimately makes a point that is too seldom made: you can succeed, you are valuable, you can discover ideas, you can have new experiences at a lot of different colleges – not just the ‘top-tier,’ three-hundred-year-old, $50k/year universities.
But, some important questions remain. First, maybe the elite institutions are not the only places where students can succeed, but what are the places? How do students identify the places that have the right mix of support, academic rigor, and opportunity?
The students that Bruni profiles, students from relatively well-to-do backgrounds, had some freedom to explore and try things. While those students might have faced some disappointment when they were not accepted to their top-choice schools, they had options. Students from lower income and minority backgrounds, however, feel high stakes not simply based on peer pressure, but also because, if they land in the ‘wrong’ school, they do not have as much to fall back on.
The take home message is this: You should aspire to schools that are right for you, not those that are right in the eyes of our consumerist culture. How to find those schools, however, is a process of discernment and introspection and a process of dialogue with parents, teachers, counselors, friends, and, hopefully, Rutgers–Camden Aim High.
