IT'S ANOTHER standing-room-only
crowd, waiting to hear from the man who's taken on the country's colleges, the
man who has stood up and called their admissions policies unfair, dishonest and
wrongheaded. When Lloyd Thacker steps to the podium, he opens with his usual
line:
"What my introducer forgot to
tell you is, I was president of my eighth-grade class.
"In fact, for two years in a
row!"
It usually gets a laugh from the harried
high-school parents who are all struggling to figure out: What can they do? Can
this mess get fixed? Who should do it? The joke cuts through the stress. And
that's his goal: To calm the frenzy around this most competitive process,
college admissions. The anxiety is holding our nation's high-school students
hostage.
They, their parents and even the
colleges feel forced to game the system, Thacker says, and along the way
created a generation of students who are obsessed with getting into elite
colleges. These students now hunt for the "right" school and sell
themselves with all the subtlety of a contestant on "America's Next Top
Model." As if learning mattered. The consequences are dire, Thacker says.
We are robbing students of their right to be children, demanding they start
writing their résumés at 14. Or younger. Meanwhile, the admissions process is
rewarding families who can afford SAT-prep courses and expensive private
counselors. Those who can't, well, they just don't get to go.
Its why Thacker quit his job as a
high-school counselor in 2004 and devoted his life to preaching against the
system. He started the nonprofit Education Conservancy in Portland, and
published "College Unranked," a book of essays by high-school
counselors and college presidents and admissions people who agree with him.
Supporters call him a man who's
found his moment. "He is so right," says Marilee Jones, dean of
admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His "time has
come, and it's about time."
Critics say he's out of touch with
reality: No matter what Thacker says, doting parents will continue doing
everything they can to get their little darlings in those elite schools, and
prestige-hungry colleges will continue doing everything they can to make
themselves the most desirable schools in the country.
Nonetheless, people are listening.
Thacker gave 22 speeches this past year to high schools and packed crowds at
college conferences. The speaking invitations keep rolling in. Harvard
University Press is releasing a second edition of his book this month. Over the
summer, he brought together admissions officers from the University of
Washington, Reed College and MIT at a Portland summit to discuss how he — and
others — can spread the word. The choir is nodding. But the pews are still full
of deaf ears.
THERE'S NO SMALL amount of irony
in Thacker's effort. Colleges and universities are now more diverse than ever.
West Coast students go to East Coast schools; women and people of color attend
schools that once excluded them; billion-dollar endowments mean private schools
are opening up to even the lowest-income students.
And yet. Schools are harder to get
into than ever. The high-school population is booming. Twenty years ago, MIT
admitted about 30 percent of its applicants. Last year it admitted 14 percent.
In the early '80s, Pomona College, a private liberal-arts school in Southern
California, admitted just under half of its applicants. For this fall's
freshman class, Pomona admitted 18.5 percent of all applicants.
With more than 1,500 four-year
colleges in the country, the frenzy for spots froths around the most selective
of the bunch. In 2002, one quarter of all college applications were sent to the
156 most-selective schools, those that accept less than half their applicants.The
admissions process feels less and less like an educational exercise and more
and more like an NBA draft, a riot bazaar where basketball superstars are
paraded around like gods. The regular student, the less than perfect, get the
message: "Don't even think about applying here."
Driven students now have to ace 20
Advanced Placement classes, score 800s on all the SAT sections, get voted MVP,
write a concerto for the bassoon, preside over the student body, intern with
Nelson Mandela, build huts in East Timor, develop a vaccine for the avian bird
flu — in short, save the world by the time they're 17. Who has time to hang out
in Dick's parking lot sipping schnapps from a Nalgene bottle? These kids are
Pink Floyd's automatons.
High school has become a means to
an end, Thacker says, recalling the father who asked him what sport his
9-year-old should play in order to get into an Ivy League school. Playing the
harp becomes a means to getting into Oberlin. Attending the summer soccer camp
turns into a line item on the application to Stanford. Going to the Galapagos
for the summer gets milked in the interview with MIT.
"The message to the kids is,
'We don't really care about you as a person,' " MIT's Jones says. "We
care about the product. The seal of approval is the college you're admitted to.
That says, 'Yes that school district was good, yes, that parent was good.' It's
not about the kid.' "
What happens when a student spends
her life preparing to get into the perfect school and gets in, Thacker asks.
Now what?
The test-prep and
college-counseling businesses feed off the fear and fan the flames, Thacker
says. Some counselors charge $30,000 per student.
The high schools inflate their
grades, and make 40 students valedictorians so the parents won't sue. Every
student is set up to think they're a winner, and then the colleges reject them.
Many colleges are complicit,
Thacker says. They say they hate the annual college-ranking report in U.S. News
& World Report because the numbers don't mean anything, but they put out
news releases touting their number the day after the report is published. They
launch rebranding campaigns and build posh dorms, lavish grounds and
state-of-the-art athletic centers to attract the "right" students —
the ones with all the top scores, most intriguing backgrounds and proper
pedigrees. The "right" students will help raise money for endowments.
If more admitted students choose their schools, Moody's maintains their bond
ratings.
While this is mainly a problem of
private colleges, it's one that is seeping into public schools as state funding
dwindles. The University of Washington is in the middle of a $2 billion
campaign. The state isn't providing the money to maintain quality,
administrators say, so they're reaching their hands out to private donors for
everything from buildings to professorships.
"Doing right has too often
gotten lost in the process. How will there be shared responsibility between the
parents, high schools and colleges?" asks Bruce Poch, head of admissions
at Pomona College. "Right now we're in finger-pointing mode, and sometimes
it's the middle finger."
BUSHY-BROWED and gray haired,
Lloyd Thacker looks like Jack McCoy on TV's "Law and Order," railing
against the injustice of college admissions. At 51, he's something of a Renaissance
man, a builder of furniture, a guitar and harmonica player as well as an
academic.
He grew up in California's San
Fernando Valley, the son of an elementary-school teacher and a personnel
manager. His high-school GPA was 3.97. He wonders if he got a B in English
because he criticized the teacher for flirting with the girls in class.
While he was at the University of
California in San Diego, students grumbled about how restrictive the graduating
requirements were. Thacker surveyed all the students and spent two years with
professors and administrators, reforming the curriculum.
After getting a master's in
political science from UC Davis, he moved to college admissions in the early
1980s, first at the University of Southern California, then at Pacific University
in Oregon. There, he was charged with making a plan to attract more applicants.
When the school took a different tack, he left — looking for a more direct way
to help students.
He landed at Jesuit High School in
Portland. Over 16 years as a college counselor there, he watched the
competition escalate. He saw parents berate kids for getting B's, and students
wither under the weight of it all. He listened to one kid on the Ivy League
track cry and tell him, "I feel like I'm having to lie about my interest
in a sport to get into this college. I wanted to do other things."
In 2004, he decided the message
needed a medium. He quit his job, collected essays from deans and counselors
around the country and combined them into his book, forming his nonprofit company
to publish it. The book has sold more than 4,000 copies, promoted by his
marketing department of one, published by his corporation of one. His aim is
simple: Invite people to think.
His advice to parents on how to
prepare a child for college is this: Turn off the television. Let them ride the
bike to the park and play Kick the Can. Read to them. Eat dinner together. It's
a dreamy replay of Thacker's youth, when he built skateboards out of 2-by-4s.
Parents ask, why should I pay
$40,000 to send my child to Hobart and William Smith Colleges when she could go
to Princeton?
Are you buying prestige, Thacker
asks, or are you investing in your child's education?
IF YOU WANT to dissect how the
admissions process turned into a frenzy, you need look no further than the
great big bulge of baby boomers, who went to college in the late '60s and '70s.
In the '80s, when boomers were busy raising young children, the number of
high-school graduates dipped, and colleges struggled to find applicants. They
began marketing themselves. Educators became recruiters.
Then the pipeline bulged again in
the late '90s, as the children of boomers started graduating from high school.
Those children — sometimes called the millennial generation, sometimes the echo
— have started applying to college in record numbers. The pressure won't abate
for another five years. "Boomers have very high expectations of ourselves;
that's one of the hallmarks of our generation," says Jones from MIT.
"We want to be perfect. We want our children to have everything we didn't
have. We're throwing all these opportunities at them — and they had better
measure up."
The Soccer Moms have aged into
Aspiring Ivy Moms. "My child goes to Dartmouth" is the new "My
child is an honor student at Fill-in-the-Blank Elementary."
To be sure, the frenzy had other
drivers.
Massive immigration in the past 40
years has imported parents who dreamed about Harvard in their homelands.
Geographic boundaries dissolved,
first from airline deregulation, then from the Internet. Students in South
Dakota chat online with students in Brooklyn. They research schools all over
the country (even though the majority of students still attend college within
100 miles of their high school).
As a result, more and more
students apply to the small group of schools crowned as the top 25. The number
of seats stay the same at private schools, and the ante goes up. Kids go to
Costa Rica to save baby turtles. Parents fly in SAT consultants to tutor their
kids on vacation.
Admissions officers say they can
smell the overpackaging, and they're sick of it. They say it's more valuable to
spend your summer bagging groceries at Safeway than building houses in Uganda.
They want kids to be kids — as long as your SAT scores and GPAs are as high as
everyone else's.
Students from high-income families
understand the system. They can afford SAT-prep courses and they go to high
schools with Advanced Placement classes and better teachers.
"If you're a low-income kid,
what's the first thing you think about when you hear what these colleges are
looking for?" asks Pace University's Sean Callaway, who teaches low-income
kids about the business of college admissions. "I'm not good enough. You
have to be perfect. It's no use to apply."
At the country's 156 most
selective colleges, only 3 percent of students came from families in the
lowest-25 percent income bracket, according to a study from the National Center
on Education and the Economy.
Colleges have shifted from
need-based aid for low-income students to merit-based scholarships to improve
their class profiles, which observers say discounts tuition for families who
can afford to pay it.
What does this say about equity
and access, Thacker asks. Aren't those important goals of higher education?
Isn't higher education the best opportunity for upward mobility in our
meritocracy?
"We have the right to expect
moral leadership from higher education," Callaway says. "If you're
going to speak about values, you need to position it in the admissions process
... the medium is the message."
THACKER IS FEELING overwhelmed,
slightly stuck. He spends all his time thinking about the admissions problem
he's helped expose. But it's too big, too complex, perhaps too quixotic, this
quest of one.
He's unsure of the next step.
Thacker wants someone to research the health effects of student anxiety. His
supporters have cleaved in two: High-school counselors want him to advocate for
change in the admissions process, for instance, by demanding that colleges
refuse to participate in the rankings, as Reed College has done. The admissions
people would prefer that his nonprofit serve as "a council of
elders," a think tank to discuss problems and solutions.
"He's now sort of a rock
star" at conferences, says Poch from Pomona. "And while high-school
counselors and admissions counselors can nod their heads, they aren't the
policy-makers."
Thacker needs to get to the
presidents, trustees and school principals, Poch says. He needs to get on
Oprah.
It's unclear whether Thacker has
that ambition.
"I have no single prescription"
for the problem, he says.
He knows that in order to clean up
this mess, all the players — students, parents, high schools and, most
importantly, colleges — will have to take the leap together.
To that end, Thacker has collected
a list of guidelines for students and parents, telling them such obvious things
as "be yourself." But he's made no such list for colleges.
Beyond the talk, it's still a long
way to the leap.
Sharon Pian Chan is a Seattle
Times staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff
photographer.