Why Do Families Put Up With It?

Some years ago, I got to know a guy who had two daughters that were approaching high school age. His lifestyle was a little too bourgeois-rat-race for me to think of him as an actual friend, but it was fun to catch up with him now and then at hobby-related events. Everything changed as his daughters grew old enough for him and his wife to chart their college admissions strategies. As far as I can tell, they went to an Ivy admissions consultant who recommended that their best chance was to aim for a Title IX recruited athlete basket via women's basketball.

So this became the program, except that women's basketball, unlike men's basketball and nearly every other sport, doesdn't have a season, it goes all year, which meant that other than this guy's regular job, he was going to have to spend almost every waking hour taking his daughters to their games, coaching them, monitoring their workouts, and so forth -- and it wasn't going to be just a burst of activity for a few months, but something that would soak up his non-work time and attention for maybe six or seven years straight.

Once he told me about this, I no longer ran into him in connection with our hobby. He wasn't allowed to have a hobby. In fact, I never ran into him again, so I never learned how things turned out for his daughters. I was lucky enough that I was part of the first Ivy admissions rat race that began in the late 1950s when I was still in junior high, and things weren't quite so intense, although at least once a year my mother would make an appointment with the guidance counselors and ask specifically what needed to change on my transcript to get me into Dartmouth.

One of my strangest experiences from junior high, in fact, was soon after my parents had gone in to consult with the principal, Dr Callahan, over some troubling aspect of my 14-year-old behavior. The next day, Dr Callahan called me in to meet with him one-on-one. "I need to explain something to you," he said. "Your parents are in a panic. They have this fixation on getting you into the right college. I've never seen anything like it." He went on to reassure me that this was going to be a tough part of my life, there wasn't going to be much I could do about it, but I should have some perspective.

I was one of Dr Callahan's problem children, but I remember him fondly.

Yesterday I asked why students and their families aren't up in arms that, whatever the sacrifices they may be making to try to get their kids into an Ivy school, the game is rigged, and in fact,it's generally understood to be rigged. The middle-class kids from the suburbs are competing for a particular subset of openings in each elite-school class, while people with the right names or the right DNA or big enough wallets are able to bypass the whole process, but I concluded they never would.

This keeps taking me back to the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. As I pointed out in this post,

This arose early in the last century when Dartmouth College, facing a financial crisis, asked its alumni to bail the school out, in return for which several seats on the board of directors would be nominated and elected by the alumni. This went unnoticed for decades until, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservative students began criticizing liberal faculty and administration policies. The result was that sympathetic alumni organized campaigns to elect avowed conservatives to the board as opportunities arose.

The movement eventually failed, in part because it never had a specific agenda beyond putting conservatives on the board, and perhaps as a result of that, the trustees it elected before the administration regained control were mostly narcissistic self-promoters. But the main reason it failed was that students, alumni, applicants, and parents complained that any controversy about the College would diminish the perceived value of a Dartmouth degree. Argument over.

In other words, there's a deep compulsion in the US middle class for families to sacrifice healthy adolescence and balanced parenthood in a vain and incredibly expensive effort to play a rigged game. On one hand, a few figures like Mike Rowe are seriously questioning the usefulness of a four-year degree vis-a-vis learning a trade or pursuing some small business opportunity, but nobody seems to be questioning the value of an Ivy degree vis-a-vis one from a less selective and much less expensive state school. I suspect the state school will do a better job teaching the basics of each discipline.

This problem won't be solved by putting conservatives, or even pro-Israel Jews, on Ivy boards of trustees. I had a long and productive chat with the first insurgent Dartmouth trustee, who pointed out that he and those like him would always be flying coach to board meetings, while the other trustees would be flying in on private jets, and they would always outnumber the insurgents no matter what. Even if there are alumni with an insurgent agenda, even a most commendable insurgent agenda, they'll get nowhere, and the strongest resistance will come from the parents, applicants, alumni, and students who are most intent on playing the same old rigged game.

There will need to be a bigger cultural change. Homeschoolers, for instance, are no less focused on getting their kids into an Ivy. Even homeschool won't solve a whole lot.