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Getting Real About Getting That Leg-Up in the Ivy + Application Pool

Check out this article from Bloomberg this week on the high cost of high school summer enrichment programs at Ivy+ universities and the false hope they create regarding eventual admission to those universities. Parents are paying upwards from $7K ($10,490. at Harvard) to enroll their children in summer school courses on selective college campuses (including some Ivy League schools and others equally renown like Univ. of Chicago, Duke and Stanford) with the hopes/expectation that this will give their kids that important leg-up in the college selection process.

For the millionth time, parents, please hear me. It won’t. Going to Harvard Summer School will not get your kid into Harvard. Not even a little. It’s just a great way for the schools listed above to earn some serious cash by exploiting desperate parents and their own reputations. Did you know that many of the people teaching those summer classes are local high school teachers augmenting their salaries for the summer, not professors from those universities?

The professors you think you’re paying for are way too busy and too esteemed to teach advantaged high school kids all summer.

So let’s get real about what it takes to get admitted to one of the top colleges in America, including some of the Ivy League schools. I suspect this news might break the hearts of some, but I hope I can help you get real before it’s too late and you hold expectations that will never be met. Forewarned is forearmed.

Want to know who gets that leg-up for admission to an Ivy school, for example? Try Division 1 athletes who have SATs of 2200+ and who are in the top 10% of their high school class. Know how many of those there are out there? Not many… and they are applying to all the top tier schools and will probably get admitted to most. Are you going to turn your kid into one? Not likely unless your kid has that kind of athletic talent, the right aptitude to play the sport, is an excellent student in school and has had the benefit of top coaching for many years. In other words, they would need that perfect storm of aspects that conjoin to create an Ivy League athlete. No offense, but it’s probably not your child.

If you had the job of reading 35,000 applications to choose 2000, you would quickly see that being able to do the work at that college is so not good enough, nor is having top grades and scores, or being a wonderful person who ‘deserves’ that education.

You would quickly experience that there are many thousands of top students who fit those descriptions and frankly, they all resemble each other on paper since 99% of those applicants are the same age and live standard teen lives without a lot of variation to set them apart from each other.

If you had to pick 2000 of those candidates, you’d admit students who fit your institutional needs, the ones who are different: Div 1 athletes, children of wealthy donors, children of faculty and staff, valedictorians of local high schools to honor the ‘town/gown’ relationship, and whatever other needs your college has. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. No laws are broken because we’re talking about private colleges who can generally call their own shots except for anything that would violate the 14th Amendment or the Americans with Disabilities Act, meaning they can admit whomever they want for any reason except ones having to do with race, gender or a disability of any kind.

You’d have to move fast through all of those applications because you have so little time to process and make decisions and get those decisions out on time. While you would read all of your cases, some you would only just scan because you could pretty much tell within 30 seconds if that candidate would be one of the lucky 2000 admitted. You might feel guilty about that, but you’d realize that this is how life is, you’re paid to admit a class within that 12 week time window and you have 40 more to read before you quit for the day.

Think writing applications is grueling? Try reading thousands of them,

one after the next, trying to keep them all straight, your eyes glazing over as you read the 12,000th essay about the lesson learned on the losing team or how the writer’s life was changed by feeding lunch to hungry children for a day in Africa or India or any 3rd world country they were visiting with their family last summer.

I don’t mean to be cynical. But if you did what I did for a living, you’d understand the realities of the college admissions business and would see that spending $10K to send your child to a summer school program where they teach classes your child could take at a local high school summer school for free, just to give your child an advantage in the college admissions process, is not money well spent. It’s dumb.

If you REALLY want your child to learn during the summer, encourage them to work a summer job for minimum wage. There they will learn lessons in integrity and character-building. They’ll learn not to quit and how to work with all kinds of people. They’ll be humbled and challenged much more in every way than they ever would be at Harvard Summer School or Oxford Summer Program which is just more of the same and won’t help them get into college.

If you were reading 35,000 applications to admit just 2000, wouldn’t you rather take a student who worked a hard construction job all summer instead of spending 2 weeks saving endangered sea turtles in Honduras (for $8K) or doing an unpaid internship cleaning test tubes in their parent’s biochemistry lab?

Yeah, me too.

The “I Didn’t Even Know You Had a Diagnosis” Kind of Teacher

I was talking with my beautiful friend and EFT instructor extraordinaire Jondi Whitis about education the other day. We were talking about beloved teachers from back in the day when she said in her soft Southern way, “You know the kind. The ‘I didn’t even know you had a diagnosis’ kind of teacher.“

My head about exploded with this concept and it reminded me that the last era was about stereotyping. This era is about diagnosis. Apples and apples.

When we judge books by their covers, we miss great works of art. But when we do this with human beings, we don’t just miss them. We can derail them.

Educators, Heads Up…

True story. Years ago when I was Dean at MIT, a renown professor, well known for his grumpiness and temper, came roaring into my office demanding to know why I had admitted a particular student. Pacing back and forth in front of me, Prof. X shouted how the student consistently walked into his class late, “shuffles slowly” to the front row and “slumps down” dramatically in his seat. “And his pants are half way down his butt. This is a disgrace. Why are you admitting these affirmative action cases who can’t do the work? It’s half-way through the semester and his grades are going down to a D. I’m sure I’m going to fail him. He’s insulting me and wasting my precious time.”

I pulled the case and we sat together at my desk, reviewing all the details of this student’s high school record. This “affirmative action case” had scores above 750 in each section of the SAT, ‘5’s in all six of his AP exams and straight A+ grades in everything. He had graduated from an unremarkable high school after being homeschooled through 10^th grade. This student held 2 patents and liked to build things. Here was a natural engineer.

Prof. X stood up, all red-faced, and slammed the file down on the desk, shouting, “What the BLEEP is with this guy? He’s SMART. Why didn’t I know that?”

I went into family counselor mode and respectfully suggested that both parties were misunderstanding each other. “Maybe this kid got intimidated by being at MIT and the-showing-up-late-in-your-face thing is his defense…maybe you scare him”, I told ScaryAss Professor. “WHAAAT? I don’t scare anybody. I’m just a pussy cat at heart.” Hmm, I said, “Maybe he thinks that you think he doesn’t belong here and feels ashamed. He was homeschooled, after all, and might not have the classroom confidence you expect.”

We sat together that day and put together a plan to save this student, and Professor X (God love him) followed it to the letter. The next time the student came in late, Prof. X gruffly asked to see him after class. The student stayed and must’ve been stunned when Prof. X offered him a place in his lab starting that afternoon. He told him that he wasn’t going to let him get away with bad behavior anymore, that he had seen his record and knew how good the student really was. “No more crap. Deal?” “Deal.”

And this student delivered. He blossomed under that faculty member’s critical eye and last I knew, he was excelling in a doctoral program. All because that professor found the humility to drop his own diagnosis/stereotype of this amazing talent.

Prof. X brought me a great lesson that day too. That’s the challenge – to see each person for who they actually are instead of as a perceived diagnosis or stereotype. I learned that people generally live up to your expectations of them. How completely counter-culture in this age of “disabilities”.

Are You In the Rafters or Are You In The Arena?

Having always loved Theodore Roosevelt, I’m thrilled that this quote from his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech from 1910 has gotten so much air time lately, mostly thanks to my favorite mentor, Brene Brown. It goes like this:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it make your heart pound with excitement and inspiration? The first time I read this quote, I cried. I’ve long known that I tear up in the presence of truth and the Sacred. To me, this paragraph carries both qualities because it’s a call for all of us to stop sitting on the sidelines saying witty and snarky things about the perceived failings of others when we wouldn’t dare expose our true selves in the world. (Are you listening, my favorite Talk Show Host?)

In my opinion, this land of the free and home of the brave has become a nation of critics, too paralyzed with fear to risk failure. We’re bringing our kids up this way too. The price of failure is too great – college admissions is culpable here – so healthy risk-taking has all but dried up in schools everywhere.

We’re going in exactly the wrong direction.

Since the beginning, America’s #1 strength has been our ability to innovate and create, to build that better mousetrap. We’ve always been a dissenting lot, choosing independence over the suffocation of convention. (Just read the Bill of Rights again, written to “design a more perfect union”.) But in the past 2.5 decades, first seduced by Big Wealth in the go-go ’90s and then paralyzed with fear of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become something different… scared to show up and play.

We’re scared to let our kids fail. We’re scared to challenge the crazy lies we’re getting from government, from both sides of the aisle. Now we know that our own government is keeping copies of our every phone call, email and text with no explanation. Google hands over our internet search data to the Feds and also probably sells it to companies so they can track our search patterns and sell us stuff, you know, for our ‘convenience’. And we’re too scared or overwhelmed or asleep to jump into the arena and deal, to question what is going on.

If I were a primary or secondary teacher or principal, I would use this quote as a mantra for myself and my students.

I’d encourage risk taking and especially failure, in order to stoke up resilience, competence and the mother of all skills, confidence. I’d encourage inquiry, not right answers. I’d get my students down into the arena where they could go for it and get plenty dirty in the process. It’s way more fun than mastering the one-trick-pony of the snarky insult of others who risk, or the paralysis of perfectionism.

Reading TR’s ‘Man in the Arena’ quote has inspired me to get real about who I am and what I am here to offer the world. I’ve been criticized plenty – still am – and that had a suppressing effect on me until this paragraph lit me up inside. I know many good people, people I love, who would rather sit up in the rafters and make fun of those in the arena. I no longer join them.

For me, I’ll take my destiny standing up. There’s plenty of room down here for us all and everyone is welcome.

Judgment or Discernment?

I’m hate to admit this, but I have always been harshly judgmental. I was raised that way and had this skill finely honed through a career in college admissions (did you know that judgment is an occupational hazard of admissions?). Mostly I was unconscious about its toxicity. But in all honesty, it did serve me by keeping others who might hurt me at bay. Ah, judgment is such a great defense…

Judgment seemed to be my friend and ally until I fell and was exposed publically to the judgment of others. As you can imagine, it doesn’t feel good to have strangers judge you. It feels so unfair. Ah, karma…

Once I experienced the destructive power of judgment, I made a promise to change and I have.

I’m careful now to hold my tongue when I want to put others down. I recognize that what I want to judge in others is what I hate in myself.

Discernment, however, is important. It’s often mistaken for judgment but they are very different. Judgment is mean and wants to lash out. Discernment is seeing what you see with no story attached. Judgment creates a one-upsmanship (“I would NEVER do such a thing because I’m a better person.”) Discernment is an awareness of what is and offers the opportunity to make another decision.

So now we have the Paula Deen situation. Judgment makes us want to lash out at her for being bad, wants us to write mean things about her and cancel all of her business contracts to punish her for things she said and did in her past. Judgment spins a bigger story here (she’s Southern, she was a closet diabetic even as she was cooking up food to clog our arteries, she’s greedy, she’s evil, blahblahblah) and wants to see her humiliated. Discernment watches with no opinion, knows Paula Deen is mortal like the rest of us and that all humans are imperfect. We’ve all said and done things that society would not approve of. Discernment knows that ‘imperfect’ does not mean ‘bad’. Discernment offers compassion to Paula even as it reviews and maybe resets our inner compass around our own behavior.

College admissions provokes a lot of judgment.

Parents often judge their children for not being smart enough or ambitious enough or conscientious enough etc etc as they begin to compare their children to college admissions standards. One parent I know literally burst into tears when she heard her daughter’s SAT scores, crying “I thought you were smart.” As you can imagine, this didn’t help her daughter at all. The daughter felt shame for “letting my Mom down and making her cry.” I wanted to hunt her mother down and give her a good slap but that wouldn’t help her mother at all.

I appeal to parents now. Drop the judgment and switch to discernment. Discernment carries no story. It sees what is. If your child’s scores don’t fit a certain college’s profile, look for a college where they will fit instead of blaming your child. SATs tell us nothing of value. Truth. If your child’s rank isn’t as high as you’d wished or if they didn’t end the year well, attend to the cause with no story attached. It is what it is. Judgment will choke off any encouragement for them to do their best. Judgment is the death of confidence and confidence is the single most important attribute your child needs to go into the world every day.

Discernment is your real friend and ally. Time to get to know it well.

The Shame Series Continues: What’s The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

The reason I’m writing about shame so much recently is that I can see how common it is to the human experience and how it cripples us, creating more drama in our lives than in the typical soap opera on daytime TV. I see how it stops us from being our brave selves. I see it in clients and friends, in people all around me. I see it in all of the haters on social media and in the self-righteous commentators on TV and radio. I can see it is because I’ve come to know it so well myself.

Shame is that awful feeling we have when we feel like we aren’t worthy of being loved, when we feel that profound disconnection from others we need. Shame is ubiquitous (only sociopaths feel none) and it’s easy to understand why. Chalk it up to civilizing children. Lord knows how many times as tiny children we heard “no”, “stop”, “that’s bad” as our parents did their best to keep us safe and under some measure of control. (My father used to say that I got myself into so much trouble, it would be a miracle if I made it to 21.) Then as older kids, we might have heard “what do you think you are doing?” or “shame on you” or “you know better than that” because adults wanted to keep our sexual curiosity in check due to the unintended consequences of that (pregnancy, STDs, big hurts), not to mention the iconic bad decision making of teenagers. All of these phrases were meant to stop us and create a course correction of sorts, but because the sentiment was based in judgment, they also generated this awful feeling called shame.

You feel guilt when you think you’ve done something bad. You feel shame when you think that you are bad.

It hurts to be judged, especially by the people who love us the best. Afterall, if they think we’re bad, we must be bad.

If you or your child is a perfectionist, shame is at the root, hiding, stealthy, even sneaky. Maybe your culture approves of this drive for absolute perfection. Maybe you’ve won awards or have taken your personal value from the perceived admiration of others around you. College admissions certainly stokes this up. But make no mistake – hidden away, shame wreaks havoc in your life. It messes with your health since the fear of doing something wrong keeps you in a chronic state of fight-flight-or-freeze.

Does your child have physical issues like stomach pain or headaches or even repetitive sports injuries? Yup. There’s shame under there.

Shame also interferes with your relationships, because you are only as good as your last success and no one can be allowed to know what a screw-up you really are inside. You’ll always hold a piece of yourself apart, for fear of rejection. Been there. Done that.

So no intimacy or rest for you. Ever.

Saddest and most important of all, there is little creativity being expressed because to do that is to risk rejection and the shame within you will not let that happen. So over time you do what you’ve always done, except really really really well. Over and over. Deluding yourself into thinking you’re growing. One-trick pony. And all the wildly interesting stuff, the juice of life within you that thrives on risk and change, goes unexpressed… and we all lose.

So what’s the point of hanging on to shame? Does it protect us in the long run and make our life worth living? Nah. It’s actually more like a silent and creepy cancer that chokes us off from our authentic self.

If you are not thriving the way you’d like, and you have always been a perfectionist, go immediately and read some Brene Brown, the shame researcher. She’ll tell you all about it in the most hilarious way. She’ll describe how shame thrives in secrecy and silence. In fact, the less you talk about it, the more exponential its growth. When you finally understand it, you’ll want to expose shame to oxygen and sunlight when it surfaces next. Best of all, you’ll want to make a joke about it. (Shame hates to be made fun of.) You’ll laugh about it and share it with those who have earned the right to hear it. You’ll swap shame stories…(Warning: don’t share shame stories with just anyone because shame-based people will only make you feel worse. Share with friends that offer compassion and empathy. Shame hates empathy.)

Soon, swapping shame stories will be the new black.

It won’t take long before you’ll feel more relaxed, more comfortable in your skin. And best of all, that creation power that was waiting in the wings to be noticed and expressed will open up your life in ways you cannot imagine. All good.

I still get paralyzed by shame a few times per day, but at least now I notice it for what it is and I laugh, saying out loud, “Oh, yeah. Should HaveAlready Mastered Everything. Hilarious. Good try.” The Shame Series Continues: Whats The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

So here’s your homework assignment for the week: tell someone who has earned the right to hear it your scariest shame secret. Then give yourself lots and lots and lots of approval because you just took a giant step toward freedom.

Fear Nation

We’re bombarded 24/7 with scary news.

If we listen to the media, or even to our friends and community members, there is so much to fear that we must be hyper-vigilant to stay safe. After all, the food we eat is killing us, the water we drink pollutes us, the air we breathe is toxic. We could get the flu and die unless we get the flu shot. We can’t trust anyone because they could snap and go crazy. We could lose our jobs at any moment. We can’t trust our elected officials because they are all corrupt and in some crazy way are united against us, the innocent general public. The world is unstable and some crazy 3^rdworld country leader somewhere is going to bomb and destroy us. Can’t trust humans. The weather is changing and will wreak havoc on us. Can’t trust Nature.

Oh, and our kid will be rejected from colleges because they are not: White or Asian or Black or Hispanic or male or female or rich or poor or middle-class or an athlete or a non-athlete or from the right school or the right state… ad infinitum.

Can’t trust life.

Really? I’m so fed up with this belief system that does nothing but wear us all down.

Recently I’ve become aware of a small conspiracy movement that believes the Newtown CT shooting was a hoax designed to marshal enough public sentiment to limit our access to guns and undermine the Second Amendment. I’ve personally been working with people from Newtown CT as part of the Tapping Solution Newtown Stress and Trauma Relief Project and I assure all of you that the events of Dec. 14, 2012 were no hoax and no actors were involved. This was one huge human tragedy because so many young children were involved. As with so many tragedies, we’ll probably never know what was in the mind of Adam Lanza, the shooter, because he took the coward’s way out. But how we respond to and interpret this challenge and others like it in everyday life is the whole point.

When we choose fear, fear wins. We lose bigtime.

Folks, this is a fear-based planet which is why we’re all here – to conquer fear. It’s no wonder we’re exposed to it again and again so we can confront and live through the fear.

So when you get scared that your child will get rejected from his college choices, your cortisol levels go up (cortisol is the body’s stress hormone) and so does your blood pressure and heart rate. You go into some version of fight or flight and over the long term, this elegant mechanism designed to save your life actually wears your health down and speeds its demise.

So turn off the news and the scary stuff. Step away from any conversation that revs up your anxiety. It’s all b.s. anyway. Look to what is real and true and not there to sell you anything – look at the sky and the trees around you. Watch the birds and wildlife if you are lucky enough to be around some. Tune into your breath and your heart rate. Smile at your children and spouse. Relax. In reality, there is beauty and wonder and innocence all around you at every moment.

Perception is everything.

I heard a recent interview with the iconic Louise Hay who, when prompted by the interviewer to discuss some plan or other, responded, “Why don’t we just trust life and see how things unfold?”

This is the perfect way to inoculate yourself from Fear Nation, even if it is heretical to our willful way of being in a world where we believe it’s all up to us. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe trusting life is the paradoxical key to happiness.

It’s what I choose.

Trying to Read the Tea Leaves – Early Decisions Are Out

It’s another one of those important life lessons playing itself out in real time all across the country. Most Early decisions are out now and have made many wonderful young people very happy. Congratulations to all of them. It’s a magical moment for sure and one they will always remember. For them, this is a launching point. Yay!!

But for so many, many more, the decisions have left applicants on some spectrum of stunned, heartbroken, confused and deflated. And I can see why, now that I’m on this side of the college admissions experience, where I actually know the individuals involved and have fallen in love with them and their families. I see their beauty and promise and strengths. I feel their talent and desire to serve. And now I feel their grief.

There is the natural urge to read the tea leaves, to connect the dots and make assumptions about why the decision did not go their way. While this is fruitless, there is a certain innocence to it that I do not have.

Because for nearly 30 years, I was one of those college admissions officers who turned so many top students down.

I know well that all decisions depend on who else is applying that year, what the institution’s needs are and the composition of the admissions staff. I’ve seen how a newbie reader or a poor reader can affect a case negatively.

I know that a change in leadership at the college can affect the school’s goals and needs. This is especially true if that school is looking to increase their USNWR ranking… I’ve seen how mistakes happen, and yes, how life happens because we’re all humans.

While I’m so happy for all of those who got admitted to college this month, my heart is heavy for all of those who did not. I know that it doesn’t help, but I still have to say that this is not personal. The application is being admitted, not the student – and therein lies the rub.

So I’m left with the wise words of Eric, one of my favorite friends who is also one of the best fathers I’ve ever met. He’s what is known as a mensch, a good and loving man who speaks wisdom in a kind way. He said, “Sh*t happens. I think that should be the #1 thing that parents teach their children.”

And you know, he’s right. Sh*t happens and life is a paradox. The best things in life most often come disguised as the worst on this crazy planet. The key is to hold on and wait it out to see this truth.

I’m always saying that the college admissions process is really an initiation into the applicant’s adulthood. If your child was deferred or rejected Early, love them all the more now and remind them who they really are. Their self-confidence just took a major hit. This is part of their maturity, part of their initiation. It’s their firewalk, one we cannot share. You can’t stop it. You can’t deflect it. We don’t know why it happened this way, but remind them that everything works for them and not against them. They need to know that you have complete belief in them and in life itself.

Loving Wastefully

I recently had the honor of listening to a lecture by John Shelby Spong, a well-known retired Bishop of the Episcopal Church, who spoke clearly and forcefully about the role religion plays in spreading prejudice. Having been raised Catholic in the ‘50s, and then frustrating my parents by adopting feminism at age 17, thereby rejecting any religion that is not built upon the equality of all humans, I listened carefully with great curiosity, for I’d heard that Bishop Spong was ‘special’. You could hear the proverbial pin drop among the hundreds in that auditorium as the Bishop, a deeply revered and thoroughly modern man despite his position in his church’s hierarchy, spoke to us about the oneness of all human beings. Even I gave him a standing O at the end. It was magic.

He told us that science has proven that we are all one, for humans share 99.9% of the same DNA. And then there is quantum physics and the oneness principle. Yeah, yeah, yeah….I’ve heard that before and didn’t need to be convinced. So I enjoyed his story telling and overall relaxed presentation style. I especially liked how he spoke in full paragraphs. Very impressive.

But the concept that grabbed my attention and literally put me on the edge of my seat was at the end, when he suggested that we “choose to love wastefully”. Huh? Wastefully? Isn’t waste a sin? (hmm…is that in the ‘mortal’ or ‘venial’ category, I wonder?)

He recommended that in these times of turbulence and fear we generate love for all living things, greeting the details of our worlds with love and compassion, regardless of where the love lands and whether or not it is returned. He used the word ‘wastefully’, I think, to suggest another meaning for the term ‘unconditionally’, because so few of us really understand that idea, having been raised in a world of duality – right/wrong, up/down, yin/yang, etc. This is not a planet of unconditional love. We must create it.

How, exactly, do we love without the promise of it being returned and why does that matter?

Even more importantly, why am I writing about this now?

When our children apply to college, our parental claws come out to protect them from the process of judgment and possible rejection. We don’t want them to be rejected. We don’t want them to be hurt. So sometimes in our zeal to protect, we contract and move into a less loving stance toward everyone in our world. We may envy other people whose children are admitted to dream schools or resent the ones who seem to breeze through the college process without so much as a hair out of place.

This contraction is exactly the opposite of what our children need at this moment.

They need as much extravagant, wasteful love as they can get while they are being exposed to the judgment of strangers who do not know how precious they are.

So this holiday season, join me in my plan to ‘love wastefully’. Give it away. Love anyone in sight. Give them your respect and your care, a smile or kind gesture.

For we also know from life that what we give out comes back to us. Love begets love.

Amen.

Rejection is God’s Protection: How to Support Your Child Through Early Action or Early Decision Disappointment or Rejection Part 2

While it is not an outright rejection, a deferral is still a big let down.

What if your child’s early application decision is a deferral?

A deferral is the most common decision from an Early program since there are many applications and few spots available. Depending on the college, anywhere from 5%- 20% of the defers might get a final admission in the spring. So while there is some face saving here, the odds are still against eventual admission and further applications must be completed within the next few weeks.

College Admissions Deferrals: Where the Parenting Gets Tricky

Deferrals offer hope. There is nothing more powerful than hope for a human being…and therein lies the rub. Your child might not grasp the odds on being admitted now and might want to do everything possible to turn that deferral into a yes. While I love that tenacity and grit, I’d strongly encourage focusing them on other schools. This might take some finesse, depending on your child…or on you and your own ego needs. 🙁

Please do not keep stoking up their desire for that school because you are probably setting them up for more pain.

Yes, your child might be one of those 5-20%ers who is offered admission in the spring because we know that your child is a star. (there’s that flicker of hope again.) The problem is that you haven’t seen the others in the applicant pool. I guarantee you that if you did, you’d be completely shocked. As good as you think your child is, there are others just as talented and accomplished. Plus admissions officers know that the student’s application is getting admitted, not the student. There is a difference. What others say about your child is just as important as your child’s record, and you’ll never know what has been said. And then there is the fit factor…so it’s too complicated for you to strategize around. Just take a deep breath and surrender…you have no control on this one.

Your role as parent in this moment is to be your child’s grounding cord. Offer your love and support, give lots of TLC, remind them who they are because they just took a big hit. Tell them why you love them. In that teachable moment, offer up a story or two from your past to prove that you went through hard moments before and actually prospered because of them. Give them their privacy if they need it.

As a Parent, You Are Modeling How Healthy Adults Behave in A Moment of Crisis

Most of all, do not match your child’s energy. Don’t allow yourself to go into grief over this. Don’t complain about their guidance counselor or teachers or any other student from their school who got admitted just now. You are modeling how healthy adults behave in a moment of crisis. Disappointment and rejection are necessary to build inner resilience to face life. You can’t protect your child from these feelings. The best you can do is to encourage them to keep going, for they are surely having their initiation into adulthood through a baptism of fire.

Give them some down time as needed and then get them moving again on those regular action applications that are due shortly. And no matter what, hold the confidence for you and your child that everything will work out fine in the end.

Are College Admissions Directors Out Of Touch With The Rest of Us?

A new survey of 576 college admissions directors about the state of student indebtedness gives us a sneak peek into the beliefs of those who create financial aid policies at both public and private colleges and universities in America. And spoiler alert – the news isn’t good.

This survey, developed jointly by Inside Higher Ed editors and Gallup researchers and consultants, takes the pulse of key university administrators about issues regarding average student indebtedness. According to the Project on Student Debt, the average loan debt accrued after four years of a college education is now $25,250., an all-time high. These loans come from all sources: government, university and private sources.

Not surprisingly, when asked to identify the most “reasonable” debt range for a four year program, 42% of surveyed admissions directors chose the current $20K-$30K range. More importantly, though, a full 28% of private college admissions directors and 12% of public college admissions directors chose the $30K-$50K range as a reasonable debt range. This leaves the average person wondering what these people are thinking because their opinions are very much at odds with public opinion.

The reality is that a full 53% of college graduates under the age of 25 are either unemployed or under-employed, way up from 41% in 2000. According to the Oraganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), these figures suggest that new college graduates actually fare worse than other sectors in the job market.

So what are these college admissions directors thinking?

Having been a college admissions dean for many years, I understand the ‘silo effect’ created by working within an organization, and the pressure to enroll a class while meeting all of that institution’s needs. You can only do what you can do within the culture of your university. There is a financial aid budget allotted annually that must be spread around to cover as much student need as possible, but often it just is not enough. Most private colleges use the policy known as “gapping” – offering aid but not enough to meet the need of the admitted student who must then make up the difference with loans or sources of income outside of the family income/asset stream. Private loans usually carry a higher interest rate, making the cost of college more than originally estimated. Most applicants are unaware of this when they apply.

While I can understand the opinions represented in this survey, I fundamentally disagree with the entire way we support education in this culture. We seem to have no national consensus about what education should be now, how it should serve the citizenry. There is currently little connection between the degrees students earn in college and available job opportunities. No one is driving this bus.

When I went to college back in the Baby Boomer days, education was a mind expander designed to open the world and help us think critically about the great issues of the day. In that very different world, is no surprise that this happened coincident with the Civil Rights, anti-war and Feminist movements. Today, however, with the world moving on at astonishing speed, admissions directors are reporting that 96% of parents and 84% of students are focused on that gold ring of employment at the end of a 4 year degree.

And herein lies the disconnect.

Once again, we are looking for the leadership within the college/university community to help structure a Deep Rethink of the whole process. What are we actually doing when we charge $50K+ annually for a rite of passage with just the vaguest of promises of employment, when so many graduates often have no way to repay those borrowed dollars at the end?

How much do we really value education in the US anyway?