Question: Who “wins” this game?
 
Player 1 was accepted into Harvard, his dream school.
 
Player 2 was denied from every highly selective school to which she applied. She also applied to and was accepted by High Point University, her safety school in a sea of “lottery schools” from which she was denied.
 
If we stop the game here, Player 1 is the clear winner. He has the acceptance to the prestigious university and the application plan that went according to plan. Player 2 is settling. She had an application plan that was not smartly put together, and she is dealing with the result.
 
But guess what? The “game” doesn’t stop there. And that’s because life doesn’t stop there. There is more to it than just getting in. Once a student gets in, he or she has to attend, work hard, interact skillfully with professors and peers, apply for and win research opportunities, pass classes, get internships…
 
What if we zoom forward three years from the scenario with which we started? What if we find out Player 2 is thriving? She is a “big fish in a smaller pond” about to do a semester in Florence with an internship for global marketing. She already has a job offer from her last internship in the summer, and she’s weighing that against the decision to continue on to graduate school. Possibilities abound. The failure she felt senior year being rejected from so many more prestigious colleges is just a blip in the past she doesn’t have time to dwell on.
 
Meanwhile, Player 1 has, amid the incredible pressure of his immensely talented peers and the increased expectations of college life, dropped out. He’s taking time off while his mother encourages him to transfer into the local state university so he doesn’t fall further behind. He wasn’t a good fit for the pressure, and he had no idea it was going to be that way. He had applied and decided to attend his first college because of the name recognition. “If you get in to Harvard, you go”, his dad had told him. So he went, and he failed. It was never a good fit.
 
Who is “winning” the game now?
 
There’s a bigger idea here that’s so important for students and parents to remember. They must remember the end goal. What is this all for? What’s most important in this process? Is it bragging rights about how selective a school you could get into? It shouldn’t be. Your likelihood of success is not correlated with the lower the admissions percentage of the school you attend.
 
Seniors, as you get your acceptances, think long term. Think realistically about your priorities. At Guru, we celebrate every success, not just the ones that come with single digit selectivity percentages, because we know we work hard to help families put together college lists that are based on substance—places our students will thrive academically, socially, and financially.  And when Harvard says yes to the right kid, we celebrate that, too! The same way we do for Ole Miss, Syracuse, Stanford and everywhere in between. 

​I fall asleep most every night reading articles about admissions trends, cognitive psychology, goal-setting… I eat this stuff up.
 
But I also read things that make my stomach turn. Some of these nausea-inducing pieces come from others in the business of college admission counseling, and some of it comes from well-meaning parents who have heard bad information from other parents—things like their child needs to be “branding” themselves in order to look good to colleges, or test-prep ought to start in ninth grade, or the higher “ranked” a college is the better it must be. It makes me want to scream, “Stop the madness!”
 
College admission planning is stressful for students and parents. This is the most scrutiny (whether real or perceived) many students will have undergone thus far in their lives. There’s adolescent (and sometimes parental) ego at stake, hinged on the idea of getting in or being denied. It’s also an incredibly expensive proposition, one where understanding actual costs is nearly impossible up front. There are acronyms to decipher (SAT, ACT, AP, FAFSA, CLEP, IB), classes to choose, leadership skills to cultivate, tests to prep for, colleges to research… If all that worry is left unbridled, it can lead to poor decisions that adversely affect the student. Decisions like turning your child into a “brand” or spending thousands prepping for a PSAT test in tenth grade that doesn’t even count for national merit (and national merit doesn’t necessarily live up to it’s reputation for being a golden goose, anyway!).
 
Stop the madness! There is such thing as too much test prep (or starting test prep too early), your high-schooler does not need a “brand”, and the Ivies are not the only colleges worthy of effusive fanfare.
 
I believe in purposeful planning, using accurate information. This has the effect of bringing the stress inherent in this process down a level. My students have plans for when they will start test prep and they understand why they are taking the tests at the times allocated. These are things any student can create for himself or herself. I also believe we best serve students when we help them find authenticity as opposed to a synthetic identity manufactured to get them in to college, as if getting in were the end goal (it’s not). Teenagers are in the midst of discovering themselves. Let’s not stifle that process by inserting an idea of what “looks good” to an admissions committee into the mix.
 
Instead, let’s help them understand the pursuit of knowledge is more valuable than a weighted GPA or class rank. Let’s protect them from unnecessary and premature stress by allowing test prep to start when it’s an appropriate time. Let’s do the best by our kids by teaching them to be themselves, giving them tools to discover what that means, and challenging them to do so with intrinsic motivation.
 
For my students and me that means engaging in goal-setting and aligning select activities with those goals. It means looking at a broad range of colleges, including some you might not have heard about before (You’re interested in research and you want a scholarship? Skip Cornell and try Rhodes).  It means fostering authentic interests and pursuing them relentlessly. (If you are a student of mine, you have probably heard me tell you to pursue two or three activities 100 miles per hour with your hair on fire).
 
I am passionate about what I do because I believe so strongly in the power of higher education. It’s the opportunity to unlock not only doors to a future career, but doors to a more liberated mind and better life. But students have to be taught to value it as such, and when we teach them to brand themselves, pursue a grade instead of an understanding of a subject, or place their self worth in the prestige of their admissions decisions, we are teaching the wrong values. 

A few weeks ago, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education released a report called “Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern For Others And The Common Good Through College Admissions.” It has received praise for its call to action for colleges, especially elite colleges, to de-emphasize test scores and the number of AP classes students rack up, and instead focus on more intangible qualities like students’ awareness beyond themselves, demonstrations of kindness, and ability to contribute to efforts to improve what’s good for the community.
 
While it’s wonderful to see the report make explicit such factors, in reality, these things are what good college counselors have been stressing to students for years. These things are also what have made students (well, those without a hook) stand out from the pack in the competitive college admissions game all along. It’s nothing new, but now we have a report to bring awareness to the masses.
 
Will you still need excellent test scores to get into Princeton? Absolutely. Has it always helped you to be able to complement those excellent test scores by demonstrating your capacity to affect change in your community? Yes. Duh.
 
Good test scores, grades, and a bazillion AP classes have never and will never be enough to get a student into the most selective colleges in the nation. The students who get in are those who, in addition to having evidenced their smarts in their academic records, show they are capable of being change-makers. Harvard wants to admit students whom they believe have the capacity to do great things, and that capacity cannot be measured through a standardized test.
 
So what’s our advice? Really, it’s the same as it’s always been: if you are serious about getting into an elite college, focus on showcasing your personal qualities through your extracurricular pursuits. But here’s the trick: don’t do any of those things for the purpose of getting into college. Instead, you need to be motivated by a sincere desire to affect change around a cause for which you feel passion. So change your headspace; start by asking yourself what problems in the world you want to solve, then go about working to find solutions or ways to contribute to solutions. The rest will fall into place on it’s own. And keep your grades up: those will always matter. This is education, after all.