David Trinh

Although I can attest this was not a problem at my school in rural MN, there is apparently a glut of honors programs in many American high schools.  Overall, I agree with the thrust of this article; it’s important to keep honors programs selective so that they actually mean something besides another tassel at graduation.  I would only add that there is an even further harm from the proliferation of honors programs at top-tier high schools that the piece fails to mention, namely, that because many lower-tier schools, like the one I attended, have only NHS, applicants from these lesser schools are at a serious disadvantage during the college admissions process. It’s awfully difficult to compete against students who can spruce up their resumes by choosing from a smorgasbord of honors programs.

Now I’ll concede that I was never in an honors society at my high school–there’s a long tale here to be told, but the short of it is that my name was vetoed by a faculty member who took issue with some of my political opinions–and still managed to make it through the college admission gauntlet relatively unscathed; however, I do remember my lack of departmental awards (non-existent at my high school) and my complete lack of honor society membership cards did cause my interviewer to raise his eyebrows while he was paging through my papers.  This is, of course, just one more advantage that students who go to comparatively better high schools have over others but it seems like one that could be eliminated relatively easily by imposing more stringent requirements on membership or by actually making an effort to introduce these programs in lower-tier schools.

Apparently an acceptance letter from Yale is worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 to a few very wealthy parents:

Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.

No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors’ often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff’s asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 — more than a year’s tuition at many colleges. (Bold Mine- DT)

That’s a princely sum, but of course, that forty grand buys you quite a bit of college preparation including but not limited to: help writing admissions essays, fancy test prep classes, advice on which musical instrument will most impress the admissions dean and fashion consulting to decide which outfit to wear to a college interview.  I’m not joking about the last item—read the article, there’s actually a woman who offers a class explaining how to dress to impress an admissions officer.  (She recommends seersucker shorts for guys and something called a “madras skirt” for girls.)

This story is really just another stake that pieces the heart of the half-true myth that the college admissions process resembles an enlightened meritocracy.  Sure, there are some people who make it through who don’t come from incredible means, but when the lowest performing students in the top income quintile go to college at the same rate as the highest performing students in the lowest quintile, one has to wonder if our system should best be described as something other than a meritocracy. 

After all, not only do wealthier Americans have the cash to pay for expensive admission services like the ones detailed in this article but they often have more free time to work with their children on their applications and shuttle them to those all-important extracurricular activities which admissions officers love to lap up.  I know this is probably an extreme case, but I’m aware of at least one person whose mother quit her job in order to help shepherd said child through the college admissions gauntlet. 

I dunno, this sort of makes you wonder if we should offer affirmative action for less well capitalized children who would also like to attend our nation’s best schools.

Over at The Quick and the Ed, via Yglesias, Kevin Carey bemoans the lack of information about the quality of education at colleges, a knowledge deficit that he argues prevents students and parents from choosing the right educational institution:

[L]et’s say I was trying to choose the right college for my (non-existent) 17-year old daughter. And let’s say I’m the perfect higher education consumer from the academy’s perspective–I don’t care at all about climbing walls or fitness centers or luxury dorms or any of that stuff. I care about all the truly important things I’m supposed to care about: the quality of the teaching, scholarship, and academic environment, how the school will help my daughter become an enlightened, ethical, fair-minded public citizen.

How would I choose? Where would I get that information, in a way that would allow me to decide among hundreds of alternatives? Answer: nowhere, because it doesn’t exist. Colleges may complain about having to market themselves based on dorm-based pilates studios and whatnot, but it’s not like they have some other secret brochure in a filing cabinet somewhere, filled with all the real information about the true meaning of higher education, materials that they would gladly distribute far and wide if only students weren’t so coddled by their helicopter parents and addled by the rap music and the video games.

In fact most colleges don’t systematically gather this kind of information, or if they do–via the National Survey of Student Engagement or something similar–they don’t release it to the public. Yes, yes, colleges are lot more complicated than televisions. But nobody can say with a straight face that colleges are doing nearly as much as they could to provide consumers with information about teaching and learning that’s useful for making consumer choices–that is, presented in a way that allows for institutional comparisons.

Color me confused.  Has Carey ever glanced at the US News College rankings or browsed through theU.com?  True, these two sources don’t provide a complete picture of the caliber of a school’s academic regimen; however, the factors that do go into compiling the rankings for US News certainly aren’t things like ‘dorm-based pilates studios.’  Rather, these rankings are created by using statistics such as graduation and retention rates, as well as factors such as faculty resources and peer assessment—presumably the sort of data that Carey is clamoring for.

Moreover, I’d like to note that Carey’s imaginary daughter is really going to be in for a rude awakening if she bases her admissions decision solely on ‘objective’ characteristics such as the quality of “teaching, scholarship[s] and [the] academic environment.”  Sure, these things matter but it’s also important to go to a school with which you can jive.  I’m reluctant to single any particular school, but I can say from first hand experience that the social environment in college is just as, if not even more, important to the success of your education than the hard statistics of educational quality.  Alas, such information is difficult to distill into data that ‘perfect higher education consumers’ can easy use.

Fortunately, the system that we have for selecting colleges which uses admissions requirements and standardized testing (dont’ want to get in over your head), college visits (check out the scene, make sure you can make friends) and college rankings (a sprinkle of objective commentary about the ability of the school to land you a job on Wall Street) works pretty well and I don’t think we need to cry wolf about a shocking lack of educational statistics being provided to would-be college students.