There are all sorts of rumors floating around our community about brilliant, qualified teens who did not get into college this year.
Heard that one girl showed up at her high school after spring break wearing a sweatshirt with the name of a college that did not accept her. She supposedly told her friends that she was offered a spot at that university, but was taking a gap year instead.
Ran into someone in a restaurant who said the valedictorian of a top private school was admitted nowhere, not even into two of her safeties. The same anxious mom reported that a boy she knows was rejected from a school where a building is named after his uncle.
Driving around like traveling salesmen was the easy part of this process. Now the party’s over and it’s crunch time: SATs, SAT IIs, ACTs, APs, finals, summer job, start a foundation, invent a software program, write about it in an essay. And even kids with perfect resumes are in for disappointment.
But there’s an alternative: For $40,000 you can hire Michelle Hernandez, the nation’s premier college consultant. She has a 95% success rate for students getting into their top-choice schools (but she will rob you of those fun teen years – prevent you from being a camp counseler and force you to attend a nanotechnology program instead.)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_43/b4055063.htm
If you can stomach the piece about Hernandez, you will see that even though she attended Dartmouth and Columbia for her BA and MA, she got her PhD at Nova Southeastern University in Florida because she needed a "quickie doctorate" for credibility. But even more interesting is that she’s "hoping to link up with a travel consultant, someone who could plan family trips to visit colleges."
Neurotic Parent’s Exotic College Travel Tours – the perfect new career for me. I will get you a late checkout at the Colgate Inn, arrange for you to board your Southwest flight in Group 1, and make sure your Garmin will get you onto the Grand Central Parkway.
It seems like one of the best ways to continue this blog is to keep up a steady stream of links to the endless “news” stories that talk about our situation, with sassy NP commmentary, of course.
This article just happens to show the height of absurdity of the process, a solid 93 on the NPI hysteria scale–and that’s a stern but fair grading system, reserving the top marks for the equivalent of cheerleader murders in the college entrance competition (TV movie brewing here…). And speaking of movies, I know it will be somewhat excrutiating, but we badly need the NPI review of “College Road Trip,” don’t we? People are also selling bad “Parents Weekend” scripts this spring, FYI. But that comes later.
As a matter of fact, I have written a script called “Parents Weekend 2067″, a gathering at the Marriot in a post-apocalyptic Gambier, Ohio. Any interest?
Wow. I just did a complicated follow up to this, and then zhived it all out into the great electronic nowhere. Will try again:
–sending you Parents Weekend scripts. Got too busy today.
Looking forward to a regular “links” feature.
First off, here’s the way that a professional does it, and I think you might be curious about this excellent blog, because it’s a window into the world of CJ:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index
Next, just to keep the level of discourse on the high side, here’s my own personal favorite blogger:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/
She has PhD in Linguistics or Rhetoric or Literary Theory, but basically she became obsessed with the Scooter Libby trial, and kick ridiculous political ass. She went to Amherst. So did Patrick Fitzgerald. They both played rugby. Can CJ play both rugby and soccer?
Lastly, I’m thinking we need regular NPI analysis of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/index.html
This is, of course, the NPI links motherlode. I’m going with “Elite Korean schools forge Ivy League Skills” for starters. All yours, neurotic.