By Armstrong Williams
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
College has become a scam in America.
We have all heard the horror stories of crippling student
debt and graduates that are lucky to land minimum wage retail jobs. But one
part of the college scam not receiving much attention is the admissions
process.
No longer are good grades and good test scores enough to
get you into a desirable university. No, it takes greater resources, time, and
existential insight. These new conditions favor the affluent and unscrupulous.
Rich students dominate most top universities. These
bastions of higher learning claim to want “diversity,” and they generally are
ethnically, religiously, and even geographically diverse. However,
socioeconomic differences are sparse.
Many assert that low-income families are either
intimidated by the cost of these schools or simply are ignorant of the
financial aid packages available for their children. They blame low-income
students and their families rather than the root problem inherent in the
system.
That problem is the ever increasing cost of jumping
through the right hoops and creating the appropriate narrative in order to gain
admittance.
You can pay $30,000 or more a year per child to send them
to a top prep school. There they will be properly challenged, get to play a
sport like lacrosse, and be offered the chance to build orphanages in Africa so
their resume looks properly polished for an Ivy League school.
Unless you are in the 1%, your child is not going to such
a prep school.
But there is still hope. In public school, you can push
your child to focus on one particular subject which they study in their spare
time -- the more obscure the better, like the molecular biology of Surinam
cockroaches. Make her play a sport or two, enroll in every other
extra-curricular, and send her on a summer trip to build a well in Guatemala.
On second thought, that does not seem like a thrifty
alternative either.
Many of the paths to the best schools require unpaid
internships, founding charities, academic camps, and excellence in sports. The
average child and parent are unlikely to be aware of such requirements, much
less possess the resources to pursue them.
What this system has become is affirmative action for
rich families. Only they can afford to meet these stipulations or pay others to
help their kids meet them.
Unfortunately, if your child studies hard to make good
grades and test scores, that is not enough to get into one of America’s elite
colleges. Children have to have a narrative arch, like a TV show. There must be
an epiphany involved, and not one about the teen himself, rather about the
plight of the world and how suffering has touched him to want to devote your
life to everyone else.
Teaching youths altruism is not a bad thing, and I
definitely encourage it, but there also has to be a realistic expectation about
the probability of having such grand revelations at that particular age.
Rather than accepting thousands of teenagers who saw the
light on the road to Damascus, universities are inadvertently encouraging
candidates to be unscrupulous.
Tell someone that they need to set up a charity to get
into a school, and they will set up a charity; the actual effectiveness of that
charity is of no consequence, it is about good intentions. Tell a kid that in
order to get into Harvard, they need to write an essay about the plight of
third world children and how they will dedicate their study of cockroaches to
ending world hunger, and they will write that essay. Neither motivation nor
truth is as important as perceived nobility.
Encouraging kids to go through the motions of charity is
not teaching kids the value of helping others. Rather, this teaches children
how to fake sincerity. Charity without the resources and drive to make a real,
measurable difference is hollow and worthless.
Universities now actively rebuke applicants from
announcing a desire to make money. They claim it is base and empty pursuit...at
least until they hit you up for contributions.
Today- all other things being equal- a hard working,
responsible teenager from a lower economic class who is taking part-time and
full-time jobs to pay for themselves and help their family is worth less to
Harvard than a well-to-do student who’s parents had the capability to found a
charity in their child’s name.
Teens can no longer have a childhood, they cannot be
themselves, and they cannot take time to figure out what they want. Instead,
they must be pushed and forced into the mold of a proper applicant. They must,
at the very least, pretend to be globally conscious and proclaim their
altruism.
The process degrades our children and cheapens
adolescence.
Unless we recognize and revise this new layer of
undisclosed prerequisites, elite higher education will be unattainable for the
vast majority of Americans.
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