Don’t Get the Varsity Blues
Don’t try to game the system to get your kid into college. That may lead to gun-wielding FBI agents storming your home. Instead, encourage your kid to become an applicant worth admitting. Get-It-Done Guy explains how.
Scandal!
We just love scandal! And today, it’s a college admissions scandal. As Harvard Law School professor Michael Sandel points out in his book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, money is increasingly letting rich people to use their wealth to buy things—like college admissions—that used to be obtainable with other currencies.
In the good old days, you could be poor, but if you studied hard or did well at sports, it could lead you to a top college. Now it seems that rich kids can bypass the accomplishment route and crowd out everyone else by using their money to game the system.
In the current scandal, aptly called Operation Varsity Blues (don’t ever say that the government lacks a sense of humor), rich parents hired a consultant to falsify their kids’ records and test scores, and bribe college coaches to say the kids should be admitted on athletic grounds.
The result: rich kids getting into elite schools they aren’t qualified for. And the highly-qualified kids who don’t have the money to bribe their way in? Well, they don’t matter, do they? Because they’re not rich.
Get-It Done Guy Was NOT a Rich Kid…
This is a big deal for me; I take it personally. I grew up lower-middle-class. For a little while my family lived in a trailer where I had three cubic feet of space for all my worldly possessions. I moved out at 15 and supported myself—barely—by programming computers. There were days I couldn’t afford to eat. My friends all knew my situation. I found out decades later that they and their parents would conspire to invite me over for homework. And if dinner happened to be served during a study break, of course I was welcome to join.
I studied my butt off. I worked super hard. I took classes at a local community college to help meet unfinished high school graduation requirements.
…Who Succeeded on Merit
And ultimately, I ended up going to MIT for my undergraduate degree and Harvard Business School for grad school. I needed a lot of financial aid, plus a semester off to earn more money.
And it changed my life. It was the American Dream: With hard work, I got into top schools where I could get an education to give me the skills for success.
In today’s world, we have the American Dystopia: A lazy rich kid who can’t make the grade (literally!) can use their parents’ money to buy that spot instead of a kid who does the work to deserve it.
I worked super hard, I took classes at a local community college, and I ended up going to MIT and Harvard Business School.
How to Avoid the Varsity Blues?
If you’re not rich enough to buy your kids into a top college, there’s still a lot you can do. Heck, you can even do it if you are rich, but still have your morals.
First: Don’t try to make them look good.
Instead, make them actually be good. Help your kids get curious. Help them get good at learning. At science. At writing. At computers. At music. At math. At dance. At languages. At athletics. Long before the World Wide Web, my mother would take me to our local community college and we would watch filmstrips together on the lifecycle of frogs or cool science experiments. She got me a library card and taught me to go to the library to learn when I was interested in things.
Thanks to the internet, you can now do this from your own home. Sit down with your kids and help them find ways to explore their interests more deeply. I highly recommend encouraging them to read books. Paper books. Because research has shown that they’ll remember more and learn more from paper books.
Work with your kids to help them learn that with enough effort, they can master their work. Help them get and stay excited about learning.
What If It’s Not Enough?
It’s always possible that your kids just can’t get the grades for admission to an elite college. Be OK with that. It’s OK. In fact, that’s more than OK. In his book David and Goliath, author Malcolm Gladwell points out that being a top student at a mediocre school can translate into high feelings of self-esteem that lead to greater success throughout life.
Top colleges can destroy a student’s self-esteem. At MIT, every admit is a top high school student. But MIT grades on a curve. So suddenly, 9 out of 10 of them are no longer at the top. Many MIT students’ self-esteem gets pummeled by the experience and some never recover. They don’t realize that even if they graduated at the bottom of their MIT class, they’re still one of the very top performers in the world overall.
And if you’re a rich parent who wants to buy your kid into a school like MIT, think twice. The work gets really, really hard. If they aren’t up to it academically, they won’t magically become able to do the work once they arrive at school.
If you’re a rich parent who wants to buy your kid into a top school, think twice. If your kid isn’t up to it academically, they won’t magically be able to do the work.
Cultivate a Growth Mindset
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has spent years researching why some children excel. A major factor is the child’s mindset.
If you praise a child as being smart, you send the message that smartness is a fixed attribute, not something that can be developed. A fixed mindset leads kids to study less and work less. If they don’t get the right answer the first time, they conclude that their smarts just aren’t enough to solve the problem.
If you praise them as having put in the time and effort to succeed, you’re sending the message that they can grow and develop. This growth mindset leads kids to view failure as simply a step along their path to greater learning.
Her book Mindset discusses the many ways that you can help a child develop a growth mindset. I recommend it highly.
Early Admission/Action Does Make a Difference
When it comes to actual admissions tactics, I don’t have any special knowledge. I’ve never worked in an admissions office. That said, I am in favor of early action.
Many schools claim the odds are the same whether or not you take early action. That claim makes no sense to me. Mathematically, the odds of getting in have to be different because the early action applications are evaluated as a separate pool from regular admits. There’s no reason to believe that the most qualified students are evenly distributed between both groups.
Unfortunately you can’t know whether the odds are better or worse, but they almost certainly must be different. But if you apply early action and don’t get in, some schools will let you roll your application into the regular applicant pool. So you get a chance to be evaluated against both pools.
Even if a school doesn’t let you roll over an early application, applying early gives you more time to apply elsewhere if your initial choice doesn’t pan out.
Don’t be that rich person who tries to buy your kid into a school they aren’t qualified for. Put your effort into encouraging and developing their growth mindset, so they can become the best they can be. Then help them get into a college where they can shine, not where they’ll be at the bottom of the heap.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise need to control your own time, join a Get-it-Done Group help you start finishing what’s important, and develop the habits you need to be hyper-productive. Learn more at https://SteverRobbins.com.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Student sleeping in college class image courtesy of Shutterstock.