Gentry
"Perspectives"
August 2006
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Perils and Pitfalls of College
An Act of Desperation
Has the quest to be accepted at an Ivy League school gotten out of
control? Gentry's Christine VanDeVelde investigates.
I can’t stop thinking about Kaavya Viswanathan. She's the Harvard
sophomore who snagged a $500,000 advance and a Dreamworks deal for the
best-selling book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.
Sounds great, doesn't it? But appearances can be deceiving.
A serious academic overachiever, Viswanathan spent
her summers in Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth programs, was the
editor of her school newspaper and carried a full load of AP courses at
the magnet school she attended in New Jersey. Nevertheless, early on,
her parents hired IvyWise, educational consultants whose mission is to
identify and get you admitted to your ideal school – in Viswanathan’s
case, Harvard. When IvyWise founder Katherine Cohen saw samples of
Viswanathan’s writing, she urged her to showcase it in her college
applications, but also went so far as to set up a meeting with the
William Morris Agency. Viswanathan got an agent, a deal and received
early admission to Harvard. She finished the book during her freshman
year while taking a full courseload.
The character of Opal Mehta, like Viswanathan, is a
serious academic overachiever. She speaks four languages, plays the
cello, founded her school’s Science Bowl team, takes a shop class in
welding to appear well-rounded, and heads three of her school’s four
honor societies. But when the Harvard admissions director suggests she
get a life in order to get into Harvard, Opal, with the help of her
obsessive parents, slips on some Jimmy Choos and starts studying Beyonce
videos instead of the Bronte sisters.
If that has the familiar ring of adolescent chick
lit -- well, it should. Amid all the mentions of Habitual jeans and
LaPerla bras and the mean girls and opposite sex angst of high school
are passage after passage lifted almost wholesale from books by
best-selling chick lit authors Megan McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, and
Meg Cabot, and, improbably, Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie. After
protests over the plagiarism from author McCafferty and the Harvard
Crimson, Viswanathan’s publisher withdrew all editions of the book
and Dreamworks spiked the movie deal.
The story of exactly how Opal Mehta got
written is a little unclear. But it’s not unclear how Viswanathan may
have gotten into Harvard. IvyWise, like Opal’s parents, prides itself on
identifying a student’s “passions” and creating a strategic plan to
"develop" them, providing recommendations for coursework, after-school
activities, summer experiences, community service and internships – at a
cost of anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000. It’s not hard to imagine that,
with all the straight-A students applying to Harvard, IvyWise might be
looking for something that would make the admissions department sit up
and take notice. So, writing became one of Viswanathan’s “passions” and
IvyWise became the promoter for the publishing deal that certainly
helped cinch her early admission. Some might think that was worth
$20,000 or so. Never mind that Viswanathan later revealed in several
interviews that she only vaguely thought of becoming a writer and really
wanted to be an investment banker. As Kurt Andersen wrote in New York
magazine, Viswanathan is “a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks
that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest
children to become.”
That may sound a little harsh. But don’t think that
this isn’t happening right in your own backyard. My 10th
grade daughter and her friends joke that you won’t get into an Ivy
unless you’re a straight-A student government leader who captains the
debate team, chairs the food drive and digs water-wells in India during
summer vacation. But they were also aghast when a straight-A track star,
student newspaper editor who had actually spent her summers building
huts in Namibia didn’t get into – you guessed it –Harvard. No wonder
then that half of the 10th grade parents I know have already
hired consultants to quarterback their children’s college applications
with SAT tutoring, expert advice on the content and style of their
essays, and 24/7 oversight to beat their resumes and extracurricular
lives into optimal shape for USC or Princeton.
It’s hard to say which aspect of all this I find
most distasteful – the “packaging”, the unseemly ambition and
status-mongering, the specter of a corporate makeover for teenagers
whose interests are only beginning to unfold, or the faint whiff of
cheating that pervades the process.
A long time ago, I was visiting with Jeanne Lepper,
Director of Stanford University’s Bing Nursery School. A toddler came
into the office, carefully securing the Dutch door that separated the
desks from the reception area. Jeanne beamed at her. “Thank you for
shutting the door,” she said. “You’re such a competent child.” I’ve
never forgotten that praise. Years later, I asked an eminent
psychoanalyst what defines a successful parent. He replied that it was a
parent whose child successfully lives apart from his parents in
adulthood. Not a child who becomes a lawyer or a venture capitalist or
gets into Harvard, simply a child who grows up to be capable of living
on their own. Neither of these qualities – competence or independence --
will get you into Harvard, but think of how rare they sometimes seem
these days.
So perhaps as we head into a new school year, we
should reorient our expectations and think about raising competent
children who can go out into the world and produce work that is the
result of their true talents and capabilities, instead of hell-bent for
Harvard students who feel that if cheating to succeed is what’s
required, so be it. Remember – the Unabomber went to Harvard and a lot
of great surgeons, CEOs, and engineers, a few U.S. Senators and -- yes,
some writers, as well -- graduated from Kansas State.
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