Getting into a top college, even for the most accomplished high school students, has become a mad scramble. But in his sensible and sensitive book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, Frank Bruni, a columnist for The New York Times, wants to help young people understand the urgent truth of his title. “Where we go to college will have infinitely less bearing on our fulfillment in life than so much else: the wisdom with which we choose our romantic partners; our interactions with the communities that we inhabit; our generosity toward the families we inherit and the families that we make.” That’s something we all know in retrospect but that’s hard to know in prospect for anyone caught in what Bruni calls the “college admissions mania.”
“Mania” is the right word. Most Ivy League colleges accept around 2,000 students each from an applicant pool that in some cases is approaching 40,000. Yet even such colleges do everything they can to pump up the numbers still more. They encourage applications through social media, extend application deadlines and buy lists from companies that administer standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, then urge the high scorers to apply, though very few have a chance of getting in. Colleges, as Bruni writes, are “ginning up desire in order to frustrate it, instilling hope only to quash it.”
Why? It’s not that they are ardently seeking “better” students — whatever that would mean when so many superachievers are already rejected. Instead, they are locked in a frantic competition for prestige, which is more and more keyed to “selectivity” — the percentage of applicants offered a place in the class. This statistic has an effect on the closely followed rankings published annually by US News & World Report, toward which colleges display “a paradox of pervasive contempt,” as Bruni writes, “and yet widespread obeisance.” They have surrendered to the perverse idea that the quality of an institution has something to do with how many young people it can make unhappy by turning them away.
Bruni writes with compassion about the victims, but he admonishes them too and their parents more. Some of the stories he tells are both amazing and, alas, not amazing. A girl tries to prove her academic seriousness by writing in her application essay that rather than curtail a discussion with her French teacher, she urinated on herself. A boy tries to demonstrate his pluck in the face of adversity by writing that he’s undiscouraged by the fact that his genitalia are small. Looking over their shoulders are, more than likely, parents who “meddle and wheedle and marshal whatever resources they have toward the goal of a college that gleams in the public eye.”
This book seems destined to mean most to students — and their parents — who hope but fail to get into a brag-worthy college. But one of its strengths is that Bruni includes among those who are damaged by the college chase the putative “winners” as well as the “losers.” He doesn’t deny the networking value of attending a prestigious college — especially for those with the dubious dream of working on Wall Street — but he knows that this value is overstated, that the exhilaration of winning the prize is often a prelude to exhaustion, and that on every elite college campus the mental-health services are overstretched. He knows, too, that many supposedly second-tier colleges are filled with gifted and fervent teachers and with talented students with a zeal for learning.
Since the behavior of colleges is unlikely to change anytime soon, Bruni writes mainly with parents and children in mind. He wants to help restore the excitement of going off to college, which should be a time for taking intellectual and social chances, for finding or confirming a passion, and for discovering yourself. In our age of what he calls “caste consciousness,” he wants to remind young people that what they get from college has almost everything to do with the attitude they bring to it and almost nothing to do with where it stands in the pecking order of prestige.
In this sense it’s a personal book. After prep school in New England, Bruni made the unusual — though hardly sacrificial — decision to forgo Yale in favor of Chapel Hill. He writes lyrically about his experience in North Carolina, which, to his prep school friends, was tantamount to exile, but where he found passionate teachers. He also discovered that his classmates were more likely than those of his siblings (who went to elite New England colleges) to have “part-time jobs off campus to help pay the tuition” than “second homes on Caribbean islands.” He learned something about the rarity of his own privilege.
I read this book with frequent nods of recognition. I know many wonderful students at Columbia who have come through the grueling admissions process psychologically and morally intact. But I have also met equally wonderful students at some of the unsung colleges Bruni praises, as well as at many more, including: Wofford, Ursinus, Central Michigan, Armstrong Atlantic, King, North Carolina State, Christopher Newport, St Lawrence, Mary Washington, Fordham and Oakton, Norwalk and Suffolk community colleges. None of these institutions is likely to be high on a prep-school student’s want-list.
As valuable as this book should be for anyone who takes it to heart, it’s important to remember that its focus on very selective colleges — and on the students who aim to attend them — pertains to only a tiny segment of our society. Such colleges will enroll perhaps 100,000 of the roughly 3.25 million students finishing high school this spring — in other words about 3 percent. And even most private colleges, because they depend on tuition revenue to serve their students, are less worried about how few applicants they can admit than about how many of those admitted will enroll. Unfortunately, our less heralded institutions — from small private colleges to large public community colleges — along with the millions of students they serve, are unlikely to be the subject of a comparably impassioned book.
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