How Ivy League lust hurts high school students
There on my newsfeed was the annual link about a high school senior who had been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools — and like a fool I clicked on it.
Stories about students who are accepted to all the Ivies are a scourge on the college application process, yet it’s usually the adults who make everything so insane.
On a field trip to New York City five years ago, I took a group of my student newspaper editors to the New York Times, where we met with an online editor. One of my students asked what kind of articles they post when they want to boost readership. “Easy,” he said. “Anything related to Harry Potter or how to get your kid into an Ivy League school.”
I will not begrudge Ifeoma White-Thorpe from Rockaway, N.J., for applying to those prestigious colleges (she also got into Stanford), but if you are applying to every one of the Ivies, then you haven’t done your research. There’s a significant difference between Dartmouth and Brown, between Columbia and Cornell. And none of them offers merit aid — an important detail that the articles bury until the end. According to White-Thorpe, “none of the schools I’ve applied to said they give merit scholarships, so I’m praying that they give me some more financial aid or some money.”
It would be a shame if White-Thorpe could not attend any of these schools if it is financially unfeasible.
When the media reports on stories like this, they contribute to the Ivy lust that makes the college search process so pernicious. And when we click, read and share these articles, we are perpetuating the belief that those are the only schools worth considering. Schools that are famous for being famous.
In December, WhiteThorpe was accepted by Harvard via Restrictive Early Action, which is nonbinding. But then she went ahead and applied to all the other Ivies. If you really want to make the parents of high school seniors apoplectic, tell them that your child got in early to her dream school, but she is still going to apply to eight more highly selective schools … just to see if she gets in. Now you’re messing with the fate of other students, and they will not appreciate it.
According to the American School Counselor Association, the recommended student-to-counselor ratio is 250:1. Only three states (Wyoming, Vermont and New Hampshire) meet that level of coverage. The national average counselorto-student ratio is 491:1, with Arizona (941:1) and California (822:1) cited as the worst. The average in Texas was 465:1 in 20132014.
Across the country, there are almost 850,000 high school students who have no access to any college counselors at all. In one recent investigation, 28 Houston high schools didn’t have a single counselor or college adviser, so in HISD, the student-tocounselor ratio was more like 1,800:1.
A knowledgeable school counselor, teacher, administrator or parent could have advised White-Thorpe to look beyond the Ivy League. If financial aid was a concern (which it is for a vast majority of students since four years of college — Ivy or otherwise — can cost upward of $250,000), then someone should have advised her to diversify her applications the way Roland Nelson did in 2015.
Nelson, then a senior at a public school in Germantown, Tenn., got into all the Ivy League schools, Stanford and Johns Hopkins — and he turned them all down in favor of a full-ride scholarship to the University of Alabama. That was a story worth celebrating.
There should be more stories about high school seniors who make thoughtful college choices based on their interests and abilities — without buying in to the hysteria of applying to the Top 25 schools listed in US News & World Report. But that wouldn’t get the page clicks.
And those clicks send the wrong message to everyone involved — especially the students.