Wow! How are you finding these people? I’m really struggling. 
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I love that so much!
D has written her common app essay at the end of her junior year and had it reviewed by her teacher and counselor and it was just kind of mid, as the kids say. So I suggested she take a look at the common app prompt on gratitude. And during the summer she wrote about a simple act of kindness that changed her life that was literally unmemorable to the person who did it, and how that made her want to be that kind of person to others and how thankful she was for it. That was her vision of the best version of herself. In the fall the counselor told the other kids they should ask D to see a good example.
I think that gratitude prompt is amazing for kids who are uncomfortable humble bragging about their accomplishments.
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I appreciate your optimism but I am curious to see if you feel differently once your son’s cycle is complete. I definitely had a very different, and less positive view of college admissions, after living through it with my 2023 senior and seeing where her friends wound up. No question things have become more arbitrary since test optional has become the norm, at least in at our school and its peers in the same city, just based on naviance and comparing school wide results 2022 onward to before 2020.
In just two to three cycles, admissions offices have had to deal with (1) reviewing test optional applications, (2) huge increases in applications each year, 3) Covid inflated grades at some schools but not others, and (4) the rise of first gen/pell eligible as institutional priorities and growing importance of these students in US News ranking. I don’t think admissions related podcasts and presentations can do that much to steer students given the current morass, and how much is ultimately out of their control.
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You’re spot on! I 100% agree with everything you said.
This sounds like an amazing essay! What was the act of kindness that changed her life?
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This is so interesting to me. I am a nurse and the caliber of the students I have precepted has dramatically declined over the last several years, most notably since covid. My sister works in a very highly regarded graduate social work program and is in charge of field placements and said the exact same thing. The overall similarities seems they want to do less work, want everything done for them and made as easy as possible and with the least path of resistance. So vastly different from when I was in nursing school in the 90’s and all the students I had up until the past decade.
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They reply to our job postings. Our work tends to draw mission-driven people to begin with, but beyond that we are looking for people who value a team that prioritizes kindness, compassion, inclusiveness, and work-life balance. I can teach skills (although of course we’re looking for a baseline of relevant experience), but I can’t teach them to be nice people. So we start there. We have hired people whose skills are a little less refined and might need a little more coaching as long they demonstrate enthusiasm and a commitment to our values.
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I remember her telling me over the summer she had to send out an email to her class that she now has some sort of new tracking ability and can see who is and isn’t watching the assigned videos. It was a large number. All of a sudden kids were watching after that email.
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So I think my own S24 is already in good shape with his two admittances so far, because that didn’t really depend on highly selective holistic review anyway. But I will try to report faithfully on how it goes with his friends. Some of them are also in good shape after ED, but some are apparently nervous after that did not go as hoped.
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Not to be a brat, but I think some selective schools are lying (possibly to themselves) when they say they want kids who take risks and fail.
There’s a moment in Who Gets In and Why where an admission counselor from Emory is looking at a kids’s application and says “look at all these Bs!” (the kid earned 5 Bs, taking every advanced course available to him). They also took issue with the fact that he was merely the co-director of a school club. The kid is ultimately rejected.
That moment hit me like a truck. Because, imo, the message in that anecdote isn’t that schools want kids who take risks even if they fail. It’s that they want kids who take risks but never fail (with “failure,” of course, being defined as anything besides a straight-A record).
The same can be said of extracurriculars. You love music? Eh, unless you made all-state band (or chorus, or whatever). Member of the math club? Snooze, unless you founded it yourself. Tried drama? But only in the ensemble? Next, please.
To be clear, all of this is fine. If selective schools only wish to serve straight-A students who excel in everything they try, they absolutely get to do that. No school owes any kid admission and schools get to set their own standards.
But it’s dishonest of schools to pretend that they are looking for well-rounded, risk-taking students who may actually have failed. And it also leaves parents in a really weird spot. They can raise kids who take risks and fail, knowing that doing so may well shut their children out of selective colleges, or they can push their kids never to fail (whether by never taking risks, or by simply expecting perfection in all things), in the hope of keeping that selective-admission window open for as long as possible. I’d suspect 100 different parents would come down 100 different ways on which direction is the right one to pursue.
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Interesting thoughts here today!
Everyone obviously has their own experiences; thought I’d share ours. My (unhooked, UMC high stat) D24 (in ED at a T20 ) wrote her essay about her main EC, but her failures in her main EC and how that reflected her own character and drive. She really did what the somewhat well-known (at least in these circles!) MIT app advice is - she “Applied Sideways”. She has not a single leadership position in HS; her main ECs are music & art centered and very self-led. She is involved in a few clubs at school involving her main academic interest (Math) and her ECs; she did not found a nonprofit or have crazy volunteer hours or even an internship or publish a paper. But she had top stats and rigor, in-depth involvement in things she cared about, and brought it together in her essays that talked about her passions and failures yet repeated attempts to get better. She did not have any help with any of this other than her English teacher, peer reviews, and my own final review of her apps & essay. I think her essay did what @Curium245 's knitting essay did - and she was very happy and proud of it, and it was clearly in her voice. Did it put her over the edge? I don’t know. But, as with the knitter, I don’t think it subtracted from her application.
She also found a school that was a great fit and we are fortunate enough to be able to apply ED to that school. Which can be a huge piece of the puzzle.
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But if this is a new tracking ability, how does she know that previous classes/generations of students were watching the videos?
I think our inclination is to always say things are getting worse, that “kids today” are lazier/more entitled/whatever. I just don’t think it’s true; in fact, I think it’s lazy and self-serving. (And, FWIW, in 25+ years of managing people, to the extent that I’ve seen changes in young employees, they have been for the better.)
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Being surprised by this is sort of like being surprised that NBA teams talk about wanting players “passionate about the game with drive”. There are plenty of players obsessed with basketball and practice/play daily who will never get near an NBA court. And none of us blink about that.
I think the biggest problem with elite college admission is that parents and students bestow a mistaken sense of altruism upon certain colleges. They are businesses in the business of making sure the institution continues. Educating students is a by-product.
Cynical? I don’t know. I would say realistic.
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I agree that the response in the unusual circumstances section probably prompted this. That is meant to allow students whose parents refuse to complete FAFSA to be able to borrow unsubsidized loans (maximum of $5,500 for freshman year). Checking this then allows all parent info to be skipped. Go back into her FAFSA when it allows you to do so, uncheck that box, and proceed with the questions that will follow.
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It’s her opinion from the past few years of observation. I was just citing one example I recall.
We own a business with core values of kindness, compassion, giving back and work-life balance, and deal with hiring issues a ton.
Agree with you that this generation has made some important societal shifts. I’d like to see a balance of it all.
Makes me happy to hear that you’re observing what you are.
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College professor at a SLAC. There is no doubt that COVID has affected current college students. Before the pandemic, it was rare to see someone distracted and on their phone in class. Now it’s about 1/3 of any given class. We are seeing dramatically increasing numbers of students plagiarizing and cheating. These are not vague observations but concrete numbers. I can’t speak to lack of motivation because that’s harder to track but I can tell you that we are still getting amazing students but it’s definitely a different cohort.
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It is not easy being a parent, or a teenager! I agree that there are so many contradictory messages and opinions. Hard to sort out fact from fiction sometimes.
I have always been of the opinion that my kid’s absolute best effort is always good enough. This includes doing the best in school and his applications that he is capable of. If a school disagrees with that, then it is time for my kid to move on and find a school that loves him. This has been our way of taking back control of the application process.
The difficult part is when S24 and I disagree on what his absolute best effort looks like 
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It’s self elimination; if you don’t take a rigorous class schedule you’re out, if it’s rigorous with too many Bs you’re out. I guess it helps the AO narrow their selection.
I like the Clint Eastwood movie quote, “A man has to know his limitations”
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Some friends and I were talking the other day about “today’s generation,” - and our takeaway was most of them have zero interest in the the struggle years. Maybe it starts with endless Lululemon in high school, moving on to breathlessly decorated dorms. But where are the years of struggle? The first apartment with plastic shelving and grandmother’s old sofa.
There are all these TikTok videos with the moms wearing Target clothes while the preteen daughters are head to toe in expensive gear. I mean, it is sort of cute, but where are these girls going if they are wearing $150 tops at age 12?
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So from my perspective those are not really examples of risks and failures, they are more examples of doing normal things and getting normal results. Like, a mix of As and Bs in a rigorous college prep course schedule is normal. A nice mix of activities at various levels of participation is normal.
Such kids can get into good colleges. But maybe not Emory. Because there are many more such kids graduating each year than Emory and the like have enrollment slots.
I do think this is a problem whenever discussing highly selective college admissions. Taking risks isn’t going to be a guarantee of getting into such a college with a normal good college prep profile. Nothing can be like that, because the slots don’t exist.
But we are missing the rest of this story. Where did this person get admitted? What would have happened without taking a rigorous college prep schedule? Not participating at all?
So personally, I don’t think that example shows this kid was wrong to do those things.
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