Shelby Steele on Ivy League Admissions

Parents Forum
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<p>The vast majority of college counselors are neither in the mode of Kat Cohen or Michelle Hernandez. They aren’t writing kid’s essays, nor are they packaging their kids using the same methods. </p>

<p>Most of them assist students find a reasonable list of colleges, adhere to deadlines, review essays and help students and families with financial aid and scholarships. </p>

<p>Most of them also provide low cost and pro-bono work for kids who can’t afford their services. Many work in collaboration with school districts decimated by budget cuts to share the message.</p>

<p>If students can do it themselves, more power to them. </p>

<p>Do families begrudge private school students with kids to counselor ratios of 40-1? Try 500-600 to 1 in many public schools right now. </p>

<p>Is there an advantage to having someone help you walk through the steps. Absolutely. Not every kid writes their essays and submits them without one or multiple adults or peers looking at them and offering suggestions. </p>

<p>Like most things, those kids that end up in college have a multitude of help with adult mentors - teachers, counselors, parents, older siblings and friends, clergy, employers and other types of assistance.</p>

<p>It’s never been a level playing field when it comes to college admissions. If every private counselor disappeared off the face of the earth, there would still be undue advantage for some, particularly those in private and prep schools. Is that a better solution?</p>

<p>Some GC’s are brilliant. Some aren’t. The advice on this site is often good, and sometimes bad. There are those that exaggerate their stats and those that are afraid to post their stats, afraid of condescending posters. There are trolls, too. </p>

<p>More power to all the kids who land in college, no matter how they got there.</p>

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<p>Xiggi - Bottomline - Are you going to start a consulting business to help oldfort and me or not?</p>

<p>Sewhappy - I knew there was some merit to your D’s thinking. I just was nt sure how the storyline worked. I thought there is only one line of Salmon that died after spawning (Pacific?).<br>
Our budgets are haywire because we will start spending a lot more on SS and medicare than we are taking in because people are living longer.</p>

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<p>"if I’m interpreting it right she’s saying our demographics are all haywire and we’re living too long and not just laying eggs and fertilizing them and dying like nature intended. And the young salmon (people) aren’t heading out into the open water and then returning home to mate on time either. The whole Great Circle of Life is just really off. And that’s why there’s so much strife in congress and the economy is lousy. "</p>

<p>my, my, my…
arent we making metaphorical leaps based on a personal and political interpretation of a 17 years old’s essay topic! Sounds like someone else is dying to write a essay…</p>

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<p>I can’t afford 50K.</p>

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<p>Xiggi is a good Texan. He cant charge us 100k for a few hours of his time. That would be grand larceny.</p>

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<p>WWRPD (What Would Rick Perry Do?) ^^^</p>

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<p>Starting to worry about sending a DD off to college who is so worried about dropping fertility rates . . .</p>

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<p>Rick Perry whole heartedly endorses another Texan creating jobs, preferably help Xiggi move back to Texas with huge tax incentives.</p>

<p>Rick Perry also challenged UT colleges to come up with a plan to have students graduate with 10k tuition across 4 years, i.e., 10k in total.</p>

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<p>Rick Perry has done a lot to create jobs for Texans. Most of us have 3 of them.</p>

<p>Sorry…couldn’t resist. Had no intention of returning to this thread to discuss the original intent of it, but hey–if the topic is now RP, Texas, and Texans…I’m down for that.</p>

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<p>I have been out all day and have missed the latest dissection of my thoughts and opinions. Sewhappy, if you wonder what I think or how I feel, why don’t you simply ask instead of making ridiculous incorrect assumptions and mislabeling them as something they are not. Posts 321 and 323 above are correct. What I feel is total disappointment in a friend who stepped way over the line, and whose child, by signing the application, engaged in unethical behavior. It is more bothersome that she bragged about it and that it happened to be the very scholarship my son has, which makes it a bit insulting.</p>

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<p>Can’t resist this one about jobs.</p>

<p><a href=“Opinion | One and Done? - The New York Times”>Opinion | One and Done? - The New York Times;

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<p>jym – the overriding consensus here seems to be that it’s okay for parents to write their kids’ apps. Or hired professionals. I have trouble with this idea that it’s okay but I’m getting there. I’m sorry my post hit such a nerve. I guess I went thru so much craziness from other parents during my first one’s college admissions that the lady you described didn’t sound that crazy to me. I had parents confronting me and accusing my son of stealing their kid’s spot at schools my son didn’t even apply to. I knew a mom who literally started and ran a small business so that her son could claim he was big entrepreneur in his Wharton application (he did not get in). It was just a total year of crazy behavior so the mom you described, while certainly pathetic, didn’t seem that personally offensive to me. Although perhaps what was insulting is that she was too dense to realize your own kid was the more serious contender for the scholarship.</p>

<p>I get beat up on a lot on CC. If I was too mean then I’m sorry. I really felt as if your story turned out so well for your child that I could not understand why you would be so upset with stupid parent antics.</p>

<p>I will say that the new school in a new state that my second kid is in seems to have a much better behaved group of parents. The lady at the dinner last night asking my DD why she wasn’t having her “consultant” write her essay was actually a parent from a different school. Different schools really do have different cultures. This one my younger one is at is a very, very good. The parents seem to understand that it’s a long shot for anyone to get into certain schools and no one get’s in your face and demands to know where your kid is applying.</p>

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<p>Your post didn’t hit any kind of nerve. My original post was in response to some comment by another poster about ghostwriting essays. I merely shared a story of what I considered an egregious example. What bugs me is when posters ascribe a feeling to another poster assuming the know how that poster feels. They should ask, not assume.</p>

<p>My s has had that particular scholarship for several years. They weren’t in competition for it. My friend’s s is several years younger. Perhaps you were not aware of this. </p>

<p>I have no idea why you assumed I was “bitter”, and it really doesn’t matter. I do put “oomph” into my stories when I tell them. And I use exclamation points. But you made an erroneous assumption about my feelings and you kept repeating it and repeating it, which, truth be told, did get a bit annoying. I am glad I was out all day, and appreciate that others pointed this out your misunderstanding of what I was saying. Again, if you want to know how I feel, please ask. I will tell you. You weren’t “mean” per se - you were simply wrong in your assumption and used an adjective that had nothing to do with what I thought or felt, and perisited with that. Your apology is appreciated.</p>

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<p>Actually I would disagree. The overriding consensus <em>I</em> have read on this site is that kids should be doing their applications themselves. If a professional is hired, it is to help identify good college choices and keep the application process going. You are insinuating (you being Sewhappy) that hired professionals are WRITING college applications for kids in the above quote. I know a number of professional college counselors and they do not do this.</p>

<p>Re: the ethics issue…we have a neighbor who is self employed. He was at a neighborhood party bragging about how his child got more need based aid because he LIED on the financial aid applications about his income from his small business. I can tell you…the neighbors with the YOUNGER kids handed him his head on a platter…basically telling him what a dishonest S.O.B. he was. The rest of us just nodded our heads in agreement.</p>

<p>In addition to the ethics issues, this sends a poor message to the student…that it’s OK to lie on these applications. It’s not. AND it’s considered FRAUD if you are found out (which isn’t all that hard to discover these days with everything computerized).</p>

<p>Best bet…be honest.</p>

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<p>Well, yes, thumper, but I’m trying to understand the perspective of xiggi and samurai, whom I respect in general in their perspectives.</p>

<p>I do think it might be a little bit lame for me to look down on parents who pay for a consultant who “consults” on the essay when by paying to send my kid to a very good private school she is receiving guidance from very, very sharp people who understand admissions much better than I do. I thought those were excellent points made on the thread today. So I’m endeavoring to not be hypocritical.</p>

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<p>^ I’m certain the sharp people at your kid’s school are not writing your kid’s essay, just consulting. Jym626 and I brought up instances where someone else wrote the essay, not the student.</p>

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<p>Exactly, ohiomom. And while I havent read the whole thread, I find it hard to believe anyone here would condone some parent or college counselor writing the student’s college essay in its entirety for them, let alone it being seen as the " “overriding concensus”. I don’t think most posters here condone unethical behavior.</p>

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<p>The consensus seems to be that several people know personally people who have cheated (parents, friends or counselors wrote the essays instead of the applicant). Some have really strong feelings about it and some know it happens and are ambivalent/resigned to such occurrences.</p>

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<p>I can’t see anything in Samurai’s post here, or in xiggi’s several posts, that indicates an acceptance of other people writing kids’ college essays. Ethical college counselors won’t do that, of course, and I imagine that the percentage of ethical private counselors is the same as in any other profession. The consensus on this thread, to me, seems clearly to be that hired counselors provide a service that families who have the means may want to purchase. People with money are advantaged going into the application process, as they are at most everything else.</p>

<p>There was some discussion of applicants whose essays were written by others, but it wasn’t condoned, though some may have thought it was more prevalent, and difficult to detect, than others. I’m pretty naive, but it would surprise me if an adult CCer posted that he thought it was perfectly fine to let someone else write the essays - then again, I didn’t believe parent1986 when he/she said that people openly admitted this kind of cheating, however many glasses of wine are involved.</p>

<p>From the POV of the people doing the reading - I’ve got to believe they’d rather see work that has been read by at least one person other than the applicant. It’s already hard enough to read a million essays, let alone unedited ones. Editing is part of the writing process, and it’s ethical to a point. Where that point is has always been a topic of debate around here.</p>

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<p>Frazzled1 - Although everyone jumped on parent1986, as the thread progressed, you can see people mention examples from their experiences that it has happened to them where parents or strangers let it slip or actually bragged about the essay writing by a non-applicant. The only point we were contesting that parent1986 made was that it is a widely accepted/spread practice that parents write the essays and adcoms know it. But as the thread progressed, we have come realize it is not as farfetched an idea.</p>

<p>We heard Jym mention her friend who cowrote essay(s) with a friend of her son, someone mentioned a doctor’s wife who wrote pretty much everything for his medical application, sewhappy mentioned her son’s classmates writing essays for a fee for other classmates and someone actually asking her at a party why the private counselor is not writing her D’s essays this year.</p>