Are you in the midst of the college planning process as a student or as a parent? Do you see those days on the horizon? Do you know someone who is in the midst of it? Run…don’t walk…to the nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be for yourself and at least one to give away. To take this even a step further from a biblical perspective, Philippians 1:6 “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
As a Christian, I remember in recent years standing with my husband before our church family to dedicate our daughter and then, a few years later, our son to being raised in a Christian home where we will point our children to Christ first in all that we say and do. So many of us have enjoyed the blessing of raising our children in a community of faith that proclaims clearly that “God has a plan for you!” Then…we all go nuts and forget that when it comes time for the college planning process. One of my seniors last year, when asked where he was headed to college, humbly…but boldly…claimed “I am 100% certain that I will get into the college that God intends for me to attend.” What a peace!
This book is a great resource to keep close by in the college planning process because it keeps our eye on the prize…college is a season of life. It is a part of what the Lord is working out in the life of someone roughly 18-22…but it’s not the WHOLE story. How quickly we forget that God is in charge of every minute detail of our lives. Ephesians 2:10 reminds us: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” So many times kids look at rejection and feel that God has forgotten then, the same God of Luke 12:7 who loves us so much that He reminds us “Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.”
Take heart high school student. Take heart parents, friends, teachers, counselors, whomever is involved in this mania that college admissions has become…God is still on His throne and His plan is still the best. You can never go wrong to seek Him first and then see all the things that He has added (Matthew 6:33).
I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those notes below…
- The main, lasting relevance of Indiana, he told me, was the way it had turned him into a bolder, surer person, allowing him to discover and nurture a mettle that hadn’t been teased out before. “I got to be the big fish in a small pond,” he said. Now, if he wanted to, he could swim with the sharks.
- A pattern emerged. “I applied for things fearlessly,” she said, “because I knew now that I was worth something even if I wasn’t accepted.” Rejection was arbitrary. Rejection was survivable.
- “I never would have had the strength, drive, or fearlessness to take such a risk if I hadn’t been rejected so intensely before,” she told me. “There’s a beauty to that kind of rejection, because it allows you to find the strength within.”
- A sort of mania has taken hold, and its grip seems to grow tighter and tighter.
- For too many parents and their children, getting into a highly selective school isn’t just another challenge, just another goal. A yes or no from Amherst or Dartmouth or Duke or Northwestern is seen as the conclusive measure of a young person’s worth, a binding verdict on the life that he or she has led up until that point, an incontestable harbinger of the successes or disappointments to come. Winner or loser: this is when the judgement is made. This is the great, brutal culling. What madness. And what nonsense.
- College has no monopoly on the ingredients for professional success or for a life well lived.
- College is a singular opportunity to rummage through and luxuriate in ideas, to give your brain a vigorous workout and your soul a thorough investigation, to realize how very large the world is and to contemplate your desired place in it. And that’s being lost in the admissions mania, which sends the message that college is a sanctum to be breached—a border to be crossed— rather than a land to be inhabited and tilled for all it’s worth.
- Those last years of high school are just one short stretch of a life with many passages before it and many to come, plenty of ups and plenty of downs, and intelligence is only part of what enables you, at that time, to walk through certain doors.
- “My fear is that these kids are always going to be evaluating their self-worth in terms of whether they hit the next run society has placed in front of them at exactly the time that society has placed it. And that’s dangerous, because you’re going to slip and fall in your life.” NJ Governor Chris Christie
- There’s no equivalence between straight A’s in school and sharp professional tools, and that’s one of the many reasons to question the obsession with colleges that admit only students with the highest GPA’s.
- The college admissions office is no longer a mere screening committee. It’s a ruthlessly efficient purveyor of Ivory Tower porn.
- If you’re a parent who’s pushing your kids relentlessly and narrowly toward one of the most prized schools in the country and you think that you’re doing them a favor, you’re not. You’re in all probability setting them up for heartbreak, and you’re imparting a questionable set of values.
- Just how well does all the fluffing work? People who are familiar with the admissions process and aren’t financially investing in believing that you can buy a meaningful advantage say that the screeners of applications have grown savvy to, and cynical about, all the flamboyant charity work; all the leadership positions in self-started organizations with memberships of three; all the summers spent learning Swahili; all the soul-baring essays about family melodramas as fulcrums for personal growth.
- “I think US News and World Report will go down as one of the most destructive things that ever happened to higher education.” Adam Weinberg, President of Denison University
- “Make no mistake”, he wrote. “The publication of college rankings is a business enterprise that capitalizes on anxiety about college admissions” Jeffrey Brenzel, former dean of admissions at Yale
- Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, propelling students toward unplumbed territory and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who they already are. And students, along with those of us who purport to have meaningful insights for them, need to insist on that.
- “It’s interesting to think about how this is shaping America. If our elite is to some extent being formed by this powerful experience of frenzied admissions, does it suggest that we’re creating a culture in which the sale is more important than the product?” Anthony Marx, former president of Amherst college
- “If you are extremely smart buy you’re only partially engaged, you will be outperformed, and you should be, by people who are sufficiently smart but fully engaged.” Britt Harris, former chief executive of the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and 1980 graduate of Texas A&M
- Counselors said that mothers and fathers are the principal agents of the frenzy, which is the apotheosis of their efforts to micromanage every last moment of their children’s lives and protect them from all injury, especially to their self-esteem. If they’ve been run-of-the-mill helicopter parents up until they start plotting college, they become Black Hawks at that point.
- The mania’s focus on such a limited number of acceptable outcomes, coupled with its attention to minutely detailed instructions for achieving them, suggests that life yields to meticulous mapping and plotting.
- Hard work shouldn’t be framed, or thought of, only in terms of a specifically defined goal and merely as a humdrum bridge to some imagined promised land. Hard work bears the ripest, sweetest fruit when it’s approached as an act of passion, a lifetime habit, a renewable resource.
- One of the most potentially meaningful aspects of the college admissions process is, in fact, rejection. And that’s partly because college is, or should be, disruptive. It’s about becoming a new person, not letting the ink dry on who, at seventeen or eighteen, you already are. In that sense defeat can be a springboard. And figuring out how to rebound from disappointment is infinitely more beneficial than any diploma.