Are We Advisers or Prescribers?

For fourteen years now I’ve been a “liner” at the National Runaway Switchboard, a national teen crisis line (Sure, no one knows what a “switchboard” is anymore, but the organization has been around for thirty years…If you can think of a better name, let me know.) Callers range from teen runaways to frustrated parents and school counselors. We listen, help sort out the situation and offer options, including access to thousands of resources all over the United States, like shelters, low-cost legal aid, counseling, and other programs.

Crucial to our interactions are the ideas that we are “non-directive” and “non-judgmental.” We are trained to build trust during calls and help callers identify the issues affecting them. We never tell them what they “should” do, leaving it to the caller to make the final decisions about what course of action to take. Doing so enables the caller to feel in charge of the situation, which is critical to successfully carrying out the options discussed in the call.

College counseling should follow a similar model. We prepare our students best by helping them assess their strengths and weakness, hearing their goals and interests, and then setting a selection of appropriate institutions in front of them. If they have some ideas already, great; we’ll add to them. If not, we get the ball rolling and help them as they get better at deciding. In the meantime, our job is to listen, respond, and offer our support and understanding.

The NRS model puts power and decision making in the hands of our students. It is not our job to tell students where they should apply, nor should we tell them not to bother applying if they’re determined to do so. We are advisors, not prescribers. We should tell students what the odds are, what they can expect if they apply, and how they can submit the strongest applications, then get out of the way. It bothers me to hear counselors brag about how they are responsible for a student’s admission to certain colleges or insist that a student “shouldn’t bother” to apply to colleges the student thinks she might like.

We should not substitute our judgment for theirs, but present all the facts and let our students decide what to do. It’s their process, after all. If an academically weak student wants to apply to Yale, that is his prerogative; we merely set the stage, letting the student make the decision. We can certainly say the chance of admission is unlikely; however, to speak in absolutes like “You’ll never get into Yale with those grades and scores” is not only unlikely to deter the determined but also to bestow upon upon ourselves a clairvoyance we don’t really have.

The college process is in fact a terrific opportunity to help our students take some major steps in the maturation process, including learning how to gather information, assess its relevance to themselves, make decisions, and then take responsibility for them. It borders on miraculous to watch students come to a greater understanding of themselves as they think about their goals and interests in detail, perhaps for the first time, then begin to take charge of them.

This situation is particularly powerful for students who come from first-generation and low-SES families who may never have been asked what they want from their lives before. Being given the responsibility for choosing their paths can be unnerving, but it can also be  powerfully liberating. For the first time, these students realize they can be the authors of their own lives–a condition their better-served peers can usually take for granted. They may need more support along the way, but this realization enables them to step toward the future confidently.

Our jobs as college counselors require us to be transparent. That is, we provide the guidance, information, and support students need and then we get out of the way. At the end of the process, when students are celebrating their college choices, I am content to step aside and let them believe they did it all themselves, because that’s the way it should be.

Where’s Moby?

Crabby wishes college application essays had more Melville in them…

No element of essay writing, college application-based or not, is more disturbing to Crabby than the crushingly literal interpretation of essay questions (known in current parlance as “prompts”). He would like to think that a question of any kind would inspire a young essay writer to flights of elegant fancy, but he would be doomed to eternal disappointment. No matter where one turns, it seems that the great literary devices–metaphor, simile, metonymy, synechdoche, irony, humor, and all the other tools of the great essayist–have been thoroughly eradicated from the high school curriculum.

There may be schools out there that teach the essays of Jonathan Swift, Poe, E.B. White, Twain, and others, but if so, the lessons are lost on young writers as they approach the college application. In fact, it seems to Crabby that the prospect of making even the tiniest mistake of tone or outlook can petrify the brightest student. One very sharp young man of his acquaintance approached with furrowed brow not long ago for help divining the meaning of the following, which, as Crabby’s readers will note, is not even an essay question: “Have you ever tossed around a(n) 1. hot potato___ 2. Frisbee___ 3. idea___?”

“What does it mean? he asked. “What do they want?” The question was optional and clearly marked as being “just for fun,” which panicked this student even more. Surely there was some malevolent reason for the question. Crabby was tempted to do his best Vincent Price imitation but resisted. “It’s just an attempt to lighten things up,” Crabby responded. But that made it worse. The young man could not believe that he was being asked a question that had no “meaning.” It took half an hour of persuasion to convince him that nothing bad would happen no matter what he did with that particular part of the application.

In this case, one might say there was almost too much interpretation, a case of over-thinking bad enough to cause a migraine (in Crabby, at least). And one couldn’t accuse this particular student of not having any imagination; it was clearly running wild, like a fox trying to figure out why that delicious-looking piece of squirrel was dangling so oddly above that rather tidy pile of leaves. But he had lost his sense of humor, his normally relaxed and casual persona in the shadow of this minor question. He could not allow himself to think it really was all in fun.

That level of interpretation, even paranoid interpretation, seems to fail students when they attempt to answer any of the questions on a college application. (Never mind that many of them seem never to have been taught how to write an essay at all–at least not an interesting one.) Crabby tries to instill in his charges a sense that they can have fun with essays, and that, in fact, they don’t have to be “essays” at all in the five-paragraphs-and-you’re-done mode. But it seldom takes, and when it does it’s almost always undone by parents whose own college application paranoia seems much closer to the surface than one might suppose.

Asked to take a stand on an issue of the day, students strain to see both sides of the coin; asked to describe a person who has inspired them, they inevitably choose grandpappy or gran, who inexplicably seem to have survived from the early twentieth century creating fishing rods out of twigs or baking pies in a wood burning stove. Telling the admission committee something about themselves usually means presenting themselves as bland perfectionists who can’t bear to see anyone being cruel to a lobster.

It rarely occurs to our young essayists that they might take issue with the question itself or create a satirical mini-biography of the friend who taught them the meaning of the word “hypocrite.” It’s all sweetness and light, with a lesson at the end. Even essayists who describe some of the most horrible home lives get done in, often, by the need to wrap things up in a neat bow. The rare student who could challenge the premise of a question or turn it upside down always got Crabby’s attention, as would one who could leave off the bow.

Crabby has read only a limited number of essays responding to some of the cruelly challenging applications questions asked by the University of Chicago, an institution known mostly for one of its faculty member’s having found despair in the early works of Steve Martin, but he can remember several responses from very bright students being reared in its shadow to the question, “How do you feel about Wednesdays?”:

“Huh?”                                                                                                                                           ”Well, I’ve always liked Wednesdays because I don’t have as many classes then.”                                                                             “It’s a day in the middle of the week.”                                                                                       “It’s that much closer to the weekend.”

And remember, these were the smart kids!

A failure to look beyond the lumpish thing-ness of Wednesdays doomed them to soddenly crouching next to the corpse of an idea, rather than considering that “Wednesday” might be a stand-in for “being in the middle,” a vestige of Norse mythology, part of an arbitrary way to divide time, and so on. Any possibility of getting pleasure out of wrestling with this concept had long ago been doused by earnestly literal approaches to literature and life and a paucity of acquaintance with symbolism.

Many years ago, Crabby created an application essay question for his institution that he thought would practically compel an interesting answer. It was

Sartre wrote that “Hell is other people,” but Streisand sang, “People who need people/Are the luckiest people in the world.” Discuss.

Partly this was in self-defense, having been bored to death by the earnest, gray and unimaginative prose he had read in years past. He longed for some humor or biting commentary. This question seemed to have everything: high/pop culture, clashing views of human nature, opportunities to put Streisand in a room with no exit or Sartre in a dress, but did any of that happen? Sadly, no.

What few students took the bait mostly wrote essays along the lines of “Sometimes Sartre is right and sometimes Streisand is.” In revenge, Crabby’s colleagues made him read every essay that took on this topic; Crabby himself managed to work through a (very nice) bottle of Scotch fairly quickly that particular year. One response did stand out, however; its opening sentence was “Hell is people who need people.” Now that, Crabby can get behind.

Of course, it hurt Crabby more than a little that his carefully crafted topic failed to inspire equally crafty responses, but when the University of Chicago gets equally boring responses to its questions, there must be more to it than that. (It’s worth noting here that the most diabolical aspect of the U of C’s essay questions is that they are formulated by their freshmen. This year’s most evil topic: “Don’t write about reverse psychology.”) One can assume, from the continued existence of its freshman class, that many applicants do, in fact, answer their questions well.

Crabby began by blaming high schools for not teaching writing very well, but one should also see the college application essay as a Hummer barreling down a dark country road toward a sweet innocent deer trapped in its headlights. Even the most facile essayist might be forgiven for writing about her ACL tear instead of Sartre. Still, one can hope that someday the Hummer will flip over and the deer will scamper away to feed on the green shoots of imagination and produce…Oh, never mind.

Chicago’s Underserved Scholars Net Over $11 million in Scholarship Aid

My organization, Chicago Scholars, sponsors an annual Onsite Admission Forum here in Chicago. Our Scholars, as well as students from partner organizations like Urban League, Kappa Leadership, Boeing/IIT Scholars Academy, and others, apply early to our 70 partner colleges; at the Onsite the receive decisions or help with their applications, as well as many offers of scholarship aid. This year, our 480 students received over $11 million and we’re not finished counting yet!

We were the subject of a front page story in the Chicago Tribune. You can read it here and see why I enjoy what I do.

Humming to Higher Ed

I enjoy Gail Collins’s columns in the Times, although she sometimes seems a little out of place there. But her column about fall and going off to college is relevant and humorous. Take a look here: Humming to Higher Ed – NYTimes.com.

Chicago Scholars: Helping Address Inequities

Chicago Scholars, the organization I now work for full-time, has its signature event on Oct. 25th. Seventy colleges and nearly 500 students, most of whom are first-generation and low-SES, will come together to interview and, in many cases, announce admission decisions and scholarships. You can read more about the Onsite College Admission Forum here.

Florida: America’s Wang

(Apologies to my mother, who lives in Florida.)

OK, it’s official, Rick Scott, Republican governor of Florida, is an idiot. There’s really no other way to describe his spectacularly moronic comments about anthropologists and education:

If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs. So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state. Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.

It’s a great degree if people want to get it. But we don’t need them here.

So take yer gol’ durned ejikashun and git the hell out o’ Flerida! We don’t need you stinkin’ pointy heads here! We kin skin a gator an’ chaw and spit jist fine, ya damn Yankee! And just whut degrees wuld ya be talkin’ ’bout anyhow, ya bald-headed skunk?

Look, I have a BA and an MA in anthropology, and so does Scott’s daughter, but the point isn’t that anthropologists should be looking over their shoulders for toothless torch-bearing yokels. He has basically said any education subtler than a sledge hammer ain’t necessary in the Sunshine State so you kin take yer book larnin’ and screw yerself.

He’s saying that people don’t need to learn how to think, how to ask questions, or challenge the status quo, whether in politics or theory. He’s saying we just need to teach people what they need to be workers and drones, taught to obey, not act on their own. When he says he wants to “create jobs,” what kind of jobs is he talking about? What does that mean in the context of “education?” I think we can assume that when Rick Scott says the word “education” he really means “training” or “indentured servitude.”

Defending anthropology per se doesn’t really help because it’s just a synecdoche for the world of thought. He, along with the rest of the Republican knuckle-draggers out there, hate educated, thoughtful people because they can see through the idiocy of their ideas. Educated people ask “gotcha” questions that any reasonable person would ask. They don’t believe you just because you said it, or said it twenty-two times. They don’t stop when you want them to. They can take apart the logical fallacies, the distortions of reality, and the outright lies. They can understand and challenge people like Rick Scott. They are a demagogue’s worst enemies. Too bad Florida’s school system can’t teach anyone well enough to do any of that.

To make matters worse, these people who claim to support science and math as ways to build a workforce don’t even like science and math. They disparage the science surrounding global warming and evolution; they dismiss the realities of the universe and cling to myths they interpret strictly according to their own twisted views (something a good anthropologist might want to study); and they think genuine scientists and mathematicians are dweebs and geeks.

So, good for you, Florida. Homer Simpson was right: you are America’s wang. If you want to do something about that, you need to dump your current Howdy Doody governor and elect someone with a brain. I won’t hold my breath, though; he’s in good company–just look at the current crop of tiny-brained wipers of other people’s bottoms running for the most powerful office in the world. Really???? We should be ashamed of ourselves.

The Crabby Counselor Asks, “How Many Books Does It Take to Get Into College?”

Crabby takes stock of what’s out there…

New Orleans is a tough place to have a conference because, well, who wants to hunker down in a cavernous conference center when one can be retracing the footsteps of Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, Edgar Degas, Anne Rice, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Jean Lafitte, or partaking of the delights of a city redolent of influences from so many corners of history and the world? (Speaking of Anne Rice, one of her most atmospheric non-vampire or -witch books is The Feast of All Saints, about 19th century New Orleans. A terrific historical fiction.)

This is not to say Crabby did not do his duty by attending educational sessions, committee meetings, and the like. He did. However, he could not fail to be drawn into the mystery and elemental sadness of New Orleans. It gets in the blood and leaves one wondering how anyone could have left it to drown…However…

Breaking out of his reverie and feeling the ache of smiling too much, Crabby visited the conference’s book sales table. New books about college admission seem to come out every year, and Crabby began to wonder, “Why?” He began to leaf through the volumes available. After a dozen he quit, but the question remained–why are there so many books on getting into college?

On that table and elsewhere were College Admission: From Application to Acceptance, Step by Step, by the estimable Robin Mamlet, a veteran selective college admission dean; Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need to Know About Getting Into College by Crabby’s West Coast pals Jon Reider and Sally Springer; the salacious-sounding How to Make Colleges Want You: Insider Secrets for Tipping the Odds in Your Favor; the science fiction-y College Admissions for the 21st Century; the not-quite-equivalently-titled The 75 Biggest Myths about College Admissions: Stand Out from the Pack, Avoid Mistakes, and Get into the College of Your Dreams; the operatic In! College Admissions and Beyond: The Experts’ Proven Strategy for Success; Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to the Colleges That is Best for You by Jay Mathews (one of Crabby’s favorites and candidate for best title); the oxymoronic Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Into Top Colleges; the sinister and possibly mad-scientistic Secrets from the Cradle to College Admission at MIT and the Ivy League; and many, many, many, oh god help us, many, more.

Upon his return to reality, Crabby decided to visit Amazon to see what’s out there for the worried middle class. Searching for “college admission” on Amazon gives one 11,376 results (7,970 paperback; 2,217 hardcover; 92 Kindle; and the rest apparently delivered directly to one’s brain through the new iPhone). These include “insider” books purporting to reveal all about the admission process; basic guides like Fiske; “how to get in” books; how to write winning essays; how to pay for college; how to contort oneself to please one’s desired college; “secrets” of Harvard students (it’s usually Harvard students); testing study guides; ways to make your otherwise dull, tedious life sparkle by spending summers in exotic locations doing good (NOT “summering”!); and on and on.

Crabby notes this list also contains books about how to get into graduate and veterinary schools, how to take time off before college, and so on, but one has to admit that 11,367 entries, even taking out half of them, is pretty staggering for the topic at hand. Using the term “get into college” produces only 9,264 entries, making one’s book selection process that much easier, at least.

What happens over at Google? Typing the words “college admission” returns 14,400,000 entries (approximately one tenth the number one gets by typing “breasts,” incidentally, but still…). The term “college rankings” returns 73,000,000 entries; “top 100 colleges” elicits 8,460,000; “college acceptance,” 70,900,000; “undergraduate colleges,” 29,600,000; and “top undergraduate colleges,” 38,900,000. Now that’s what Crabby calls information!

“Information desperation” might be another term for it. There is so much to know, it seems, about the college process, so many ways to bend the twig to shape the tree, so little time to get everything done and so many models of how one can, in fact, do it. Insiders, outsiders, hangers-on, and opportunists know where there’s an overwhelming fear of being left behind, and the college admission business is ripe for the picking. Wherever there is fear, sweaty-palmed or ulcerous, there are those who know how to exploit it.

Crabby doesn’t begrudge any of these writers their moment in the sun. (Actually, he does begrudge a few who prey on readers’ fears; lead them to plagiarise–unwittingly or not–or tempt them to make themselves into someone they’re not to achieve an illusory goal.) Some terrific colleagues have written level-headed books that are standing the test of time, but everything they say is basically not only the same but, one would hope, common sensical. They tell readers to be themselves, do their work, participate in class and in activities, be responsible community members and citizens, and be open-minded about the future.

But no, that would be too easy. It should be more complicated than that. But really, there’s no secret to getting into college, unless one feels one must go to a particular college. When Crabby gets together with his colleagues, they trade stories about the essential randomness of their own college process and how we all managed to turn out basically all right. The idea of intending to go somewhere specific in order to achieve a particular life outcome is a relatively recent development. (Never mind the scions of Ivy League parents in prehistoric admission times, groomed from bulldog-blanket-wrapped cradles to follow their fathers’ footsteps.) So there’s more than a little irony in our being college counselors ourselves.

How much information does one actually need for successful college acceptance? Not eleven million bits, that’s for sure. Some good teachers, supportive but non-invasive parents (you know who you are…or maybe you don’t), a few opportunities to express oneself, good friends who have goals and ambitions without being obsessive, and a loving, supportive boy/girlfriend who believes in one’s goals (and vice versa). Follow the instructions on the Common Application and the FAFSA, pay attention to deadlines, and think about the many possibilities out there instead of just “the one.”

Sure one will be a different person if one attends Sub-Ivy College instead of Uber-Ivy U, but who’s to say that might not be a good thing? If one reads all the how-to books, sweats through all the essay models, goes through all the test prep manuals, and memorizes all 75 hints for getting in, how tedious would one’s final year(s) in high school be, and where would one be at the end of it all? Face it: One can’t know or influence the future; all the competing voices telling you you can, at least in the college admission biz, are just noise. Thoreau was onto something when he decamped to Walden Pond because he “wished to live deliberately.” That’s what matters in the end.