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https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/08/13/what-craziest-thing-about-college-application-boot-camp-that-has-wait-list-its-secret-location/qBA6dDuE49KFAtYNrJNZPL/story.html
The headline refers to a $16K college application boot camp — price due to rise to $18K next year. Cheap fodder for outrage / keeping up with the Joneses scrambling. Depending on which kind of blinkered reality you live in, you’ll either find it outrageous that rich people are going to have even more assistance in locking down all the slots at the “good schools”, outrageous that you have to pay _even more money_ to get your kid into one of the “good schools”, or you will start trying to figure out how to buy this new service to get your kid into one of the “good schools”.
Never mind all that. That’s the Globe being Buzzfeed. And not very well, either.
The article continues with how the people writing the piece had difficulty getting any details either or permission to publish them. Oh my job! It is so hard! Sympathy.
It wraps up with a bit about how it isn’t _actually_ super rich people buying this type of service. $16K is the shocker high price, but $4K is more normal, and the major block of users is “middle class families”. I don’t know what to think of that, precisely. Anyone in this country who isn’t homeless and/or hasn’t gone over the B speed bump seems to think they are “middle class”. I’m unconvinced it has ever meant very much. (Even when the definition was, has at least one servant.) Well, I mean other than, I have problems a lot of people wish they had the resources to have, but not so much money that I’ve completely given up on attracting any sympathy for them. There is, indeed, a middle, and that’s basically my working definition of it.
Having gotten most of my whining out of the way, I was really interested in another aspect of the problem. Middle-aged person / adolescent person who are also parent / child is a tough dynamic. Transitioning to college is terrifying and there are a fair number of deadlines. Since the parent is generally paying, they generally think they should have a lot of say in the process. Since the kid has pretty mixed feelings about exiting the nest of high school — which, if this process starts before 9th grade, they still haven’t even _entered_ — the kid is likely to want to put stuff off to the last minute and/or do things too fast and sloppily to be their best work. Kids have never gone through any of this before and thus lack experience.
Parents remember _being_ those kids with quite a lot of shame all mixed up in there. They have some experience. They remember missing deadlines. They wish all kinds of things were different about their own past. It seems to me that this has got to be a pretty fraught interaction, and the best part of the article — which should ALSO have been better — touches upon this dynamic. It would have been nice to have an explicit paragraph about how the major service desired by parent and kiddo alike, and offered by the independent consultant is only partly the one-on-one, and not really about getting into the “good school”, but rather providing a professional, experienced mediator with up-to-date knowledge of the schools and, hopefully, their admissions policies.
If you are about to drop the better part of $100K on your kid’s education, spending $4K up front to make sure that the _first_ school they attend is also the school they graduate from 4 years later, with decent job prospects, doesn’t seem BuzzFeed level crazy at all. That can pay for itself purely by not having the kid start, stop, and restart a term or a year later at a different school, generally from zero.
High school counselors are mentioned. I really liked my high school guidance counselor. I used to go hang out and talk her ear off when I had part or all of a free period. The advice she gave me on picking a school was really not advice that I followed then or respect now (like everyone else, she was pushing for some sort of liberal arts / humanities program, ideally at one of the Claremont Colleges in Oregon [ETA: Actually, as ethelmay notes, in California] or an Ivy, and I had known from before 9th grade I was going to recap my eldest sister’s trajectory at the local public university and get a computer science degree. Which I did.), but she was an intelligent, compassionate person who took time to try to match kids up with schools taking more into consideration than what a lot of other people involved in the situation were taking into consideration. If we really are finding it necessary to hire independent consultants, probably we should look into funding more hours of high school guidance counselor time per kid.
The headline refers to a $16K college application boot camp — price due to rise to $18K next year. Cheap fodder for outrage / keeping up with the Joneses scrambling. Depending on which kind of blinkered reality you live in, you’ll either find it outrageous that rich people are going to have even more assistance in locking down all the slots at the “good schools”, outrageous that you have to pay _even more money_ to get your kid into one of the “good schools”, or you will start trying to figure out how to buy this new service to get your kid into one of the “good schools”.
Never mind all that. That’s the Globe being Buzzfeed. And not very well, either.
The article continues with how the people writing the piece had difficulty getting any details either or permission to publish them. Oh my job! It is so hard! Sympathy.
It wraps up with a bit about how it isn’t _actually_ super rich people buying this type of service. $16K is the shocker high price, but $4K is more normal, and the major block of users is “middle class families”. I don’t know what to think of that, precisely. Anyone in this country who isn’t homeless and/or hasn’t gone over the B speed bump seems to think they are “middle class”. I’m unconvinced it has ever meant very much. (Even when the definition was, has at least one servant.) Well, I mean other than, I have problems a lot of people wish they had the resources to have, but not so much money that I’ve completely given up on attracting any sympathy for them. There is, indeed, a middle, and that’s basically my working definition of it.
Having gotten most of my whining out of the way, I was really interested in another aspect of the problem. Middle-aged person / adolescent person who are also parent / child is a tough dynamic. Transitioning to college is terrifying and there are a fair number of deadlines. Since the parent is generally paying, they generally think they should have a lot of say in the process. Since the kid has pretty mixed feelings about exiting the nest of high school — which, if this process starts before 9th grade, they still haven’t even _entered_ — the kid is likely to want to put stuff off to the last minute and/or do things too fast and sloppily to be their best work. Kids have never gone through any of this before and thus lack experience.
Parents remember _being_ those kids with quite a lot of shame all mixed up in there. They have some experience. They remember missing deadlines. They wish all kinds of things were different about their own past. It seems to me that this has got to be a pretty fraught interaction, and the best part of the article — which should ALSO have been better — touches upon this dynamic. It would have been nice to have an explicit paragraph about how the major service desired by parent and kiddo alike, and offered by the independent consultant is only partly the one-on-one, and not really about getting into the “good school”, but rather providing a professional, experienced mediator with up-to-date knowledge of the schools and, hopefully, their admissions policies.
If you are about to drop the better part of $100K on your kid’s education, spending $4K up front to make sure that the _first_ school they attend is also the school they graduate from 4 years later, with decent job prospects, doesn’t seem BuzzFeed level crazy at all. That can pay for itself purely by not having the kid start, stop, and restart a term or a year later at a different school, generally from zero.
High school counselors are mentioned. I really liked my high school guidance counselor. I used to go hang out and talk her ear off when I had part or all of a free period. The advice she gave me on picking a school was really not advice that I followed then or respect now (like everyone else, she was pushing for some sort of liberal arts / humanities program, ideally at one of the Claremont Colleges in Oregon [ETA: Actually, as ethelmay notes, in California] or an Ivy, and I had known from before 9th grade I was going to recap my eldest sister’s trajectory at the local public university and get a computer science degree. Which I did.), but she was an intelligent, compassionate person who took time to try to match kids up with schools taking more into consideration than what a lot of other people involved in the situation were taking into consideration. If we really are finding it necessary to hire independent consultants, probably we should look into funding more hours of high school guidance counselor time per kid.