SUCCUMBING TO THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ARMS RACE
Once our kids are in middle school, on any given afternoon in any given semester, we fear—and it may be true—that if our kid gets a B, or doesn’t make it onto the elite sport team, or in some other way fails to check off every item in the checklisted childhood, they won’t get into the type of college we have in mind for them (and what we have in mind for them is some function of where we went, our belief about which colleges offer the “best” education, our sense of which college graduates have the “best” job opportunities, or our desire to have the most bragging rights over coffee or cocktails with friends, and so on). We then feel we must do as much as or slightly more than the next parents seem to be doing in order to facilitate the desired college outcome for our kids. So even when our gut is telling us don’t do that—such as when we face an ethical conundrum about whether or not to do our kids’ homework for them outright, or when we’re simply exhausted from all of the scheduling, driving, and staying on top of things—our greater fear is what might go wrong if we fail to involve ourselves.
The college admissions arms race mind-set goes something like this: “If I let my kid write this paper on his own, he might not do well and may even do poorly, and yes I hope he’ll learn from that and do better next time. But he’ll be competing with a classroom full of other children, many of whose parents will have heavily edited or written their kid’s papers. My kid might learn but their kid will get the better grade and be put into the honors program where they’ll be exposed to greater things. Their kid will get into the college I want for my kid.”
If we could go through life with a picture of our infants learning to walk plastered Google Glass–style in front of our eyes at all times, we’d have the reminder we need that kids learn and grow precisely by trying new things, being allowed to fail, picking themselves up, and trying again. But the holy grail of college admission—admission to highly selective colleges, that is, with its apparent refusal to acknowledge that stumbles and falls are what make the brilliant among us fallible and the fallible among us brilliant—seems to completely cloud our thinking.
Jane, whose daughter attends the very rigorous magnet public school Thomas Jefferson High School in northern Virginia, told me, “I would have thought my daughter would have more independence than she does. I would love for her to be making her own breakfast and packing her own lunches and doing her own laundry. But her life is so intense right now. If I want her to get any sleep at all, I’m going to try to do the things that help her. She doesn’t need a mom; she needs an assistant to keep the pieces of her life together.”1 Jane’s daughter travels ninety minutes by school bus to and from TJ, as the school is known. Between that travel, homework, school itself, meals, and sleep, there simply is no more time for Jane’s daughter to do anything except the tasks that will affect her high school transcript.
There are a severely limited number of slots at these colleges we want our kids to attend, and an overabundance of people who want them. Hence the arms race. Why we’re only interested in a small number of schools, what’s wrong with that analysis, and what we can do about it will come in later chapters of this book. For now I want to shine a light on the extreme lengths to which we might go to ensure that our kids complete every item in the checklisted childhood and have a perfect and polished record to show for it.
TAKING A SHOT AT HOMEWORK
We see from admission results that the most selective colleges admit students with all As or darn near close to it. So, by hook or by crook we try to make sure those grades are gotten.
Some parents take the prophylactic measure of urging their kids to take easier courses. In her well-to-do Manhattan neighborhood, a mom named Laura tells me, “When a teacher is known not to give As, parents tell their kid to drop the class. Parents tell their kid to take the easier class so they’ll get an A.” This seems to be exactly the opposite of anything a mom or dad would have read in a parenting book. It’s also likely to backfire as a strategy for elite college admission, since admissions deans asked whether they prefer to see the A grade on the transcript or the most challenging course taken, reply to our consternation, “BOTH!”
Regardless of what level coursework our kids undertake, when kids are doing their homework, we can’t help but help. There are relatively benign ways to help—asking how much homework they have and checking up to see if they’ve done it, sitting with them while they do it, or offering suggestions when they struggle. Then there’s the heavy-handed intervention of our rewriting or correcting—or of simply doing the assignment for them. If you’re doing your child’s homework from time to time, you are not alone.
We’re worried about the quality of our kid’s work, but in many communities the quantity of homework is an even more pressing concern. In 2014, Stanford lecturer Denise Pope, author and cofounder of the nonprofit Challenge Success, published results of a homework study that used a sample of 4,317 students from ten high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class California communities, where median household income exceeded $90,000 and 93 percent of the students went on either to two-year or four-year college. Students in the study averaged 3.1 hours of homework each night. (Only 3.1 hours, you may be wondering? Many of us have seen the upper end of those results.)
A student at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts (known as Andover) told me he spent five hours every night on homework during his junior year. A Palo Alto High School freshman told me her biology teacher bragged on the first day of school that his course would prepare her for college-level science, with a nightly homework load to fit that bill. My son, Sawyer, regularly did three hours of homework a night during his freshman year of high school, and, on some nights, upward of five. When the homework load seems completely unmanageable on its own, let alone alongside the other things kids want and need to do—like extracurricular activities, eating dinner, having some downtime, and getting the nine hours of sleep pediatricians say is necessary for teenagers—what’s a parent to do?
In 2012 a Stanford professor and parent of three told me about a time when he took homework matters into his own hands. We were attending a meeting of Stanford’s admissions and financial aid policy committee and the topic of the amount of stress and strain high school kids experience was a discussion item. The professor leaned over to me and told me that one night it was well past bedtime and each of his three kids—all Palo Alto public schoolers—had a mountain of homework still to be done. His solution? He told his elementary schooler to go to bed, told his middle schooler to do the elementary kid’s homework, told his high schooler to do the homework for his middle schooler, and he himself, the professor, did the homework for the high schooler. Sure, it’s problematic. But why criticize this short-term repair when the system itself is so broken?
Teachers know we’re doing our kids’ homework and try to devise ways to stop us. During a group interview I conducted for this book with parents in Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the nation’s top school districts, I spoke with a parent named Holley who is also an instructional aide. “Teachers want the children to do their writing in class because they know if they send a writing assignment home it does not come back as the student’s own work.”2 This isn’t just an issue of ethics, Holley tells me. Homework is meant to show teachers the level of a kid’s understanding in the subject area; when parents do the homework teachers have no idea where the kids are.
Ellen Nodelman, my friend who taught English at Rockland Country Day School in New York, saw parental involvement in schoolwork skyrocket in the last fifteen to twenty of her forty-plus years at the school. “Parents are now vigilant over every homework assignment, and a whole lot of parents are doing their kid’s homework for them. They do it under the guise of helping their kids, but the kids feel helpless. If parents aren’t doing the homework but they’re running out and hiring tutors to help kids with their homework, it’s the same thing. It fosters a sense of dependence and helplessness in kids; they come to feel they just can’t do it on their own.”3 Yeah, yeah, yeah, but the homework is often hard, time-consuming (and the student needs time for other important activities), and the homework is often graded. How a student does on homework can affect his or her GPA. And Stanford won’t take less than perfect. Besides—and here’s where the arms race begins—all the other parents are helping their kids.
GRABBING THE GLUE GUN
School projects are the type of homework that end up on display for everyone to see. They become a kind of in-your-face demonstration of just how far we’ll go to ensure that our kids succeed.
Every California fourth grader learns about the Spanish missions in social studies class; how in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries the Spanish colonized the territory now known as California by marching north from Mexico and building large adobe structures known as missions along the way. The culmination of this unit is an assignment called “the mission project,” where kids are to make a three-dimensional replica of one of these adobe and red-tile-roofed structures.
As with any similar school project, the mission project is intended to assess a kid’s knowledge of the subject and his or her creativity and precision in executing the assignment. Kids will use anything to make these large structures; some use Lego bricks to frame the mission. Others use pasta. I even saw one kid who baked a cake with white icing for the adobe bricks, red icing for the red-tiled roof, and the telltale Catholic cross made of candles. And as with any similar school project these days, the mission project has become an opportunity for parents to demonstrate just how skilled they are at being children—in this case, fourth graders.
When I went to see Sawyer’s and Avery’s mission projects, at least half were designed to such a degree of architectural or engineering precision that they could only have been made by parents. I’d raise my eyebrows and flair my nostrils at my husband (a designer, who, admirably, had restrained himself from becoming involved in our kids’ projects), pointing my finger at that project. Each year I wondered who these parents thought they were fooling, and hoped teachers would be explicit about parental involvement being completely inappropriate, and then back that up with a ding to the kid’s grade if the parent crossed the line. But it turns out it’s very hard for all but the most seasoned of teachers to stand up to a well-heeled parent wielding a glue gun.
Hillary Coustan lives just north of Chicago, in Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University. She is a lawyer and adjunct law professor at Loyola and Northwestern, and is a graduate of Exeter, University of Michigan, and Stanford Law School. She is also the mother of two young sons. Hillary is smart, thoughtful, and frank. I talked to her on the phone one day about her experience with elementary school projects. Even though her kids are quite young, she was already familiar with parental overinvolvement.4
When her son Eli was four, he was in a local program for youngsters that culminated in the children making a presentation on a sea creature. “The point was to go through the motions of doing the project and talk about it in front of a crowd of people who love you,” Hillary told me. Eli was assigned a shark. “I wanted to help him come up with a project he could do himself and feel proud of doing, something that didn’t require me doing everything for him.” At this age Eli’s fine motor skills weren’t very developed so he could not draw. But he could cut. Hillary decided to draw the front and back of a shark and have Eli cut it out, color it, staple it, and stuff it with newspaper.
A few days later it was time for the presentations. Among this group of fifteen or so kids—all four or five years old—a good number arrived with rather impressive work featuring trifold poster boards, shellacked photographs, and research and analysis that were beautifully typewritten. And then there was Eli, standing proudly with his little stuffed shark. There was some audience tittering throughout the presentations that night—some perhaps directed toward poor underperforming Eli, others toward the obvious fact that some parents had done their kid’s project. Little Eli was unfazed. To this day, that stuffed shark occupies a prominent position on Eli’s bedroom door.
In kindergarten, Eli wanted to participate in his school science fair. As with the shark project, Hillary wanted him to take on a project he could actually do himself. Eli understood and liked the idea of friction, so they went with it. He found some little toy cars to put at the top of a ramp, and a bunch of different materials he could use to make a road at the bottom of the ramp—a bath towel, tinfoil, and wood. He understood that the point was to test how far the cars would go as they encountered the different surfaces. But how will he do the data? Hillary wondered. Eli didn’t know what an average was, she reminded me—he was in kindergarten. So Hillary suggested to him that he color a bar graph showing the different distances the cars had traveled. And that’s what Eli did.
When Eli and his parents got to the science fair, the young elementary school kid next to Eli had an elaborate volcano that showed how different chemicals erupt differently, with the chemical names written in their scientific notation. The kid’s dad was furiously fixing things while the kid just stood there. When people came by to observe the volcano project, the kid had nothing to say about it.
The next year Hillary signed on to be one of the science fair organizers. She hoped to make it a more robust opportunity for kids to discuss their projects, ideas, and conclusions, and really play the role of scientist, as opposed to an evening where the kids stand around mingling next to their trifold presentation boards. So she and her fellow organizers brought in outside scientists to judge the fair.
The science fair was held at night and was open to parents and the public. The judges came the morning after and walked around to see each project and spent a good deal of time engaging each young scientist in grade level-appropriate conversation; the kids responded, or didn’t, depending on how familiar they were with their own project. The school made it explicit that no parents were allowed to come to the judging session. One component of the judges’ rubric—made known to parents and students when the science fair was first announced—was whether the work was clearly the student’s own.
FINGER ON THE BUTTON
Parents arguing with teachers about academic outcomes is the stuff of Internet meme and cartoon. We use technology as both our spy and our weapon.
Most school districts use some kind of student information software that includes a parent portal where parents can log on and see their student’s attendance record, grades, and so on. I’ve never checked up on my kids’ records online—this is one of those arenas where I want to reduce my involvement, not increase it, and where I expect my son and daughter to inform me of what’s going on as needed, just as I informed my parents back in the day (or didn’t; I realize that’s one of the risks). To be frank, I just can’t deal with that additional information—either logistically in terms of finding the time to log on, or emotionally in terms of figuring out what I’m supposed to do with all that data about my kids. I’m told that I’m an outlier, though, and that many parents not only log on but do so regularly.
Earlier I mentioned an Atlanta mom who’d told me that hours after her son took an exam she went online and learned he’d failed it; her kid wasn’t even home from school yet and hadn’t been notified himself. She lit into him by text, to which he responded, “Mom I thought I did well. I don’t know what happened. I have to focus on this other class now.” By the time this mother was talking to me several months later, she was worried not about the failed exam but about how the parent portal was messing with her relationship with her son.
At Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School (JLS), one of three public middle schools in Palo Alto, many parents check up on their kids’ grades quite frequently. Sharon Ofek is principal at JLS, where she balances a parent’s need to know now with a teacher’s need to keep teaching. For example, when JLS parents learn from the parent portal that their kid hasn’t been turning in homework and now has a zero, they might e-mail the teacher saying, “You should have told me my child wasn’t turning in work. Now I want you to tell me every time.”5 To the parent this is a benign request, but if a teacher has to e-mail all the parents whose kids haven’t turned in homework each day, the teacher would spend a lot more time on parents and a lot less time on students. “That seemingly unobtrusive request becomes really challenging, particularly for teachers who see a couple hundred kids in a given week. How do we shift responsibility for learning to the student?” asks Ofek.
A nasty child custody battle in Tim Walden’s school district in Massachusetts revealed just how substantial the volume of e-mail correspondence schools receive from parents had become. As superintendent, Dr. Walden received a subpoena from a boy’s father for all e-mails related to the boy; the father hoped to use the content of some of his ex-wife’s e-mails against her. Instead the subpoena revealed a different fact pattern: in the aggregate over the boy’s freshman and sophomore years the father had e-mailed teachers and administrative staff over two hundred times. Ironically the mother had sent only about ten e-mails.6 Technology has changed many things but the school day is still only six or seven hours long. How do teachers and administrators even begin to handle the enormous work increase caused by interactions with parents?
SCHOOLS IN THE CROSSFIRE
Parent involvement in the minutiae of teaching and grading children “impacts the practice of education,” says Dr. Walden. He’s worked in a few districts and in most, teachers used an electronic grade book in which daily homework, quiz, and exam results are entered. Some districts chose to use portal features that give parents access to the electronic grade book entries for their child. When schools opt to give parents such access, it provides fuel for parents who feel a need to know everything about their child at all times. Then, if a teacher alters the grade book during the course of the term, it can cause parents great concern. They e-mail or call asking, “Why did you do this assessment? Why did you change this? How come this hasn’t been corrected or assessed yet?” This kind of constant second-guessing day in, day out, week in, week out, can wear some teachers down.
“We walk a tightrope,” said Dr. Walden. “I believe we should be transparent—that a teacher’s assessment should be fair, valid, credible, and to a certain degree we should deprivatize our practice. On the other side of the coin, teachers need academic freedom and flexibility—if we want them to differentiate to meet kids’ needs, kids’ strengths, and so on, not everything needs to be under a microscope.”
Dr. Walden has seen schools achieve a balance when they put tight parameters around the use of the online grade books, and communicate those parameters to parents, for example, “This is how frequently it’s going to be updated. This is how you’ll be notified,” and so on. Without tight parameters, schools end up putting too much time and effort into responding to a subset of parents, which then takes away from the attention they can give to all the other kids and to other parents. These controls make a teacher’s life more sane, too. “For some of our teachers,” Dr. Walden tells me with a withered voice, “parental access to their grade books makes them feel rather paranoid.”
Schools that do not provide strong, clear boundaries between pedagogy and parents can suffer serious consequences (which means, of course, that student learning suffers). At a small independent school near New York City a decade ago, the headmaster felt it was better to appease parents than continue to uphold academic integrity. His solution? He encouraged his faculty to give kids As and Bs, and let the chips fall where they may. Parents were happier. The school environment was much more relaxed. Before anyone caught on, the headmaster had been fired for unrelated reasons. When the new leadership team discovered that there was a huge disconnect between student GPAs and SAT scores, the former headmaster’s grading “policy,” such as it was, was reversed and things got back on track. He had been misguided, but with a horde of well-heeled parents breathing down his neck, I imagine he felt tremendous relief when he decided to cut and run.
STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVES
Sometimes the arms race for elite college admission makes parents employ covert tactics. In academically competitive communities in particular, parents may feel it’s best to lie to other parents about what we—our kids—are doing, particularly when it comes to extra enrichment. “Oh, Johnny’s not working out with a strength coach,” we say, when in reality Johnny sees a strength coach twice a week and is more likely to get on the elite team as a result. “Oh, Jenny’s not doing much after school,” we say, when in reality she’s in a super-secret robotics club organized by a genius dad that gives kids a better shot at getting on the highly renowned robotics club at school. The best resources can seem scarce and we want to keep a good thing secret so as to secure a competitive advantage for Johnny and Jenny when it comes to applying to college.
Parents can also be quite defensive when our kid does something bad—steals or damages property, physically hurts someone, or puts themselves or others in danger. Sure, privately we might want to wring their necks with our own hands, but our mama and papa bear protective instincts come on strong when it seems our kids are backed into a corner. Sometimes we find the wherewithal to take a really deep breath and do the right thing—hear the facts, talk with the parties involved, sit down with our child and have a conversation about values, actions, and consequences, and then implement those consequences. But sometimes, fearing that the incident will go on their “permanent record,” which we want to prevent at all costs, we come out swinging while our kid stands either meekly or smugly just off to the side. We can’t let this incident keep him out of college.
Alcohol and drugs are often at the center of the problems kids get themselves into. Many school districts take a tough-love, 24/7 approach to underage drinking and drug use, meaning that if the police catch a student drinking or doing drugs, there will be school consequences such as loss of eligibility for sports or extracurriculars, even if the event did not occur within the context of the school year.
Before becoming a superintendent, Dr. Walden was a principal in a different Massachusetts district, one that engaged in a raging debate about whether to adopt the 24/7 philosophy. “Kids very actively involved in sports, student council, and honor roll would do something completely over the top, like get so drunk at a party they had to be hospitalized. When we implemented the consequences, like losing a sport for a portion of the season or being stripped of their captaincy, I would have parents come to the school with an attorney to fight the decision.”7 Ultimately Dr. Walden’s school board declined to adopt the 24/7 philosophy, stating that it was too invasive. But part of the rationale was that board members knew full well that there were children in the community who were big-time partiers, whose parents would mount a legal defense—or offense—to combat any type of consequence resulting from their child being caught drunk or stoned.
Kids—particularly adolescent boys—often make poor choices as a normal part of their development as humans; they’ve got an impulse to do the bad or crazy thing but their prefrontal cortex is still developing, which means they can’t yet appreciate the danger involved and so can’t use what we would call “good judgment.” While we’re wide-eyed with fear over the risk they took, regardless of whether it led to a bad outcome, they’re thinking, “Um, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Enforcing consequences for our own kids is essential. It’s the only way they learn not to do those things.
If instead we hire a lawyer to defend our kid’s bad behavior, we might achieve some kind of short-term “win” and feel reassured that the incident has not derailed their chances of admission to the “right” colleges. But when the teachable moments go untaught, what our kids get in exchange is the moral or ethical shortcomings that come from getting away with stuff.
ON THE FRONT LINES FOR THEM
Many college faculty reject the premise that students come out of Advanced Placement (AP) courses having learned what they would have learned in the “equivalent” college course. Faculty in such departments won’t give the student college “units” or “credits” toward the major for these courses, nor will they allow the student to “place into” a higher course at the college. For example, Stanford’s English, history, psychology, and biology departments have not accepted AP credit at least as far back as the 2006–2007 school year (the earliest year for which records are publicly available) and quite likely longer. And 2006–2007 was also the last year in which Stanford’s economics faculty accepted AP credit for micro- or macroeconomics.
Regardless of their value as a substitute for college work, however, students load up on these courses because often they come with the best teachers, and because such courses are favored by college admission deans looking for students to have taken the most challenging courses available in high school. And, due to their higher degree of rigor, these classes offer more weight in the GPA (typically increasing a grade by an entire point, making a B look like an A). Therefore, in high school, nowhere are the academic stakes higher—and nowhere is the school transcript arms race more ferociously fought—than in AP and other advanced courses such as International Baccalaureate (IB) and honors classes.
So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that anecdotally, school officials say the greatest disparities between the quality of work done at home versus in class—that is, the most frequent and egregious evidence that parents are doing homework for their kids—occurs in honors, AP, or IB classes. Homework quality versus in-class work varies most greatly in classes like these because the stakes are so high—and many of us are doing our kids’ homework for them. When our kids face the greatest academic hurdles in high school, some of us won’t risk the possibility that they’ll fall or flail. How? We stand in their place and face the challenge for them.
Schools try to prevent students from passing off third-party work as their own—plagiarism—by having them submit papers via websites like turnitin.com, which will scan the submitted material and report whether it duplicates someone else’s published work. But software programs that uncover plagiarism are powerless when it comes to parents. (And the very notion that a parent is a “third party” when it comes to the child is a hard concept for overinvolved parents to grasp.)
Beth Gagnon regularly sees parents having a hard time drawing this line.8 She has a marriage, family, and child therapy practice in New Hampshire, just outside the Boston area, a practice that is full of parents who are doing their best to help their kids cross off the items on their checklist. When parents admit to Beth that they wrote the essay when their kid was applying to a private high school, Beth uses humor to try to get parents to think about whether this impulse to stand in for their kids can or should ever end. Remember, these parents are coming to Beth for therapy—for solutions to their problems. Her standard routine goes something like this:
Beth: “How is your kid going to function in college if you’ve done all this for them? How are they even going to get into college?”
Parent: “I’ll write that for them, too!”
Beth: “Where does that end? Because I’m pretty sure the RA in the dorm is going to kick you out. You’re not exactly age appropriate.”
Presumably some laughter ensues, and if things go Beth’s way, a little introspection, and then maybe a reality check and a commitment to work on that. But no matter how effective Beth is within the therapy session, her clients go back out into the real world with its relentless pressure on parents to do whatever it takes.
Many college admissions officers want to admit students who have demonstrated a genuine interest in their school. With kids being busy, shy, or just not interested, this is an area rife for parental involvement—or impersonation. In 2013, Ira Glass, host of Chicago Public Media’s nationally broadcast radio program This American Life, interviewed Rick Clark, director of undergraduate admissions at Georgia Institute of Technology (a.k.a. Georgia Tech). Rick told Ira that he and his team regularly get e-mails and phone calls from parents pretending to be their own kids. It can be an e-mail from a boy thanking the school for his recent visit, sent from the mom’s e-mail address. Or an e-mail using words like “awesome” and “cool,” which is language Rick and his team almost never see from a high school student. Or a phone call from a mother acting as if she is her teenage daughter, who slips up about fifteen minutes into the call by saying, “What if she, I mean, I, wanted to list more than that number of activities on my application?”9
BRINGING IN REINFORCEMENTS
We probably couldn’t pay someone to do our kids’ homework without our internal ethical barometer going haywire, but we can hire people to help our kids get through high school with as much accomplishment and polish to show for it as possible. Kids can be tutored in virtually any (and in some cases every) subject—not just to remedy C, D, and F grades but to turn Bs into As and A minuses into A pluses. Kids whose families can afford it may prepare for the SAT for years, including enrolling in expensive test prep courses and making multiple attempts at taking the test in order to boost scores. I heard of a man who was offered more than $100,000 to tutor a high school kid through the AP, SAT, and all SAT subject tests.
If our kid attends public school—where college counselors routinely face a load of 150 to 400 students in contrast to their counterparts at private schools who face a load a fraction of that size—we might feel the urge to hire a “private admissions consultant” to give our kids’ college applications the attention they deserve. These private consultants consult one on one and also offer things like essay-writing boot camp weekends. Parents of kids at private high schools hire these consultants, too. Some consultants offer an ethically dubious guarantee that they have “pull” at certain selective colleges. In 2013, 26 percent of college applicants reported having utilized such a person, three times the rate of kids who sought such services just ten years prior.10
In the summer of 2014, a Silicon Valley woman posted an ad on Stanford’s job boards seeking a student who could mentor her fourteen-year-old son, whom she described as having “a high IQ and various talents, no special needs, and the ability to talk about complex subjects at adult levels.” The job would entail working weekday afternoons with this young man “to make sure he exercises, organizes his folders, plans ahead, and talks through the normal teenage issues … and to help him improve his understanding of responsibility, consequences, and resourcefulness.” The mom sought candidates who have achieved at least a 3.5 GPA in college, and offered $25 to $35 an hour for the work (the higher end for someone in or through grad school or with teaching/coaching experience).
Of course I don’t know the particular reasons this parent feels the need to provide such mentoring for her kid, but it’s reasonable to presume it has something to do with preparedness for college and perhaps for later life. The question I have is why is childhood itself not enough of a preparation? Why do our kids need special handlers? What is this great future for which we are so ardently preparing them? What would happen if this kid was left to his own—seemingly rather accomplished—devices? Even feeling as I do about these matters, a small part of me panics just reading this woman’s ad. Look what this parent is providing for her kid. Should I be trying to do the same?
And that frightened feeling is at the parental heart of this academic arms race. A New Yorker explained the panic as he sees it. “We live in a time where we feel scarcity. We’re no longer living the American dream. If your kid gets that job or that college spot, it’s not there for my kid. In that environment parents will go to any length to make sure their kid can get into that Ivy League school.”
Yes, there are too few spots at Stanford, MIT, and other Ivy League–type schools. But as I’ll discuss in later chapters, scarcity does not portend a limited future for a student who does not get into those schools. President Obama drew attention to this fact in 2014 while touring colleges with his older daughter, Malia. “We tell her, ‘Don’t assume that there are ten schools that you have to go to, and if you didn’t go to those ten, that somehow things are going to be terrible. There are a lot of schools out there.’”11 Of course, it’s easy for the president of the United States to take the long view about his daughter’s future security, but his was reasonable advice in what is, for the rest of us, an unreasonable situation.
MARCHING WITH THEM INTO BATTLE
As is the case with other forms of twenty-first-century overparenting, stocking academic weaponry for our kid doesn’t end when the child graduates from high school. Kids whose parents battled the college admission process for them become kids whose parents fight their battles in college. Stanford and colleges in every rankings tier around the country have seen parents show up to do the actual schoolwork of being a college student; they select the courses they feel will lead to their kid’s success, choose their kid’s majors, edit their kid’s papers, call faculty to question grades, and bring lawyers to defend behavioral accusations. Working alongside college students as parents began increasingly to insinuate themselves in academic life, at times I found myself thinking, Who’s going to college here, anyway?
Once a kid is in college, the next front in the battle is grad school and/or the job market. If our kids are accustomed to receiving our help, they will want—and need—it more than ever when the time for the job hunt comes.
In 2014, the economy was finally beginning to recover from the Great Recession that began in the 2008–2009 academic year. In terms of landing full-time paying work, the recession hit Millennials harder than any other generation.12 Twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds with a college education had suffered the greatest percentage increase in unemployment rates.13 This years-long slow start into the job market doesn’t hurt only in the short run; people graduating college in a recession economy see their overall long-term earnings diminished by 10 percent—across their lifetime.14 In addition, this particular generation of young people is graduating with more student loan debt than any previous generation. And they are searching for paid work in an era when employers offer not paid work but unpaid internships, and they are competing for jobs with others among the largest pool of college degree holders ever: The number of Americans aged twenty-five to twenty-nine who hold bachelor’s degrees increased only 3 percent in the twenty years from 1975 to 1995 (21.9 percent to 24.7 percent), but from 1995 to 2012 that number jumped almost 10 percent (24.7 percent to 33.5 percent).15 Millennials are also the first generation in the modern era to have lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations (Gen Xers and Boomers) had at the same stage of their life cycles.16 Put simply, the picture is not rosy. Many of us read these headlines and think, How can we send our kids out into THAT? So we go for the short-term win by hand-holding them, unaware of the long-term cost, that is, Are they ever going to be able to do anything for themselves?
The Collegiate Employment Research Institute (CERI) at Michigan State University surveys the national labor market focusing on what’s going on in the early career segment, and how employers can achieve more successful transitions from college to work. According to Phil Gardner, the director of CERI, parents didn’t become seriously involved in their children’s work lives until the early 2000s recession fueled by the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks.17
But by the mid-2000s, Gardner had heard a number of sensational media reports about parental involvement in college students’ job hunts and in the workplace. Being a researcher, he wanted to move from anecdote to data. So in 2006–2007, CERI’s annual survey of employers included questions about the extent of parental involvement in recruiting and hiring efforts and the activities parents are likely to engage in.18 A total of 725 employers responded. (Keep in mind that this survey was conducted during a growth economy before the Great Recession hit, and before the practice of prolific texting/calling between parents and children, both of which have been said to have exponentially increased parental overinvolvement in the lives of young adults.)
Of the 725 employers, 23 percent reported seeing parents “sometimes” to “very often” when hiring a college senior. Small companies hardly ever encountered parents, but one third of large companies (defined as those employing more than thirty-seven hundred people) witnessed parent involvement. (This distinction may be the result of large companies being more likely to participate in campus recruitment and job fairs, both of which are rife with parental involvement.)
Through the CERI survey, Gardner sought to gauge the frequency of a variety of types of parental involvement in the recruitment and hiring of college students. The survey showed parents were: obtaining information on the company (40 percent), submitting a résumé on behalf of a student (31 percent), advocating that their son/daughter obtain a position or salary increase (26 percent), attending a career fair (17 percent), complaining if the company does not hire son/daughter (15 percent), making interview arrangements (12 percent), negotiating salary and benefits (9 percent), advocating for promotion/salary increase (6 percent), and attending the interview (4 percent).
Mothers were more likely to do the front-end work of collecting company information and arranging interviews or company visits, while fathers were more likely to appear during negotiations and when the son or daughter was being disciplined. According to the CERI survey report, “One employer had advice for parents submitting résumés: ‘Please tell your student that you have submitted a resume to a company. We have called a student from our resume pool only to find out they did not know anything about our company and were not interested in a position with us.’”19
“Some parents are helpful in good ways,” says Gardner. “They explore job opportunities, encourage their kids, and provide emotional and sometimes temporary financial support, but they don’t do it for them. You would not have seen parents ten to twenty years ago become involved in negotiations on starting offers and conditions of employment. But you do now.” Employers report to Phil that parents who are overinvolved in recruitment and hiring don’t quit—they continue in “Act Three” (the workplace) where they do work assignments for their kids. “We’ve interviewed some parents who said, ‘Maybe we made a mistake because our kids are now in their thirties and they still want us to do their job search.’”
The lesson here is that even though we parents may one day be eager to exit the arms race—realizing, if belatedly, that our adult children ought to be able to handle things—we will have a hard time exiting the field. Our kids—accustomed to our involvement on all fronts—won’t have the wherewithal to handle things if we go.