by Mary Cleary Kiely
One recent evening after dinner, our 13-year-old, Bridget, announced that she was heading off to do her homework. "Hang on a sec," I said. "We need to clean the kitchen first." "But I have so much math!" protested Bridget. Then she added slyly, as if she were playing her trump card: "Don't you want me to get into a good college?"
Bridget and I have been talking about college admissions and different definitions of success a lot lately, mostly because two of her favorite cousins are among the high school seniors from all over the country who are now awaiting their college acceptance or rejection letters. For many kids it's a particularly stressful time, in large measure because of a fairly widely-accepted notion that the results of the college admissions process represent a kind of summary assessment of a young person's accomplishments and potential. This is crazy. What I have tried to tell my nieces and my daughter is that their happiness and success in life ultimately will not depend on whether they get accepted to and attend a prestigious college or university. Here's why.
1. In general, a prerequisite for getting into a competitive, selective college is the ability to get good grades and scores and the willingness to do what is necessary to obtain them. While this may imply a certain level of intelligence and perseverance, other qualities often prove to be as important or more important later in life. People who end up making a positive difference in the world often possess qualities that transcripts are powerless to measure. These traits and attributes include courage, self-knowledge, imagination, the ability to identify and pursue what you deeply love, the willingness to take risks, the ability to rebound from setbacks, and the capacity to empathize with and to work well with others.
Some years ago, when I worked as an admissions officer at an Ivy League institution, an interviewer from National Public Radio who was doing a special on competitive admissions asked me what was the most difficult or frustrating aspect of my job. "Having to watch our mistakes walk around campus," I replied without hesitation. The most annoying of those "mistakes" were the kids who looked good on paper but who turned out to be total jerks, usually owing to a defect in character that was not discernible during the selection process.
College admissions officers know very well that their information is incomplete and their judgments imperfect. So parents and kids should take a cue from admissions staffers and not vest those decisions with more power than they deserve.
2. The only thing in life that is truly once-and-for-all is death; everything else is a work in progress. As my mother used to say when we were growing up, "It all depends on what you make of it." If a person's mind and heart are closed, that person really won't get educated no matter where he or she goes to school. Conversely, someone who is hungry to expand the boundaries of his or her world can get a good education anywhere. Within a few years of leaving college, it tends to matter far more what opportunities a person took advantage of while there (and since) than on the reputation of the college or university itself.
3. We live in a society that loves to rank people, and encourages us to believe that coming out on top competitively is a sure route to happiness. Kids experience these pressures firsthand as they go through the college admissions process. I hope that my daughter and my nieces will figure out, more quickly than I did, how transient and illusory are the promised comforts of competitive success, and how irrelevant they are to dealing with the real challenges of life.
As I write this, I am just back from visiting my best friend from college, who has been a polestar in my life for over thirty years and who is now undergoing intensive chemotherapy for breast cancer. When I was in high school and in college, I knew nothing of worries like what we are facing with her, or of those I have experienced having two children with other serious health and learning issues. I thought that my happiness in life would be largely a function of the energy I was willing to invest, and that brains would be my lucky charm. On the day I won a Rhodes Scholarship, I remember thinking to myself: I might never be unhappy again.
How much I thought, and how little I knew.
Eventually, I figured out that the glittering prizes are fun but they don't solve anything. As Anne Lamott says in "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life," if you're not whole before you get the external validations (the acceptances, the awards, the promotions, the publications, the whatevers), you won't be whole after them. It's a humbling lesson, but a liberating one, too.
What I wish for my nieces and for my daughter as they look forward to adulthood is that they will end up with the real prizes in life, the ones that are most worth having even though they are not exclusive. I hope that they will love and be loved, in a web of relationships that stretches across space and time. That they will find work that uses their talents and feeds their souls. That they will visit or live in some amazing places and see some amazing things. That they will not lose sight of the humor and the beauty in it all. Because most of life, unlike college admissions, really is not "admit one." |
