The Problem With Branding Kids: They’re Growing

February 8, 2012 • Admissions, Education, Lowering Stress, Parenting • by

Here’s an interesting take on being true to yourself as a college applicant by Mike Chapman, as seen through the Tebow lens.  Tim Tebow, that is.
Though football is finally done for the season, and Eli Manning stole the show at the Super Bowl, Tebow was really the “It Guy” of the season.  He was the star of so many blogs and sports pieces and I can understand why, since he’s a true minority – someone who is willing to be his true self, lousy passes and all.  I respect him because of this and the authentic work he does with disabled kids and their families.

(As an aside, though, I can’t let the Tebow topic go without remarking about this public adulation of his behavior on the field. We get all warm inside about a handsome young white athlete who is willing to publicly express his Christian devotion, but would we feel the same way if he was Muslim, if at the end of each game he knelt facing Mecca to pray to Allah, if he quoted the Koran in tweets and to the press, if those were Koran references in Arabic on his cheeks?   Nah, he’d be booed by crowds everywhere, probably fired and certainly wiretapped by the FBI. OK, back to the topic…

While I agree that most of the five pieces of advice for college applicants made in the Chapman piece are good ones, I challenge his #2 suggestion to “establish your brand and communicate it”.    I get the concept.  Know thyself and stay true to that.  I agree, great advice. But I get crazy when educators and college admissions professionals use the term “brand”. Words are important and they often take on a life of their own, like the word “passion” did a decade ago in college admissions. “Brand” has become a colloquial term for identity, but it really doesn’t mean that at all. “Brand” connotes a consistent product that is being marketed for public consumption and here’s where I deviate from Mike Chapman and others.  This business mindset that has permeated American discourse has no business in the education of kids.

Sorry, fellow entrepreneurs, but people are not brands.  People are people.

Teenagers are growing, guys.  They generally don’t have a clue what their “brand” is, just as they didn’t have a clue what their “passion” was years ago, because they’re just getting through their days, consumed with trying to meet often-conflicting demands from adults while struggling to stay afloat in the raging rapids of their social networks.  The job of the adolescent is to come to understand who they are relative to others.  This process takes years, since their brains continue growing well past the age of 25.  Why in the world would we expect them to think of themselves as “brands” when they are changing so rapidly, when they barely know themselves as individuals, when they can hardly think past tomorrow?

Expecting them to “establish your brand and communicate it” becomes just another unrealistic expectation by the adults in their world, spooling up more anxiety in their parents who are liable to take this brand advice to heart if it means getting their kid into Harvard. Our job as adults is to calm young people down and assure them in every way we know how that they are OK the way they are, messiness and all.  They don’t need to concoct passions or a brand identity to make us happy or to be admitted to college.  They just have to be themselves and find a college that will love them for that.

Vassar, WTF? Another Postcard From the Land of Unaccountability in College Admissions

January 31, 2012 • Admissions, Education, Lowering Stress • by

This is a story of how adults act when busted, when accountability becomes a principle in name only.

I train senior admissions officers to become Deans and Directors.  I was trained by the people who were trained by the father of all private college admissions, B. Alden Thresher, known as BAT Thresher.  Being an avid Jeffersonian, BAT believed that private college admissions should serve society and their staffs should see themselves as educators.  That lofty concept seems like just a pipe-dream now, with the common acceptance of the business model that rules college admissions.  The Vassar College screw-up is a prime example of how things are done today and here’s my take on that.  Spoiler alert:  they aren’t going to like it much.

We know the facts.  Vassar posted an admit letter to test their electronic notification system and forgot to either do that testing or to take it down when they were done.  Either way, because of this mistake, 122 Early Decision applicants learned the happy news that they were admitted, only to learn shortly thereafter that 76 weren’t actually admitted at all – sorry about that.  Worse, Vassar told about half of those no-longer-admitted applicants that they would be reconsidered in the regular pool, leaving about 30-odd students to feel the double sting of rejection after the elation and public embarrassment of the mistaken admission.  As a consolation prize, they’ve been offered their application fee back.  Really, Vassar?

Let’s get real.

These kids were applying for Early Decision.  ED applicants are usually the strongest candidates, the ones who will enroll if admitted.  They are the home crowd, loyal to the brand, drinkers of the Kool-Aid.   Though I did not see or read the entire Early applicant pool at Vassar this year, I’d bet my next month’s paycheck that every one of those 76 kids who got the bad news would do fine at Vassar.  Maybe some had lower scores or lower grades than others, but honestly, they would be OK students in the end.  Vassar is a rigorous place, but it’s far from impossible.

If I were training the new Director for Vassar Admissions, I would have urged that person to swallow their pride and take all 122 Early, to eat it and welcome those students with joy, to turn that stupid mistake into a wonderful moment for everyone.   It’s the right thing to do.  And it teaches young people how adults are accountable in the toughest moments, how it’s possible to make a mistake and still hold grace.

Instead, Vassar’s arrogant decision to hold the line and reject some of those applicants is not only stupid, cruel and immoral, it smells like a business decision to me.  Perhaps the lower scores of some of those falsely admitted kids would lower the average SAT results for this year or the higher admit rate might do some damage to Vassar’s #14 standing on the USNWR ranking.  (Admissions owns 4 of the 17 indicators in the algorithm afterall.)  Perhaps some of those mistakenly admitted kids need more financial aid than others, forcing Vassar to dig deeper into its endowment.

Whatever the reason, Vassar Admissions lost their moral moment and abdicated their role as educators.  I strongly encourage that staff to get copies of BAT Thresher’s iconic book, “College Admissions and the Public Interest” to read and discuss at their annual staff retreat this year.  Time to get their manners back.

How To Create Peace At Home During the College Application Process

December 21, 2011 • Admissions, Creativity, Education, Lowering Stress, Parenting • by

Well, we’re now full-blown in the holiday season again (didn’t we just do this a few months ago?) and if you are the parent of a high schooler applying to college, you probably aren’t singing songs of joy and peace right about now.  Chances are, your child is having the usual teenage mood swings and rebellion compounded by all the additional stress of applying to college and the ultimate fear/Nirvana:  leaving you for college come fall.  If your home is peaceful, please write and tell the rest of us how you’ve managed that.  If you are typical, though, you probably need a breather from the increasing tension.

I know a lot about such things because I’ve been through that minefield.  And if you think it’s hard to parent a 17 year old, wait until you have to parent a 20-something, which is where I am now.  24 is the new 17.  Yikes!   So here’s my holiday gift to you…

My surefire recipe for creating peace at home in stressful times

Step 1.  Lock yourself in the bathroom and breathe.  Breathing is very under-rated.  It calms the nervous system and slows the heart.  The goal is to get centered in what is happening around you and how you feel about it.  In other words, locking yourself in the bathroom gives you some distance, and distance is good when your nerves are frayed and you are about to say or do something stupid that you’ll later regret.

Step 2.  Accept the fact that you are not applying to college.  Your child is.  This is not your firewalk.  You don’t have to stay up all night making applications to school. Your academic performance is not about to be judged.  You are not about to be accepted or rejected by strangers. It isn’t happening to you, though it sure feels like it.  Breathe some more and feel a tiny bit of relief as you meditate on this thought: aren’t you glad you’re not your child?

Step 3.  Remember that your role in this college application business is to be your family’s grounding cord.  You’ve lived through harrowing times before and have came through them OK.  You know that life ebbs and flows, that it brings great times and tough times.  That’s what we signed up for when we decided to be human beings.  So breathe again and ask yourself how you can ground the rest of your family and create a peaceful home.  Breathe in some of that peaceful feeling that you’d like to inject.

Do What Only You Can Do

Step 4.   Commit to yourself that you will be unflappable in the coming weeks.  You will listen and empathize and go on with your life without trying to fix anything, because you are doing what only you can do – modeling healthy adult behavior during a tough time.  You are literally showing your child how it’s done.  Matching their own anxiety doesn’t help them.  It just makes everything worse.

Step 5.  If you want to clear your anxiety and frayed nerves, there is nothing like tapping (EFT).  Here is a great script for that. If not, there are many other ways to stay calm in the center of a Category 5 storm:  breathing; meditation; reading; going for a walk; talking to a friend or a “paid friend”.  Remember what flight attendants tell us upon boarding a plane: place your own oxygen mask on before helping others.   Your child needs you to stay strong and relaxed now.  Your family needs you to create peace.  And you need to enjoy the holidays.

 

The Myth of the Soul Mate

March 1, 2010 • Education • by

The Myth of the Soul Mate

By Marilee Jones

I don’t know about you, but I was raised to believe that there is just one person for each of us out there in the world – our soul mate – and our main job in life is to find that person and live happily ever after.  This belief is both scary and self-limiting and best of all, is totally made up.  Who knows how many possible mates there are for each of us on a planet of 6 billion humans?  If we believed that there are endless possibilities in life, that there are many, many people we could choose to partner with over the span of our life, we would feel freer somehow and might make better choices.

It’s the same with choice of college.  There are so many colleges and universities in the US (2500+ 4 yr. schools alone, not to mention the 2 yr. and professional schools) that we can conclude there are many good matches for each applicant if only we can reject the notion of one soul-mate and stay open to the possibilities.  For parents this means that some of these choices may be schools we are not familiar with, not in the top ten schools nationally.  Just because we haven’t heard of some colleges doesn’t mean they aren’t good.  And many schools will be the right match.