In Irena Smith’s memoir about engaged on the entrance traces of America’s faculty admissions mania, the Palo Alto-based unbiased faculty admissions counselor remembers how she made a ninth-grader cry.
Smith advised the boy and his mom that he shouldn’t depend on entering into Stanford, regardless of his good grades and vow to do no matter he may to be accepted. As Smith writes in “The Golden Ticket,” she labored in Stanford’s admissions workplace for 4 years and knew that the employees learn most functions with “an eye to turning students down.” Indeed, information reported in February exhibits that Stanford’s acceptance charge for its class of 2026 was a file low 3.7%.
When Smith assured the boy he may nonetheless get an important schooling at a whole bunch of different universities, his mom wasn’t happy. She shot Smith “a look of hatred” when she dismissed the concept of letting the scholar falsely declare that he was captain of three varsity sports activities. “Who’s going to know?” the mom stated.
Smith tells the beleaguered boy’s story and different tales of desperation and striving in “The Golden Ticket” (256 pages, She Writes Press), which additionally displays on what it means to be a dad or mum and to have expectations in your youngsters. The guide is ready in her hometown of Palo Alto, world-renowned for its inhabitants of achieved residents. But as Smith writes, Palo Alto is also “off the charts” in relation to parental aspirations and ranges of sweet sixteen stress.
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“I wrote the book to get at what a lot of people in Palo Alto, and more broadly in the Bay Area (and nationally), don’t talk about: specifically, the pressure on so many young people to be perfect in an ‘Ivy League’ way,” she stated in an interview. “The truth is that only a few kids can actually pull that off.”
Smith counts her three Palo Alto-reared youngsters as among the many many who couldn’t conform to this slender Ivy League best as a result of they confronted a range studying and different challenges. Smith continues to work with a few of most “tightly wound” teenagers in America and tries to dissuade them from the U.S. News and World Report-style hype that surrounds the “HYPS” faculties (Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford).
She desires readers of her guide to know there are greater than 2,500 U.S. faculties that would dispense the “golden ticket” to a cheerful, profitable life — and most wouldn’t anticipate candidates to overload themselves with AP lessons, extracurricular actions and unrealistic hopes.
Smith sees her job as serving to teenagers uncover “who they are in the world” to allow them to pen genuine essays geared to colleges which can be actually proper for them. Perhaps as a result of she costs $500 an hour, some dad and mom nonetheless anticipate her to supply the magic formulation — the best sport or the best summer season mission, say, working with poor folks in Honduras — that may enhance their child’s probabilities of a HYPS admission. All too typically, Smith finds herself mediating household conflicts and attempting “diplomatically but firmly” to maintain moms and dads from “destroying their children” – whilst they see themselves as “helping.”
With the ninth-grader, Smith received solely to this point in managing his mom’s expectations. She by no means met with the boy once more. Still, his household’s story resonates within the period of 2019 Varsity Blues scandal. Smith stated she wasn’t shocked by the scandal — wherein Bay Area entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars and different rich dad and mom throughout the nation allegedly paid tens or a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} in bribes to get their youngsters fraudulently admitted to high U.S. faculties. To her, it “laid bare the ugly underbelly of the need, the striving, the obsession with status and prestige” that drives the faculty admissions course of and the hopes of many households in high-achieving communities like Palo Alto.
Unfortunately, Smith isn’t certain that the scandal has taught many households concerning the futility of this type of striving and obsession, on condition that 57,000 college students clamored to hitch Stanford’s Class of 2026, whereas Harvard, Yale and different faculties proceed to submit acceptance charges within the low single digits.
Meanwhile, as “beguiling” as Palo Alto is perhaps within the nationwide creativeness, it’s additionally constructed on a “bedrock of barely contained dread” and the perpetual stress of teenagers, Smith stated. The city’s youngsters typically really feel like they’re being judged by their deficits.
“Almost every parent I speak to, at work or outside of work, says that they moved here for the schools only to find that the schools stretched their children to the breaking point, that all the joy has gone from their eyes,” Smith stated.
As with different current examinations of Silicon Valley tradition, together with Malcolm Harris’ best-selling guide “Palo Alto,” Smith mentions the clusters of sweet sixteen suicides from 2009 to 2015 that ended the lives of 10 Palo Alto Unified School District college students. The clusters prompted the district to make college students’ psychological well being a high precedence, in addition to native and nationwide discussions concerning the function of faculty admissions in teen stress.
Smith particulars how her personal youngsters weren’t proof against psychological well being struggles. Her oldest son has autism and survived crippling despair and considering suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge earlier than receiving therapy and graduating from University of the Pacific, in Stockton. Smith stated her daughter self-medicated for anxiousness and despair.
In an interview, she additionally reveals one among her “saddest moments” as a mom: Her second son stated he felt “stupid” in center faculty as a result of she and her psychiatrist husband stored telling him they needed him to “live up to his potential.” Smith realized this is likely one of the worst issues that seemingly well-intentioned dad and mom say to their children as of late. Her son, who was later recognized with ADHD, stated he felt like he wasn’t attempting arduous sufficient and requested: “How do you know I have this potential that I’m not reaching?”
Smith presents up different items of her private historical past to indicate her relationship to the American dream and the way folks’s lives typically take surprising turns. Her dad and mom had been Russian Jews who introduced her to the U.S. from the previous Soviet Union within the hope of giving her a greater future. Much to their dismay, Smith wasn’t probably the most motivated teenager to graduate from Cupertino’s Homestead High – the alma mater of “the Steves,” Wozniak and Jobs. She wore black eyeliner, frolicked with the people who smoke, learn trashy best-sellers as an alternative of doing faculty work and barely received into UCLA with a 3.3 GPA.
At UCLA, Smith’s love of literature blossomed, she pursued a PhD and landed a lecturer place at Stanford, the place her husband was doing a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship in psychopharmacology. But her desires of turning into a professor received sidetracked by parenthood and he or she ended up in admissions. From November to March, she and colleagues pored by means of tens of hundreds of essays to seek out round 2,000 college students to make up the college’s subsequent class.
“There is such an infinite variety of accomplishment, striving, and resilience that reading applications sometimes (felt) like drinking excellence through a fire hose: Students who hold patents; who teach dance to blind children; who work the evening shift in the family restaurant seven nights a week …” Smith wrote.
But fairly quickly she turned haunted by all of the rejections she needed to suggest. The overwhelming majority of those college students wouldn’t be admitted, Smith stated, even when that they had straight A’s, university-level programs and check scores within the 99th percentile.
She launched her enterprise as an unbiased faculty counselor in 2008. She needed to assist college students reach entering into faculty. Sometimes meaning serving to them notice that neighborhood faculty or no faculty in any respect could be a great guess till they determine what they need to do in life. Those are paths her two youthful youngsters have taken.
“Getting into a highly selective college is, frankly, not all that interesting,” Smith writes. “There are other paths, some of them frightening, some of them tragic, some of them exhilarating. They may wind through college, or they may not.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”