The Admissions Obsession

Lloyd Thacker is bucking the tyranny of the college system

IT'S ANOTHER standing-room-only crowd, waiting to hear from the man who's taken on the country's colleges, the man who has stood up and called their admissions policies unfair, dishonest and wrongheaded. When Lloyd Thacker steps to the podium, he opens with his usual line:

"What my introducer forgot to tell you is, I was president of my eighth-grade class.

"In fact, for two years in a row!"

It usually gets a laugh from the harried high-school parents who are all struggling to figure out: What can they do? Can this mess get fixed? Who should do it? The joke cuts through the stress. And that's his goal: To calm the frenzy around this most competitive process, college admissions. The anxiety is holding our nation's high-school students hostage.

They, their parents and even the colleges feel forced to game the system, Thacker says, and along the way created a generation of students who are obsessed with getting into elite colleges. These students now hunt for the "right" school and sell themselves with all the subtlety of a contestant on "America's Next Top Model." As if learning mattered. The consequences are dire, Thacker says. We are robbing students of their right to be children, demanding they start writing their résumés at 14. Or younger. Meanwhile, the admissions process is rewarding families who can afford SAT-prep courses and expensive private counselors. Those who can't, well, they just don't get to go.

It's why Thacker quit his job as a high-school counselor in 2004 and devoted his life to preaching against the system. He started the nonprofit Education Conservancy in Portland, and published "College Unranked," a book of essays by high-school counselors and college presidents and admissions people who agree with him.

Supporters call him a man who's found his moment. "He is so right," says Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His "time has come, and it's about time."

Critics say he's out of touch with reality: No matter what Thacker says, doting parents will continue doing everything they can to get their little darlings in those elite schools, and prestige-hungry colleges will continue doing everything they can to make themselves the most desirable schools in the country.

Nonetheless, people are listening. Thacker gave 22 speeches this past year to high schools and packed crowds at college conferences. The speaking invitations keep rolling in. Harvard University Press is releasing a second edition of his book this month. Over the summer, he brought together admissions officers from the University of Washington, Reed College and MIT at a Portland summit to discuss how he — and others — can spread the word. The choir is nodding. But the pews are still full of deaf ears.

THERE'S NO SMALL amount of irony in Thacker's effort. Colleges and universities are now more diverse than ever. West Coast students go to East Coast schools; women and people of color attend schools that once excluded them; billion-dollar endowments mean private schools are opening up to even the lowest-income students.

And yet. Schools are harder to get into than ever. The high-school population is booming. Twenty years ago, MIT admitted about 30 percent of its applicants. Last year it admitted 14 percent. In the early '80s, Pomona College, a private liberal-arts school in Southern California, admitted just under half of its applicants. For this fall's freshman class, Pomona admitted 18.5 percent of all applicants.

With more than 1,500 four-year colleges in the country, the frenzy for spots froths around the most selective of the bunch. In 2002, one quarter of all college applications were sent to the 156 most-selective schools, those that accept less than half their applicants.The admissions process feels less and less like an educational exercise and more and more like an NBA draft, a riot bazaar where basketball superstars are paraded around like gods. The regular student, the less than perfect, get the message: "Don't even think about applying here."

Driven students now have to ace 20 Advanced Placement classes, score 800s on all the SAT sections, get voted MVP, write a concerto for the bassoon, preside over the student body, intern with Nelson Mandela, build huts in East Timor, develop a vaccine for the avian bird flu — in short, save the world by the time they're 17. Who has time to hang out in Dick's parking lot sipping schnapps from a Nalgene bottle? These kids are Pink Floyd's automatons.

High school has become a means to an end, Thacker says, recalling the father who asked him what sport his 9-year-old should play in order to get into an Ivy League school. Playing the harp becomes a means to getting into Oberlin. Attending the summer soccer camp turns into a line item on the application to Stanford. Going to the Galapagos for the summer gets milked in the interview with MIT.

"The message to the kids is, 'We don't really care about you as a person,' " MIT's Jones says. "We care about the product. The seal of approval is the college you're admitted to. That says, 'Yes that school district was good, yes, that parent was good.' It's not about the kid.' "

What happens when a student spends her life preparing to get into the perfect school and gets in, Thacker asks. Now what?

The test-prep and college-counseling businesses feed off the fear and fan the flames, Thacker says. Some counselors charge $30,000 per student.

The high schools inflate their grades, and make 40 students valedictorians so the parents won't sue. Every student is set up to think they're a winner, and then the colleges reject them.

Many colleges are complicit, Thacker says. They say they hate the annual college-ranking report in U.S. News & World Report because the numbers don't mean anything, but they put out news releases touting their number the day after the report is published. They launch rebranding campaigns and build posh dorms, lavish grounds and state-of-the-art athletic centers to attract the "right" students — the ones with all the top scores, most intriguing backgrounds and proper pedigrees. The "right" students will help raise money for endowments. If more admitted students choose their schools, Moody's maintains their bond ratings.

While this is mainly a problem of private colleges, it's one that is seeping into public schools as state funding dwindles. The University of Washington is in the middle of a $2 billion campaign. The state isn't providing the money to maintain quality, administrators say, so they're reaching their hands out to private donors for everything from buildings to professorships.

"Doing right has too often gotten lost in the process. How will there be shared responsibility between the parents, high schools and colleges?" asks Bruce Poch, head of admissions at Pomona College. "Right now we're in finger-pointing mode, and sometimes it's the middle finger."

BUSHY-BROWED and gray haired, Lloyd Thacker looks like Jack McCoy on TV's "Law and Order," railing against the injustice of college admissions. At 51, he's something of a Renaissance man, a builder of furniture, a guitar and harmonica player as well as an academic.

He grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, the son of an elementary-school teacher and a personnel manager. His high-school GPA was 3.97. He wonders if he got a B in English because he criticized the teacher for flirting with the girls in class.

While he was at the University of California in San Diego, students grumbled about how restrictive the graduating requirements were. Thacker surveyed all the students and spent two years with professors and administrators, reforming the curriculum.

After getting a master's in political science from UC Davis, he moved to college admissions in the early 1980s, first at the University of Southern California, then at Pacific University in Oregon. There, he was charged with making a plan to attract more applicants. When the school took a different tack, he left — looking for a more direct way to help students.

He landed at Jesuit High School in Portland. Over 16 years as a college counselor there, he watched the competition escalate. He saw parents berate kids for getting B's, and students wither under the weight of it all. He listened to one kid on the Ivy League track cry and tell him, "I feel like I'm having to lie about my interest in a sport to get into this college. I wanted to do other things."

In 2004, he decided the message needed a medium. He quit his job, collected essays from deans and counselors around the country and combined them into his book, forming his nonprofit company to publish it. The book has sold more than 4,000 copies, promoted by his marketing department of one, published by his corporation of one. His aim is simple: Invite people to think.

His advice to parents on how to prepare a child for college is this: Turn off the television. Let them ride the bike to the park and play Kick the Can. Read to them. Eat dinner together. It's a dreamy replay of Thacker's youth, when he built skateboards out of 2-by-4s.

Parents ask, why should I pay $40,000 to send my child to Hobart and William Smith Colleges when she could go to Princeton?

Are you buying prestige, Thacker asks, or are you investing in your child's education?

IF YOU WANT to dissect how the admissions process turned into a frenzy, you need look no further than the great big bulge of baby boomers, who went to college in the late '60s and '70s. In the '80s, when boomers were busy raising young children, the number of high-school graduates dipped, and colleges struggled to find applicants. They began marketing themselves. Educators became recruiters.

Then the pipeline bulged again in the late '90s, as the children of boomers started graduating from high school. Those children — sometimes called the millennial generation, sometimes the echo — have started applying to college in record numbers. The pressure won't abate for another five years. "Boomers have very high expectations of ourselves; that's one of the hallmarks of our generation," says Jones from MIT. "We want to be perfect. We want our children to have everything we didn't have. We're throwing all these opportunities at them — and they had better measure up."

The Soccer Moms have aged into Aspiring Ivy Moms. "My child goes to Dartmouth" is the new "My child is an honor student at Fill-in-the-Blank Elementary."

To be sure, the frenzy had other drivers.

Massive immigration in the past 40 years has imported parents who dreamed about Harvard in their homelands.

Geographic boundaries dissolved, first from airline deregulation, then from the Internet. Students in South Dakota chat online with students in Brooklyn. They research schools all over the country (even though the majority of students still attend college within 100 miles of their high school).

As a result, more and more students apply to the small group of schools crowned as the top 25. The number of seats stay the same at private schools, and the ante goes up. Kids go to Costa Rica to save baby turtles. Parents fly in SAT consultants to tutor their kids on vacation.

Admissions officers say they can smell the overpackaging, and they're sick of it. They say it's more valuable to spend your summer bagging groceries at Safeway than building houses in Uganda. They want kids to be kids — as long as your SAT scores and GPAs are as high as everyone else's.

Students from high-income families understand the system. They can afford SAT-prep courses and they go to high schools with Advanced Placement classes and better teachers.

"If you're a low-income kid, what's the first thing you think about when you hear what these colleges are looking for?" asks Pace University's Sean Callaway, who teaches low-income kids about the business of college admissions. "I'm not good enough. You have to be perfect. It's no use to apply."

At the country's 156 most selective colleges, only 3 percent of students came from families in the lowest-25 percent income bracket, according to a study from the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Colleges have shifted from need-based aid for low-income students to merit-based scholarships to improve their class profiles, which observers say discounts tuition for families who can afford to pay it.

What does this say about equity and access, Thacker asks. Aren't those important goals of higher education? Isn't higher education the best opportunity for upward mobility in our meritocracy?

"We have the right to expect moral leadership from higher education," Callaway says. "If you're going to speak about values, you need to position it in the admissions process ... the medium is the message."

THACKER IS FEELING overwhelmed, slightly stuck. He spends all his time thinking about the admissions problem he's helped expose. But it's too big, too complex, perhaps too quixotic, this quest of one.

He's unsure of the next step. Thacker wants someone to research the health effects of student anxiety. His supporters have cleaved in two: High-school counselors want him to advocate for change in the admissions process, for instance, by demanding that colleges refuse to participate in the rankings, as Reed College has done. The admissions people would prefer that his nonprofit serve as "a council of elders," a think tank to discuss problems and solutions.

"He's now sort of a rock star" at conferences, says Poch from Pomona. "And while high-school counselors and admissions counselors can nod their heads, they aren't the policy-makers."

Thacker needs to get to the presidents, trustees and school principals, Poch says. He needs to get on Oprah.

It's unclear whether Thacker has that ambition.

"I have no single prescription" for the problem, he says.

He knows that in order to clean up this mess, all the players — students, parents, high schools and, most importantly, colleges — will have to take the leap together.

To that end, Thacker has collected a list of guidelines for students and parents, telling them such obvious things as "be yourself." But he's made no such list for colleges.

Beyond the talk, it's still a long way to the leap.

Sharon Pian Chan is a Seattle Times staff writer. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.