Striving for the ivies: a sport for its own sake?

An amusing essay from the New York Times Book Review on two books about elite college admissions:

Before reading “Fat Envelope Frenzy,” I was convinced that our nation’s youth spent all their time uploading party photos to the Internet. I still think that. Yet it appears that a division of labor has been effected. Reading about Felix, who at 14 spent the summer assisting doctors at a rural orphanage in his parents’ native China; and Nabil, a top “mathlete” already familiar with the work of his potential future professors; and Lisa, a national champion rhythmic gymnast who tells Jager-Hyman that gymnastics “is like my anti-drug — not that I’d be doing drugs,” I kept thinking of poor John Stuart Mill, the original early applicant, whose father home-schooled him from the age of 3, teaching him Greek and Latin and the theories of Jeremy Bentham, but not how to feel. At the age of 20, Mill suffered a breakdown; already one of the most brilliant polemicists in England, he couldn’t say anymore what the point of it was. As he later wrote, “The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

What’s the point of all this striving now? It’s hard to tell, because the striving itself, as a kind of sporting contest, has become so much a part of American life. Jager-Hyman is alive to some of the more outrageous aspects of the college admissions process, but she is also an eager participant. At the drop of a hat she will switch into admissions-officer mode, telling us for example that Felix, while a nice guy and a straight-A student and an accomplished pianist, is “also a member of a group” — Asian-Americans — “that is overrepresented in the Harvard applicant pool, which could be a disadvantage.” In the end, almost despite yourself, you read “Fat Envelope Frenzy” to find out who got in and who didn’t.

(The other book is THE RUNNER: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, by David Samuels.)