College admissions 2009 report and confessional

I had big plans to blog my way through my oldest child’s college admissions process, and co-blogger/technical guru KC Jones set up this blog for that to happen. Well, here’s why that fizzled during the most intense parts of the process:

1. I discovered that when your kid is a teen, you can’t pour out your soul about what’s going on with him the way you can when you have an incoming kindergartner. Au contraire.

2. So I moved away from that concept and started trying to aggregate the most useful information I could find for other parents about college admissions. But then it became clear that parents who are paying attention are inundated with an overwhelming barrage of information – far more than we can process – and the parents who aren’t paying attention aren’t going to read this blog either.

But with my son graduating from high school next week and the college search behind us, here are some key things I learned from the process.

We Class of 2009 families were told it would be extra-tough for our kids – this high school graduating class, and reportedly the ones immediately before and after it (2008 and 2010), are the largest ever, in U.S. history.

And we were told that our kids had to be not just superstars but veritable gods and goddesses to get into the most sought-after schools; that the competition would be crushing.

I’m happy to say it wasn’t that bad. For example, short of the Harvard-Stanford pantheon, UCLA is often presented as the holy grail of the 21st-century college search. Here’s the anecdotal information: Quite a few of my son’s friends got into UCLA without a sweat – all wonderful, amazing, talented kids, but within the range of normal; not necessarily jaw-droppingly perfect in every way. Others are going across the bay to now-prized UC Berkeley – also great kids, but still normal mortals.

What about Harvard (pictured) and Stanford? One of my son’s classmates is going to Stanford, and she is indeed an impressive, accomplished achiever. I know that a couple of his more-ambitious classmates applied to Harvard, though not with wild eagerness, and didn’t get in. The one kid we know this year who did is a talented musician from a very high-end Bay Area suburb – and who is going without enthusiasm, to please his parents.

Here’s a random and partial list of colleges that accepted kids this year in my son’s SFUSD world: Berklee College of Music, Cooper Union, Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, McGill, New York University, Oberlin, Pace University, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, University of Indiana, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, George Washington University, University of Washington, plus many other UCs and CSUs.

And here’s my son’s story: He’ll go to Oberlin Conservatory (a venerable private liberal-arts college outside Cleveland) to study jazz trumpet. He was very specific about what he wanted during his college search – unusually focused, I would say – and applied to a limited number of colleges, with Oberlin the most ambitious. He was accepted to all of them, most being CSUs. As an applicant, he was a distinct package: a jazz trumpeter with a long music resume, high test scores and an indifferent grade point average (it slid as his list of music activities grew every year).

Obviously, a BFA in jazz trumpet is not the most marketable of degrees, but it’s unstoppable. (I keep meeting college journalism majors who seem utterly unaware that there is no paid future whatsoever in their field, unless they re-create the entire industry on their own; at least my son is in touch with reality.) Oberlin has both a stand-alone conservatory and a traditional college and does offer a dual-degree program, which my son is considering moving into, possibly to pursue his passions for history and/or politics.

Here are a couple of other lessons learned.

• By now I’ve seen many, many students who were accepted to fine colleges that they could not, in the end, afford financially. (We were lucky; pricey Oberlin is offering us sufficient financial aid.) Many settled for a second or third choice because that’s what they could afford. Since I’ve listened to so many parents of young children trying to assess schools based on what colleges their graduates ultimately attend, this is a really important point to understand – you’re largely looking at family income, not academic outcome. This is especially true of many students attending many CSUs, and even more so with San Francisco State, City College, and suburban Bay Area community colleges like Skyline, Laney and College of Marin. (And those schools are providing excellent educations, too.)

• I watched as some kids handled the whole process themselves, without parental involvement, compared to others in which the parents were on top of things the whole time. We were in the latter camp except for the fact that my son did the research, quite doggedly, and chose the schools to apply to. He insists that the outcome would have been the same if we’d left him to do it all himself. But my observation – strictly anecdotal – is that while there are indeed many students who work the entire process themselves, with great success (a demographic in which this is especially true is the children of Chinese immigrant parents), there are others who I think would have had a more shining outcome if there’d been some parental involvement and guidance. That’s not to say that those kids won’t be happy and successful at college – or that those who were steered to prestige, big-name schools by pushy parents will be better off.

I still think there’s a need for a particular kind of blog; actually, KC has been doing this part of the College Admissions Beast blog already. What busy applicants and their parents do need is ongoing reminders landing in their inbox of dates, deadlines and obligations throughout the process, plus opportunities such as local college fairs, SAT prep options and such. It needs to be steadily maintained and relentlessly localized. Another huge need is one that some benefactor should be providing for SFUSD – high-level college application counseling and guidance at all SFUSD high schools, as opposed to the uneven, catch-as-catch-can resources that are provided now.

Congratulations to the Class of 2009! You're the future leaders, peacemakers, artists, innovators who will bring us a better world. We're so proud of you.