<p>It’s not that the boot camp would “cripple” a student or is necessarily “dishonest,” at least not to me. It’s that one would think that kids aged 17-18–especially the most privileged ones–would know how to write 500 words about themselves without hours of coaching and training.</p>
<p>emilybee’s story about her son shows exactly the kinds of advantages kids gain from going to the right schools with the right supports. My kids attend a diverse, urban public school where the GCs are stretched really thin and we are basically on our own in the college-preparation process. Students are steered toward a class called “Advanced Writing Workshop” as a way to help them get comfortable writing essays but from what I have seen the class only serves to make their writing more bombastic and fanciful.</p>
<p>“I also can’t imagine how exhausting it would then be for an introvert to be living in a dorm and taking classes surrounded by outgoing colorful extroverts who were constantly putting on a show. My head hurts just thinking of it.”</p>
<p>If they are extroverts, it’s not putting on a show. It’s who they are, which might be different from your kid but is equally as sincere and valid.</p>
<p>It is a rare high school student who couldn’t benefit from help with their college essays. OP, have you ever read Harry Bauld’s book “On Writing the College Application Essay”? He summarizes all of the bad cliche essays that students write, and then moves on to helping students write effectively. The book is available for cheap or even free from a library. A self-motivated kid is going to be able to pick up that book and dramatically improve their essay.</p>
<p>Or, they could be a fortunate kid who attends Horace Mann where tuition is over $40k a year and get Mr. Bauld’s advice personally, because he teaches English there. </p>
<p>We didn’t pay for application boot camp for our kids (though D2, who wanted nothing to do with my Bauld-inspired suggestions, was lucky to get the advice and enthusiasm of a friend of mine who’s a professional writer), but if someone said my kid could spend a week of application boot camp with Harry Bauld for $14k, I figure it would be a lot cheaper than paying Mann tuition (not to mention having to move to NYC ). </p>
<p>I personally find Michelle Hernandez’s style overblown–her descriptions of how students should describe their activities put the purple in prose–but hey if people want to spend $14k for a week of boot camp, they’re welcome to it. </p>
<p>I don’t know why we’re shocked when people pay a lot of money for luxury versions of stuff you can get for much cheaper. It’s all around us every day.</p>
<p>Introverted kids can write essays too and find plenty of kids just like them in colleges. Essays don’t have to be about the rah-rah things you did, they can also be about how you think. My younger son’s best essay (IMO) was about how he felt like a real historian when he was doing a volunteer project filing neighborhood association papers and realized first hand the limitations of primary sources. He kept getting really interesting stories that were missing the endings.</p>
<p>What I thought was funny about the article was not the Essay boot camp, but the truly horrific subjects some of the kids chose to write about. Writing about peeing on yourself, because you couldn’t tear yourself away from an interesting conversation is not going to make anyone want you. </p>
<p>I plan to send my kids to a college essay workshop, it’s only $300 for one 1.5-hour seminar and three 1-hour private coaching sessions with an expert. They would most likely do ok on their own but I don’t want to chance it.</p>
<p>In the case of my shy, dutiful, humble daughter who has lived on the social sidelines, writing is the place where she stands out the most, and I personally believe that her success as an applicant really did hinge on her essays. People come in all kinds of packages.</p>
<p>How other people spend their money is a constant source of amusement for me. If you have the money, go ahead and spend it on a camp that doesn’t even include meals! It’s not like the admissions counselor at Yale is going to call the parents and say “you know, your child was marginal but then we read that ESSAY and we had to have her!” They’ll never really know what the ROI is. </p>
<p>What the market will bear. What about these counselors that start with the kids in middle school to guide them through the process so that their chances of getting to a highly selective schools are optimal? A lot of them here in my neck of the woods. I know someone who has contributed a lot of money to top schools years BEFORE his kid is applying so it has no smell of bribery and he’s on board for being hit up for more as his kid is applying to the top schools. Kid goes to a top prep and he has a top counselor that has been working with them for several years. He would laugh at the idea of this essay writing camp, as a desperate straw that those come-too-late are grasping for too little. He’s paying 6 figures before his kid gets an acceptance letter or even applies, so, yes, I’ll bet his kid gets into HPY or like. </p>
<p>That’s actually pretty sad. I wonder what the kid thinks about it? Probably–“if this is how the game is played, I might as well win.” On the other hand, he might end up spending the rest of his life feeling entitled to things simply because of who his parents are or what strings they can pull to assist him–and someday find himself in a situation where even that isn’t enough.</p>
<p>I think that the admissions officer who revealed the content of the essays that caused the students to be rejected has violated the confidentiality expectations of the applicants, even though the students remain anonymous. No matter how ill-chosen the remarks in the essay (and those were pretty extreme), I think that the applicant should not have to read about it in The New York Times years later. I fault Bruni for publishing the information, as well as the admissions officer for disclosing it.</p>
<p>There are things that adults learn that they need to keep completely under wraps. I have gained a lot of information about various people in the course of my professional life that I have never revealed to anyone else, even when I was being prodded about the information, and when disclosing it would have been helpful to me.</p>
<p>Or he may understand that sometimes to get an extraordinary result, one must have extraordinary preparation, work and effort. For instance, while some other students were maybe only marginally working with a counselor during junior year, if at all, he was working with a counselor for years, learning about the process, making changes along the way and not pretending he knows how the system works.</p>
<p>But fluffy, in this case do you think it will be the years of preparation that will make a difference…or the largesse of the kid’s parents? There are many people who pay for that level of counseling, but they don’t all have gazillions of dollars to hedge their bets at multiple elite schools.</p>
<p>These kids get into the top schools and do just fine, from what I have seen in the last 15 years. Yeah, some have issues but not at the rate of the middle of the income and lower crowd.</p>
<p>There are two parts of this.
Clearly, a huge donation makes it infinitely easier to get in, probably a shoe-in.</p>
<p>But the other part is the kid is working with counselors for a long time, going to a top prep school (which presumably means it is competitive and a lot of work), realizes that people who are just doing essays now are behind the curve already, he also learned a lot about prep and also not taking that “shoe-in” as a given.</p>
<p>It would be different if the example was of a kid whose parents made a huge donation, but wasn’t working with counselors or going to a top prep school and was instead phoning it in a non-competitive, non-top prep school.</p>
<p>My drill instructors at boot camp would have probably gotten them the same results in less than four days, but they would have had to sacrifice some blood, sweat and tears for it. </p>
<p>I see nothing wrong with a business employing 12 people who can successfully assist high school students during a critical time as long as they are not writing the essays for them. And isn’t $14,000 the going rate for monthly allowances this year?</p>
<p>Wait for the article on Grad School Bootcamp.</p>
<p>I guess we American are a bit provincial on this. Why is this shocking.
I knew a few international students who actually paid top dollars to have people write personal essays for them.
The essays include things that students clearly have not done (bogus charity works, etc).
Yes, quite of few have gotten into Ivies.
By the way, they are doing quite well after college - karma is just a myth. :o)
In this day and age, it is not a surprise that money can give you a leg up on all sort of things.</p>
<p>There are plenty of kids who get into top schools without using all of these advantages like essay workshops and what not. While I went to very rigorous public high school (Scarsdale would be a good comparison) which did have a history of sending kids to Ivies, I wrote my essays and did the rest of my applications all by myself. My post high school counselor a suggestions weren’t that helpful for my search or the essays, I only think I applied to one school he suggested (as my safety). The only help I had on my essays was from my mom offering to proofread them.</p>
<p>I specifically remember when I showed him my last draft of my common app essay, he told me I should promote myself more. I did not follow that advice since it seemed incredibly forced and
unnatural. It’s likely that this is exactly how the essays from this boot camp sound. I honestly think that unless a kid is a poor writer, participating in such a workshop might actually stifle the development of their essays.</p>
<p>I graduated from Penn last month. Graduate school applications (at least for doctoral programs) were very refreshing compared to undergrad. No more weight put on all of this nonsense. PhD admissions are done by department so they only care about relevant displays of merit. No more pressure to pretend that you want to be president of ten clubs!</p>
<p>Or your kid can go to a college with more introverts (what my introvert did, picked a STEM school where there is a pretty big cohort of introverts that she can, um, hang out quietly with. :)</p>
). </p>