Is this whole "college craze" a recent phenomena?

Parents Forum
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<p>Another mid-70s almost-East Coast preppie here. My school didn’t offer classes called “AP”, but we took the AP tests, I in Calculus, Spanish, French. English was considered useless to take, because no college any of us would apply to would let you out of its English requirement.</p>

<p>There was definitely competitiveness and anxiety associated with applications, but nothing like now. (On the other hand, only a handful of schools, and not the most desirable ones, had ED, so there was really only one judgment day.) My school regularly sent 3-4 kids/year to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan, with one-offs to MIT, Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Michigan. That pretty much took care of the top third of the class. I was first in my class (and the #2 only wanted to go to RPI), so it was basically understood that I would have my pick of colleges (and that I shouldn’t crowd my classmates by applying to more than a handful). I applied only to two colleges, my first choice and my safety, Harvard, where I had strong family ties. But my best friend also only applied to two colleges, Yale and Princeton, and his only claim to fame was being the multi-sport varsity athlete with the highest grades (he was probably ranked 6th or 7th out of about 110).</p>

<p>The Ivy League was relatively expensive, but the COA was well under 10% of my family’s income (which was good, but hardly sensational, then), and probably no more than 15-20% of what an experienced, union steelworker could make. It was a period of rapid inflation, so low-interest college loans had negative real interest rates. </p>

<p>In my community, going away to college – beyond your parents’ reach – was the norm; it was only when my school started accepting lots of scholarship students that anyone went to the local public university. But outside the thin upper/professional class of my city, going to college itself was exotic, and living in a dorm practically scandalous. (For my Polish scholarship-student rival and his family, RPI was a biiiiig leap. However, many of the scholarship athletes, if they had decent grades – meaning Bs – found themselves at Amherst or Williams.) At the blue-collar summer job I had, no one had ever heard of Yale or Harvard (although they all knew various college students). The attitude was that there must be something terribly wrong with me if I had to go all the way to Connecticut to find a college that would take me. In a county with a population of 1 million, there were probably no more than 10 schools, roughly split among private, Catholic, and public, that ever sent students to elite colleges.</p>

<p>So . . . among the things that have changed are a much broader awareness of the benefits (such as they are) of elite colleges. Some of that is USNWR, but a lot of it is The Gilmore Girls, Love Story, Conan O’Brien, Jodi Foster, Harvard Man, etc. The quality of suburban public schools has gone way up. There has been a huge boom in immigration by groups that value prestigious education. And the elite colleges, their endowments swollen with investment gains, have engaged in significant social engineering to make themselves more diverse.</p>

62

<p>“The attitude was that there must be something terribly wrong with me if I had to go all the way to Connecticut to find a college”</p>

<p>That is hilarious. Some of the wags in my town would make very similar comments about my friends who prepped and went to “distance” colleges. Hilarious.</p>

<p>I also agree about the cost. I remember everyone’s mouths going about the cost of Bennington, which everyone thought was shockingly expensive but total costs as a pecentage of one executive salary at Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth etc. was not prohibitive or anything anyone cried about. But again, most kids whose parents were the true equivalent of today’s middle class did not go “away” for high school or “far” for college. But the wealthiest guy in my town has a smaller house, smaller boat and older cars than most of the local upper middle class which isn’t uncommon today either. Family priorities are different today. Many families who give their kids everything growing up forget about the cost of college along the way.</p>

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<p>Graduated in the mid 70’s from what was then and is still one of the “best” districts in WA. No APs. Lots of hippie teachers who encouraged us to write well but never taught rules of grammer or spelling.<br>
Depression in the area when I graduated so the college results were somewhat skewed. I’ll bet fewer than 10 kids in the class even knew what an Ivy League school was. Stanford was where the really smart kids with lots of money went. UW was for those unfortunate kids whose parents insisted they live at home (for money reasons, mostly). The rest of us either went to near-by LACs or other state schools farther from home and Mom’s control!</p>

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<p>I graduated in 1971 from a working-class suburban high school in the Detroit area. We had AP classes and Honors classes as well. Most of the kids in those classes went to college. However, no one looked much beyond the state publics and many of the Honors class kids went to Wayne State so they could live at home. No one in my class went to HYP although there were a few kids in other classes who had. The valedictorian of my class went to the University of Chicago; I had one good friend (who was a football player) and he opted for Notre Dame instead of the University of Michigan. Both were recruiting him. The majority of my classmates didn’t go to college–they went to work or enlisted in the military. That’s really different from the experience of my kids, who went to schools where 99% of the students were college bound. Another big difference–tuition and room/board at the University of Michigan back then was IIRC about $1200; my parents (who were immigrants and not professionals) could afford it. They didn’t understand why I wanted to go so far away (it was 40 minutes from home)–but it wasn’t out of their reach financially.</p>

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<p>A whole series of events and social factors, dating back at least to the end of WWII, have combined to create the perfect storm we call current college admissions. The basic problem is that we have too many kids chasing too few slots at selective schools. We got to this point in a series of steps:</p>

<ol>
<li>Post-WWII GI Bill opens up college to lots of middle class kids who previously never would have considered it.</li>
<li>The Baby-boomers started to get to college age. Huge population bulge.</li>
<li> Viet Nam war pushed even more boys to choose college, since for most of the war college students are exempted from the draft. A choice between studying in college or dying in a rice paddy in a pointless war is an easy one to make.</li>
<li>The invention of government-backed college loans and need-based financial aid made it more affordable.</li>
<li> College rankings get published and prove to be popular. And being brand-conscious, many people concentrate on those schools at or near the top.</li>
<li> Echo Boomers begin to come of college age.</li>
<li> To enhance their rankings colleges start agressively marketing themselves. Can you say junk mail?</li>
<li> The internet comes along providing kids in even the most isolated towns a view into the top colleges and college life in general, generating even more interest.</li>
<li> Common App is invented.</li>
<li>CC is founded</li>
</ol>

<p>Add all that up and you have 30,000 kids applying to Harvard and Stanford and 55,000 applying to UCLA.</p>

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<p>Try my school, Texas A&M. In one year the acceptance rate to this school has gone from 70% to 30%. Not to exclude UT either. So you can add the state of Texas to that list…</p>

67

<p>Add Illinois too. In my day it was a cinch and now top students get turned down.</p>

68

<p>Back in the 1970s, there were whole categories of students who were left out of the competitive college admissions process – minorities, women (LOTS of completely capable girls in my class of 1978 went for secretarial training), children from blue-collar families whose parents did not attend college, children from poor families and immigrants. Of course, immigrants were not really a factor then. So, if your dad was a lawyer who went to an Ivy League school, and you attended a prep school or affluent suburban public school, and had good grades with a decent SAT score, you could slide into HYP or the equivalent without much stress.
Now, the top colleges have cast a much wider net, actively seeking out first-generation college students, recent immigrants, foreign students, and children from low-income families. There are more women than men in most colleges. There is no question that these students are far better off today than they were 30 years ago, when they would have had little chance of attending any college, let alone a top-rated, highly selective one. But since the number of seats at these schools has remained essentially unchanged, it’s obviously not good news for the upper-middle class white kids who used to dominate the admissions process. So it’s no surprise that their families see the current process as far more competitive and stressful than it was back in the day.</p>