<p>Today's WSJ published a review of two books on admissions--one by Michelle Hernandez and one by Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. The WSJ reviewer was apparently rather taken aback by the advice offered:</p>
<p>*What colleges are looking for these days, according to Ms. Hern</p>
<p>Both are just trying to capitaliize on the college "feeding frenzy". It's just another book for frantic parents to buy in order to find the "magic formula" to getting their child into the college of their[ parent's] dreams!</p>
<p>man, my kid is disadvantaged.</p>
<p>No sat prep books or classes, no college coaches, and he wouldn't let me read his essays until After he had submitted them. He got in anyway just being himself. Imagine that....</p>
<p>My well meaning brother bought the Wissner-Gross book for me last year. The woman and her methods are odious. The entire book is about faking it -- creating "instant" passions & exagerating credentials. Her kids were micro-managed, their teachers were hounded by her, and I'd not be surprised to see the kids on a shrink's coach some day, curled up in the fetal position.</p>
<p>Very issue specific. If your child is trying for a top 20 school it is very much on point. For the vast majority it is not so applicable. Consider the source. What demographic reads the Wall Street Journal to begin with?</p>
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If your child is trying for a top 20 school it is very much on point.
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<p>It sure seems that way. However, all three of my kids were admitted to top 20 schools in the past few years and none of them did any of the things suggested in the article. My H and I are also well educated professionals with top 20 credentials. Just goes to show...</p>
<p>So Wissner-Gross thinks summers should be spent doing research for NASA and organizing political movements and Michelle Hernandez thinks they should be spent baling hay. Or can you just bale hay if you're a rich preppie? But not bale hay if you actually live on a farm? So complicated.</p>
<p>Doesn't this all depend on your goals?<br>
Friend's son wanted hotel/restaurant management. Our high school GC staff gave him tons of flack about the fact that all he did, EC-wise, was play football. Oh, by the way, he worked 10-20 hours a week for a convention center (after all, he wanted hotel/restaurant mgmt), but the GC couldn't see past the point that he hadn't taken the requisite 5 AP's and wasn't in student government.<br>
If going to a certain college is so important that it impinges on your kid's personal choices, happiness, autonomy, independence... it's not worth it.</p>
<p>How do you get the kid to perform all these amazing feats? Just getting my teenagers to pick up their dirty laundry wipes me out. I want to read the book where the Wissner and Hernandez child victims tell all.</p>
<p>I have read both books under review, and think the first is silly and the second actually quite useful. But, yeah, the tone of both reflects regional and class concerns that are not commonplace in my region or in my economic class. I read the second book strictly for specific tips on interesting programs for high school students that I KNOW--having checked--that most high school staff members in my state have never heard of, but that young people in my state would find enjoyable. I have NO IDEA what my children's chances of getting into an out-of-state college are, and that's not really my concern at the moment. Today's job is getting my kinds good primary and secondary educations.</p>
<p>Muffy, I actually went to camp with Wissner-Gross's son (at least I assume it was; it's not exactly a common surname). We were only in middle school at the time, so I suppose he could've turned into a jerk later on, but he was really nice and down-to-earth at the time.</p>
<p>Ugh! Having read the excerpts in the WSJ link, I sure wouldn't read the Wissner-Gross book on a full stomach. </p>
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Very issue specific. If your child is trying for a top 20 school it is very much on point. For the vast majority it is not so applicable. Consider the source. What demographic reads the Wall Street Journal to begin with?
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<p>Um, I read the WSJ. That's what happens when you are married to an econ. prof. Actually, it is a pretty interesting newspaper. </p>
<p>What a miracle my son got accepted to any college. He took a very rigorous course load and did lots of interesting activities, but he never did a single activity, or took a single class, in order to make himself palatable to any particular university. He never took a test prep course, never bothered to take a practice test. I never saw any of his applications, never read or discussed his essays with him. Yet he was accepted to several top-20 schools, and attends one on a very large merit scholarship. Would he have been accepted at the one school that rejected him if we had scheduled and planned his life starting in middle school? Who knows, and who cares? He wouldn't have allowed it anyway, but if he had, I think I would hate myself. DO PEOPLE REALLY DO THESE THINGS?</p>
<p>tokenadult, sorry, but I just cannot see taking the advice of someone who advises dumping your friends every summer in order to improve yourself. (Maybe my kids just have unusually nice friends.)</p>
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<p>High school friends are overrated. Your kids are going to dump them inevitably when they head off to college. Network fast and wide in a top university; that's when friends will come in handy.</p>
<p>sueinphilly,</p>
<p>We must share the same DNA, because my son did the same thing as yours! We are still waiting to hear which school he's admitted to, but he will be ok wherever he goes!</p>
<p>"The Journal also enjoys enviable demographics. According to readership surveys, the average annual income of Journal readers is about two hundred thousand dollars—about twice that of the Times." New Yorker Mag.</p>
<p>Not your average American as I suggested. I think the issue is how to get in if you are affluent, but, not first generation college, not minority, not legacy, not a recruited athlete. Then what do you have to do to try and change the odds? It stands to reason that some are better than others at enhancing their acceptance rates. For example at most Ivy's 30% of the students are Jewish, if you believe that no ethnic group is genetically superior to another, then other factors must be nuanced.</p>
<p>^^^Averages can be deceptive. The majority of their readership is not wealthy. My husband signs up dozens of undergraduates every semester at a special student rate. One multi-millionaire skews the average. Really, I know a lot of very unwealthy people who read the WSJ daily.</p>
<p>PlanPlusDebater: I'm sorry your friends are unimportant to you. My son is home from university on break now, and he has spent a huge amount of time with his high school friends, home from universities across the nation. I certainly do not expect him to dump them. By the way, many of them are at "top universities"; however, many of them are at a variety of public institutions, and they are just as smart, and just as valuable.</p>
<p>midmo: I really like your style. It actually scares me to think anyone could argue with what you are saying.</p>
<p>Gee, my husband and I both still have close friends from our respective high schools and even (<em>gasp</em>) middle and elementary schools. I didn't realize we were supposed to dump them....</p>
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<p>As with most printed books, it's possible to badly misrepresent what an author says by taking one sentence out of context. To establish context for MY response to the Wall Street Journal review of Wissner-Gross's new book (NOT to be confused with her book that came out last year, which one CC participant is referring to above), let me describe my son's friendship relationships. </p>
<p>We have lived in the same neighborhood of rental townhouses now for about six and a half years. We have never "owned" a house and our last previous address was overseas, but our last address before that was a few miles down the road from here. We tried to return to a part of town where we had friends. My son made a friend in the neighborhood immediately after arriving, whom he sees essentially daily, and at whose house he spent about two hours this afternoon. My son has made other friends on summer programs he has attended to pursue his personal interests. Within an hour--it has never been longer than that--of returning home from any summer program, my son will be playing with his long-time local friend. I think now when they are apart they keep up conversation by telephone or instant messaging via computer. (The local friend goes to the local public schools; my son has always been homeschooled for school year K-12 subjects.) </p>
<p>Just this evening, in fact just when the several replies above were posted, my wife and son and I were discussing how to strike the balance between more face time with friends and pursuing some of his personal interests. My son mentioned to me yesterday that he has good friends now in several states--he was just at a meet-up with some of them in Chicago till the 1st. Part of his planning for college involves figuring out where to go to be most likely to find friends like the best friends he has made locally and around the country through his activities. My son will always be keeping up with friends in various places (one guy he was instant messaging today left a more distant place in Minnesota to study at Exeter two years ago), but he will always cherish each friend he has. </p>
<p>So, not having a citation or page reference from the Wall Street Journal review, but having read the book very soon after it was published, I take Wissner-Gross's meaning to be that if your child has HIS well established personal interest, and part of developing his talent in connection with that interest involves going to one of the several </p>
<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/summer-programs/%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/summer-programs/</a> </p>
<p>summer programs in various places that help in developing that talent, then the parent can tell a kid who is worried about losing contact with friends, "You can still see your local friends when you're back here, and you can make new friends while you are over there." And isn't that just the reality of going to college? It's a rare parent on CC ;) who expects Junior only to go to college with kids from the immediate neighborhood, but I don't know ANY parent on CC--certainly not me--who would suggest that anyone "dump" a friend. (The term "dumping" does NOT appear to come from the book under review. It's quite unfair to the author to put words on her page that she never typed, and unfair to me to assert that I agree with a statement that she never made.) </p>
<p>Yep, my kids have unusually nice friends too. They are very blessed with their good circle of friends. They have companions they can always come back to when they visit their childhood home, and they have emotional strength and resilience they can take into the broad world. I think it's wonderful when kids can make good friends, and I'm glad to hear it when other kids do too. Oh, yeah, and I like my online friends here on CC, and I count several of the people who appear to be disagreeing with me here as my friends.</p>
<p>Re: high school friends: It depends on where you went to high school. Mine was blue-collar, and 3,000 miles away from where I went to college and graduate school. So yeah, I didn't "dump" my high school friends, but they certainly became irrelevant once I went off to college, if only because they were geographically undesirable and no longer had much in common with me.</p>