College Application Craziness
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Is applying to college really so different than it was 20 years ago?
That’s what I asked tutors, teachers, and administrators about the current frenzy surrounding the quest by private school seniors to find their way into college. First semester seniors have always been a pretty anxious bunch, I ventured. You’ve got to prepare for your final crack at the SAT, decide whether it’s worth the gamble of applying early admission, put the finishing touches on applications — all the while trying to snag the best grades in impressive classes.
That’s how I remember the process for my brothers and me. Today, does your teenager really need to have near-perfect SAT scores? Does she need to have seven extracurricular activities? Does he need to be captain of the tennis team? Ski competitively? Speak Mandarin? And if so, who’s to blame? The parents? The high schools? The colleges?
“Some issues aren’t as obvious to me, but this one is crystal clear,” a tutor who works with several private school students at the measly rate of $175 an hour said. (There are tutors with waiting lists who charge more than $500 an hour.) “The parents are crazy and they are making each other crazier and crazier, investing more and more money and time into their child’s chances of gaining acceptance to a top college. Each year I think it can’t possibly get worse — and it does.”
Tutoring used to be focused on the SAT and other exam preparation, but now more and more of the $1 billion industry is centered on helping students get good grades.
“If I were to guess, I’d say that on average, at least 60% of the high school students in private school have some kind of tutor,” an ex-marketing executive who helps high school students gain entry into their first choice college said. “I help them with homework, narrow their college choices, we write the essays together, I choose the classes they should take senior year.Almost all my charges always get into their first choice college.”
Part of this craziness has to do with the glut of money that has settled into our city limits.
“I actually can’t keep up with the demand,” a doctoral candidate who charges $250 an hour for helping high school students with their English homework said. “I just raised my rates in the spring and I’m going to raise them again. Some parents will basically pay anything not to have to worry about their children’s grades, not to have their children worry about their own grades, and above all, not to have to fight with their teenagers about getting homework done.”
Several parents who employ homework tutors said they were tired of worrying about their children’s high school careers and that this was the one problem that could be solved with money.
“I work long hours and the last thing I feel like doing when I come home is editing my kid’s paper,” a lawyer at a white-shoe firm told me. “Believe me, very few kids are handing in a paper that someone hasn’t edited.”
“This has just become the way it is,” a college counselor at a private school told me. “Parents are so stressed out about getting their children into college.It’s not even that parents just want Ivy League schools, but they feel like they’ve paid more than $100,000 for their kid to go to high school. Their friends should at least have heard of their kid’s college.”
According to the New York State Association of Independent Schools, in 2005 there were 10% more children attending the city’s 87 independent schools than there were in 2000.This is coupled with the fact that top universities are receiving more applications than ever. Princeton, for example, accepted 10.2% of its applications from the 2010 graduating class, down from 11% the year before.
“My friends call me and ask me if I’ve called for this application and sent in this test form and called so-and-so’s miraculous tutor,” an acquaintance who chose not to hire any tutors to help her oldest child, a senior in high school, said. “I tell them that I don’t want to hear it, that they should do what works for their family and I’ll do what works for mine. But it’s hard. I know that he’s better off learning right now that he needs to make his own way, but in this kind of environment, I think he feels deprived.”
It seems that even while Harvard and Princeton have taken early admissions off the table, there’s little college presidents can do to reduce the number of anxious parents that are hell-bent on their own version of early admissions.
“I had a mother of an eighth grader called me yesterday to find out when she should begin tutoring her daughter for the SATs,” the doctoral candidate told me. “I giggled and told her that for the grand ol’ rate of $1,000 an hour I could begin working with her daughter next week. I was kidding. She wasn’t.”
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