Our Obsession with Perfection: A Broken College Admissions Pipeline
“I got in and he didn’t”
Where I grew up, not taking a test prep class for the high school entrance exam meant that you were already behind in the college admissions race.
At the first open house, hundreds of eager students listened as the school went over its academic program, clubs, student life, and lengthy admissions process. They took careful note of the October testing deadline, the need for official transcripts, and above all else, the fact that if you decided to apply to this school, you were forbidden from applying anywhere else in that district.
At the end of the info session they asked interested students to pick up an application packet. I joined a horde of people, pushed forward by their parents, and dutifully retrieved the form.
When I walked back out to the parking lot there was a yellow postcard on every car windshield:
Sign up now for 10% off our entrance exam classes! Last year, we placed over 85% of our students into their top school.
“Thanks to your classes I was able to answer one more math question correctly than my best friend. I got in and he didn’t.”
-An anonymous 8th grader.
The Asian Parents WeChat Group Part I
To minimize risk, parents continue to send their children to test prep classes, where they learn that perfect scores will be rewarded with money, and imperfect scores with shame. What better way to spend the summer? After all, you don’t have time to explore your interests — -college application season is a mere 15 months away!
The summer before junior year my friends were at SAT bootcamp, sending snapchats during their lunch break of thick prep books opened atop picnic tables, desperately trying to get a head start on the 300 practice problems for the week.
Certificates lined the walls of the tutoring center, where every December, as results were announced, those who got a perfect 2400 received $240 visa giftcards.
The previous spring, when everyone in the Asian Parents WeChat Group were busy signing their kids up for the same “accelerated” class to get a group discount, my mom asked if I would like to join them. I flatly refused, saying
“If you wanted to spend $4,000 for a 2350 buy plane tickets for a family vacation to Hong Kong instead.”
So we did.
“150 point boost guarantee”
Now that you’ve successfully beaten the system, it is time to perpetuate the cycle with the next generation of parents. A perfect score confers upon you social status and the ability to cash in on your hard work by imparting your knowledge to younger students.
Junior spring into senior year, students at my high school ran an SAT tutoring service, charging more than $40/hour to have a fellow high schooler tutor you.
It had a sleek website, filled with headshots listing the number of perfect 800s each tutor received, a sticker displaying a “150 point boost guarantee”, and links to Twitter promos.
The tutoring service had revenues of over $50,000. Pretty good money for a high school side gig.
I didn’t work for them, partly out of pride, mostly because I felt like I was cheating parents out of their money. The fact that there was a market this large in central New Jersey sickened me. I thought by refusing to teach people ways to game the system that I was better than the system.
“I never thought of myself as a minority”
In the narrow road to success, conversations about diversity, inclusion, and implicit bias are absent. As a result, students aren’t exposed to different perspectives and don’t realize their own prejudices.
My high school admitted 85 students a year, out of a pool of over 200 (now 400). We had 1 (one) African-American student in the 7 years of students I interacted with. But we always scored fine on the diversity scorecard, which only looked at the percentage of students that were minorities, because, as I didn’t realize until college, when someone asked me why I wasn’t using the Office of Minority Education, to which I replied
“because I never thought of myself as a minority,”
Asians are minorities, and not all minorities are equal.
I enjoyed the people in my class. I went from a middle school of 1,100, where I could count on one hand the number of East Asians, to a high school of 285, where I shared a last name with multiple classmates.
Who cares about diversity in background or thought when were all going to become computer scientists anyway? Or so the thinking went. The only thing that mattered was who could pick up the most Ivy-league acceptances.
The Asian Parents WeChat Group Part II
It’s bad enough when you compare yourself to your peers. It gets worse when parents get in on it too.
My phone buzzes in class. It’s supposed to be off and away in my locker, but everyone knows that everyone else keeps their phone on them. Y’know, for emergencies.
It’s a friend in a group chat, with a screenshot of his mom texting him another classmate’s chemistry exam score, asking what his score was, so that she may compare the scores and brag to the other parent how her son scored higher on the exam. This, even though she knows full well we’re in class. The best part is the fact that the classmate is also in this group chat, and has no idea that scores are up on the online gradebook, and even less what his score was.
Our Obsession with Perfection
In the world of competitive high schools, the narrow definition of success doesn’t leave any room for stepping outside of the lines.
Lots of people are questioning what’s wrong with the American higher education system. And there are lots of right answers, from crushing student loan debt, to atrocious college graduation rates, to highly publicized accounts of a lack of administrative accountability, free speech, mental health, sexual assault, homelessness, food insecurity………
But for me, the little corner that I am most passionate about is fixing our obsession with perfection. Because by the time students get to college, they would have already spent thousands of hours in the broken college admissions pipeline, practicing, rehearsing, preparing for that moment, going for the highest grade, the best score, and the most recognized, name-brand school.
It started in middle school for me. For others, it was even earlier. Parents hire coaches for their pre-schoolers to prep them for the interview into kindergarten, to get them into a good elementary school, to make sure they were in the best middle school, that was a feeder to one of the top high schools, so they were well-positioned to get into an elite university.
It’s a system built around the myth that a successful applicant needs to be perfect and follow a formula to check off all of the boxes. That myth needs to stop.
Competence over Happiness
The current system sucks the life out of anyone who wants to follow their passions because doing so is a risk that students, and their parents, aren’t willing to take. It is easy to think that if it were you, that you would make the correct decisions and not crumble under the weight of your internal, peer, parental, societal, and cultural expectations.
As a result of this system, we become excellent sheep. Extraordinarily functional lemmings who know nothing but how to jump through hoops, to color between the lines, and to follow instructions to a T.
So for our college careers, we do what we know best: become a code monkey for large tech companies. Work as mindless drones for investment banks. Sell our souls to consulting firms.
We base our values on competence, even over happiness. Because being competent at something validates all of the hours we spent slaving for a grade. It means we are successful at something. At getting manufactured community service trips, at laboring over a musical instrument for years (you were free to choose, as long as it was either a piano or violin. I did both), at diligently playing sports, season after season (because colleges love continuity), at racking up resume-fluffing honors (National Honor Society, club presidencies, etc), and at writing compelling personal statements thanks to the college coach your parents hired.
I’ve used “we” here because my experience is still being played out by students everywhere.
One of my friends quit the National Honor Society his senior year because he didn’t like the phoniness. He tried convincing me to drop out as well. I was too scared to. After all, I didn’t want to be the only person who didn’t have NHS written on their resume and as one of their 10 extracurriculars on their college application. Now though, I wish I had the courage to do so — -to actually take a stand for what I believe in and break free of the pipeline.
