Is a College New Currency?
What would guarantee acceptance into a good college in the 2020’s? FBI accuses Georgetown University, Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Southern California and UCLA, among others in a college-entrance bribery scheme.
To get into good colleges high school students of ’80s had to have perfect grades and play sports. In the ’90s they had to add volunteer hours to their college applications. It was a decade when every young person was volunteering at a local animal shelter or at a local food bank.
This formula didn’t work for students of the ’00s. In order to differentiate themselves, they not only had to be creative in selecting their volunteer opportunities but also had to be presidents of the clubs at their respective high schools.
Students of the 2010s had an even more difficult task at hand. When every student has good grades, volunteers, plays sport and runs a school club, what would the secret sauce be to get into a college of your dreams? These students took it up a notch, they went in strides to create non-profits and write books on how to do it.
I talk to a lot of young people who apply to attend Gooddler Social Innovation Youth Incubator, and it seems like every other teenager in the Bay Area has a non-profit. Most of these non-profits serve communities of India, Southeast Asia or Africa. The process is simple, you either find a corporate partner in the US to donate goods to be shipped to these regions, or you take a “design thinking” curriculum, readily available online and travel to teach it to the communities in the third world countries. If you are a freshman in a high school and you are just starting to do research on how to register a non-profit, you are too late. The race to get into a college of your dream is heating up. What wouldn’t you do to see your child get in?
The events of today with FBI accusing major elite universities in a college-entrance bribery scheme just shows you that an elite college is a modern day currency.
And while this news is making headlines, I would want to believe that it is just one isolated case, a scheme designed for a handful of people. For the rest of us the question remains:
what would guarantee acceptance into a good college in the 2020’s?
A rhetorical question, what is the purpose of getting into a good college?
A large number of teenagers, prompted by us, adults around them, and some targeted at us advertising that ricochets off us, thinks about getting into a good college as a mean to land a good job, which as a result will secure a financially stable old age, aka retirement. They might not say it outloud but, when probed with questions, that is where conversations go. Scary thought!
What happened to pursue your passion, thinking about your contribution in this world, making a true difference for the cause you care about? Thoughts of strategizing your young life with the sole purpose of being able to create a brilliantly written college application are taking over. College is a currency and if invested well will bring a good return. Well, this is a topic for a different discussion.
What the Gooddler Social Innovation Youth Incubator is set to accomplish is not a trivial task. Our youth learns a collaborative approach to problem-solving which takes into consideration the culture, customs, behaviors, direct and indirect stakeholders, everyone and everything that can potentially be affected by the solution brought forth. This approach requires slowing down to be able to reflect, research and strategize. Our projects not only address the needs of communities but also have solid business structures. Afterall, philanthropy and impact should not exist separate from businesses, impact metrics should not be added to a business as an afterthought, businesses should be built with an impact as a cornerstone. It requires a mental shift… easier said than done!
While we all continue to think about it, things are slowly moving forward. What a weekend it was at the Gooddler Social Innovation Youth Incubator! Our team of super-teens, no less, facing pressures from multiple sides — from parents with their never-ending requests and a remarkable ability to fill every second of the life of their teenagers with what they believe to be extremely valuable activities, to school demands with weekly tests and a whirlwind of activities, ranging from sport meets to club meetings and everything else in between — was able to accomplish by Sunday evening what seemed to be an impossible task on Saturday morning, create four incredible social enterprises, all with solid business models.
The teams worked on their projects for the last three months. Three face-to-face meetings and a dozen weekly virtual team meetings later, it all came together beautifully, leaving smiles on the faces of everyone involved. I will leave it up to each team to talk about their projects in the blogs that would follow. For now, I just wanted to express how incredibly inspired I feel by the level of maturity in the group, commitment to their respective causes and remarkable personal resilience. They are starting a new trend for students of 2020s. What do you think?
Author: Galina Fedorova
