How College Obsession Can Be a Force for Good
[Music]
[Applause]
i confess
when my oldest child my son sam was in
high school
i was college obsessed
the moment it occurred to me that he
would be applying to college
i thought about that and i worried about
it
a lot where would he go to college
how would he apply to college how does
that even work
would he get into a good college
i became that parent that you did not
want to sit next to
in an auditorium or run into that at the
grocery store
because if you did i would somehow steer
our conversation to the topic that was
on my mind
seemingly unaware of your utter lack of
interest in the topic of college
i’m sure parents were avoiding me
but that would soon change
now parents are drawn to me just to talk
to me about this topic when their
children are applying to college
because although i was gripped by
college obsession at a time when i had
been a trial lawyer for over 15 years
now i work as a professional college
admissions consultant
i want to talk to you about how college
obsession can be a force for good
in the lives of students children
when they’re applying to college and how
the help of
adults and parents can be
natural and right
let me start in the beginning when i was
nine years old
my father a lawyer took me to work with
him
it was extremely exciting to go to work
with dad because it meant going to
downtown detroit
where he worked in a classic art deco
skyscraper
the guardian building it meant rides on
shiny elevators and lunch at a diner
on that particular day on our way to
lunch
my father had to duck into another
building to meet with a lawyer
he asked me to wait in the lawyer’s
waiting room
and that’s when it happened there on the
coffee table in front of me
was a glossy magazine the building
on the cover was made of large limestone
blocks
it had arched doorways the doors were
made of a rich mahogany
it had brass hardware on the door
there was ivy climbing up the walls of
the building and blue sky up above
it was a castle when my father came out
of the lawyer’s office and saw me
looking at the magazine
he said that’s yale
that’s where all the smart people go to
college that’s where all the brilliant
people are
and he told me the lawyer he had just
met with
had gone to college there
i was amazed there was a place
where all the brilliant people were
where my father was proud
just to know someone who had gone to
school there
and no less it was a castle
it made college seem wonderful
and i think it was in that moment that a
little bit of college obsession
was made a part of me and made a part of
me
forever
now i don’t think i knew what a college
was
i don’t think college was even a thing
back then
where i grew up in the suburbs of
detroit the worldwide epicenter of the
automobile industry many people in my
life
did not have a college degree you didn’t
need a college degree to have a good job
in fact my mother envied some of our
neighbors
who had jobs in the auto companies
whether they worked in assembly sales or
some other position
because they had such stable high-paying
jobs
now don’t misunderstand my father was a
lawyer
he was a solo practitioner he made his
living legal fee to legal fee it was
just a different way of making money but
we were doing just fine
so my mother’s bit of envy not
particularly rational envy aside
everyone in my neighborhood was doing
very well we were all very comfortable
we lived very similarly in fact we lived
almost identically
because we lived in tracked housing all
the houses were alike
fast forward to the early 2000s when my
son was
about to start high school much had
changed
by the time he did start high school in
2003
the income divide between
people with degrees and people without
degrees had widened
by 60 percent
so that in 2003 a person with a college
degree
earned a median income
of sixteen thousand dollars more than
someone without
a college degree the stakes were getting
higher
also in 2003 u.s news and world report
had been publishing its famous college
rankings issue
and our minds were infused with the idea
that there were best
and better colleges and more and more
students were applying to those colleges
so naturally the admissions rate the
chance of getting into those college was
steeply and rapidly declining
for example in 1976
an applicant to yale had a better than
26 chance of being admitted a better
than one in four chance of being
admitted to yale
that rate of admission that rate of
getting into yale had declined to below
9 so now an applicant had
less than a 1 in 11 chance of getting in
and it’s not as though these colleges
had become first come first served
no now every student that applied to
yale or any of these colleges
was a needle in a haystack to be found
among an increasing number of
competitive applicants
to these stresses that according to
recently published research by two
economists
a certain parenting style started to
arise it was much more involved much
more intensive and helpful
to help children compete in this arms
race
for college admission in fact it was in
the years
early 2000s that the term
helicopter parent came in a very common
usage
among college administrators who are
experiencing
these intensive hyper-vigilant
hovering like a helicopter type parent
helicopter parent it’s a headline
grabbing term
in fact journalists who write for
media outlets like the new york times
the washington post and harvard health
publications just to name a few have
reported
that it is said of these parents that
they are
robbing children of adulthood they are
putting children at risk of higher rates
of anxiety
and depression and that these
helicopters are themselves
high strung nuisances who are tormenting
college administrators
strong words headline grabbing but the
good news is
we don’t have any proof that these
helicopter parents so-called
exist in any significant numbers we
don’t have
the academic comprehensive research to
show that they do
and what we think we know about these
helicopter parents is largely based
on anecdote
recent research out of eastern illinois
university
that included a meta-analysis
a study of the studies of helicopter
parents
found two things first
the studies did not have agreed upon or
common definition of what a helicopter
parent was
and the definitions varied widely
so you could not compare one of the
studies to the other
and secondly those studies that did try
to
zero in on the prevalence of these
parents
were not able to show that these parents
were particularly prevalent
now i can hear my friends in the
teaching profession
my friends who are college
administrators thinking to themselves
how can anyone deny the pervasiveness of
these
pushy parents you’re thinking i know
i just had one in my office yesterday my
coach just had one on his field last
week
i feel your pain i recognize your con
your cognitive dissonance i’m not saying
that those parents don’t exist i’m not
saying they’re a myth
i am saying that they are grabbing
all of the attention they are the
anecdote-worthy ones that are grabbing
the headlines
and they may be outliers
i’m asking for you to rethink
i’m asking for a reframing
two suggestions let’s shrink
the concept of the helicopter parent to
match the research that we do have
more research may be needed but for now
let’s shrink that concept and secondly
let’s embrace a new concept to talk
about
helpful involved parents
i suggest the tow truck
parent it’s a humble term
and believe me being from the motor city
it pains me to name any vehicle
by a humble name in the motor city we
name
new vehicles racy names market
marketing worthy names but this term
this humble term tow truck parent
aptly describes what i have experienced
with
parents in the last several years
they are to define them
like a tow truck often available
come to the scene when needed
and can make repairs most of the time
i’m asking for a new classification of
parent
so we can separate the hovering type
from the more intermittent type like the
tow truck parent
from the parents that are just caring
for their children
and to borrow a term of art from my
prior profession
the standard of care for our children
has been raised
necessarily as the value of that college
degree both socially and economically
has increased
so has the need for the help of parents
and adults and children’s life increased
it’s inevitable
it’s rational it’s helpful
intensive parenting is here to stay
college obsession when i talk about
college obsession
many people inextricably blended
with the idea of this intensive
parenting but college obsession
is neither a type of parenting
or linked to any particular type of
parenting
other people when i talk about college
obsession think that it is a
frenzy for admission to one particular
star-studded school or dream school
that is not college obsession that’s
college consumerism
not long ago when a group of wealthy and
powerful families including hollywood
celebrities
brought the armored trucks to the curbs
of colleges to
cheat and pay their children’s way into
the colleges
that was college consumerism run amok
and
run amok all the way to criminal
behavior
in fact it was ultimately a part of a
criminal investigation called operation
varsity blues
any college process that involves a
parent in an orange jumpsuit is not
college obsession
what college obsession is is a desire to
be
as my father put it where all the
brilliant people are
to modernize that idea it’s a desire to
be where you
will learn and where you can learn
among others in a collaborative setting
and that can be achieved at any
four-year college
community college trade school or tech
school
and you don’t need armored trucks full
of cash or any particular type of
parenting
to achieve that college obsession
is the secret sauce that motivates
young people everyone to seek out higher
education
of every type and at every level
so in my own case when the time came for
me to apply to college
i told my father i want to go to yale
after all that’s where all the brilliant
people were
my father just looked at me and said
people like us don’t go to yale
gone was that dad who so admired
education and intellectual life and
romanticized that castle that i was
seeing
and then came a very practical man who
had six children
it would have been very expensive to
send someone to yale
and from a working class all-girl
catholic school like mine
it was never imagined much less done
so if you’ve ever been in a building
where there’s a hallway and a velvet
rope is across the hallway
and a security guard wanders up to you
as you go somewhere near the velvet rope
and says to you sir madam you don’t
belong there
don’t go there you know exactly how i
felt when my father said
people like us don’t go to yale
and you may think what a shame your dad
could have
encouraged you or he could have been a
tow truck and taken down the velvet rope
it doesn’t matter what he
did for me was more important and it’s
what i want for everyone
my father gave me that little bit of
college obsession in that lawyer’s
office so many years ago
and it is what carried me through my
life
through my education and importantly it
was passed on through me
to his grandchildren my children
so when the time came for my four
children each in their turn to apply to
college
my husband and i had raised them to
revere
education to enjoy education and to have
a little college obsession
of course but now we took the velvet
rope down
and they were allowed to apply widely
so my oldest son sam unlike me
did apply to yale and he did get
into yale he didn’t go to yale
he chose to go to harvard my other three
children
all had similar opportunities they were
allowed to pl
apply widely they
were admitted to several selective and
ivy league colleges
my second son joey chose to attend mit
my third child my son tom chose to
attend harvard
and my youngest my daughter annie chose
to attend the university of michigan
go blue
so you see that spark that my father
gave me
that’s what helped and
notice that he also spoke the truth
people like us don’t go to yale
we go to other colleges and i honestly
believe that my children attended the
colleges they did because of that spark
transferred to me by my father in that
office of that lawyer so many years ago
and i think it’s why i do what i do
today
so i encourage all of you to have a
little college obsession
to have a wonderful life in higher
education
a little college obsession never did
anyone
any harm and it could be a force for
[Applause]
good