Ranks Are Rank

Two pieces in today’s New York Times reflected on the absolute nonsense of the U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) annual rankings of colleges and universities. A news article predicted the annual angst the rankings issue will draw. An opinion piece by a recent University of Pennsylvania alum offered an insider perspective on the competitive toxicity that permeates the “elite” schools for those who won the admission game.

But such annual teeth-gnashing has no apparent impact, as the process marches not-so-merrily along. USNWR and highly selective colleges keep raking in the dough, collateral damage be damned.

I suppose my annual dismay is just as predictable and just as futile. I’ve been at it for decades with no discernible impact, other than occasional “Amens” from my very small choir.

This year I focus on a slightly different dimension of the issue; the many women and men who are neither part of USNWR nor the vast majority of college administrators who go along with the game even as they bitch about it.

I’ve often described the trickle-down nature of the selective college chase. Although this is primarily a private and wealthy public school phenomenon, the mythology of prestige, superb education and meritocracy permeate our national misunderstanding. While the chances of gaming the system are remote in most communities, it doesn’t inhibit striving, despite the insurmountably long odds. The idea of Ivy League superiority is as deeply embedded in small town Kansas as in mid-town Manhattan. 

Trickle-down.

Because admission to Harvard, for example, is statistically much more likely from the Horace Mann School in New York, the competition for Horace Mann is as stiff, or stiffer, than the competition for Harvard.

Kids from some middle schools are statistically more likely to get into Horace Mann or its so-called peers, so the competition for those middle schools is equally intense. And it trickles down into elementary schools and, perhaps most hilariously, into pre-schools, which admit only those toddlers who present the necessary predictive pedigree. 

If not so horrifying for children, it would be amusing to watch how some pre-schools begin grooming kids and families for the abuse. Test prep for 3 year-olds so that they will be dressed up and shoved up the ladder, burnishing cocktail bragging rights for parents and for the schools on both sides of each upward transaction.

At each transition point, the receiving schools serially cull the little strivers, finally distilling the 10s of thousands down to the select few who survive the process. Everyone in the game loses. The anointed “winners” arrive on campuses with deep anxiety and debilitating fear of failure. They are often incurious and lack passion, because curiosity and passion were not the currencies of the realm they navigated. The “losers” are often heartbroken and forced through an emotional readjustment to whatever sub-stratospheric college they are left with.

Learning, at every level of this pyramid scheme, is sacrificed to the chase. It should be understandable that, among other effects, the humanities are dying. That happens when humanity is dying.

The unsung villains in this long-running soap are the administrators, parents, and counselors who oil the machine. School heads, like I was, brag about the numbers of their kids who get into selective colleges, despite that they and their schools had nothing to do with those kids getting into those colleges. They only chose the kids most likely to fulfill their institutional bragging rights, and were happy to sacrifice all the others. It is cruel to watch how many of them discard the disappointing “performers” to make room for a fresh batch of strivers at the next enrollment juncture. The “swell” St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn is an example. They claim a progressive mantle and then play the game viciously and were rewarded by being called “the best school in America” by the Wall Street Journal a few years back.

For the cast of villains, an incentive system overrides any smidgeon of understanding about the  damage caused by the process. The head and counselors of any fancy school will be judged by their success in elite placements. I watched up close how many would deny it and then do it. Administrators at every point along the gravy train will cluck about “student-centered,” “play-based,” and “deep learning” while doing everything possible to never be relegated to “second tier.” 

This obsession with tiers leads to a cascade of tears shed by the winners and losers. 

Yes, this is small grievance potatoes in a world and nation where violence and poverty are rampant. But still . . .

(As I typed this last sentence an email popped up soliciting my interest in a job as College Admissions Coach for an organization called Winning Ivy Prep! You just can’t make these things up.)