The Chronicle of Higher Education

July 18, 2003

Help Not Wanted

Parents are more involved than ever in the admissions process, but they can do more harm than good

By JENNIFER JACOBSON

In her senior year of high school, Chloe Lewis knew exactly which colleges she should apply to. The problem was, so did her mom.

Although Amy Lewis, a French teacher in Claremont, Calif., wanted her daughter to apply to Boston University and McGill University, in Montreal, Chloe did not like either one and wanted to apply to small liberal-arts colleges on the East Coast. Because they disagreed, Chloe was reluctant to include her mother in the next step -- actually applying.

"I wasn't sure if I wanted her to read my essays," says Chloe, who graduated this year from the girls' half of the Webb Schools, a pair of private schools in Claremont, where her mother is head of the foreign-language department. When she finally let her mother proofread the applications, the two argued over the wording. "I was completely overwhelmed," Chloe says. "I told her it was my own thing. They were my applications."

Many parents, it seems, tend to forget what Chloe sternly reminded her mother: "I'm the one applying to college. You're not."

Admissions deans and guidance counselors say that parental involvement in the college admissions process has increased in recent years -- and not for the better. More parents now heavily edit applications or fill them out themselves, make repeated calls to admissions offices, or threaten lawsuits if a college rejects their child.

This heavy-handed approach has sometimes strained relations between parents and admissions officials, and has caused some in the field to fear that the voice they hear in application essays is the parent's rather than the student's.

"It's an important developmental moment for a student making a claim on their future," says Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even so, she says, "parents feel obligated to intervene to make sure college admissions stuff is done because they understand the importance of it. We assume kids don't." But with "parents faxing in everything for the kid, you think, 'Who wrote this?'"

"There have always been outrageous parents," says Ms. Jones. "We've always felt sorry for their kids. The story is how the norm has shifted. It's normal behavior for parents to order up applications and make all the phone calls."

Higher Anxiety

A simple demographic shift has contributed to the increase in parental involvement, those in the field say. While the number of students applying to college has steadily risen, the number of colleges and universities has stayed the same. That not only has made traditionally elite institutions harder to get into, but also has made some small private colleges and even flagship state universities, once thought of as "safety schools," much more selective. So while a student with a 1250 SAT score and a B+ average would have easily gotten into Union College, in New York, in 1993, today that student might not make the cut, says Daniel M. Lundquist, the college's vice president of admissions and financial aid. "Everyone got a couple clicks more selective. That took the parental group by surprise."

The greater uncertainty of getting into college is hard for parents to handle -- especially parents who send their children to top-tier private high schools, like Webb, says Hector Martinez, who has been director of college guidance at the Webb Schools for 15 years. These "families are very successful in their own lives," he says. "They aren't used to hearing 'no.' This may be the first time they're going to hear 'no.'"

And parents today are used to being heavily involved in the daily lives of their children, and have long ferried them to and from ballet lessons, soccer practices, and many other "enrichment opportunities," says Mr. Lundquist. When it's time to select a college, he adds, "they can't turn it off."

As a result, many parents are more likely to want to see everything their son or daughter submits to a college to make sure the application contains no mistakes, Mr. Martinez says. That, in turn, leads parents to act like they are the ones applying to college. "I always know there's trouble when the parent first says, 'We're going to be applying to X, Y, and Z,' instead of saying, 'My son or daughter will be applying and we're here to support him or her.'"

When admissions officers see tidy, handwritten applications capped off with a messy signature from the student, they suspect that a parent has done most of the work on the application. That leaves them wondering, "what's real here?" says Ms. Jones, of MIT.

Admissions officials say that overly involved parents are more likely to hurt rather than help students' application bids. After all, parents cannot change the raw academic data, such as grades and SAT scores, or teacher recommendations, says Thomas H. Parker, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College. But they can sap all of the originality and spontaneity out of their kids' essays, he says. Parents "end up subverting the application," he adds, because "they have the student play it safe." If this happens, "students end up losing their own voice."

And that voice can sometimes greatly influence an admissions decision. "We're looking at far more intangible than tangible qualities," Mr. Parker says. "At a certain point everyone has very high scores and grades. That's when you start to look for evidence of passion, a real commitment to an academic field, and originality. If you're reading an uninspiring essay," it may be because "parents have edited it to death."

Lawsuits Threatened

The parental involvement Ms. Jones has witnessed goes beyond the college application, however. For instance, she has seen an increase in the number of lawsuits parents threaten to file against MIT when their children are denied admission, claiming discrimination "on the basis of something," Ms. Jones says. But because MIT is "extremely data driven" and is able to prove there was no discrimination, she says, these threatened lawsuits "don't really go anywhere."

A few years ago, the parents of a child denied admission to the University of Pennsylvania threatened to sue both the institution and the dean of admissions. "The university attorneys dealt with the father and he subsequently backed down," says the dean, Lee Stetson. But the threat, along with the growing number of calls from irate parents of rejected applicants, shows that many parents think that college admissions are negotiable, Mr. Stetson says. They view it as "part of the political arena," he says. "'If you push hard enough, they'll change their mind.'"

To prevent parents from pushing, at least right after the decisions are mailed or posted on college Web sites, Ivy League institutions and other highly selective liberal-arts colleges have created a one-week "blackout period." If parents call the office during that time to inquire about a decision, they are allowed to speak only to a secretary in the office or to leave a voice-mail message.

After having worked in the admissions office at Penn for seven years, Mr. Lundquist brought the practice with him when he went to Union in 1991 "to save parents from themselves," he says. If parents do call during the blackout period claiming that "a horrible mistake has been made," 9 times out of 10 they don't call back, he says. And that's because parents' initial reactions to a negative decision are visceral. Once they realize that, he says, they calm down.

Joyce E. Smith, executive director of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, remembers when parents could call to speak to an admissions officer during the week when decisions were made and the few days after they were mailed. "That used to be part of the counseling process," she says.

At a recent association meeting in New England, members of the group told her why that is no longer the case. She heard stories from deans about parents who had cursed them and parents who had taken their sobbing child to the admissions office to tell the staff members how they had ruined the child's life.

Several weeks ago, Mr. Lundquist, of Union, was eating soup and a sandwich with a staff member in the campus dining hall when someone from the alumni office spotted him. "She said, 'Dan, we've got Mrs. So-and-So from St. Louis, the wife of an influential alum here,'" Mr. Lundquist, remembers her saying. "'Her daughter is on the wait list. Can I introduce them?'"

Mr. Lundquist thought he was going to finish his lunch, but "five heartbeats later" the mother appeared "like a scud missile," with the daughter, he says, and expressed the family's interest in the college.

She reminded him more of an agent than a parent, while her daughter was sitting next to her looking, he says, like "can I please be anywhere but here?"

'Intense' Parents

"We used to joke that we wanted parents to be more involved in this process" and connect with the college counselor, says Ms. Smith. "But at some of the pretty competitive suburban high schools, they're pretty intense. They want the kid to get into the selective schools at whatever cost."

Mr. Martinez says the news media is partly to blame for making admissions seem so high stakes, "by putting a lot more attention on a handful of colleges that end up looking like the perfect places they're not.

"If families could see that there are 1,600 colleges out there and not just 16, I think they wouldn't be so anxious," he says.

So Mr. Martinez says part of his job is to remind parents that the process needs to be focused on the student's interests and not on the parents' agenda.

It is a lesson that some parents may never learn.

Asked if she would have done anything differently when her daughter applied, Ms. Lewis says she wished she had insisted on her plan, that Chloe apply to one Canadian college and Boston University. Since her daughter has had a lot of exposure to French, Ms. Lewis thought a Canadian college would have been good for Chloe and that she would have had a greater chance of getting into one. And because Chloe is "very urbane," Ms. Lewis also thought a city would have better suited her.

Chloe, however, applied to 12 other colleges -- five accepted her, six rejected her, and one put her on its waiting list -- and she will attend Skidmore College in the fall. That is where her older brother went (he graduated in 1997), and she has wanted to go there since she was 7 years old.

"I'm not disappointed with Skidmore," her mother says. "I know Skidmore is a good school. I know she'll do well there."

Still, she would have liked to proofread her daughter's list of extracurricular activities more thoroughly. "She left out lots of stuff that would have made a difference in the number of colleges that accepted her," Ms. Lewis says. "I don't think she promoted herself. That is a regret I have."

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Section: Students

Volume 49, Issue 45, Page A27

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