Marilee Jones, former dean of admissions at
MIT, wrote a great blog entry entitled, “Getting Real About Getting That Leg-Up in the Ivy +
Application Pool.” It focuses on the common practiice of parents sending kids to high-priced summer programs in the hopes it will somehow turn into an admissions advantage, but it's a good read even though summer is now behind us. Here's my favorite part:
…spending $10K
to send your child to a summer school program where they teach classes your
child could take at a local high school summer school for free, just to give
your child an advantage in the college admissions process, is not money well
spent. It’s dumb…If you REALLY want your child to learn during the
summer, encourage them to work a summer job for minimum wage. There they
will learn lessons in integrity and character-building. They’ll learn not
to quit and how to work with all kinds of people. They’ll be humbled and
challenged much more in every way than they ever would be at Harvard Summer
School or Oxford Summer Program which is just more of the same and won’t help
them get into college. If you were
reading 35,000 applications to admit just 2000, wouldn’t you rather take a
student who worked a hard construction job all summer instead of spending 2
weeks saving endangered sea turtles in Honduras (for $8K) or doing an unpaid
internship cleaning test tubes in their parent’s biochemistry lab? Yeah, me too.