The elephant in the room of the college admissions grind
There’s a small cottage industry of articles, blog posts, and essays pointing out how much more difficult, time-intensive, and “grindy” upper-middle class American childhoods have become in the 21st century [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. All of these identify the same cause: elite university admissions are far more competitive. This has led to much more intensive helicopter parenting to stop kids from falling behind in the increasingly important education-status race. It’s not just money. The social decay afflicting America since the 1960s is far worse among the non-college-educated (as Charles Murray showed in Coming Apart) so avoiding downward mobility is much more important than it once was.
Helicopter parenting has gotten so intense that it even continues into university, turning what was once the start of independent adult life into a further extension of childhood. The effects of this are widely lamented: the pressures of Ivy League admissions are said to be crushing kids into status-obsessed zombies. And the effort it requires from parents is even blamed for falling birth rates. Setting aside the broader societal implications and long-term effects, isn’t making kids unnecessarily miserable for 13 years of their lives bad enough in and of itself?
One might reply that it’s all worth it. Feeding 30% of kids into the college admissions meatgrinder might be bad, but stagnation is the default state of humanity and avoiding that is imperative. If it takes heroic efforts on the part of 12-year-olds to develop the skills needed to keep technological civilization running, then that’s a sacrifice that must be made. But is that really what’s going on?
