Reply to Stop asking student tour guides where they're applying to college

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]School administrator here.   Because of the ridiculous hype and stress around college apps in recent years, OP is right.

Don't ask.  Look at the college list that is readily available.  Ask admissions.  Just don't make students answer the college question from every adult in their lives.  Yes, they can handle it most of the time. But they shouldn't have to.  And you don't know if they just got rejected from their EA, ED or top RD.  
[/quote]

Listen to the school administrator (even if they might be a dog)

What has changed in the last 20-30 years is that admission rates have dropped for the top tier schools and for many families and kids, particularly in independent schools, admission to top tier college has come to seem to be increasingly important as the path to maintaining status and having a successful life.

There have been tons of articles about the increasing perceived importance of top tier college admission in the face of decreasing admission rates and debating whether the importance is simply a matter of competition for status or is meaningful in life outcomes but whichever you believe the competition is clearly there (and if you haven’t seen those articles feel free to spend 5 minutes on DCUM).

So college admissions is perceived as more high stakes these days, and of course everyone knows it involves a complex calculation of grades, test scores, extra curriculars, costs, etc. And for many top schools admission rates are under 10%.

So as result, when you are asking a kid “where are applying to go to college” you are asking them to implicitly reveal a fair bit of complicated personal information about their grades and hopes exactly at a time when every part of their lives is under scrutiny for whether it measures up, and yet it reveals very little about where they will actually go.

Now certainly kids vary— some kids are fine sharing with strangers, some kids are fine sharing with classmates, and some kids want to share only with family and closest friends.

For that reason, I think the comparison to exchanging salaries or trying to conceive is closer than just average small talk (not that “what do you do” is great small talk anyway).

Of course those of you who want to “test” kids don’t care anyway. [/quote]

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