Racing to Make It to Head of the Class

High school seniors across the nation have just concluded a hard-fought contest--the college entrance race. For many, victory is acceptance into a college high on the prestige list, a hierarchy established by peers and parents, by U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of top schools, by high school and other counselors eager to add a few Ivy League acceptances to their records. Defeat is a mailbox of rejection letters, a forced march to a lower-ranked, less prestigious school.

But what exactly is such a victory worth? What is the cost of defeat? It’s hard to say that this contest has any meaning. There are no studies--academic or anecdotal--that indicate a correlation between the ranking or prestige of an undergraduate college and success in life, whether measured in financial, emotional or spiritual terms.

In some ways, the focus on the few top schools seems a throwback to an earlier age when major institutions of the country were all on the East Coast and in the hands of a properly credentialed elite.

That is certainly no longer the case. And yet, every year tens of thousands of high school seniors clamor for the precious spaces in the schools deemed to be at the top of the heap.

Morton O. Schapiro, an economist who studies higher education and is president of Williams College, a top-of-the-heap school, says that the top students in the country are going to a smaller and smaller number of schools.

In a recent book on financial aid, Schapiro and co-author Michael S. McPherson, president of Macalester College in Minnesota, noted that the bulk of National Merit semifinalists who attended 150 colleges 20 years ago now are concentrated in 40 colleges.

“It’s like a lot of other product markets; there’s a great interest in perceived quality,” Schapiro says. “BMW is doing well, but Oldsmobile goes out of business. Ritz-Carlton is fine, but Howard Johnson is bankrupt. There’s a flight toward perceived quality.”

Part of the reason, he says, is that the marketplace is national. In decades past, the prestige college game was played mainly among prep schools in the Northeast. Other students tended to stay closer to home, supporting their local schools. Now the whole country gets involved. “There’s a lot of hype involved,” says Martha O’Connell, dean of admissions at Western Maryland College. “It’s not unlike the way Americans approach anything; they clamor to go toward the brand names people recognize. It’s not the most positive thing for higher education. Students are choosing schools that might not be the best fit for them so their parents can drop its name at a cocktail party. That’s not the way to choose colleges.”

Freeman A. Hrabowski Jr., who knows that the school where he is president--the University of Maryland, Baltimore County--probably never will rank in the U.S. News and World Report’s top 10 list, says students and their parents should be focusing on outcomes: What does your degree get you and at what cost?

Hrabowski contends that many top high school students get crushed in the highly competitive atmosphere of prestige schools and never reach their potential.

He can point to the fact that almost all students who accept UMBC’s Meyerhoff scholarships remain in their science-oriented majors while only half of those who turn down the scholarship--usually for a bigger-name school--stay in those difficult fields.

“Parents need to look at the philosophy the institutions have about undergraduate education,” Hrabowski says. “Some places say, ‘We don’t spoon-feed kids.’ They make it very clear you are on your own, that it’s prestigious to be here, you are smart, you should be able to make it on your own. Our experience is that smarter students lead more complicated lives, and so face more challenges. Many students need special support, especially in the freshman year.”

Better, he argues, to go to a smaller, nurturing liberal arts college, and worry about the prestige name for graduate school.

“People get focused on going to the biggest name regardless of whether the institution meets the needs of that child,” Hrabowski says. “What we are doing is showing where students go when they leave here--Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Harvard.”

David W. Breneman, dean of the school of education at the University of Virginia, says Hrabowski has a point. “Unless you are totally self-directed at 17 or 18 years of age, know exactly what you want and are very aggressive, you can get lost,” he says of some of the large prestigious research universities. Maynard Mack, who heads the honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park, says that when he was in the English department at Harvard University, he read all of the applications for graduate school.

“There were about 600 of them, and we would accept 30,” he says. “Every year, 10 of those, a third, would be from schools you had never heard of. I’m not talking about the University of Maryland, I’m talking about schools you had to look up in the almanac to find out where they were.”

But Ira Berlin, who has spent most of his career as a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, says there might be something to the prestige game.

“What people are buying for their sons and daughters is a cohort population from whom they will learn and they will grow,” Berlin says. “I mean, Al Gore’s roommate at Harvard was the actor Tommy Lee Jones. In some ways, that’s not accidental. These are bright, ambitious people who in some ways feel themselves anointed to do great things, having convinced themselves it is appropriate for them to do great things, so they end up going out and doing great things.”

But Berlin says that if a place such as Maryland can attract such a cohort with its honors program--which he helped spruce up while a dean--then it has an advantage over an expensive private college.

Still, all agree that one of the strengths of U.S. higher education is that there is such a wide range of schools for all sorts of students, unlike most of the rest of the world where your fate is sealed by an examination taken at age 16 that decides your educational track.

Breneman fears that the focus on a few top schools drives America in the direction of other countries. “I think it’s better for the country when the bright kids are spread out,” he says. “This has all the earmarks of a stratifying class system. What’s very clear to me is that people who go to all kinds of places do very well and plenty of Harvard graduates have not succeeded.”