Giving up your life for the Ivy League

ALL WE DID was meet with the high school guidance counselor, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve sold my son down a river called “The Rat Race to a Top College.” It feels like an awfully cold and swift choice for a 15-year-old kid, heading in one narrow direction.

My family is at the lucky end of the education spectrum: We have choices. Sam is a high-achieving freshman at Laguna Beach High, a school recently refurbished with bond money. It has qualified teachers. Parent donations help keep its extensive arts and sports programs thriving. There’s even a staffed math lab to tutor struggling students. It has enough guidance counselors to meet with families and plot out each student’s future, an uncommon luxury in California public education.

That’s what we were doing the other day, under the guidance of a cheerful, impressively knowledgeable woman whose experience includes a stint at an elite prep school.

She shows real interest in getting to know Sam and his hopes for the future, which include a terrific college, and she fills in a complicated-looking chart that maps out his life for the next three years. It’s chock full of annotations about honors this and Advanced Placement that, extra math and science -- every bit of college-prep fodder that UC and Ivy League schools will want.

Then come the friendly warnings about the challenges ahead. The honors English teacher is demanding and a tough grader. The AP European history class requires an hour and a half of note-taking each night. And, by the way, the B-plus in first-semester honors geometry this year? Not a problem for UC, which looks only at sophomore and junior grades, but it might hurt a little for the Ivies. She’d had recruiters from those schools ask her about a single B in an otherwise stellar student’s record.

My lower jaw slowly unglues from the upper one and drifts downward into a gape of dumb amazement. Sam is fighting the ends of his sweatshirt sleeves, trying to pull them over his hands, and I’m fighting the urge to tell him to stop.

Think the counselor exaggerates?

Here’s the ultimate reality check from UC’s latest booklet for high schoolers: Berkeley accepts fewer than half the applicants with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average or higher (the “higher” comes from extra points conferred for AP courses). It accepts about half the kids who score an awe-inspiring 700 or better on the 800-point verbal SAT and only 42% of those with the same score on the math SAT. Similar story at UCLA.

We haven’t even thought about squeezing in SAT tutoring! I’m in full panic mode, and it’s only freshman year.

Getting into elite schools has become an arms race. The weapons are AP classes and SAT prep sessions. Not to mention private college counselors and efforts to develop an outstanding passion at the age of 16 so you stick out from the crowd. Then, once in a name school, you do it all over again to get into a name grad school.

Is this what Sam wants? Is this what we want for him? Three years of stressing over mountains of schoolwork for the possible -- just possible -- prize of a spot at a great university?

The thing is, good student though Sam is, it’s not his grades that have made us proudest during his early months of high school. It’s how he has branched out to become a more interesting person, befriending new people and taking advantage of the options high school offers. This former video-game couch potato loves cross-country running. The guy who shied from the limelight is interested in drama and had bit parts in two school plays. Suddenly, he signed up for dance class and will be in the spring dance production. He volunteers at a wilderness park.

He manages all this with apparent ease, but it won’t be the same next year. Not with an hour and a half of homework each night for one class alone.

We’ve all heard about the kids who are bound and determined to enter Harvard, and whose parents won’t be appeased by Princeton. They stay up until 2 a.m., grinding away, while their mothers cook up midnight snacks to keep them going. This isn’t something most of us want for our children. But we can’t help that nagging worry that they’ll never survive the cutthroat competition of the much-vaunted 21st century global economy that we’re continually threatened with and tired of hearing about. Sam’s too young to give up the sleep and the fun of life, and frankly, I’m too old.

We’ll see how it goes. Whether little compromises -- one fewer honors course here, one fewer semester of team sports there -- will make it all workable and give him an occasional afternoon at the beach too.

More and more I’m thinking, maybe a spot in a good college, not a great college, is the more perfectly great ambition. It might be that only a few prestige colleges can give him a leg up on a stellar career, but there are many colleges where he can get a lot of good learning done. Just as important, a place to learn how to enjoy what he’s doing, rather than always focusing down a narrow path to the future.