Ambitious high school students hunker down with tutors, take after-school lessons in sports and music, volunteer for community service and attend SAT-preparation workshops -- all in an effort to buff up their chances of getting admitted to top schools like Stanford.
"High school students think the way to get in is by being very, very busy," says Robin Mamlet, Stanford's new dean of admission and financial aid. "They are so stressed, and the whole college application process has become less joyful than it should be."
And lately, Mamlet says, Mom and Dad have been turning up the pressure on kids. Parents who once filled bassinets with educational toys are paying consultants thousands of dollars to review -- and, in some cases, substantially revise -- entrance essays.
"We hear things like, 'We are applying to X, Y and Z schools,' " she says. "Parents are very, very involved."
If their efforts fail to win admission to the school of choice, many parents pick up the phone and complain.
"As soon as Early-Decision letters go out in December, we spend the following week dealing with the aftermath," Mamlet says. "Parents don't understand how their children could have done everything right [and not get in], and we get a lot of angry phone calls and e-mails. The e-mails come straight to me, and people can pack an extraordinary amount of meanness into a few lines."
Mamlet and admissions officers nationwide are tracking a troubling new development: after surviving the rigors of the application process, freshmen are emotionally and academically burned out by the time they arrive at college. In fact, a UCLA survey of 462 campuses nationwide found that a record 30 percent of students who entered college last fall felt "overwhelmed" by the process of getting in.
The signs are alarming -- so much so that bellwether Harvard University is now calling for a time-out. Literally.
In a new posting on its website, Harvard's dean of admissions suggests that it could be healthy to "postpone entrance to college for a year." Step back and reflect, the university urges applicants. Noting that about 20 percent of Harvard students take a year off at some point before graduation to backpack around Europe, sample kibbutz life, write stories or work for a political campaign, the dean concludes that the results of those time-outs have been "uniformly positive."
Although Mamlet says Stanford does not actively encourage deferment -- "I think it's not right for the majority of students" -- she adds that "it is right for a significant subset.
"I think it's great if those students take a year to do something they wouldn't otherwise get to do," she says. "I don't think of it as an additional way to get admitted, but as a way for really talented students to defer entry for a year. I would hope they would make the best use they can of that time by doing something meaningful -- by having a life-altering experience."
Just as many incoming students need to catch their breath to reflect on their values and passions, Mamlet thinks it is important for the University to consider what kind of student body it wants. She has been making the rounds of departments since she arrived on campus in November and so far has talked with professors in computer science, mathematics, music and physics about the kinds of students they most enjoy teaching.
"For one thing, faculty want kids who are not running from scheduled event to scheduled event," she says. "They want kids for whom success has been a byproduct, not a goal -- kids who are in love with learning, who have had the experience of being enthralled. They want the kinds of kids who stay awake reading a book all night, not because it's an assignment that's due, but because they couldn't put the book down."
Of course, Mamlet adds, as soon as she says something like that in public, "high school students will think they're supposed to stay up all night reading [to get into Stanford]."
Mamlet has been evaluating college applications since 1982, when she graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles and started working in that school's admissions office. As associate dean of admissions at Pomona College, and as dean of admissions at Sarah Lawrence College and most recently at Swarthmore College, she became familiar with applications from all geographic regions of the United States and even got to know the subtleties of specific school districts.
In December, Stanford offered admission to 520 of the 2,227 high school students who applied under the Early Decision program. By the time regular admission letters go out in early April, Mamlet and her staff will have read some 130,000 pieces of mail from more than 18,700 applicants. Mamlet herself reads the records of every student who is offered admission and the records of all the "swims" -- those who survive the initial cuts but are not immediately put into the admit pile. She also reads the majority of legacy applications -- all in the space of five months.
Does she have a life? "No." But, sensitive to the danger of burnout herself, Mamlet says she reserves three hours of "sacred time" every evening to be with her 7-year-old daughter, Chloe, 6-month-old son, Austin, and her husband, Charles Brown, who is director of medical development at Stanford.
Then, come 8 p.m., it's back to the piles of applications.
