Absurd Competition

I recently attended the National Small Schools Conference in Falmouth, MA, a gathering of leaders from small independent schools. One of the keynote speakers was Janet Rapelye, the Director of Admission at Princeton University. Ms. Rapelye showed us lots of demographic information relative to high school aged students in various regions of the country. No surprise, but the number of high schoolers is stable or even decreasing in the Northeast while in the South and Southwest they are steadily growing. She also showed Princeton’s own statistics. In the last eight years the number of students applying to Princeton has more than doubled. This past year nearly 30,000 young men and women applied to Princeton to fill a class of about 1,200.

A member of the audience asked, “What type of student has a good chance of getting into Princeton?”

Ms. Rapelye answered with brutal honesty, “No student has a good chance of getting into Princeton.”

Like many of the most selective colleges, Princeton, if they chose to, could accept nothing but valedictorians and perfect SAT scorers and still have a lot of these overachievers leftover, rejected. While I had suspected this was true, it was sobering hearing it right from the horse’s (or in this case, tiger’s) mouth. As the Head of an independent school for grades K-8, I wondered what lessons I could take home from this talk that would benefit my own community. How could I possibly bring any message of hope about the selective college process to the parents at my school?

Ms. Rapelye did say one thing that gave me some hope. She said that since just about all of Princeton’s applicants have stellar, if not flawless, academic and extracurricular records, they need to look for other qualities that distinguish one student from another. As Ms Rapelye said, Princeton looks for students who are “engaged and engaging.”

Those words resonated with me. At The Sage School it is our chief purpose to thoroughly engage our students in an inspiring curriculum. The result of this deep engagement is that Sage students become very engaging young men and women by the time they complete eighth grade. One of the main reasons that our school does not assign letter grades at term’s end is that we believe that students become much more engaged and interested in their learning when they are doing it for their own reasons and not when they are doing it solely to earn an external reward.

As I have written before, kids who engage with curriculum and content for its own sake, who dive deeper into a question or an issue out of curiosity, and who work hard for their own reasons tend to be very successful at our school, and, in turn, very well prepared for whatever comes next. The students who tend to achieve the best academic results are those who want to know and understand, who want to extend what they know and understand, and who want to share what they know and understand with others. For these kids external reward is incidental, it is internal satisfaction that drives them. When students engage deeply in this way they in turn become engaging people. They have interests and passions that they are eager to share and they become articulate and animated about the subjects that excite them.

Given that the competition for spots at these most selective colleges (and, in some cases our local independent secondary schools) is daunting to the point of absurdity, I am glad that our emphasis is not placed on grades, but on each child’s unique intellectual and social development. There is a “right” school for every student. If we let each student’s unique strengths, challenges, interests and passions be our guide, we will find it. If we allow the vision of our children’s future to be narrowed by the pursuit of perfect test scores, perfect GPAs, and perfect brand names we (and our children) will almost certainly wind up bitterly disappointed.