College fair... starting young

So, this week I participated in a college fair which I thought was going to be for high school students (possibly because the email invitation I received said it was going to be for high school students). Yes, I did find it a little confusing that the location was the middle school next door to the high school I thought it was going to be for... and didn't I already do a college fair for this high school's district, last fall?

Things started to make more sense when students arrived and turned out to be middle schoolers.

I think the other college representatives at the fair, of which there weren't many really, may have felt a little baited-and-switched. I sure did, at first.

But for me, this was a great opportunity. I actually prefer, in some ways, to do recruiting among younger students. In this part of the state, and in this part of the country generally, parents and counselors have almost no good information about how to prep for admission to a highly competitive college. It's very satisfying to give them advice while there's still time to use it. (Take the PSAT early and often! IB is preferable to Running Start in most cases! There's such a thing as need-based financial aid! Look out of state!) It just took me a few tries to get my spiel switched over and figure out how to talk to these much younger kids and their parents.

I think the community outreach organization that helped put on this college fair is in a bit of a bind... baiting and switching isn't cool, but if they worried that most colleges wouldn't bother to come for middle schoolers, they're probably right. A companion problem, however, is that most full-time professional college recruiters don't have a spiel for younger kids and their parents. I'll be interested to see whether this particular fair takes off or crashes next spring.

Regrets

When I talk nowadays to prospective Smithies about the college's amazing offerings, I can't help but feel a twinge about the chances I didn't take advantage of myself. Being the sort of person who goes after what I want (no! really?), I have a tough time getting my brain around the notion that some opportunities really have, permanently, passed me by.

A#1 biggest regret was failing to take a junior year abroad. It didn't occur to me that grownups don't just get to take years abroad later. At the time, I felt I had good reasons for not going. In my sophomore year, I went through a pretty rough estrangement from a family member, as well as some financial problems, and my Smith housemates became my replacement family and primary sources of support... I couldn't face the thought of never seeing half of them again. (Unfortunately, the ones I most relied on were already seniors and I had to cope with their "loss" during my junior year anyway. Denial is a sad, sad thing.) I also wouldn't have been guaranteed a space in my house upon return, and it didn't seem worth the risk. Considering how close I still am to so many Hopkinites, and how important it was for me to graduate with them, this might have been an OK decision after all. I suspect I'd make the same choice again given the same circumstances... but I can't help wishing I could have had it all, can I? :)

The other big regret was that I never made it into any of Smith's famous a cappella singing groups. I auditioned for two... the Noteables, as a youngster, where I went in unprepared, was terrified, quavered pathetically, and deservedly wasn't called back... and the Smiffenpoofs, later, where I prepared my heart out, sang my heart out, got called back, sang my heart out again, and didn't get picked anyway. That one hurt. Music was a big part of my life at Smith anyway, and if I hadn't had time to sing in the College Choirs for Jessel Murray or sing in Darshan with Cindy that probably would have been a great loss as well and I wouldn't even have known any better. But when my first-year recruits get into singing groups and immediately excel and are embraced by an amazing musical community, I can't help but wonder how it might have been to be a superstar myself. :)

However, I'm not sorry I quit the parli debate team as a first-year... I got all the good I was gonna get out of that one after I met my debate partner Heidi, and I still have her. :)

Strangely enough, I'm also not sorry I didn't get selected as a first-year-alum Head Resident, even though that was probably the most devastating thing ever at the time. I literally cried for days. It felt like a repudiation of me and my very Smithiness, and I do still wonder what it was about me that wasn't good enough. But nearly everything good in my life now was made possible by the fact that I was forced to find other avenues after graduation. If Smith suspected I was trying frantically to delay growing up, they were right, and I owe them my thanks for giving me the shove I needed. (But if they think I wouldn't have been a good HR, they can bite me.)

Which reminds me, I do regret that I wasn't able to return to my Grrrl Scout troop at the Clarke School after graduation... in spite of not picking up the HR post (with its cushy free rent and modest stipend), I had made certain promises that I'd move back to Northampton, get a menial job, live in poverty, and keep my commitment to those wonderful girls. I didn't, and worse yet, I was too cowardly to make any serious attempt to contact them over the summer to tell them so. That was uncool, and it does leave me with much to atone for... somehow.

No, we shouldn't wallow in regret, but once in a while we have to remind ourselves to live. :)

Gender bending and breaking

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

1. It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )
   


2. It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

Great Experiments in Sexual Orientation

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Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)

Paying for college, or more to the point, getting college to pay for you

This weekend I attended a workshop for students and parents, put on by a member of the Federal Way school board, on the subject of small, private, competitive and generous liberal arts colleges.

Most of these institutions are located "back East" and most folks in the Northwest have never heard of them. But they're excellent schools, and they've got lots of money to spend and infinite flexibility in how they will choose to spend it. For a low-income student, this translates into a good chance at a free ride if they work hard in school and know the right places to apply.

Many schools now emphasize need-based financial aid, but one school's idea of "need" can be very different from another's. Public schools are required to adhere to the federal and state definitions of "need", which can be severe ("after your parents take out their third and fourth mortgages, the remainder that you'll 'need' is..."). But private schools can do whatever they want. Some private schools come up with their own extremely generous definitions of "need"; others offer huge merit scholarships to the students who really impress them (see also this article). Some do both.

Parents and students often have no idea, and assume they are stuck with the federal assessment. It pains me how many families don't even try, because they don't know.

The workshop teaches families how to find these colleges, and students how to make themselves into attractive candidates.

The basics:

Get the best possible grades, but more importantly, take the most challenging classes available. All that stuff about being a well-rounded student is only true if you have already demonstrated that you can handle the college's curriculum.

But don't give up if you don't have a 4.0... a B student with a tough high school course load is usually very attractive, and that's where the well-roundedness comes into play as well.

Refer to Barron's Profiles of American Colleges and or Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges, both available on Amazon.

Start with the lists of most competitive and highly competitive colleges, throw out all the public schools (they don't have any money), and build a list of ~20 schools of potential interest (overall, not just financially).

Big, famous schools that everybody has heard of will have huge pools of applicants competing with you for admission and money. Look for lesser-known but highly-rated gems where you'll be a bigger fish.

Look beyond tuition. Barron's has information about endowment, average grant/aid award, and percent of students receiving aid. This can be helpful in figuring out which schools on the list are potential best buys and cash cows.

Finally, open up a correspondence early on with any school you feel passionate about. Ask intelligent questions, and generally make yourself known to admissions officers, alumnae, even faculty. (The workshop leader related the tale of a young woman who started writing to her chosen college and meeting with its alumnae as a 9th grader; by the fall of her sophomore year they accepted her to the class starting 2 years hence... with a full scholarship and without her ever submitting an application!) Passion counts for a lot. Even a need-based program will probably happen to find a few extra dollars for a really compelling candidate.

Most importantly, don't assume you can't, and don't give up!