By the following week, the wave of alarm among Sternberg’s colleagues, critics, children, nominal friends, acolytes, students past and present, editors, and now, ominously, creditors seemed to be cresting, so on Tuesday morning Portia relocated her operation to West College, with a box of Constant Comment teabags and the back pillow from her sadly abandoned armchair, a move that might have signaled—to her colleagues, at least—an unusual situation at home. There, however, she was scarcely less distracted.
Corinne stopped by early, to rhapsodize about her children (Bennett, the elder, had won some wrestling prize, and Diandra had been invited to join the Andover debate team, even as a freshman!) and, with a martyred blush, announce that she had single-handedly fed twenty-five for Thanksgiving. Clarence, too, stopped by to sympathize, barely concealing his own interest in the English Department morass.
“Mark must be stuck in the middle of this Sternberg mess,” he said without preamble.
“Right in the middle,” she told him. “The phone rings off the hook. Which is why I came in,” she said, answering his implicit question.
“Ah.” He nodded. “Sad for the wife.”
“Yes. And the kids.”
But he was already distracted and moving on. “How’s your region looking?”
“Well, it’s early, of course. But the numbers are pretty much in line with last year.”
“Good, good,” Clarence said absently. “Do me a favor and look out for a Milton Academy student named Carter Ralston. Development has already called twice about him.”
Portia wrote down the name on a Post-it note and stuck it on the end of her lap desk. “You want me to look for it?”
“No, no. It’s either here or it’s coming. Just make sure we talk about it. Anyone else?”
“We have a fourteen-year-old from Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Homeschooled. He has eight hundreds just about everywhere, and six AP fives. His mother sent a letter saying she wants to come with him and have him live with her off campus.”
Clarence sighed. There were a few of these every year, brilliant kids twiddling their thumbs in high school or even middle school, screaming to be let out. Emotionally, of course, they were unprepared for college life, and in general they were noncontributors to the extracurricular life of the community. But even so, there was sometimes a place for them.
“Leave it on my desk,” he said. He turned to leave, then stopped. “How was that school you visited? That new school.”
“In New Hampshire?” She frowned. “Quest?”
“Yeah. I had a letter from someone on their board, a Class of ’60-something. He said they were doing amazing things.”
“Well… ,” she said skeptically, “amazing. I don’t know.”
“How’d it seem to you?”
“Like a work in progress.” She shrugged. “I mean, they’ve got the students milking the cows, but they’ve also got Harkness tables. The kids are kind of different. Very secure and opinionated. I had one girl arguing with me about whether college was necessary and whether Princeton was only branded prestige. I don’t know if the school is going to wind up looking like Putney or Choate, but I can tell you they’re very serious about what they’re doing.”
He nodded. “We shouldn’t see applications for a couple of years, then.”
“Actually,” she told him, “I’m pretty sure we’ll get at least a couple this year. There’s one kid I met, I hope he applies.”
“Oh?” Clarence said, looking at her.
“Very gifted, and a little bit odd.”
He gave a tired sigh. “One for the faculty, then.”
“Whatever works.” She laughed.
“All right, I’ll let you get back to it. Remember to look out for the Milton kid.”
“Carter Ralston,” she read off the Post-it note. “I will.”
He moved off in the direction of his office, trailing cologne.
Portia read on. It was early in the pool, still before the official deadline, but the applicants and the high schools were still adjusting to the post–Early Decision era, and it seemed as if a lot of these kids (and their advisers) were just programmed to get their stuff in early. Maybe they wanted it done so they could get on with the out-of-my-hands portion of their senior year. Maybe they wanted to convey that they were so together, so on top of the task at hand, that the deadline was incidental. She had read a number of notes from applicants assuring her that while Early Decision might be a thing of the past, Princeton was their first choice, and if admitted, they would certainly attend; but she put aside this information—if it was information. Without the binding contract of Early Decision, they might be making the same vow of commitment to every college on their list.
The art of admitting students to selective colleges had never really stood still, but the shifts and reversals seemed to be coming thicker and faster, and the end of Princeton’s Early Decision option was only the most recent course correction. The previous century had been a continual shuttle between academic excellence and “our kind of fellow,” and no move had been made without a corresponding chorus of disapproval. Placate the faculty by tightening academic standards, and certain objectionable immigrant groups became a bit too well represented on campus. Introduce the notion of “character” into the process to salve the wounded alumni (and keep the Jews out, or at least down), and the faculty let you know how disgusted they were. Let in women: Piss off the traditionalists. Beef up the football team: Watch the academics slide. Show diversity: Insult the traditional applicant pool. Open the door to impoverished students from all over the world: Turn your back on children of the American middle class. A Princeton class of one hundred years ago looked very different from the way it did today, which was of course no bad thing, but Portia sometimes had to remind herself that they would probably always be tinkering with the idea of what a superior applicant looked like. In her brief tenure alone, for example, a new focus on scholarship had seemed to take hold, and a disregard for dabbling in any form was now entrenched. Gone—or going fast—was the reign of the all-around kid, the tennis-playing, camp-counseling, math-tutoring, part-time-job-holding A student who was pretty sure he wanted to be a doctor or an investment banker but was also considering law school. These kids had to know, from the cradle, it seemed, that virology or avant-garde music was their destiny. Portia was sorry to note this change, not because it made her job harder to see the thoroughly specialized, committed, and wildly accomplished applicants she saw now (it didn’t, actually), but because she herself had been the epitome of an all-around kid: soccer team member, Amnesty volunteer, stage manager for the musical, book reviewer for the school paper, honor roll perennial. Her own era as a desirable college applicant was now, clearly, past.
Officially, of course, colleges did not comment on such things. There was hardly an Ivy League press office declaring the current fashion to potential applicants with Vogue magazine authority, and it took time for the new reality to permeate the culture. These kids were at the mercy of their parents and advisers, too many of whom were still rooted in outdated thinking about what Princeton was sifting the applicant pool to find, and it pained her to pass on these students who had clearly done, and done well, the precise things they’d been told to do, who had become the very seventeen-year-olds they’d been encouraged to become, a project that sometimes reached back to their infancy, with Music Together and toddler gymnastics. What it did to the kids—she saw that every day. But what it did to the parents! One day a few years earlier, she had been stripping off her sweaty clothing in the locker room of her gym when she overheard two Princeton Day School mothers lamenting the state of their children’s seventh-grade science fair projects. One was distressed because a research partner would share the credit for her son’s experiment design. The other lamented the fact that her daughter’s project did not constitute an original contribution to science. Portia, who was struggling to pull a wet Lycra top over her head at the time, looked intently at the two women to reassure h
erself that they were joking.
They weren’t joking.
More to the point, it was like this everywhere now. Toddlers herded into early enrichment so they could get into the right nursery school, segue into the best elementary school, compete for the most intense high school, and, finally, break the ribbon for one of the right—the so very few right—colleges. She remembered a speaker she had once heard at Rachel’s children’s private school, a man who had founded a campaign to wrest parental (and child) sanity from the scheduling nightmare that family life in middle-class and affluent communities had become. “Look at us,” he had scolded the audience. “We’re driving our kids around like maniacs. They’re changing into the Girl Scout uniform in the backseat after ballet class. We’re feeding them fast-food dinners between the clarinet lesson and the math tutor’s house. Why,” the man had asked them, “do you think we’re behaving this way?”
A woman in front of Portia had raised her hand and stood up. “Everyone knows,” she announced, “that Ivy League schools want well-rounded students. We’re only trying to do the best for our kids.”
It had been a gradual build, the advent of this new parent. Millennial parents, she’d heard them called, and took some comfort in the fact that they now constituted a recognized phenomenon, with a cold, precise, academic-sounding label. Millennial parents were baby boomers, of course, and had always enjoyed the generational perk of being part of a big, big crowd, capable of influencing policy and politics, fashion and music. Now, their offspring had a bubble of their own, and for once, bigger wasn’t better. These parents had never been so out of control as they were now, watching their carefully nurtured children discover that they were the camel and Ivy League admissions offices the eye of the corresponding needle. Nothing could be done to make them all fit through, not SAT prep courses and private tutors, CV-enhancing internships, or service trips to Costa Rica. Letters from CEOs could not help them, nor—despite what they desperately sought to believe—could private college counselors, and the helplessness they felt was like a silent but vibrating sound track, just outside the walls of West College.
It was still safe to call Princeton with a question about your child’s application, but Portia knew of at least two other Ivies that had begun keeping track of parental contact and adding that information to the applicant’s folder. She knew of a small, highly competitive liberal arts college in New England that had begun to employ “parent bouncers” for orientation weekend, in an effort to get them off campus as soon as possible. She had heard from numerous professors about parents calling to discuss their children’s grades or negotiating to submit a revised paper. (Revised by whom? A worrying thought.) And she had herself, on occasions too numerous to count, been forced to overhear the student walking beside her across campus whip out his or her phone to call Mom with the results of the Spanish quiz or statistics midterm.
What was behind it? A fear that to let go meant they were no longer parents? Or no longer young? Was it some tragically outsourced pride that began with a my child is an honors student in kindergarten bumper sticker, swelled with every SAT percentile or coach’s letter, and ended with a Princeton decal in the rear window? What happened to perfectly capable kids who’d been so bombarded with help that they felt helpless to do anything on their own? Or the kids who’d been so driven at home, they’d never had to find their own drive? It couldn’t be good, she thought.
Late in the afternoon, one of her youngest colleagues knocked tentatively on her door. This was Dylan Keith, three years out of Princeton himself and newly elevated to associate director. “Portia?” he asked politely, and waited.
She looked up. She was writing her summary on a girl from Maine with a baffling transcript—devoid, it seemed, of any hard science or language but crowded with rhythmic dance, Photoshop, and something called “Creative Expression.”
“Sorry, you want to finish that?”
“Yes, if you can wait.”
He could wait. She wrote: “Likable girl, and I appreciated her essay on her mother’s influence and encouragement to explore her artistic inclinations, but scores are weak and she clearly has not challenged herself academically. Wait for reports from Dance and Art Depts—otherwise unpersuasive.” She checked “Low Priority—Unlikely.”
“Okay, thanks.” She smiled, closing the file. “How’s it going?”
“Fine,” he said, clearly looking as if it weren’t.
“You getting slammed?”
“No. Not yet. I was traveling last week. You have a moment?”
She put her lap desk on the floor. He took the swivel chair and swiveled in her direction.
Dylan was a slight man with a hairline already under assault, sweet and extremely kind. He had come to Princeton from a Houston prep school and had never been north before his college tour, but he had fallen so in love with seasons that Portia doubted he could go home now. Close enough in age to the applicants that he seemed still to bear the marks of his own admissions passage, he was full of empathy with them. That would change, Portia suspected, over time. In a few years, he would grow less patient with them, less able to dismiss self-indulgences and cultural myopia. But not yet. For now, he was their advocate and apologist, a famously soft touch in the department. He had just been assigned to the Southwest.
“Where were you?” Portia asked him.
“New Mexico. And Arizona. I went to the Native American boarding school near Taos.”
“Oh. Good,” she said, wondering where this was going.
“It’s a very inspiring place.” She nodded, waiting. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, you were at Dartmouth, right?”
Portia frowned. “As a student? Or an admissions officer? Well, yes to both.”
“Right. I thought so. I just wanted to ask what your experience was there, with recruiting Native American students.”
“Well, we had a designated admissions officer for Native American students. It wasn’t my area. If you have a specific question, I mean, I did observe while I was there, obviously. But you know, Dartmouth has a historical relationship to Native Americans.”
Dylan frowned, demonstrating a forehead creased beyond its years.
“The college was founded to educate them. Well, the point was to convert Indians in New England, and then ordain them so they could go out and convert more Indians. Vox clamantis in deserto is the college motto. You know, ‘voice crying out in the wilderness’? But they were matriculated students at the beginning, alongside the others. All training to be clergy. Like here,” she said, alluding to Princeton’s own Presbyterian roots. “But then they disappeared from the student demographic for a hundred and fifty years, give or take. We had to get a liberal president in before we got them back on our radar. He came from Princeton, actually.”
“I didn’t know that,” said Dylan.
“Yes. Anyway, in his inaugural speech he rededicated the college to its original purpose, and that meant getting out to the reservations and the Native American schools, and recruiting. So I guess we had a little head start on the other Ivies. Or else we were really late fulfilling our own obligations.”
“But,” said Dylan, “how did they know which kids were going to make it through?”
“They didn’t. And a lot didn’t. Of course, there were kids with Native American heritage coming through the general pool, and they did fine. You know, a parent or grandparent had a tribal affiliation, but they were mainstream. The ones we had to go out to find, it was rough for them. On the other hand, the college is very proud of how well some of them have done. And they’re committed to continuing. Was there someone in particular you wanted to discuss?”
He nodded, his eyes downcast. The light caught his scalp, already visible. She tried to age progress him a couple of years and found, to her regret, that he would not be an attractive man.
“I met this great kid in New Mexico. At the boarding school. He’s a Chippewa from Minnesota. He did horrendously in public school, and they took a big
chance on him and let him transfer in last year.”
Portia nodded and waited.
“He wants to be a doctor, but if he came here, he wouldn’t be as prepared as a typical freshman pre-med. Actually, he’s behind across the board: English, languages. He’d need a lot of support with writing.…” Dylan trailed off.
“There’s a ‘but’ here,” she said helpfully.
“Yeah. But. He’s this amazing kid. He’s so alive. He’s eating everything up there. It’s like he’s been waiting for some growth hormone, and they’ve got him on IV. He asked me all these questions about Princeton, and the culture here, and whether they’d let him catch up and keep going. He has a pretty clear grasp of what he needs to do. It’s just that I have this awful sense of him getting here and being overwhelmed by the workload, and just falling apart. I don’t know if we can support him enough, you know? And I wonder if it’s doing him a disservice, in the long run. Maybe if he went somewhere less challenging, he’d be successful, and he’d get there sooner. If he comes here, he might not get there at all.”
Portia considered. This was a discussion she had had many times, with many colleagues, and it was an even more frequent internal preoccupation. It wasn’t a question of who deserved. They all deserved. But the very delicate balance between ambition and accomplishment, daring and security, made more volatile still by the essential adolescence of the average college applicant, made these decisions of massive—but unknowable—personal impact. When her geographic area included (and was dominated by) California, she’d been able to enjoy a considerable buffer for her anxieties, because the excellent students she rejected for Princeton had an enormous safety net in the form of Berkeley, the jewel in the crown of California’s public university system and the likely destination for any high-achieving students who fell short of the Ivy League. The chess master valedictorian from Los Angeles, the brilliant mathematician from San Diego, the meticulous girl from Santa Cruz who had worked so hard, only to be the tenth or fifty-eighth or ninety-first hardworking girl from Santa Cruz to come before the Princeton committee: All of them would be offered admission to Berkeley, and once there, a superb faculty could get them where they needed to go. Now, with Portia’s focus on the other end of the country, she felt the lack of such a secure fallback. Not that there weren’t state universities for these accomplished applicants, but the University of Maine wasn’t Berkeley. Applicants from New England had more to lose, and she—as a result—had even more sleep to lose over them.
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