It’s college email season. The emails from colleges drift in and pile up in my daughter’s email inbox — and my own email inbox — like the falling leaves of the sugar maple and the red oak. We each receive somewhere around 40 or 50 emails a day from esteemed universities that never will accept her for admission but would very much appreciate it if she paid $75 to apply.
The emails from colleges inevitably feature one of two images: a photo of an undergraduate student of color wearing a white coat and scientist goggles while holding a pipette over a beaker in a laboratory; or the school’s mascot hugging girls in sports jerseys and face paint.
Some of the mascots seem like they’d be more inspiring of school spirit than others. There’s a plucky bantam chicken (wink, wink! you know who you are), buffalo and bison, several bulldogs, tigers, and wolves. Lots of eagles with fierce beaks. Nettie is “talking to” (as the kids say) the University of Richmond, but why does the Richmond mascot have to be a spider? It’s a big, red, hairy spider; I guess the student body acclimates to that and at least it’s unique, but, like, ew? Wake Forest, another appealing suitor, has the somewhat unsettling Demon Deacon — a lantern-jawed lay minister in a top hat with a yellow face, yellow bow tie, and yellow trousers. The Demon Deacon is good-weird? And props to Stanford for the tree mascot. It’s a tree. With lips and teeth. And to Dartmouth for its mascot, Keggy the Keg. Who doesn’t love Keggy the Keg? (Okay, the tree, since 1975, and Keggy, since 1974, are only unofficial mascots, but still, I.M.H.O, the humor of the tree and keg is indicative of a more sophisticated self-awareness than, say, the leprechaun who capers across the field for the Fighting Irish out at Notre Dame. Don’t be mad, Notre Dame. Nettie loves you. She really does. Wink, wink.)
I cannot say I understand the algorithms that ping to match Nettie as a candidate with a given institution of higher learning’s public-relations and marketing departments. It’s been interesting to read the pitches of some of these joints. Nettie is the one driving the college-admissions bus, not me, but still, I think I can say with confidence that she will not be paying $50 to “prepare to be a Champion for Christ” at Liberty University, where, the emails promise, “every student is prayed for daily.”
Also, Kennesaw State University? You can stop spamming her now.
We, as a family, attempted to ignore the insane college admissions game — (and it’s really wild, it’s bonkers, way nuttier and less egalitarian than you are imagining if you haven’t played since the 1990s or 1980s!) — for as long as we could, but it caught up with us last winter. That’s when Georgetown and Dartmouth, having been “test optional” for some years, announced they would once again require applicants to submit SAT scores. Ruh-roh! as Scooby-Doo says. Nettie had pretty much never taken a standardized test in her life at that point, had already advanced to her junior spring, and certainly had not been prepping and sweating for the SAT moment as so many of her peers up at her “elite New England boarding school” (as they like to call it over on collegeconfidential.com) have been doing since they were toddlers running around their parents’ Spanish-Moorish house in Palm Beach wearing diapers and a tuxedo.
I feel slightly ashamed to have, belatedly, turned into the sort of parent who listens to “The Game: A Guide to Elite College Admission” podcast, but needs must. We’ve had a lot of catching up to do. Over on Reddit, I learned that some of the parents of Nettie’s more ambitious peers pay large sums not just to admissions consultants but to “agencies” that “fill out” their applications for them. California just this week banned the practice of legacy admissions, even in private colleges, so how is it legal for moneyed families to be paying a third party to complete the actual application? Meanwhile, the teenage killer-dillers of collegiate ambition on the “A2C” Reddit page have busied themselves since middle school applying to special programs and honors, like Boys State and Girls State or the Scholastic Awards for distinction in the arts, to pile laurels on their extracurriculars lists. I genuinely had no idea it had gone this far. One in three has founded a nonprofit or done research into the application of kohlrabi DNA in carcinoma research.
Another alley you can get disoriented in and mistakenly wander down is Ridiculous Scholarship Ally. Admissions-industry promoters beckon like kidnappers with candy, offering gimmick scholarships that, again, are just marketing in disguise. These actually make me kind of angry on behalf of the youth of America who perhaps don’t have adequate counseling at an underfunded high school or parents with the spare time or insider tip-off-savvy to have read Jeffrey Seligo (I have not!) or listened to the “You Got Into Where?” podcast with Joi Wade, who boasts of having received scholarship offers in excess of $500,000 (again, have not, but probably will!).
This morning, for example, Nettie was invited to apply to the “$1,300 Werewolf v. Vampire Scholarship.” I did not make that up. Applicants have to answer one question: “Who would win in a fight: a werewolf or vampire?” That email-address-harvesting scholarship is run by collegexpress.com. Also, to give another example, over on unigo.com this month, kids have until Halloween to enter the Zombie Apocalypse Scholarship for a chance to win $2,000 “in the form of a check made payable directly to the accredited post-secondary institution of higher education attended by the Scholarship Prize Recipient.” Young men, young women, please don’t waste your energy writing about zombies and werewolves; write your supplemental essays for the Common App instead. Momma said!
Many of the emails that come into my parental inbox morning, noon, and night contain links to videos that are meant to frame the institution of higher learning in the most appealing light, with generically uplifting music that doesn’t require the payment of royalty fees, cheering fans in stands, cheering upperclassmen in matching T-shirts greeting freshmen as they arrive in their parents’ cars crammed with plastic storage bins, and, inevitably, the Black kids doing lab research and the South Asian clubs performing bhangra. Seriously, these videos are so alike as to be interchangeable. A modern dance troupe will always be leaping and reaching skyward. Someone will always lean forward in silhouette to peer into a microscope. A cello or violin will be played. Autumn leaves will rustle in orange and red through dappled light.
In this video-recruitment category, I can confidently declare two winners for superior film production. Colgate wins Best Use of Stirring Voiceover for its 2023 documentary short in which the voice of the university president, Brian W. Casey, addresses students at the 203rd commencement as handsome, joyful people dance with abandon under a marquee and the graduates walk up the Willow Path with eyes on the dark horizon and torches aflame. So simple, so affecting. And Columbia University wins Best Picture, over all, for the stellar performance turned in by a sophomore film-studies major named Ashley, from Dallas, as she takes prospective students on a virtual tour of campus. Ashley deserves an Oscar. Colgate and Columbia can expect their $60 and $85 checks, respectively, before the end of the month.