From the New York Times, an article about the growing business in student packaging to better sell themselves to top colleges:
Many colleges engage in Orwell-speak about assembling congenial communities with a variety of backgrounds and talents. Academic feats, they also insist, must be abetted with good works and evidence of leadership. And so applicants end up in activities they may not care about. At the same time, admissions officers seldom meet the flesh-and-blood students they are evaluating, basing decisions on fleeting reviews of paper. Students are distilled to slogans like “the Greenwich ballerina who mentored students in the South Bronx.”
...Colleges say they are getting wise to students who dress up a privileged background with a benevolent sheen. The shame is that in a world where students are compelled to game the system, probably more than a few genuinely good souls are thrown away along with the counterfeits. Meanwhile, children are being subjected to pressures they may not be ready for. After all, why should a teenager be penalized for wanting to spend the summer as a camp counselor?
Read the whole story here.
