The intense competition about college admissions is hurting today’s teens

This is Part 5 of a dialogue between Caitlin Macy, author of Spoiled; Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries; and DoubleX associate editor Samantha Henig. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.

Sam, I’m shocked, shocked to learn that wealthy children are being chauffeured to school in Manhattan! :)

Guys—ladies—I’m sorry, but I just can’t get on board with a lot of these assumptions. W. is a comfortable target, but let’s remember that his father—also a scion—left Andover to fly planes and get shot at in World War II and was a serious president even if you disagreed with him. Summer internships might be all about who you know, but the highest-paying jobs (banking, law) have quite meritocratic recruiting processes. Finally, just because an author of a pseudo-nonfiction book who wants to sell copies “makes it sound like the whole thing is pretty true to what she experienced,” I’m not convinced.

The conventional wisdom, from what I understand, is that kids these days at the best schools work incredibly hard. A friend of mine with high-school-aged children describes the “tons” of homework they have. I did a little research between posts: According to a friend of a friend who is a player in the big-league tutoring biz, the workload is “backbreaking;” the top schools are wildly, intensely competitive, even more so than in our day. While it’s clear that many, many students—let’s even say a majority—have tutors, far from trying to coast on their parents’ abilities to pay for extra help, they’re anxious and beleaguered and working feverishly to get into good colleges, which, incidentally, are a lot harder to get into now than when we applied.

There’s a lot of then vs. now coming up in the conversation, and I think we can acknowledge that things in New York in the aughts are different from when we grew up. Parental anxiety seems to be one of the major differences, vast mind-numbing wealth the other. In the first place, our parents may not have been Betty Drapers, but they seem to have been signed up to let us figure it out on our own, even to let us fail. Not anymore. The overwhelming parental anxiety in New York has led to a relentlessly interventionist parental culture, supporting industries from baby-proofing to time-organization for teens. Parents through the ages have wanted the best for their children; nowadays, in New York, they can often afford it. To put it another way, if I’m a billionaire and I have a kid who’s brilliant in four subjects but struggling in math, and I know that one B is going to keep the kid out of Yale (or forget Yale—Haverford), am I going to say “Oh, well. Good luck with that, Johnny?”

Do I agree that something is lost in our current culture of dissociated achievement—achievement for achievement’s sake? Of course. But the problem isn’t that the kids aren’t working hard enough; it’s the way the culture screws up their expectations about what it means to be productive members of society. I would prefer a world without tutors, in which kids had lots of free time after school and did their best with the time allotted. But to me, the issue isn’t so much the free pass the rich kids get as it is the added stress and pointless pressure this generation is under because of the possibility of academic “perfection” that the culture supports. In some cheesy parenting book I read, I remember the author asking us to ask ourselves, What do we actually want for our kids? It’s not the worst way to take the measure of a society. On the other hand, voyeurism and titillating anecdote aside, I’ll leave you with the question I often find myself asking after a scroll through the Urban Baby school message board—namely, does this actually matter?

Tags: college admission, gossip girl, New York City, prep schools, schooled, the nanny diaries

Caitlin Macy is the author of the novel The Fundamentals of Play and Spoiled: Stories. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Slate. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

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