Admission (23 page)

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.

As for Dylan’s Chippewa student, he could certainly go to Minnesota State. He could take the time he needed to graduate, go
on to medical school, and return to his reservation to become the beacon of his community, inspiring generations of other
bright kids to see beyond the horizon. On the other hand, he might come to Princeton, or a place like Princeton, and buckle,
leaving school altogether and never achieving what he might achieve. On the other hand, a Minnesota State might lack Princeton’s
abilities to carry him, support him, bear with him. It might lack the scholarship support Princeton could provide, and the
mentorship. On the other hand, Princeton’s foreignness, its diversity, its raw pressure, might prove unnecessary distractions
to someone who would otherwise focus on the matter at hand: to establish a bedrock foundation for the ultimate goal of becoming
a doctor. On the other hand, what if this student wasn’t really destined for medicine at all, but only awaiting the film studies
or religion or art or Chinese mythology class that would set his path in a radically different direction toward an unsuspected
vocation? Princeton did that for so many students. And this alive kid, this hungry kid, shouldn’t he have the broadest possible
range of brilliant outcomes?

Unfortunately, there was no gain in looking to the past for guidance. Over the years, she had taken various deep breaths over
various marginal students, some of whom had sailed through and some of whom had faltered and then failed. That girl from Sitka,
now at Oxford studying economics on a Rhodes, had been horrendously prepared for Princeton, but once on campus (and with massive
support from the writing program), she had found her footing. But there were others who had not been able to stay, and they
were like little stigmata to the admissions officers who had fought for them. Portia, like every one of her colleagues, carried
her own secret retinue of sorrows: the single mother from Oakland who had fought her way through high school, taking six years
to do it, and who had ardently (if inarticulately) pleaded for the chance. She had had to leave after freshman year. The boy
from Hawaii who had spent his life in foster care, finding a relatively stable home only in the last two years. It hadn’t
been enough. Sophomore year, he had bought a history paper off the Internet and been suspended. The fact was, they didn’t
know. They couldn’t know. What would happen if we said yes? What would happen if we said no? Sometimes she thought that every
new admissions officer should be issued a Ouija board.

Dylan was waiting patiently, if grimly. “How bad are the scores?” Portia asked.

He seemed to consider this with a weight the question didn’t quite indicate. “Bad. Low five hundreds.”

“Science aptitude?”

“Unreflected in the transcript, but I do think so, yes.”

“Can he write?”

“Passionately. But not very well.”

Passion, Portia thought. It was what they were all about. But passion underscored by the attendant numbers and letters. This
was not looking good.

“Have you considered asking them to keep him for another year? It sounds like it could make a big difference for him, wherever
he ends up.”

Dylan sat back in the swivel chair and folded his arms. He looked suddenly calm and pleased. “Yes, actually. I was waiting
to see if you had the same thought.”