★★★★★ 5
What is better? The overachieving 6 or underachieving 8?
Format: Hardcover
First, let me say that I thought that this was an excellent book and would recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the college admissions process. Second, I was surprised at how many of the reviewers seemed shocked--shocked!--that applicants got bonus points for coming from minority backgrounds. Was this some kind of revelation? However one thing that surprised me a little bit is how--even moving beyond race entirely--the more advantages you have had in life, the more disadvantageous it will be for your admissions process. For example, I was unaware that having successful parents would be, in essence, held against you on the theory that more would be expected of you. While other reviewers have (jokingly?) said that they would advise their white kids not to check the "Caucasian" box, I might advise my (still very young) kids to say that their parents have been unemployed their whole life.
I suppose that the main issue which this whole process really boils down to is the following: As a college applicant, is it more important to succeed in life relative to the world around you (i.e. relative to your classmates, to others of your race, to others of your geographical area, to your own parents' life and accomplishments, etc.) or is it more important to succeed absolutely and not on a relative scale. This book clearly informs us that the answer is the former and not the latter. Whether that should be the answer is another question.
For example, say that a student's entire life could be distilled into 2 numbers each on a sliding scale from 1-10. The first number is simply your academic performance (grades, SAT's, course load, etc.) The second number is your background (race, economic circumstances, gender, etc.) In the case of Wesleyan, it seems clear to me that they would rather have a student whose first number was, say, a 6 if his or her second was a 2 (take Mig for example in Steinberg's book) than a student whose first number was an 8 if the second number was a 9 or 10 (take Tiffany Wang for example). Whether that is the right approach is certainly a legitimate issue for discusion and I'm not saying that it's not.
I suppose that one of the things that would be interesting to know (even though one never really can know of course) is whether those numbers will change in the future. For example, if one were to know that Mig would always be a 6 and Tiffany would always be an 8, would that change the analysis as to which is the right approach? I suspect that part of the reason that a school like Wesleyan would favor the overachieving 6 over the underachieving 8 is due to the hope or expectation that those trends will continue in the future and that one day the 6 will actually be ahead of the 8. And maybe that's the way it works. Who knows.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2003
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