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Thursday, March 23, 2006

Too late to do me any good...

Posted by: Jambo / 11:33 AM

...but just in time to screw things up for my daughters. From today's NYT:

Rest assured that admissions officers are not cavalier in making their decisions. Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women. While gulping down coffee and poring over statistics, we heard about a young woman from Kentucky we were not yet ready to admit outright. She was the leader/president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.

Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write "admit" next to her name.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

Well that's just great. Now that it is no longer an issue it turns out that I would have an easier time getting into a prestigious college but it's only getting harder for my daughters to do the same. Thankfully I have a good decade to help them prepare but it sounds like it is going to take more than writing a hit play and founding the Rushmore bee keepers club. (Hammer and cp, are you listening?)

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