Obsessed With Going To An Elite College? Read “The Golden Ticket” First

Another May 1 - national college decision day - has come and gone, and with it millions of students have made their choice about which college they will attend in the fall. Their decisions have been wooed by institutions, pulled and pushed by parents, lobbied by friends, and influenced by scads of information including national ranking systems, in-person campus visits, meetings with college counselors and reviews of the latest ROI estimators.

Now a new class of high schoolers are beginning their senior year, and the hamster wheel of burnishing just the right resume, crafting the oh-so-compelling personal essay, hiring the most in-the-know college consultant, and packaging “the goods” to gain admission to what’s sometimes called the HYPS schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford) is spinning again.

For tens of thousands of students, the pressure to be admitted to one of the nation’s elite colleges is overwhelming and all-consuming. It’s a desperate chase for what they see as a guarantee of later success, wealth, and status. But they and their parents should first read independent college admission consultant Irena Smith’s captivating, and smart memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life In College Admissions Essays. It can serve as a potential antidote to the fevered belief that being admitted to an elite college will spell the difference between a successful life vs. a doomed future. That’s a fever that’s hard to break for many families, but Smith’s highly personal, literate, sometimes snarky account might just do the trick.

Part autobiography and part reflection on the college application and admission process, Smith’s memoir is structured into chapters offering her responses to various college essay prompts (a sample prompt from the Common Application: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself and others;” and one from Georgetown: “What does it mean to you to be educated?”).

Smith brings a wealth of academic cred to the task. After emigrating as a young (and, as we learn, very strong-willed) child with her parents from the former Soviet Union, she earned her BA in English from UCLA and later her PhD in Comparative Literature, also from UCLA. She then taught literature and composition at UCLA and Stanford before becoming an admissions officer at Stanford, where she worked for four years, reading and reviewing thousands of applications for admission.

Following that, Smith founded her own college consulting practice in Palo Alto, where for the past 15 years, she has helped students and their families navigate the college admissions process. “Every fall, I help students figure out how to tell their best story - how to find the germ of a good idea in what is often an uneventful life dutfully devoted to all the suburban markers of success: sports teams, bands, science competitions, speech and debate competitions, math competitions, an endless parade of tutors, summer enrichment programs, volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club, volunteering in Tanzania, volunteering in Nicaragua, volunteering at the local soup kitchen.”

In an Inside Higher Education interview, Smith likened her consulting work with students to “a batting coach whose job it is to help them hit harder and more accurately, but I certainly can’t guarantee a home run.” She pushes students to dig deeper to discover who they are and what they care the most about and then teaches them to write their personal story with as much clarity as possible.

Serious readers will enjoy Smith’s frequent side tracks into both the high brow literature and pop culture stories she accesses with ease. Author of a doctoral dissertation comparing Nabokov and Henry James, Smith knows her way around books. Describing the aspirations we hold for our children and ourselves, she writes, “we want to be Odysseus, not the suitors; Cinderella, not the stepsisters; Charlie Bucket, not Veruca Salt or Augustus Gloop.” Near the end of the book, she likens the world that awaits students regardless of where they go to college to a “universe of the imagination that Nabokov called ‘unreal estate.’’’

Smith displays an active ambivalence toward her work, While she clearly loves the process of helping smart teenagers examine their interests and express their “funny, idiosyncratic, thoughtful” selves, she also recognizes “the ugly underbelly of the need, the striving, the obsession with status and prestige that are the driving engines of my profession.”

Throughout the book, Smith recounts in detail her own struggles, particularly those involving her and her psychiatrist husband raising their three children, each of whom had significant psychological problems. Jordan, their first child, is diagnosed with autistic disorder, Mara struggles with depression and social anxiety, and Noah, their youngest, is diagnosed with ADHD.

She reveals the guilt and anxiety her family’s dysfunction causes her, and she acknowledges the “keen irony” of earning a lot of money by trying to help parents get their kids into “the best college” so she can help pay for the therapy and psychiatrists needed by her own children. Smith offers plenty of candid lessons on parenting, notably how frustrating and fulfilling it can be, no matter how good or bad we are at it.

The book mixes Smith’s often biting but witty perspectives on admissions (”The students I’ve seen get into Stanford are usually too busy being extraordinary to care whether they get into Stanford or not.”) with observations about the college admissions scramble, including the parents she encounters (”some parents astonish me with their tact, their kindness, their generosity,” others strike her as “egotistical, self-absorbed, insane.”)

In the end, Smith’s memoir recognizes that the patterns in our lives come from both accident and intent, and that regardless of where students go to college or even if they never go at all, there’s a universe out there “independent of your alma mater,” and “that universe - invisible, democratic, all-embracing, catholic - is right there for the taking.”