Generation Gaps and the College Application Process

February 17th

So I never knew this, but that's what they're calling us “the Millennials”. The generation after Generation X who has are coming of age in 2000 and later. People who are born between 1977 and 1998, which I'm pretty confident includes most of our class and the real-life applicants that are depicted in the book. Between Admission and This Side of Paradise, our class has focused a lot on generations, and in that vein, generation gaps. Needless to say, our college application expereince is diffrerent from that of our parents. In the scene in Admission when Portia visits John's family and talks to his sister, Deborah, they have what we are lead to believe is a typically aggressive conversation about the college admissions process. Deborah talks about her husband going to Cornell as back up school, saying that he was “supposed to go to Yale”. Porita wonders cynically what that is even supposed to mean. But despite this comment, Deborah does have a point; the very idea of college is different from how it was when some of our parents were applying to college, and so clearly our applications are different.

This got me thinking about my parents' role in my college application process. I was blessed to not end up with helicopter parents, but my parents, my mother in particular, were really involved in the process. The nagging that got me to finish up applications over Christmas break, the support system that pulled me back into the fray when I faced repeated rejections. I'm the oldest of my siblings, so this was a whole new territory for my family. Although all my parents when to college (I say 'all' because both my biological parents are remarried, so there's four of them in total), but no one had an experience like me. While I love and respect my parents, I'm smarter than they were. None of them even thought of applying to the big shot Ivies I applied to. My step-mom went to the art school down the street, and my step-dad had to go part time to help support the family. But its more than the actual colleges they ended up at. I didn't get the sense that my parents had to jump through the same contrived hoops that I, that we, that this generation did. My step-mom worked the animal shelter because she liked animals, that's it. My mom was captain of the field hockey team, but only because she really liked field hockey and played seventh grade through her senior year. My dad put in long hours at his job because it was a family business; the whole family put in long hours at the business. And my step-dad certainly didn't use his application to explain why this smart kid was coming off two years of part-time community college, because it was none of the admission officers business. When I had him read one of my essay drafts about our some what unexpected relationship, how blood relations have never really defined family for me, he was plenty touched, but also a little confused. Why would the college admissions officers care what I thought about family beyond financial aid questions?

I think that the application process has certainly changed from one generation to the next. The question that remains to be seen, it what kind of grown-ups we end up being because of it.

PS, This is a kind of cool article I found about marketing to our demographic. Not sure if I totally agree with it, but interesting anyway. http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/mgt08044.html