According to the IHT, thin envelopes will be out in full force this May:
Applications to selective colleges and universities are reaching new heights this year, promising another season of high rejection rates and dashed hopes for many more students. […] Officials said the trend was a result of demographics, aggressive recruiting, the ease of online applications and more students applying to ever more colleges as a safety net. The swelling population of 18-year-olds is not supposed to peak until 2009, when the largest group of high school seniors in the nation’s history, 3.2 million, are to graduate. (IHT, “Applications to U.S. colleges are breaking records“
In other words, record numbers of parents and teens are putting themselves through an incredibly high-pressure, traumatizing experience for a shot at the university lottery. Is it worth it?
I think it’s one thing if it’s largely the kids putting themselves through hell to get into Harvard. That’s fine. I think it’s another thing for parents to be pushing their kids. Those parents need to kicked pretty hard. Happiness is self-determination, not “success”—and a marquee degree doesn’t guarantee either.
Yes folks, it’s time for a marvelous spring at the glorious, prestigious, orgasmically wonderful Yale University School of Architecture! This semester begins the famous Building Project—more specifically, the half-semester housing studio that leads up to the famous Building Project.
Our first design problem is a two-week ditty by the title of “Cohabitation,” referring to the imaginary people we’ll be inhumanely squeezing into a 16 foot by 16 foot by 14 foot volume. The lead professor (we’ll call him “Alan” because his last name is entirely too Google-able) has prepared descriptions for five “characters,” of which we are supposed to choose two for our depraved design machinations. The first character is a:
37 year old male; single; unemployed blogger; self-described ‘reclusive’ and occasional ‘night owl’; health problems related to clinical obesity and general inactivity.
Somehow I feel strangely… insulted.
Anyway, 16 ft x 16 ft x 14 ft is not a lot of space to squeeze two separate units for two people (and oh, the whole thing is 10 feet off the ground so valuable space needs to be wasted on a series of stairs), and near the end of the studio introduced our gleeful professor cackled suggested that the design problem was “set up for failure.” Yay!
Y’all with latent Ivy League (i.e., H-Y-P) hate are going to love this classic New Yorker article by Malcom Gladwell, “Getting In“:
The admissions committee [at Yale] viewed evidence of ‘manliness’ with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because ‘there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.’ Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being ‘mediocre in comparison with many others,’ was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, ‘we just thought he was more of a guy.’ So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
I think you’ll agree that the Ivy League is endlessly interesting, if not necessarily in the most positive terms. It really is the history of America’s most obvious instrument of class separation and promotion.
Élite schools, like any luxury brand, are an aesthetic experience—an exquisitely constructed fantasy of what it means to belong to an élite—and they have always been mindful of what must be done to maintain that experience.
*Incidentally, I apologize that this blog has become the Yale-Soaked Scraps Show: I’m as tired of typing the word “Yale” as you are of reading it. But, that’s my night-is-the-new-daytime life right now.
I’ve only been in class two days, but here’s the dig on YSOA admissions:
- Your school matters. The first thing every prof and adviser wants to know is where you went to school. Moreover, it matters whether the people admitting you know faculty at your school, and thus whether faculty at your school actually like you. (For example, Eisenman’s an Ohio State alumnus; every year his friends there call him and tell him who their top students are.)
- Whether or not other schools have accepted you matters. They talk. They all know who’s going where. Yale (aka Dean Stern) is in a dead heat with Princeton and Harvard… especially Harvard, it’s like a more happy Cold War. They could give less of a crap about Columbia, which is why I didn’t get more monies when I appealed to fin-aid with “but Columbia gave me $cash!”
- 3. Your family couldn’t hurt. Some of the faculty know a surprising amount about who comes from what family, as was made abundantly clear in class today.
So, undergrads, be memorable.
Roger Connah, “An Unlikely Degree Zero?” Perspecta 38 Architecture after all. 13:
“Depending on how useful this intellectual wants to be, could spend time identifying the latest thinkers and critical masters as being responsible for future ‘trends.’ But would not necessarily need to absorb these as the pace of cultural change would blur the effort taken to attempt any ‘understanding.’”
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