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In the college-admissions wars, we parents are the true fighters. We're pushing our kids to get good grades, take SAT preparatory courses and build resumes so they can get into the college of our first choice. We say our motives are selfless and sensible. A degree from Stanford or Princeton is the ticket for life. If Aaron and Nicole don't get in, they're forever doomed. Gosh, we're delusional.

I've twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. It's the one-upmanship among parents. We see our kids' college rating as medals proving how well or how poorly we've raised them. But we can't acknowledge that our obsession is more about us than them. So we've contrived various justifications that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn't matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford. Admissions anxiety afflicts only a minority of parents. It's true that getting into college has generally become tougher because the number of high-school graduates has grown. From 1994 to 2006, the increase is 28 percent. Still, 64 percent of freshmen attend schools where acceptance rates exceed 70 percent, and the application surge at elite schools dwarfs population growth. Take Yale. In 1994, it accepted 18.9 percent of 12,991 applicants; this year it admitted only 8.6 percent of 21,000. We have a full-blown prestige panic; we worry that there won't be enough medals to go around. Fearful parents prod their children to apply to more schools than ever. "The epicenters (of parental anxiety) used to be on the coasts, Boston, New York, Washington, Los Angeles", says Tom Parker, Amherst's admissions dean. "But it's radiated throughout the country". Underlying the hysteria is the belief that scarce elite degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All that's plausible and mostly wrong. "We haven't found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters", says Ernest T. Pascarella of the University of Iowa, co author of "How College Affects Students", an 827-page evaluation of hundreds of studies of the college experience. Selective schools don't systematically employ better instructional approaches than less-selective schools, according to a study by Pascarella and George Kuh of Indiana University. Some do; some don't. On two measures professors' feedback and the number of essay exams selective schools do slightly worse. In the author's eyes, parents pushing their kids to an elite degree are ______. A．aggressive B．misguided C．reasonable D．failing

时间：2023-10-08 10:59:15

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