Privilege and the College Admissions “Arms Race": Review of "I left My Homework in the Hamptons"

(Part 3 of 3)

Rounding out my review(s) of Blythe Grossberg’s I left My Homework in the Hamptons… thanks for sticking around for the finale.

Grossberg’s harshest critiques are aimed at the socioeconomic systems that create and reinforce wealth inequality; on the institutions that put brand identity and college admissions acceptance rates ahead of the individuality and personal development of their students; and on parents who force their children into situations that are untenable and even harmful. But her anecdotes often cast an off-putting judgement, as if it’s the child’s fault for not being able to control her shoe addiction, even though it is her parents who have enabled her. She clearly empathizes with her students and supports them, by going to their sports competitions, for example. But her critical eye is always present. Though Grossberg pointedly protests on page 199 that “this is not meant to be an indictment of those with more,” the inescapable conclusion of the book is that it is.

However, the picture of private school excesses that Grossberg paints is rather outdated. These days, the scandal-plagued battle lines—in NYC, at least—feature well-intentioned, pseudo-woke administrations trying to address generations of racial and socio-economic inequality, often in heavy-handed ways that are politically correct, but which don’t amount to significant change. Battles over dress codes and free speech, not to mention social-justice virtue-signaling, have embroiled many of these vaunted institutions.[1] The “crisis” of privilege now plays out in battles over curriculum reform intended to promote inclusion, equity, and belonging, but which often lead to cries of censorship. Many conservative parents—(cf. Brearley Dad)[2]—feel that their children are being forced to apologize for having been born wealthy and white and that their schools’ anti-racist initiatives have become an all-consuming educational focus—instead of, you know, good ol’ fashioned math and science. It’s a morass, and I don’t pretend to know the way out of it.

Grossberg, however, clearly has an objective beyond reportage. The social mission of I left My Homework emerges on page 267 when she advocates, “Dismantling the athletic-and-academic industrial complex that has been built around affluent children.” That is a major proposition and involves, primarily, combatting the ultra-competitive college admissions process. After all, that’s what all the stress and striving is for—not to create a perfect human, but to earn visible status and distinction as a member of the Ivy League (plus MIT and Stanford).

Critics of K-12 education often refer to the college “arms race,” a years-long process that, for the most competitive families, begins before Kindergarten and leads to intense pressure to perform at the highest levels in all areas (in and outside of school). Looking for an edge, parents push their kids to develop athletic skills that will help them get recruited: squash (early morning and late-night practices) or travel soccer teams (evening and weekend matches). Needless to say, not many of these kids end up playing Division I sports, but they do end up stressed, exhausted, and with too little time to devote to their homework—which in turn makes it necessary to hire a tutor like Grossberg (or me). Grossberg points to studies that acknowledge the legitimate psychological and emotional stresses facing affluent children as a result of what researchers call “time poverty,” which leads to lower well-being and even lower productivity.[3] In other words, too much striving can backfire.

Long practices, weekend sports matches, and travel sports teams do take time away from studying. For Grossberg, however, competitive athletics have become a modern-day scourge. She writes repeatedly how pernicious the squash schedules are. In another description, she makes the hallways of one private school seem like a World War I field hospital: students in pain, on crutches, dragging their broken bones from class to class. But it is certainly not so; for many students, sports are a valuable outlet, a chance to blow off steam, develop physical skills, be part of a team, and experience a camaraderie that can’t be felt in the classroom.

In offering some advice to parents about the college admissions process, Grossberg presents five tips:

1. Leave New York City, where there is too much competition.

2. Take up a “double-reed instrument” that might be underrepresented in university orchestras.

3. Choose a sport purely based on the numbers (hockey for girls, lacrosse for boys) that might provide a higher rate of college acceptance.

4. Choose a potential major in the Humanities that may prove attractive to colleges experiencing declining numbers of majors in those fields.

5. Switch from private school to public school to escape the stress and competition.

These suggestions may be tactical, but they’re also silly—especially number five. The choice to go to a private school is as much about the academics as it is about reinforcing a particular culture or lifestyle. The private school moniker is a status symbol, a testament to family success and an indication that, in addition to money, they are also smart and deserving. Besides, going to public school—certainly those that compete at the highest academic levels with their private counterparts—would come with its own stresses, not least of which would be confronting an enormous and often unresponsive bureaucracy.

With respect to her second, third, and fourth suggestions, their real value is not in the prescriptive choice of instrument, sport, or major, but in the idea that colleges have needs, too, and those can be met by children who possess underrepresented, but valuable, talents. Rushing to pick up the bassoon when you have no interest in it would be foolish—and in fact would be the same mistake as committing to travel sports teams in the hope of playing Division I squash. But if the student nurtures her personal interests and perhaps find “flow” in whatever she pursues, then that will be time well spent that might also, eventually, fulfill a college’s particular needs.

Beyond the five suggestions listed above, Grossberg’s final idea to parents to help their children get into college is both crass and ridiculous: give a lot of money, a suggestion that at least offers the benefit of that money for the university’s scholarship initiatives. But buying a child’s way into college—by donating money directly to the school’s endowment, for example, which is perfectly legal—would almost certainly harm the child. It would be a disempowering admission of his inability to hack it. It’s irresponsible of her to suggest it because it runs contrary to everything that, in my mind, the tutor should be doing to help the child discover and empower himself in finding idiosyncratic pathways, not buying into educational brand names or hype.

One of the main paradoxes of the 1% is that, though they have the money and power for their children to do whatever they want in life, they tend to be fixated on a limited number of potential colleges and careers. It’s as if their high standing is so precarious that any deviation from those expectations will topple them. They end up forcing their children onto narrow paths on which the children may not want to walk. Most of the children in Grossberg’s book will never worry about money and will take advantage of their parents’ connections to get good internships, high-flying jobs, and, yes, maybe even a Harvard acceptance letter. Naturally, their parents want the “best” for their children, but that often means they work “backward”: they envision the object of high status and try to match their child to it, rather than starting with their child and finding the proper match. This is not a new phenomenon, but it is painful to witness, especially when the range of happy and productive outcomes in our society is broad.

The most touching moment in the book is when Grossberg facilitates a community service trip for her students to work with immigrants preparing for their naturalization tests. She is surprised that her students come alive when helping others learn. My hunch is that, removed from their disempowering grinds, the students finally were given a welcome chance to leave their lives behind. They felt trusted and helpful, responsible for someone else, not just concerned with themselves. That’s a wonderful way for young people to gain perspective and balance and to get them off of the college admissions hamster wheel. Schools should provide more such opportunities to engage with the wider community; it will help students contextualize academic achievement and allow them to look out at the world and see how their educations might serve them.

Must high school be a crucible? Like Grossberg, I don’t think so. More important than any particular course or grade is learning to enjoy something for its own sake, and not for the perceived goal that mastering it will achieve. Otherwise, schools and parents are setting kids up for a lifetime of stress and a feeling that they can never meet expectations—always short on time, always feeling like failures, always detached from the elusive “flow.”

Though I disagree with some of her suggestions, I do believe that Grossberg’s core idea is right: in order to guide students to happy and productive futures, we must work to reform a private school system that has become overly contentious and competitive, one that distances a student from, instead of helping her find, herself.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/nyregion/trinity-grace-church-school.html.

[2] https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-dad-gutmann-brearley-parent-support-site.

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0920-z.