Publication Date: Wednesday, February 09, 2005
The long, hard climb
The long, hard climb
(February 09, 2005) Students scramble to get into brand-name colleges
by Alexandria Rocha
Arianna Gianola admits she's a perfectionist. The 17-year-old has a stellar Grade Point Average; a resume chock-full of advanced courses, volunteer work and sports; and a fearless drive to work on the cutting edge of biotechnology. This fall, she'll head to Princeton University.
Arianna, a senior at Palo Alto High School, also has trouble sleeping. She routinely passes out on her books after hours of riddling her mind with tasks left undone. A few years ago, her doctor told her to start living for the moment and not the future. "That's what I'm trying to do this year. Here you work really really hard to get into college and once you get there you can kind of take it easy," she said.
Arianna's driven lifestyle -- guided by a craving to attend a prestigious college -- is all too common in Palo Alto. Students here literally grow up in the shadow of Stanford University, and many have parents who either went down Palm Drive or attended another top-tier school.
With the population of college-bound teenagers growing steadily across the state, Palo Alto high schoolers have started to feel the burn of competition.
Many of them, like Arianna, dive head first into the fight by loading up on Advanced Placement courses, extra curricular activities and internships -- of which there are a plethora available. When it comes time to apply for college, many file dozens of applications in fear of not making the cut.
It's hard to ignore the possible negative side effects of such workaholic attitudes. In trying to keep up, students run the risk of missing the normal high school and teenage experience altogether, where free time and friends are plenty.
"They're suppose to decompress and not talk about college and school every day. They should be getting lots of sleep, hanging out with friends. I don't think that's happening here," said Annette Nassir, a college advisor at Paly.
So where is all the pressure coming from?
For starters, more than 95 percent of graduates from the Palo Alto Unified School District go to college. Dozens enter the University of California and many are accepted into private colleges or the Ivy League. More than 75 percent of the student bodies participate in extracurricular activities and athletics. They rarely miss school, not to mention a homework assignment.
Adding to the pressure, there is also a frenzy among agencies selling services that guarantee a top college acceptance at the end of an expensive program.
First there are companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review that offer test prep courses and tutoring if you can afford a few hundred dollars. Then there is an elusive market of private counselors who will "package" up a student -- telling them exactly what classes, activities and internships to take -- creating a bulletproof college application no one in their right mind would turn away.
Then for kicks, walk down the right aisle in any major bookstore and you'll find hundreds upon hundreds of guides on how to get into the most selective colleges.
When all the elements wrap into one tight package, Arianna's mom, Sabrina Gianola, said it feeds into the kids' fear of failing.
"All these elements are creating a fear that if you don't have this private counselor and do what these books tell you or send your child to Guatemala for the summer, you have no chance," she said.
The figures also support the high-stakes. The GPAs of today's attractive candidates are staggering. The average GPA of a freshman at UC Berkeley last year was 4.15. At UCLA it was 4.09. San Diego? 4.06.
"It gets more and more competitive every year. We're seeing students achieving higher standards, too," said Ravi Poorsina, a spokeswoman for UC admissions.
Last year, the UC Board of Regents even decided to raise the minimum GPA requirement from 2.8 to 3.0, effective with the fall 2007 entering class. The system is designed to admit only the top 12.5 percent of high school graduates, but last year 14.4 percent met that benchmark.
It's a sign that public schools are better preparing students for college, but it's also making the young peoples' rat race even more congested. Just last week, UC released a report revealing a 3 percent spike in freshmen applications for this year's fall semester.
Some also attribute the swell in college goers to more eclectic offerings of advanced courses. Schools in urban areas that couldn't fund or staff AP classes now offer two or three. In affluent Palo Alto, the high schools have super beefed-up curricula and catalogs.
With choices like gourmet cooking, interior design, law, Java, Steinbeck, AP calculus and kinesiology to name a few, Gunn and Paly students want to take them all because it "looks good on paper."
At Paly, Nassir witnesses their hard-driving attitudes first hand.
Every time a fresh-faced junior walks into Paly's college center, she sees the gleam, and the greed, in their eyes. Nothing will suit them but a well-recognized, highly-respected, name-brand university.
"That's a battle we're fighting here at Paly," she said. "Here, kids share their SAT scores, not just with their friends but their acquaintances. They know who got the A's on the tests. It permeates the environment.
"It's a status thing. You've made your mark around here in the parents' social circles if they can tell their friends that you got into Stanford," she added.
When Nassir began working college admissions in 1996 at a small women's college in Georgia, the process was far different. At Wesleyan, Nassir was able to develop relationships with each candidate, sometimes visiting their homes and attending their high school graduations.
The purpose of that personal interaction with each young woman was to ensure that not only was that student what the college was looking for, but that the college would fit her needs, as well.
For Nassir, today's vast differences from the past are highlighted every fall. It's when the Gunn and Paly College Application Guide -- an anonymous record of students GPA's, test scores, where they applied and where they were accepted and denied -- comes out.
Parents make a beeline to the book, and Nassir is sure some are crunching the numbers and trying to find patterns in acceptance rates.
Last summer, Anna Luskin -- a senior at Paly who interned at the Weekly -- put the raw gleam and greed into public view. She wrote a column about a Paly college advisor who said she had "a pretty slim chance" of getting into UCLA, the college of Luskin's childhood affections.
And Luskin is a stellar student. She maintained a 4.0 GPA her first three years at Paly, got a 1250 on the SAT, played varsity softball and the flute, put in many hours of community service and coached a Little League baseball team.
It turns out, Luskin's visit to the college center and her interpretation of what she was told happens a lot. It's a college advisor's job to provide students a wealth of data about various admission requirements.
"Sometimes when you try to pass on the information, they interpret it as we don't believe you can go there. Never is that the intent," said Paly's principal, Scott Laurence. "But that's the message they walk away with."
In her next three pieces, Luskin publicly shed most of that name-brand greed. Now, she's proud to be heading to San Francisco State University to study journalism.
Robin Mamlet, dean of admission and financial aid at Stanford University, was compelled to respond to Luskin's first column. Mamlet said Stanford is trying to "debunk the myth" that an overloaded schedule of AP and other advanced courses is required to get into Stanford.
"Such a course load is not required, nor is it healthy," she said.
The obstacle, Nassir said, is making kids believe it. Especially when all they see is pressing competition.
Gunn senior Eric Nguyen, whose four older siblings have already gone off to either a UC or CSU, is another example of a fully-booked student. He serves on a multitude of school and district committees, including Stressed Out Students and the district's Food Service advisory group. He is also a student board member, which requires him to participate in lengthy policy meetings twice a month.
He admits the loaded schedule is a bit calculated. And like Arianna, he says most of the pressure comes from within.
"I love being in the professional realm. It has taught me how to act, how to carry myself," he said.
Nguyen's parents faced incredible odds to raise their children in Palo Alto. After emigrating from Vietnam in the early '70s, they were placed in a refugee camp in Arkansas, but were soon sponsored to go to Cornell College in Iowa. That's where they heard about Palo Alto's public school system.
His parents now both hold high-pressure jobs. His mom, Alice, is a senior chemist at Novo Nordisk, and his father, Albert -- who is currently recovering from a stroke -- is a computer manager.
With that kind of trailblazing history, Nguyen wants to carry on the tradition of success.
And despite Stanford's attempt at myth-debunking, colleges and universities do want to know if candidates took the most difficult courses at their high schools and participated in a slew of extracurricular activities. Admission officials, however, stand by an annotation students like Arianna and Eric rarely hear: Only do what you can handle.
"It does look good if there are 'X' number of courses available to them, and they took all of them," said Poorsina. "Did they do what they just had to do, or did they take advantage of what's available to them?"
Officials from both Stanford and the UC system say they look at the whole student during the admission process. They want students who focused on activities they're passionate about, while displaying initiative and a sense of time management.
But, they also admit that the bottom line is academic excellence.
"If that's not there, then the other strengths are not going to make up for it," said Anna Marie Porras, admissions director at Stanford.
Senior Charles Vickory, Paly's student body president, says it doesn't have to be all fast and furious. He ignores the hype and considers himself successful. This is the first year he has taken any AP courses (environmental sciences and psychology) and he only applied to four colleges, while a friend applied to 17.
When he attempted advanced math courses one year and they didn't work, he switched out of them without a worry.
"From that point on, I realized there was more to life than taking these hard classes," he said.
And all too often, students who push themselves too hard toward academic excellence end up having regrets.
Gunn graduate Cathy Sun is in her first year at Stanford. The university is treating her well, but the road to get there was less than smooth. During her junior year, which many students say is the most challenging, her friendships suffered because she was so busy with school. She spent a big portion of her senior year repairing those relationships.
"I should've probably not overloaded myself and spent some more time with my friends," she said.
Sun's situation is likely not all that rare.
"You sometimes find that the kids in the higher levels don't really hang out with other kids," said Vickory.
And such hard-driven preparation is not guaranteed to work.
Lisa Wu, a science teacher at Gunn, admits to flopping in her first year at UC Berkeley in 1996. Although she had taken "a fair amount" of honors and AP courses at Saint Francis High School in Mountain View , she just wasn't prepared for the large-campus environment. She failed her first mid-term, and didn't make a lot of friends that year.
She attributes it to her high school preparation. She doesn't remember having any homework. (An average Gunn or Paly student has six to eight hours of homework a night, Wu said.)
Regardless, she acclimated quickly and graduated on time. Wu now uses the story as a way to reassure her stressed-out, college-bound students.
Her own experience, however, creates a teaching conundrum of sorts.
"Are we pushing them too hard? Or, if we didn't push them, would they not be prepared?" she asked.
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