But beyond the top hundred universities in the country (or, in truth, the top fifty), the competition to get in is not terribly intense. Even the so-called “selective” institutions offer places to upwards of 75 percent of all applicants. An institution like Colorado College—an impressive place to be sure—makes offers to over 70 percent of applicants, meaning that it’s reaching a bit to call it “selective.” Similarly, Canada’s highly ranked and aggressively entrepreneurial University of Waterloo accepts close to 75 percent of the students who apply. Many of the institutions with quite flexible approaches to admission, particularly when trying to balance the entry class by gender and race, are truly fine institutions, offering an educational environment as good, if not better, than the allegedly elite institutions that garner the headlines. But, truth be told, a strong high school graduate, with an average of over 80 percent will get into almost all of the universities she or he applies for—outside the top hundred—and might even squeeze into the very top institutions, provided the goal is not a particularly high-demand program. Smart applicants realize that they can often apply for a low-demand program, sadly, in the arts at most institutions, and wrangle a transfer later into a high-demand offering, like business.
Despite this, American parents devote a remarkably large amount of time and money preparing their children for admission to the right school. They send them to after-school programs—called juku (cram) schools in Japan, but available in countries around the world, particularly through the now-ubiquitous Sylvan Learning Centres—to overcome the perceived and actual liabilities of most high schools. They pay for SAT (the Scholastic Aptitude Test) preparation classes, aiming to get their children into the 1,200+ score category that opens a lot of campus doors. These same students are counselled to volunteer, excel in sports, run for student council, help the needy, write a screenplay, sing on Broadway, or otherwise demonstrate to the admissions officers that they are real firebrands, worthy of entrance to a high-profile university. With many of the best schools requiring a formal letter of application, parents also pay for a coach to help draw up the all-important document, outlining the applicant’s stellar citizenship, legacy of overcoming personal crises, humanitarian zeal, and intellectual gifts. These same aggressive, overbearing, and highly protective parents then accompany their children on extensive campus tours, visiting top choices (and a couple of “safety schools,” institutions that are sure to admit them in case the top ones send rejection letters) and seeking to impress admissions officers.
The United States is not the only country that has developed an entire industry around preparing children for admission into elite universities, but it is the one that does it most openly, at the highest expense, and with the greatest public awareness of the topic. Parents have come to view the investment in admission coaches as akin to a form of career health care, evidence that they are loving and devoted to their kids. Focusing on the USA, however, overshadows the increasingly global nature of this student-focused enterprise. In the Middle East, wealthy families also spend very large sums to support their children at overseas universities. In China and Hong Kong, where the value of a top-flight technical (that is, engineering, math, science, accounting, or business) education is valued more than anywhere on earth perhaps, parents of all social classes invest heavily in the academic careers of hard-working youngsters. The growing African middle class, likewise, seeks out international opportunities for its children, despite the high costs and long periods away from the home country. So it goes in Brazil, where the intellectual allure of the former imperial power, Portugal, draws hundreds of students across the Atlantic each year—aided now by a multi-billion dollar scholarship program to send undergraduates and graduates overseas. In Brazil, as well, the academically elite public university system attracts a great deal of attention, with parents pushing their students to excel in high school so that they can avoid the much higher fees at the country’s private institutions.
Many countries—Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand among others—take great pride in their egalitarian university systems, with the quality of teaching, research, and facilities varying relatively little across a wide range of institutions. In these countries, parents can rest much easier and can feel comfortable about sending their children to the local publicly funded university, although this is starting to change as national and international ranking systems become all the rage in the pursuit of advancement for young adults.
Parents are important simply because they play two crucial roles in determining the shape of the global university system. They influence the choice of institution and they finance (or refuse or are unable to finance) the undergraduate education for many students. Their preoccupation with the world of work leads them to press for admission to a prestigious university and enrolment in a market-related field. Parents from China and those of Chinese ancestry of place exceptional pressure on their children to take a science, business, or technical program. European families are far more comfortable with arts-based education. A Chinese family, facing massive and even multi-generational investment in a single child, cheer the decision to go to CalTech or to study computer science at the University of Hong Kong. It is often considered an extended family failure if a son or daughter ends up at Brandon University or Newcastle in the UK. A Western family is likely to be happy with admission into any field at Yale, Swarthmore, or Auckland; if the young adult is only able to get into the University of Pennsylvania at Bradford or Charles Darwin University (Australia), it is much preferred that they take a practical field, such as math or education. University is a family matter, starting with the enforcement of parental expectations from a very young age, establishment of an education trajectory, selection of a university, and financing.
There is a gripping illustration—tragic in so many ways—of how this works out in America, and this story can be replicated in dozens of countries around the world. Waiting for Superman is a documentary film indictment of public education in the United States. In the process of critiquing the existing school system, director Davis Guggenheim follows dozens of children entered into a lottery to get into a prestigious and high-quality charter school. The calculus from here is devastatingly simple. Get accepted and the student is on track to university admission and the prospect of a good life. Get turned down and the student is sentenced to a lifetime of mediocrity and poverty, based on attendance at a substandard public school. The faces of the parents—and by extension, their children—as the lottery names are called, passing over one after the other, speak volumes about the crisis of expectations. With so many North American families assuming that their children have to go to university in order to succeed, the failure to get into a good feeder school at the age of eight or nine years is viewed as a family catastrophe.
As for the agents who help with getting them into a good college, a distressing number of them are apparently willing to fabricate or alter high school transcripts and other documents in order to get past admissions officers and visa officials. Often, the universities pay the agents as well, creating impressive cash flows and potential conflicts of interest all around. The result can be spectacular abuse, such as the 2012 scandal that hit Dickinson State University in North Dakota, where it was discovered that dozens of students had been let in inappropriately and were then shepherded through the degree process in questionable ways. Or worse, the 2011 scandal involving Tri-Valley University of California, accused of collecting fees from foreign students but not requiring them to attend class so that they could work throughout the country on student visas.[25]
While most Western countries have fairly straightforward systems of admission—those with the highest grades get in—the United States has a bewildering array of institutional choices and admission procedures. Here, as in China, admission agents have proven extremely popular. Agents advise about where to volunteer, how to broaden the resumé, and how to shape the all-crucial letter of application to suit institutional expectations. There are shady dealings here as well. Some high school seniors have been directed to faux humanitarian