Stop Looking at College Rankings and Read This Instead: 8 Books for Ambitious Parents of High School Students
As a college counselor, I get a lot of questions from parents. About 93 percent of them are variations on the same theme: what can my child do to become a stronger college applicant (unspoken: “…so they can get into a really good college”)?
Apart from the obvious (take challenging courses, get good grades, become involved in meaningful activities outside the classroom, don’t get suspended or expelled), I emphasize a simple and unspectacular-sounding piece of advice: read. I believe wholeheartedly that reading — whether Homer’s Odyssey or Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone—gives all of us, students and parents, a broader, more generous view of the world. It nurtures engagement and imagination and empathy; it allows us to inhabit the struggles and realities of other people. It takes us outside of ourselves and shows us that a meaningful life is possible even without breathing the rarefied air of colleges atop The U.S. News & World Report rankings. (For students and parents unable to let go of The U.S. News & World Report rankings, it also helps with academic performance, problem-solving and verbal skills, and writing college essays. A win-win!)
My memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, is about a lot of things: my parents’ hopes for me, my hopes for my own children, my work as a Stanford admissions officer and an independent college counselor. It is also a story about what I learned from reading books. Books transcend the narrow metrics and anxiety-inducing acronyms (GPAs, SATs, ACTs, HYPS) we often use to define success, and I hope the books below help parents see the college application process not as a culmination but rather as a chapter in a far bigger story.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that any college highly ranked in the U.S, News & World Report must be in want of stellar students” — or so an opening line to a 21st century retelling of Jane Austen’s beloved novel might go if it were set during college application season. Mrs. Bennet is a classic case study of outsize parental aspirations (granted, she longs for wealthy suitors for her daughters, not top-tier colleges, but you get the point), and those aspirations cause her to behave in ways that run entirely counter to her daughters’ true interests. Come for the snappy repartee between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy; stay for the evergreen themes of overbearing mothers and class anxiety.
Tara Westover, Educated. Nothing in Tara’s off-the-grid childhood or adolescence on an Idaho mountain set her up for conventional success — not her father, who mistrusted doctors, hospitals, schools, and the government, not her mother, who treated all injuries with herbal medicines, not her brother, who abused her. Until she was 17, Tara received no formal education, slept with a head-for-the-hills bag in preparation for an apocalypse, and helped in her father’s metal scrapyard. But with the encouragement of another brother, she taught herself enough math and grammar to apply to Brigham Young University, embarking on a journey that would take her to Harvard and Cambridge — and to a life lived in pursuit of multiple perspectives.
Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith, iWoz. The other Steve behind Apple was not a model student (fun fact: he and I both attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California). He was expelled from CU Boulder his freshman year (for hacking into the university computer system, because of course he was), attended community college, and transferred to UC Berkeley. You know the rest of the story; the takeaway is that the road to success isn’t always predictable or linear.
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air. This slim book will break your heart, but not before it affirms, eloquently and powerfully, how studying the humanities, and literature in particular, makes life more meaningful even as it’s ebbing.
Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures. Before Temple Grandin was a professor of animal sciences, an author, and a world-renowned expert on humane cattle processing facilities, she was a child who threw violent tantrums, didn’t speak, and couldn’t bear to be touched. When she was diagnosed with autism in the early 1950s, doctors advised her mother to institutionalize her; instead, her mother insisted that Temple was “different, not less,” and together with teachers and mentors, encouraged Temple’s passionate curiosity.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. By the time Mary Shelley was 18, she had eloped to the continent, suffered a miscarriage, lost a newborn, and written Frankenstein. This is not to suggest that your children are underachievers if they have not authored a novel by the time they’re seniors in high school, but it is an invitation to reflect on Frankenstein’s astonishingly contemporary themes: the dangers of obsessive, solipsistic scientific inquiry and the importance of family and community.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. All parents want what’s best for their children: to teach them, to guide them toward a successful life, to keep them safe. For Black parents raising their children in a country where they, or their child, can be killed for walking, or driving, or wearing a hoodie, or nothing at all, those imperatives are infinitely more fraught. Coates’ powerful account of being Black in America, written as a letter to his son, shows us that wanting what’s best for our own children is inseparable from understanding and confronting our collective history as a nation.
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. Just kidding! Nobody has time to read a door-stopper of a book about life on a 19th century whaling ship, although parents obsessing about getting their child into an elusive top 10 college might take heed of the dangers of monomania (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well).