An Age of Tainted Admissions and Too Much Homework

AUTUMN leaves, sharp pencils, new lunchboxes: back-to-school season is always an exciting time. It’s livelier than usual when muckraking is part of the curriculum. 

This fall education is a particularly hot topic in publishing. New books raise a wealth of ticklish questions, beginning with the ones about wealthy kids. What got them into those Ivy League classrooms? Have they been pushed nonstop toward college from the cradle? Will they self-destruct once they get there? How many coaches and essay editors and tutors can dance on the head of a pin?

Although these are familiar topics, they have developed extra heft. One reason: the privacy strictures that once protected even the most knuckleheaded students can now be breached via the Internet. As colleges deal with overwhelming numbers of applications by making their calculations more blatantly quantifiable, embarrassing facts and figures have begun finding their way into the public discourse. Students’ test scores, colleges’ rankings in surveys and parents’ bribes all figure in institutions’ decisions. So they have all become fair game.

Daniel Golden uses these numbers for maximum embarrassment in “The Price of Admissions: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” (A big authoritative subtitle is essential in this genre.) His conclusions are expected; his tactics are not.

Mr. Golden, the deputy Boston bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, is the son of immigrants and legitimately worked his way into Harvard. He now has an animus for students whose families are wealthy, powerful or famous enough to shoehorn them ahead of more (in Mr. Golden’s opinion) qualified college applicants. “How the ‘Z-List’ makes the A-List” is his chapter on Harvard’s treatment of major donors.

Michael Goldberger, a former director of admissions for Brown University, is quoted here as acknowledging that “having a building named after your family on our campus would be a plus factor.” Point taken — but Mr. Golden goes much further. His book is the season’s barnburner because it cites specific donations, test scores and even essay topics that are linked to questionably qualified applicants. Their names are named.

“The Price of Admission” describes “development admits” — applicants with family money but no previous ties to Duke University, the most egregious offender cited here — as “the dirty little secret of college admissions.” Somehow he knows that Dhani Harrison, who went to Brown, wrote an admissions essay about playing music onstage with his father, the Beatle, and Eric Clapton — and that celebrity-mongering Brown was suitably impressed.

Mr. Golden’s dishy, mean-spirited book delivers a mixed message: that although prominent institutions select students unfairly, applicants should still be fighting their ways into these same unscrupulous colleges. A how-to guide, “The New Rules of College Admissions: Ten Former Admissions Officers Reveal What It Takes to Get Into College Today,” raises the ante by suggesting that every applicant needs a theme. (“That girl is going to be president someday!”) No wonder America’s schoolkids have a collective headache.

And as described by Alexandra Robbins in “The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids,” they are all but strangled by creeping Ivy, in the form of college-application consultants with names like IvyWise and the Ivy Guaranteed Admissions Program. Ms. Robbins describes a boy who, in light of this pressure, finds it no coincidence that “SAT” overlaps with the name Satan.

She also scares one counselor into ditching a teenage client when the client becomes one of Ms. Robbins’s interview subjects. The student could tarnish the counselor’s reputation by failing to get into an important college.

Ms. Robbins takes a soapy reality-show approach as she tracks a cross-section of high school hopefuls through the admissions gantlet. Her book is more anecdotal and less biting than Mr. Golden’s. But she does illustrate the scope of the problem by showing that it’s a short leap from identifying flash cards when applying to kindergarten (“letter, whale, broom, plug, snail, camel, shovel”) to the full kiddie rat race.

Similarly, in “Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child,” Alissa Quart describes an experiment measuring how big expectations warp young prodigies. Some children who participated in I.Q. testing were randomly told they were gifted. That reduced both their ability to work persistently and their capacity for enjoyment.

“Hothouse Kids” is a more serious study than “The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It.” This blander book presents unsurprising evidence that today’s school workloads can be monstrous. Witness the kindergarten girl from Fairbanks, Alaska, who from 5:30 to 6 each day “needs cajoling from parent to do homework, while parent tries to cook dinner.”

On this book’s back cover, it is suggested by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., that every parent in America buy a copy of “The Case Against Homework” — even though Dr. Kindlon now has his own “Alpha Girls” to recommend. “Alpha Girls” reflects the kind of firsthand perspective that colors many such studies of schoolchildren.

As the father of two teenage girls, Dr. Kindlon feels that father-daughter connections are important and empowering in creating successful alpha personalities. His book has a chart to prove that girls with good relationships with their fathers have high self-esteem. Another shows that the majority of alpha girls disagree with the statement “I am shy.”

Although “Alpha Girls” means to combat the idea of stifled female ambition, its central insight is nothing new. The alpha was a smart cookie even when she was known as a coed.

“College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens and Coeds, Then and Now” is an entertaining work of feminist history that digs up every conceivable manifestation of the she-student, from novelty item to fashion plate to trendsetter. It helps to know that even when an advertisement for fruit might feature a pretty model in cap and gown (courtesy of the College Heights Orange and Lemon Association), and girls were offered advice by books like “Co-Ediquette” (“if he gets amorous, don’t wander alone with him in the moonlight”), they were still alpha enough to resist the brainwashing.

Whatever their sex, college students risk overreacting to years’ worth of torment once they finally leave home. What happens at college once they get there? “From Binge to Blackout: A Mother and Son Struggle With Teen Drinking” is an especially gripping cautionary tale on this subject. And it is unusual in that it does not follow the standard story template, from downfall to miracle cure. Instead this account is divided between two narrators: Toren Volkmann, who slid with scary ease from fun-loving party guy to desperate alcoholic, and Chris Volkmann, his mother, who bought Toren’s assurances that he was fine. He had a secret, and she hadn’t a clue.

In light of all this, perhaps there’s a lot to be said for armchair academia, the kind best reached via someone else’s imagination. A covert enjoyment of numbers, puzzles, cognitive tricks and pattern recognition fueled the vast popularity of the novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” — even though the author, Mark Haddon, has not replicated this gambit in his new novel, “A Spot of Bother.” Instead this season’s schoolbook of choice is Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” a novel that trades on classroom cachet.

With chapters named for famously great books, this showily erudite novel has a prep school for its setting. It has a bright young student as its narrator, and a mysterious teacher at the center of its plot. Best of all, it comes with a final exam. And as Ms. Pessl puts it, in a last sentence that’s a lovely feat of school mimicry: “Take all the time you need.”