and early twenty-first centuries, universities have become the object of global dreams and aspirations.
Don’t underestimate the anxiety that underscores the attempt to gain access to a university. In January 2012, one person died in a stampede set off when students panicked about admission to the College of Johannesburg in South Africa. With more than ten thousand students vying for one of eight hundred spots, the assembled youth rioted. The conflict started when the government, seeking to respond to the inequities created by an unjust and unequal high school system, lowered the passing grades for math from 50 percent to 30 percent, instantly making thousands of new aspirants eligible for admission. Sbahle Mbambo, a young woman, was one of those desperate for a place. “Everyone in this country wants to be educated,” she said. “They want to be independent, and to get proper jobs.”[24] South Africa’s anxieties peaked again in October 2015 when planned tuition hikes sent tens of thousands of angry students, mostly black, to the streets to protest what they saw as the growing inaccessibility of a university education.
The metrics of this application process are quite remarkable. In Japan, students pay an application fee of up to ¥10,000 (or more than US$1,000) for many universities. In India, middle-class parents with talented children work tirelessly to get them accepted into the career-making IITs, among the hardest universities in the world to get into. The tiger mothers immortalized by Amy Chua devote much of their energy to ensuring their little treasures have their choice of the very best schools. Getting a young adult into Oxford or Cambridge typically requires careful attention to the elementary and secondary school that the children attend, for few graduates from mediocre high schools make it into a top British university. In country after country, getting into an elite institution is seen as a sure road to career success and personal wealth.
No one, however, does it quite like the Americans. The USA has the world’s most remarkable and diverse university system. Everyone knows about the elite Ivy League universities, the superb public research institutions (Wisconsin-Madison and UC-San Diego are among the best universities anywhere), and even the truly special liberal-arts colleges, like Wellesley, Bates, Lewis and Clark, and Reed. Many fewer people have ever heard of the vast array of mid-ranked institutions, from Bowling Green to the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, that provide top-flight research to their regions and a decent education to their students. Almost no one has heard of the large number of aggressively mediocre institutions that admit all comers, graduate only a small percentage of their students, and give them little of value while they are there. While we forebear to name the universities in this last category, they are often in the news for their high attrition rates, poor student-satisfaction results, and financial crises.
It’s also worth noting that the image of cutthroat competition to get into a top institution is more hokum than reality. The top schools—Harvard, UC-Berkeley, Middlebury, and the like—are truly difficult to impress. Harvard accepts fewer than 7 percent of those who apply, and there is a careful self-selection process that winnows down the applicant pool to a small group of truly talented individuals. The mystique of Harvard—of which more later—is such that American parents are, like their Japanese counterparts, prepared to devote large sums of money and years of planning to line their children up for such an opportunity.
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
