Colleges: The Sheepskin Squeeze

Once upon a time, the children said good night to their parents and went to bed; nowadays, often enough, the parents say good night to the children and go to bed, leaving the young scholars to finish their endless homework some time before dawn. If the American student could be fitted out with a pressure gauge, the needle would be trembling at a high figure. One man who has thought a lot about the pressure is John D. Black, 44, director of Stanford University’s counseling service and an associate professor of psychology. In recent speeches and writings, he gives a few of his observations.

Personal-File Tragedy. The text for Black’s speeches was a Stanford student’s personal file, the dry paper chronology of what Black called one of the saddest stories he had ever seen: a parent pushing his son toward a prestige college so hard that the kid broke down. The file began with a letter on the stationery of a large corporation, signed by the president, which requested a college application blank for his son and added in a guileless-looking P.S. that the boy’s mother was a Stanford alumna. Next, with thanks for the dean’s prompt reply, came a $250 check for the mother’s life membership in the alumni association.

The application showed that the boy was in a dozen and one school activities—but his College Board scores were 200 points below the Stanford average (around 650). A further note from the father implied that Harvard would welcome his son, but the lad “persists in his preference for your institution.” An anguished admissions office rejected the boy. Nonetheless, after a creditable year at a junior college, he transferred to Stanford as a sophomore.

The boy’s first-quarter grades were borderline—two C’s and a D, plus a B in golf. During the second quarter, his golf improved to an A. Then came an unusual paper: proceedings of the student court that found the boy guilty of cheating on a geology final, sentenced him to an F in the course and a half-year’s suspension. The next enclosure was an impeccably typed apology on the father’s corporation letterhead. Though the boy signed it, the prose was not that of an English student with a D average. His request for reinstatement was refused.

The New Shape. Parental pressure can work to its own defeat—but Black knows that it is by no means the whole story. He singles out four sociological factors that in the past few years have, as most people are more or less aware, increasingly shaped U.S. higher education:

∙ COMPETITION HAS MULTIPLIED. “Today, with a superior education, there are no bars to equality for any white American—and poverty itself is no direct bar to obtaining an education. Furthermore, education is now the only channel of upward mobility in our society, since the amassing of great wealth is now virtually impossible.”

∙ TECHNOLOGY IS VITAL. “Half of our children will ultimately be employed in occupations which do not even exist today. Our economy has become dependent for its growth on intellectual manpower.”

∙ EDUCATION IS A SORT OF GOD. “I think that some of us have turned to education as we turned in times past to religion—to help us handle our fears and anxieties. We are no longer terrified by mysterious plagues or earthquakes, but by the irreconcilability of political systems, the very real danger of nuclear explosions, the inevitability of overpopulation. Most of us feel that the only hope lies in new knowledge.”

∙ A BACHELOR’S DEGREE IS NO LONGER ENOUGH. At Stanford, more than 85% of the freshmen aim for graduate school. And although C averages are enough for a B.A., higher degrees require B’s and A’s.

These factors, concedes Black, are inescapable, even good, by-products of U.S. society, and together they put enough pressure on students without the parents adding any. If students must face mounting standards, parental understanding and approval must increase even more. Concludes the Stanford psychologist: “We must not impose our anxieties about the world on our children, or try to decide for them what their roles should be in a future we cannot even visualize.”