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Oh dear, this is sad on a number of counts.

I read this article and thought (once again): Obsession with money, image, and the business model is going to do this country in.

You go to college to learn a lot about a lot of stuff, to hone your skills, & to discover your talents. You can do that perfectly well at any good state university for half the cost of a private college--plus, you experience people from all walks of life & you have to prove yourself against some really smart people (not much coddling as an undergraduate at your state university). And there will be all kinds of temptations that will take strong self-discipline on your part. A good preparation for what life will throw at you.

Colleges are part of the problem when it comes to admissions, as this article demonstrates. The college bureaucracy is overly wrapped up in money and brandishing their image--not for the better as far as teaching, education, and learning are concerned. Millions spent on hotel style dorms & "extras" rather than enhancing learning and talent.

And, parents need to back off & let their college student offspring learn how to be independent adults. I saw some parents follow the business model and try to sell their child as a product. They pushed their adolescents--not to be more intelligent and develop good judgment--but to game the system & seek advantages by being brash and arrogant. And if their student child wouldn't do it, they would. Truly embarrassing and damaging.

That any admissions offices would tolerate this kind of behavior is shocking. The notion that you can plead, charm, or bribe your way to success is blatantly corrupt. There is no difference between this and bribing a congressperson. Is this what we want to teach tomorrow's leaders? Everyone should submit the same credentials, the admissions office should rank them according to consistent criteria, then accept those on the list according to the ranking.

I had attempted to watch some of the videos that these misguided young people have sent to their schools of choice. I gave up less than half way through the third of them. I am sorry to say that I find them quite . . . pathetic; in fact, to my mind each of them displays a catalog of reasons *not* to admit these individuals.

Dear students, your own perception of your "awesomeness" is not what it takes to succeed in college nor does it impress the responsible adults who make the admissions decisions. The process of higher education requires self-discipline, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to learn from criticism. In two of the three videos I managed to watch the students "starring" in them--let's face it, they're making videos as if they're celebrities--admitted that their grade point averages and test scores were less than perfect (how much less, I wonder). Yet they seem to think that the colleges to which they've applied should simply ignore this because, well, they're so cute and "awesome," at least in their own minds. To others, though, these videos betray a severe absence of anything resembling a mature grasp of reality.

Without constructive criticism, without being told "no" from time to time, and without ever facing rejection and learning from it, one will never be able to function appropriately in college, much less in life.