Guest Post

My husband was asked to write a personal story to share as a speech for a work-related program, and he decided to write about the college admissions process, which we are in the thick of at the moment. He (and our daughter) said it was fine to share here.

I’m D. I’m a father of four kids, ages 11, 12, 14, and 16. My oldest daughter is a high school senior.

Last April, I took my two oldest kids on a whirlwind college tour of the East Coast. In nine days, we did nine guided campus tours and information sessions, walked around three other campuses, and did quick windshield drive-bys of four more. Since then, I’ve become immersed in the overwhelming, scary, and exciting world of college admissions. So today I want to peel back the curtain a little on what has been occupying my life and mental energy the past 4 months. 

When I started college in 1995, Duke admitted roughly 25–30% of the 13,500 applicants. There were four students from Gunn High School in Palo Alto who enrolled that year. None of us were extraordinary students. Fast-forward thirty years. Duke now receives more than 60,000 applications and admits only about 4%. No Gunn High School students were admitted last year despite the vast majority having GPAs greater than 3.8 and SATs greater than 1500. And so when I looked at the statistics for schools my daughter was considering, I realized something pretty painful: my daughter is far more accomplished than I was at her age, and yet she probably will struggle to get admitted to the vast majority of schools she applies to and need to apply to schools I never even considered 30 years ago.

And I’m incredibly proud of her. She is empathetic, creative, self-motivated, an award-winning artist, a talented cellist, a gifted writer, a swimmer, a lifeguard, and has faithfully served her school, her church, and many organizations in the local area. She has never received below an A and her SAT score is higher than pretty much everyone I knew in high school. So when we visited colleges, I thought, of course she could get into Amherst, Brown, Princeton, Duke.

Then I came home and looked at the data. Which looked terrible for pretty much any student who was trying to go to an Ivy Plus school. So I became obsessed with trying to crack the code—to figure out how to “win” college admissions. I dove deeper and deeper into statistics, admissions strategies, portfolios, activities, testing, and what other parents were doing.

And then I realized something even more uncomfortable. Many families around us had been thinking about this since seventh or eighth grade. They had been strategically building portfolios, choosing classes, planning activities, and essentially engineering their kids' college applications for years. But we hadn't done that and so I started to feel guilty. But then I realized that my daughter had actually been telling me this all along. Since her sophomore year, she had said, “Dad, it’s almost impossible to get into these schools. I’d be lucky and happy to go to any UC.” Still, she let herself get dragged out to the East Coast to visit these schools that I later realized had 4-5% admission rates. 

When it finally started to sink in that college admissions is completely different than 30 years ago, she looked at me with a mixture of exasperation and relief and said: “Finally, Dad. You understand. I’ve been trying to tell you this forever.”

That was a turning point for me. I realized three things. First, what I think my daughter deserves and what an admissions committee decides are two completely different things.

Second, I cannot control the outcome, which my daughter realized much earlier than I did, all while working incredibly hard for the past several years without adopting a defeatist attitude.

And third, I’m actually grateful we didn't start this process years earlier. My daughter got to spend sixteen years pursuing things she genuinely cared about instead of constantly optimizing herself for a college application.

But I’m still working through something deeper: my own identity and how I saw myself through her behavior when she was a child and through her academic success now that she is becoming an adult. Somehow, probably as an Asian-American immigrant, I have this idea that my worth as a parent—and maybe even what other people think of me—is tied to where my kids go to college. I’m still struggling with this. Recently, my daughter asked me to help with a brag sheet, and I told her that “diligent, hardworking, and organized” were terrible adjectives to brag about to her teacher. Because I write many letters of recommendation for medical students and residents, I asked her instead if she thought she had "intellectual generosity," displayed "constructive contrarianism," or possessed "moral imagination." I made her cry. 

I think inside all of us parents is this tension between trying to optimize everything for our children while letting go of control and allowing them to take the reins. I'm still not sure what that means for each child and each developmental stage they are in. But I do know that what I really want is for my daughter to chart her own path, not fall prey to my standards—when she already has such high ones—and slide into doing what I feel like is the best path forward for her when she could have used this time during adolescence to truly self-reflect on the goals she wants to set for herself. 

So I'm trying to let go of my expectations and wait hopefully for my daughter to find a college that really values who she is—where she can develop her interests, meet wonderful people, and become more of herself. Because, ultimately, that’s what matters. Not where I think she deserves to go. Or how much I can game the system through data accumulation, playing the college admissions game, or hiring expensive college admissions counselors.

Apparently, I will have to continually relearn these lessons because I have three more children after her. Hopefully, by number four, I'll be a little less of a controlling dad. But even after they are out of the home, I imagine this whole process of loving and letting go, being invested but not controlling, being disappointed alongside them but not in them, will happen over and over again, with graduate school, jobs, and maybe even dating. So I guess my journey toward becoming a less controlling dad is only just beginning.