Students Should Not Be Allowed In High School

I realized there was something wrong with me when I noticed myself scrutinizing the extracurricular activities of my daughter’s friends, and wondering how they’d look on a college résumé. How would Model U.N. stack up against Mandarin? Would playing a violin or a lute stand out more? What about foreign service trips vs. summer “nerd camp” vs. Indian cooking classes? Archery, fencing, or diving—which would be more likely to catch the admissions officer’s eye?

We were talking about a bunch of seventh-graders.

I’d been infected with the pandemic afflicting many American parents (and many non-Americans as well): the obsession with getting our kids into the “right” colleges. It hits different parents at different times—in certain upscale enclaves, it’s received wisdom that your child’s university fate is sealed by what preschool she gets into—but it’s spreading. And the sickness is nourished by the annual release of U.S. News and World Report’s Best Colleges rankings. (This year’s just came out Wednesday—spoiler alert: Princeton, Harvard, and Yale are the top three.)
Whether U.S. News’s data tell us anything useful at all about the relative merits of these schools, they certainly don’t tell us which ones would help our own children thrive. Yet in today’s data-driven world, a number—however it’s determined—can overshadow what our own eyes and instincts tell