Product Description

A sought-after "packager" of high school students shares highly coveted strategies to help parents get their kids into the country’s most competitive colleges

Did you know? A child’s guidance counselor can help reverse a deferral. A parent can help get a child off a waiting list. And there is a way for students to back out of Early Decision once they’ve been accepted.

Based on the controversial insider information Elizabeth Wissner-Gross has gleaned from working for years as a successful packager of high school students and from interviews with heads of admission at some of the nation’s most competitive colleges, this book helps parents answer questions such as: Can an application be sabotaged by a competing student or parent? How do colleges really know if a student applies to two or more schools for Early Decision? Is it possible to prescreen a teacher’s recommendation? As well as the biggest question of all: Of the tens of thousands of highly qualified students that graduate each year, why should a college choose yours?

Targeting the college-educated parents of today’s college-bound teenagers who seek to gain a proven edge in the highly secretive and seemingly arbitrary college admissions process, What Colleges Don’t Tell You (and Other Parents Don’t Want You to Know) reveals 272 little- known, unconventional, tried-and-true secrets to help parents get their children into the most competitive schools of their dreams.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #515929 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A self-styled "educational strategist" and mother of two high achievers, journalist Wissner-Gross has found a keenly sought after niche in helping parents "package" their children for college admission. The author's approach is to endow the student's advocate, usually a parent who has the most time to devote to the task, with the skills to elicit and enhance the student's natural accomplishments, rendering him or her desirable to colleges. Through sound experience, and the use of scattered case profiles, Wissner-Gross demonstrates that even students with extremely unlikely prospects for admission to good colleges can succeed handsomely when they are wisely packaged—i.e., when their specific academic passions ("the current buzzword") are extracted and polished. The author highlights 272 "secrets" to winning at the college application process, from answering the Big Question of why a specific college would take one's son or daughter to preparing for standardized testing and interviews with college admissions officers. Most helpful is the author's advice gleaned from admissions officers about the best and worst kinds of application essays ("Avoid writing an essay about a luxury tour"), and her reminder to stay persistent even when a student is waitlisted at her college of choice. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, trained as a journalist, has for ten years succeeded in helping students, including her own children, gain admission offers to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and other competitive colleges.

Customer Reviews

Morally bankrupt, and bad advice, to boot
Wissner-Gross has managed, in one slim volume, to put forth every college admissions "trick" ever invented for "packaging" an applicant. If you use these ideas, not only will college admissions committees be on to you in a heartbeat, but you risk sending a child out into the world who believes that being clever and deceptive is a substitute for being genuine.

Just some examples of the kinds of advice this book provides:

**Manipulate your child's class rank by having him take non-challenging, outside courses where a good grade is guaranteed.

**Remember, nice guys finish last. If your child is not named editor in chief of the school newspaper, don't let him settle for a lesser job.

**Fake interest in an unpopular major in order to tip the admission scales in your favor. (Geology, anyone?)

**If your child is not athletic, least have him express interest in the Crew team and contact the coach.

**Parents should be prepared to contest all grades, and question any teacher whose grading policy is less than desirable.

**Get a pro to edit that all-important college essay.

**Secretly organize your child, and make sure you keep track of all his classroom test dates and paper deadlines. Parents must read all homework assignments thoroughly.

I could go on, but this is typical of the advice offered by this book.

Follow these instructions, and your parental manipulation will be patently clear to college admissions professionals, who have seen it all and can sniff out an overpackaged applicant a mile away.

Even worse, your child will arrive at college feeling inadequate and totally unprepared to fend for himself. After all, your actions have shown that he couldn't even be trusted to remember when his own term papers were due!

There are many wise and thoughtful college admissions books out there, but this isn't one of them.

Don't Develop a Strategy Based on This
As a college professor and parent of a high-performing high school junior, I found this to be a very disturbing book. The author is a journalist and self-styled "educational strategist" who claims to be privy to insider "secrets" about the selective college admissions process. In fact, the useful parts of her book did not contain anything that was secret, and the rest could be best described as wrong-headed or downright wrong. She states, for example, "If your kid gets a C, then you get a C as a parent." I won't even begin to go into why I think this belief is a recipe for disaster. Elsewhere, she says "Don't be fooled by a low faculty-to-student ratio, for example, on a campus where students are not supposed to speak to faculty members except during very limited office hours." She has this backwards. A low student-to-faculty ratio is what is considered desirable. The book is full of advice and comments like these that are at best off the mark and at worst potentially harmful. I suggest you spend your money on one of the truly useful guides to the college admissions process instead of this one.

For helicopter parents only
If you want your kids to think well of you and your relationship in the future, read another book. This one sends both kids and parents on a hyped-up quest that may -- or more likely may not -- get teens into a school they think they want to go to because, well, everyone else does. And if that is not a school for which they are suited, well I guess that's their problem. Er, make that yours too. Many tens of thousands of dollars and lots of tears later.