Confessions of a college counselor: Pushy parents, teen misery and the futility of the Stanford dream

In Irena Smith’s memoir about working on the front lines of America’s college admissions mania, the Palo Alto-based independent college admissions counselor recalls how she made a ninth-grader cry.

Smith told the boy and his mother that he shouldn’t count on getting into Stanford, despite his good grades and vow to do whatever he could to be accepted. As Smith writes in “The Golden Ticket,” she worked in Stanford’s admissions office for four years and knew that the staff read most applications with “an eye to turning students down.” Indeed, data reported in February shows that Stanford’s acceptance rate for its class of 2026 was a record low 3.7%.

When Smith assured the boy he could still get a great education at hundreds of other universities, his mother wasn’t pleased. She shot Smith “a look of hatred” when she dismissed the idea of letting the student falsely claim that he was captain of three varsity sports. “Who’s going to know?” the mother said.

Smith tells the beleaguered boy’s story and other tales of desperation and striving in “The Golden Ticket” (256 pages, She Writes Press), which also reflects on what it means to be a parent and to have expectations for your children. The book is set in her hometown of Palo Alto, world-renowned for its population of accomplished residents. But as Smith writes, Palo Alto also is “off the charts” when it comes to parental aspirations and levels of teen stress.

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“I wrote the book to get at what a lot of people in Palo Alto, and more broadly in the Bay Area (and nationally), don’t talk about: specifically, the pressure on so many young people to be perfect in an ‘Ivy League’ way,” she said in an interview. “The truth is that only a few kids can actually pull that off.”

Smith counts her three Palo Alto-reared children as among the many who couldn’t conform to this narrow Ivy League ideal because they faced a variety learning and other challenges. Smith continues to work with some of most “tightly wound” teens in America and tries to dissuade them from the U.S. News and World Report-style hype that surrounds the “HYPS” schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford).

She wants readers of her book to know there are more than 2,500 U.S. colleges that could dispense the “golden ticket” to a happy, successful life — and most wouldn’t expect applicants to overload themselves with AP classes, extracurricular activities and unrealistic hopes.

Smith sees her job as helping teens discover “who they are in the world” so they can pen authentic essays geared to schools that are truly right for them. Perhaps because she charges $500 an hour, some parents still expect her to provide the magic formula — the right sport or the right summer project, say, working with poor people in Honduras — that will improve their kid’s chances of a HYPS admission. All too often, Smith finds herself mediating family conflicts and trying “diplomatically but firmly” to keep mothers and fathers from “destroying their children” – even as they see themselves as “helping.”

With the ninth-grader, Smith got only so far in managing his mother’s expectations. She never met with the boy again. Still, his family’s story resonates in the era of 2019 Varsity Blues scandal. Smith said she wasn’t shocked by the scandal — in which Bay Area entrepreneurs, Hollywood stars and other wealthy parents across the country allegedly paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get their children fraudulently admitted to top U.S. schools. To her, it “laid bare the ugly underbelly of the need, the striving, the obsession with status and prestige” that drives the college admissions process and the hopes of many families in high-achieving communities like Palo Alto.

Unfortunately, Smith isn’t sure that the scandal has taught many families about the futility of this kind of striving and obsession, given that 57,000 students clamored to join Stanford’s Class of 2026, while Harvard, Yale and other schools continue to post acceptance rates in the low single digits.

Meanwhile, as “beguiling” as Palo Alto might be in the national imagination, it’s also built on a “bedrock of barely contained dread” and the perpetual stress of teens, Smith said. The town’s children often feel like they’re being judged by their deficits.

“Almost every parent I speak to, at work or outside of work, says that they moved here for the schools only to find that the schools stretched their children to the breaking point, that all the joy has gone from their eyes,” Smith said.

As with other recent examinations of Silicon Valley culture, including Malcolm Harris’ best-selling book “Palo Alto,” Smith mentions the clusters of teen suicides from 2009 to 2015 that ended the lives of 10 Palo Alto Unified School District students. The clusters prompted the district to make students’ mental health a top priority, as well as local and national discussions about the role of college admissions in teen stress.

Smith details how her own children weren’t immune to mental health struggles. Her oldest son has autism and survived crippling depression and contemplating suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge before receiving treatment and graduating from University of the Pacific, in Stockton. Smith said her daughter self-medicated for anxiety and depression.

In an interview, she also reveals one of her “saddest moments” as a mother: Her second son said he felt “stupid” in middle school because she and her psychiatrist husband kept telling him they wanted him to “live up to his potential.” Smith realized this is one of the worst things that seemingly well-intentioned parents say say to their kids days. Her son, who was later diagnosed with ADHD, said he felt like he wasn’t trying hard enough and asked: “How do you know I have this potential that I’m not reaching?”

Smith offers up other pieces of her personal history to show her relationship to the American dream and how people’s lives often take unexpected turns. Her parents were Russian Jews who brought her to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union in the hope of giving her a better future. Much to their dismay, Smith wasn’t the most motivated teenager to graduate from Cupertino’s Homestead High – the alma mater of “the Steves,” Wozniak and Jobs. She wore black eyeliner, hung out with the smokers, read trashy best-sellers instead of doing school work and barely got into UCLA with a 3.3 GPA.

At UCLA, Smith’s love of literature blossomed, she pursued a PhD and landed a lecturer position at Stanford, where her husband was doing a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship in psychopharmacology. But her dreams of becoming a professor got sidetracked by parenthood and she ended up in admissions. From November to March, she and colleagues pored through tens of thousands of essays to find around 2,000 students to make up the university’s next class.

“There is such an infinite variety of accomplishment, striving, and resilience that reading applications sometimes (felt) like drinking excellence through a fire hose: Students who hold patents; who teach dance to blind children; who work the evening shift in the family restaurant seven nights a week …” Smith wrote.

But pretty soon she became haunted by all the rejections she had to recommend. The vast majority of these students would not be admitted, Smith said, even if they had straight A’s, university-level courses and test scores in the 99th percentile.

She launched her business as an independent college counselor in 2008. She wanted to help students succeed in getting into college. Sometimes that means helping them realize that community college or no college at all would be a good bet until they figure out what they want to do in life. Those are paths her two younger children have taken.

“Getting into a highly selective college is, frankly, not all that interesting,” Smith writes. “There are other paths, some of them frightening, some of them tragic, some of them exhilarating. They may wind through college, or they may not.”

Author appearance

Irena Smith will be speaking at Books Inc. in Palo Alto, Thursday, April 20, at 7 p.m., www.booksinc.net.