Why Getting into College Is Not Like Getting a Job or Buying a Car

On the surface, it makes sense to talk of marketing the millennial student. The competition for admission to elite American colleges and universities has never been more intense. The cost of an undergraduate education in the United States has never been higher, while federal sources of financial aid are becoming harder to secure. When compared to earlier generations of college students, millennials value higher education primarily as the first rung on their ladders of career development. Taken together, these factors suggest the merit of applying market models to college admission.

But the model, even as metaphor, breaks down upon closer examination. Sectors within a free market economy depend on assumptions that do not (and cannot) apply to higher education. Among these assumptions we call attention to four crucial dimensions.

The Market Metaphor

Marketing implies selling; and consuming depends on buying a definable good or service. But what is being bought or sold in the arena of higher education? Students are not selling anything to the colleges that admit them–under notably opaque criteria, and they do not take on the role of the consumer, as that role is usually understood.

A college education is not sold on the open market, and it is not available to just anyone with the price of admission. Despite recent calls for accountability, the degrees granted by institutions of higher education come without warranties. Indeed, it is very difficult to know what will be provided once someone signs that check to the bursar’s office.

The signatory “someone” paying the bursar is generally a composite entity. For traditional students, costs may be divided between the student, as one legal party, and the parents, as a separate legal party. Students are not responsible for meeting the Expected Family Contribution through avenues such as PLUS loans or second mortgages. Similarly, parents are not liable for the balances on federal student loans. 

In addition to federal loans, colleges and universities may defray expenses for certain individuals. However beneficial they may be for the recipients, scholarships and other institutional aid are not consumer rebates; they are not universally or transparently available. Finally, for qualified applicants, there are federal grant programs.

Nothing in this process matches the methods people use to secure employment, purchase vehicles or conduct other normative transactions in the American marketplace. Despite its popularity, the market metaphor is singularly ill-suited to describe the activity of college admission. Fortunately, there is a better conceptual tool available, one that field researchers have long valued when describing life transitions.

A Rite of Passage

Each culture creates and recreates a range of rituals. Some renew the bonds of family, community or nationality; others honor the individual. The rituals that mark a significant change in a individual’s social status are called rites of passage. Building on earlier field research, Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) emphasized three stages for a rite of passage: separation, liminality, and incorporation.

In the first stage, an individual makes preparations for leaving a place and/or a social status. By the end of the third stage, the passage has been attained and the individual begins to perform social roles appropriate to the new setting and situation. The intervening step of liminality is the most confusing time. It is a time of being, literally, in limbo, often accompanied by an acute awareness of the need to move forward as well as feelings of uncertainty about one’s competence to attain a successful outcome.

We believe that college selection has become the major rite of passage into emerging adulthood in contemporary American society. While all of our services reflect a mission of client empowerment, critical skill transmission and healthy adaptation to the changes in higher education admission, the client packages focus on a student’s progress through this central rite of passage. The goal of this process is entry into a thriving academic community.

At each stage, we emphasize learning to recognize and apply the required key educational competencies, be they cognitive or interpersonal in nature. This emphasis keeps the attention on the mechanics of making a good college match. Its practicality discourages the student from making excessive and unhealthy comparisons to peers and from fixating on unwanted outcomes.

In addition, all three client packages include an optional capstone experience at no additional cost. The capstones direct the attention of family and friends to the student’s success in performing the tasks for a given stage. Their aim is to recognize and honor an individual who is performing, in his or her own utterly distinct fashion, this cultural rite of passage into early emerging adulthood.