I'm hot for teacher. (I'm speaking of Mrs. Doohickie of course! She's also a high school teacher.)

Good luck to your niece. I hope she's passionate about teaching; we need all the good teachers we can get.

I think Clementine truly does have the vocation for teaching. Until I worked on her applications, I'd never really realized how strongly she felt about it.

Wow, this really makes me think about the level playing field.

I have been fighting tonight with my low self esteem daughter on some scholarship essays. She just can't hype herself at all, and the essays sort of require that.

It's a struggle.

I remember checking out a pile of "Writing a Great College Essay!" books out of the library, reading example after example, and writing draft upon draft until something read smoothly and did the trick. It takes a lot of work. This was pre-internet: I imagine it's easier now.

I know kids get a lot of help these days, and heck, the richest can even get services to prepare their entire applications for them, essays included. But it sticks in the craw. What about less well-connected kids? Does the fact that they don't have this help to access mean they are less talented or deserving? Does professional help boost less deserving kids to positions of greater access to resources?

Yes, teaching is a vocation. And something that is undeniably in one's blood.

Mrs. Doohickie wanted to become a teacher right away, but was dissuaded by well-meaning nincompoops. She didn't get her degree in teaching until 25 years after she graduated high school. Since becoming a teacher, she couldn't be happier.

I wish Clemmie well, and couldn't be happier for her.

Hey, that's great--good for her.

Remind me to say more later, but I've kinda got the thought, in the back of my mind, that this kind of it-takes-a-village college admissions process (I see a lot of it at work, too--and in my grad-school days, quite a few of my friends made big easy money tutoring the children of rich people, doing test-prep stuff, etc.) might be reflective of the way that most folks these days think of a diploma as symbolizing commitment and follow-through rather than intellect per se.

The test-prep and application-optimization industries, and the summer camps, and the internship economy--yeah, that's how it is these days. The great/awful thing about it is that, if you don't look too closely, it can be confused with meritocracy.

Wow, this really makes me think about the level playing field.

I did have some qualms when I saw the bold type on the application instruction forms declaring that the applications must be prepared without professional help. I gulped, and thought, well, technically this means that you're not allowed to hire someone to help you. I'm sure that most, if not all, of the other applicants will have their friends, partners and family help them with their applications, at least some of whom would be able amateur editors, and so it's just Clemmie's good luck that she has a professional editor in the family. So I think she's in the clear at least so far as academic honesty goes.

In terms of a level playing field... well, it's never really level. And I do think it's only sensible to be at least somewhat self-interested and take advantage of your own opportunities and resources so far as you reasonably and ethically can. And everyone has to decide what the standard of reason and ethics are in their own case. I once had a college roommate chastise me because, by letting my parents' accountant do my taxes, I was gaining an unfair advantage over all the people who can't afford an accountant. I countered that she had a university degree — hasn't she gained an unfair advantage over all the people who didn't have the intelligence and financial resources to go to university? These services and resources are there for people who can pay for them, and if your family and friends are willing to help you you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't accept. I tend to think society is better served by those who accept help and therefore accomplish more in the long run than by those who make things unnecessarily hard for themselves by not accepting the assistance available and therefore waste their own time on strength trying to accomplish more basic things.

One of my other nieces, um, "Cherry Swan", is in first-year university. I've offered to help her with her essays. No, I would NOT rewrite them for her, but I would correct mechanical errors and suggest ways to improve them by reorganizing, backing up her arguments with more proof, etc. I know I could really help her improve her writing skills, which are not very good. Good GOD, the execrable poetry Cherry publishes on her Facebook page! I swear I read to her and gave her stacks of books as a child!!! It seems to have been for naught. Cherry hasn't taken me up on it, at least not so far. So be it.

The test-prep and application-optimization industries, and the summer camps, and the internship economy--yeah, that's how it is these days. The great/awful thing about it is that, if you don't look too closely, it can be confused with meritocracy.

Absolutely true. Where there is no really level playing field, there can be no pure meritocracy. Clemmie's hard-working, but she's also very fortunate in terms of her inborn mental capacity and the upbringing and family she has had.

I'm sure that most, if not all, of the other applicants will have their friends, partners and family help them with their applications

If only that were true.

I think the only way for me to feel better about this would be for me to think that there were programs out there where professional editors could offer their services to kids who are from families in which there are few professionals to do such things for them. I'm not sure whether that's the case. But as a first-generation degree earner, I'm painfully aware of the leg-ups that families who have been successful can give their progeny. Just being familiar with the way the game works, having people who have professional skills to lend in areas in which they're useful, people who understand what a college application is and does and how the admissions process works - you'd be surprised how many talented, smart kids there are out there who don't have these ways of parsing the system, and thus inequality begets inequality.

I see your argument about mental capacity, and yet if your neice's application had to live and die by her ability her to write the essay as original work, wouldn't that be a demonstration of her mental capacity as well? As turned in, it becomes more a demonstration of your mental capacity.

Perhaps I'm ethically naive, but I often find that in my career and among my friends whose families have had generations of success in academia and the professions, I have a different perspective. I come from working-class roots, and my parents were educated by the Army and their churches. Though my mom is a successful newspaper editor, she would not do much with my essay other than copyedit and make suggestions. It was very clearly supposed to be my work, both in her mind, and according to the statement where I signed that it was. The fact that almost everyone else disregarded that statement was not particularly pertinent to her.

These sorts of stories serve to remind me how difficult it is for young people whose social class or learned values do not provide these kinds of resources. Without a patron adult of some sort outside the family, or an unusual gift for dogged self-determination, it's an uphill climb. I just recently started serving on an advisory board for the Liberal Arts program at our local community college, working to help develop the program to increase student rates of successful transfer to the state university. It reminded me how much help is needed for some students - talented students - to parse the system. Many are from depressed NH mill towns, received a basic education, and don't know any college graduates other than their teachers and maybe their doctor and the school nurse. They are ready for an education, but don't understand things like "credits" and "matriculating" and "core curricula" and what "liberal arts" even means. Before they can do well in college, they basically need a primer on what the hell college is and how to handle themselves with self-direction in this environment, knowing that they are at a disadvantage not just financially, but in terms of personal resources and knowledgeable support.

Sure, it happens all the time. Sure, self-interest is the general rule. But it's just a problem that replicates our current class system and poverty structure. One of my friends started a great program in his poor, rural, Vermont high school for kids who were the first in their families headed for college. This "First Generation Degree Earner" program was so smart - it basically broke down, coldly and baldly, for kids whose families were simply not conversant with college what the entire set of behaviors, expectations, and strategies was. If only I'd had something like that, I've no doubt college would have been much more productive and less stressful for me. Familiarity with the rules is something people do take for granted.

Wow, this really makes me think about the level playing field.

There never was such a thing and there never will be.

if your family and friends are willing to help you you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you don't accept

This is one important difference in perspective. I think in my family, the sort of military-service ethos was that we were supposed to stand on our own feet and do the best we could as individuals, with appropriate guidance. This wasn't viewed as shooting ourselves in the foot, but adult independence. In some ways it could be said that I was disadvantaged because my parents did not deploy resources toward my support that they definitely did command. In other ways, I would have less to offer that advisory board had I not had a similar experience to the students it is serving. I do recognize, as an adult, that the values I was raised with aren't all that common outside a service environment.

This "First Generation Degree Earner" program was so smart - it basically broke down, coldly and baldly, for kids whose families were simply not conversant with college what the entire set of behaviors, expectations, and strategies was. If only I'd had something like that, I've no doubt college would have been much more productive and less stressful for me.

I think in my family, the sort of military-service ethos was that we were supposed to stand on our own feet and do the best we could as individuals, with appropriate guidance. This wasn't viewed as shooting ourselves in the foot, but adult independence.

I think you're arguing the issue both ways. You would have taken advantage of a program designed to help kids from non-university educated families cope with university, and you did have access to, and accept, expert assistance from your copy-editor mother in writing your college essays, and yet you're also saying your perspective is that we should stand on our own feet in an adult independence.

I would say the resolution to the issue of unfair advantage is to try to make the playing field as level as possible, while, in a kind of double-think intellectual maneuvre, understanding and accepting that it will never be level. And I don't think efforts to even out the playing field should include denying people the use of advantages which are honestly and legitimately theirs, but rather on increasing the resources available to those who have less, and on the prevention of outright cheating on the part of anyone.

I think the question is about where you draw the line. Understanding that many students have an unearned advantage and that that will continue, it makes sense to try to even the playing field, to the extent possible, by providing a similar advantage to students who do not have access to professional skills through their family and social networks.

you did have access to, and accept, expert assistance from your copy-editor mother in writing your college essays

(My mother's a managing editor, not a copy-editor).I'm not suggesting I had no help, just thinking about the degree of help offered. She agreed to proof my essays and to make suggestions, but not to write portions or change structure.

This was the line she drew. Certainly there are kids today who have their whole essays, essentially, written for them, from topic choice to final polish. Given that, I think it would be a good thing to find ways for students without these connections to receive similar help. But I would never suggest that they should have the kind of help that involves original writing by someone else. Using advantages which are ultimately yours - say, native intelligence, writing ability, or earned class rank - makes sense and is indeed, ostensibly, the criteria on which to judge applicants. But I think there's an ethical line that should be observed when it comes to others doing work for you. That, I'm uncomfortable with, despite the fact that I know it goes on all the time and is, in large part, responsible for stuff like who our current President is.

I mentioned my mother's skill to note that she offered help she believed was ethically appropriate, but refused to go beyond it. I guess it's a question of where that line is. The question of class and values is an interesting one: it's our class system that tries to have it both ways, telling working-class people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" without acknowledging that others were born with the boots already on.

Certainly there are kids today who have their whole essays, essentially, written for them, from topic choice to final polish.

I'd agree that this is wrong. I really did not do some total revamp of my niece's applications for her, though I did do a heavier edit than what your mother did for your work.

No, I didn't think you had. Again, I'm not mounting an attack. It just makes me think a lot about the power of networks and how to use them well, and how to help kids who haven't got them make up, somehow, for that fact.