I'm not a parent, and my nieces and nephews aren't yet in high school, so I'm pretty much out of the loop with regard to what it takes to get into a competitive college these days. Thus my surprise at learning about the "admissions packaging" industry, represented by such groups as IvyWise, whose services start with the "Nursery School Package" and range all the way through grad school.
I fully support the idea that experienced professionals can help a kid explore and understand their interests and abilities, so that the admission process isn't simply about getting into the "best" school but about getting into the school and starting down the life path that's best-suited to that particular kid.
But the recent plagiarism furor surrounding young author Kaavya Viswanathan, an IvyWise client who's now a sophomore at Harvard, suggests that "admissions packaging" can go beyond helping a kid understand herself better in order to present herself more effectively to an Admissions Committee. These services don't just "package" people--they invent them. There can be a kernel of truth in these exercises--Viswanathan was actually interested in writing, and ultimately a book was written (although apparently by committee)--but taken to extremes, they're fundamentally phony and inauthentic.
OK, so why does a childless guy like me care? I'm never going to be an IvyWise client. I care because this isn't just about getting into college or one kid's plagiarism. It's about the fact that we are now marketing ourselves more self-consciously and at ever-younger ages, and because marketing--and packaging in particular--can have such a powerful impact, we owe it to our authentic selves and to the audiences we're seeking to reach to do so responsibly.
Malcolm Gladwell described Louis Cheskin's concept of "sensation transference" in Blink,
[M]ost of us don't make a distinction--on an unconscious level--between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.
Sleazy marketers and flim-flam artists of all stripes have abused this process so thoroughly over the years that it sounds shady, a type of trickery. But nevertheless it works--as Gladwell reports, marketers have demonstrated that ice cream tastes better if it comes in a cylindrical container instead of a rectangular one, brandy tastes better if it comes in a decanter instead of a wine bottle, and margarine tastes better if it's colored yellow instead of white.
It's one thing to rely on superior packaging to transform food; it's another to use the same process to transform ourselves. I'm not railing against the practice--it's here to stay, and I'm sure it can be of real value when applied appropriately. But there's a line that separates a more effective presentation of our authentic self from the creation of an inauthentic self intended to make a more favorable impression than our authentic self ever could. And if we cross that line, and grab whatever brass ring we thought would elude our authentic self, what have we won? And at what cost?
