Who Needs Harvard?

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Actually, no. And thus begins their higher education about higher education. "The more sophisticated kids who take on the search as a research project, they are getting past the prestige," says Petrella. Students see that schools like Vassar, Lehigh, Colgate and Dickinson really care about the quality of undergraduate life, she says. Since many counselors will advise the more anxious students to apply to at least nine schools (three stretches, three matches and three safeties), students run spreadsheets rating various criteria on a scale of 1 to 10, from the food to the student-teacher ratio to rates of acceptance into grad school. And then there are the unquantifiable assets. At Davidson, townspeople and professors bake cakes for the winners of the freshman cake race and students boast that scattered around the campus are dollar bills held down by rocks, tangible evidence of an honor code so entrenched that if a dollar falls on campus soil, it stays there until the owner claims it. Kenyon in Ohio includes a paragraph in its acceptance letter that is entirely personal to the particular student: good job on the essay, nice season in basketball. The big schools can't do that — "and it's making a difference," says Sharon Merrow Cuseo, dean at Los Angeles' Harvard-Westlake Academy. "I think of my students as cynical consumers of college propaganda, but they love that personal touch. They come in and say, 'Jeez, look at this note they wrote me. It's good to be wanted.'" She can map the change in priorities based on the school's spring 2006 college tour. Five years ago, they just did the northeast. This year the group, after visiting a campus or two in New York, split into two parts. The first went south to University of Richmond, Davidson, William and Mary, and George Washington. "People are starting to understand that a lot of the Southern schools in general are great," she says. The second broke north into Canada to visit McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto. Cuseo calls Canada "the new frontier."

Who Needs Consultants?
So how do the private consultants fit into all this? As many as 1 in 5 applicants to private four-year colleges get some kind of independent coaching, which can range in price from $469 for Kaplan's three-hour consultation by webcam to $36,000 for four years of hand holding offered by superconsultant Michele Hernandez. Although consultants are easy to caricature for sanding down and varnishing a nice, raw kid, admissions officers insist that they can see past the polishing to the real human being beneath. How useful counselors are may depend as much on the attitude of the client as the approach of the counselor. "Some of them are very helpful and are helping students learn how to tell us about themselves," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, in a rare defense of the breed. "I don't think it's fair to say they're all negative."

For better or worse, working with a consultant forces students to decide who they are as they shape their self-portraits and what sacrifices they are willing to make in the course of their college search. Emma Robson, 17, a junior in Westport, Conn., found herself wrestling with a consultant who tried to spike her favorite activity of the entire year, her seven weeks at a summer camp on Moose Pond in Maine, where she and a bunch of girls she has known since she was 10 sing campfire songs and canoe and make lanyards. Many of her classmates will be spending their summers racking up achievements, while Robson will be collecting and recollecting, in a very old-fashioned way, memories. "Camp is very dear to me," she says, and she's prepared to give up whatever edge a more intense summer might give her. "It's a time I get to recharge from a pretty stressful school year. If I spent the summer taking extra classes, I would just be worn down by the time school starts."

If parents see college admission as the culmination of years of investment — the homework showdowns and soccer shuttles — it's not hard to find kids like Robson who see it as their deliverance. "I don't really want to continue all this hypercompetitiveness," says Greg Smith, 18, a senior in Charlotte, N.C., who cringes as he notes how, when history projects were announced at his high school, there was a literal footrace to the library to be the first to get the key books. He won a Morehead scholarship to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a full ride offered to the very top students. It was not only the money but also the feel of the place that drew him. "The Ivy Leagues just seemed like a very intense four years where I'd get more of the same that I've been through here," he says. "There's such a seek-and-destroy mentality." Others seek out schools like Sarah Lawrence, which has no required courses and few exams but rather research papers and essays. Or Hampshire, where students focus on projects instead of courses and receive detailed evaluations rather than grades.

College students this spring watched the flameout of Kaavya Viswanathan, the prepackaged Harvard prodigy who published a best seller at 19 and had been exposed as a plagiarist by 20. That's not the way things are supposed to unfold. College is supposed to be about the Best Four Years of Your Life, "the love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books," not to mention pizza and football and long, caffeinated nights of debate and confusion and discovery. All that families have to do to succeed, say veterans of the admissions wars, is let go of some old assumptions and allow themselves to be pleasantly surprised by how much has changed on campuses across the country in the past generation. That ability in the end may be the admissions test that matters most.