The Ideal Student: Plato, The Ideal, and Get Real: Part 1

Plato pointing toward the Ideal (Raphael)

From the perspective of a college admissions office, what does the ideal applicant look like?

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The question above was posed on the website Quora.com

Your question gets asked, in one form or another, many times a day during the fall. As I write, admission officers from hundreds of schools are covering cities in every State in the US as well as hundreds of cites across the globe in search of students. In my travels when I served as director of international admission, I heard many versions of the answer to this question from representatives of the most selective schools in the US. My answer, however, will try to provide a frame in which the answer branches into world we live in now.

Whether we know it or not, most of us are Platonists. As Alfred North Whitehead famously said, all subsequent philosophy can be interpreted as a footnote to Plato.  I for one think this is unfortunate. Plato’s great idea was the Ideal. He created another world in which everything on earth was but a pale shadow (see the allegory of the cave in The Republic for more on this) of the Ideal forms that exist, actually exist, somewhere. As a bit of mythmaking this approach to things—to the world—led to Western civilization judging the world by how any particular thing measures up the perfection of the Ideal.

                                            "Perfection" written and directed by Karen Lin

The search for perfection has led to all sorts of disappointments. The perfect place, mate, or school does not exist despite the way ratings games place people places and things on lists of what is best or what approaches most closely the Ideal.

To me, however, and to admission offices, at least at some places, Plato’s approach does not work all that well. Why? I think most who work in highly selective admission do not have a template for what THE ideal student is.

Valedictorian of the top secondary school in the world, 2400 SAT, 22 APs, captain of national winning football/crew team, founded a start up company listed on NYSE but gave all proceeds to charity, medal of valor for saving families from floods in Colorado, (as well as kitty cats from trees) who also happens to be a left-handed mix of African American, Latino, Native American and a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Confucius, and Gandhi who has been raised by neighbors after he or she (or transgendered) was living in a homeless shelter after his parents died one of suicide after having been abusive to the rest of the family and  the other killed by a drunken driver. His or her science research has been published in Science magazine. A feature film 'Bootstrap", based on his or her multimillion selling autobiography will be out released just in time for the Holidays with a cast including Brad Pitt, Frieda Pinto, Jonny Depp, Rihanna, Aishwarya Rai and Gong Li, co-directed by Steven Spielberg, David Lynch, and Abbas Kiarostami with a musical score by Daft Punk, Bob Dylan, XX, PSY, and Miley Cyrus. He or she, of course, played at least one instrument on each track and will have the lead vocal on the song that opens with the credits. And he or she will, of course, play himself or herself-- the Oscar buzz is already the subject of stories Buzzfeed, Huffington  etc. etc.

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Get real. Forget the ideal. The ideal person described above does not exist. If you begin to compare yourself to this ideal you will find yourself feeling inadequate. People are flawed; that’s what makes us work for things. We need to learn from our mistakes as much as our successes (if not more). If you are thinking that I do not believe in role models, then you would be wrong. But role models are real people who lived in the world. Having high goals and role models, scientific research and data demonstrate, leads to success. But having an impossible ideal to measure yourself against is not useful or pragmatic.

In Part II of this examination of how schools choose students, I will promote what I think is a more useful way of thinking about what schools look for and how best to think of ways to approach the process without as much stress and without having a perfect/impossible ideal to compete with.

                                                     Plato's allegory fo the cave