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The Tuition (& Admissions) Blues

Bob Primmer is a typical American dad. He makes dinner and helps his high school kids with their homework and worries about getting them into college, which is now a much more difficult process than when he went to school.

"When I went to college, I pretty much applied in July, and I was enrolled in August. As long as you got a certain grade and a certain G.P.A., that was pretty much a lock," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Cynthia Bowers.

Getting into a good college is an uphill battle that favors the rich and well connected and will cost parents more than ever before. At the same time, the cache of an Ivy League school is increasingly appealing.

Primmer, a marketer at the EMC Corporation in Hopkinton, Mass., didn't go to an Ivy League school, but, like a lot of parents, he thinks about it for his kids.

"I'm gonna fight to make sure that every possibility of them getting the best possible education is what happens," he said.

Chantal Lyon is a lawyer with three kids in high school. For her, college admissions are a big worry.

"I have stress coming from all directions and that's definitely one of them," she said.

Lyon attended Boston College but she thinks it'd be a stretch for her son Christopher now.

"I think it's a lot more competitive than ever before," she said.

And then, of course, there's paying for it, another thing about attending college that has become more difficult.

"I know that B.C.[Boston College] is $42,000 a year — that's very steep. Multiply that by three kids, I'm gonna be working a long time," Lyon said.

This year, with more than 500,000 more high school graduates applying to college than just 10 years ago stress levels are at an all-time high for both kids and parents.

The nation's universities have never been more selective. At top schools like Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, and Stanford only one in 10 of the highly qualified applicants have a chance at being accepted.

Today, even some so-called safety schools are no longer a sure bet.

Reed College is a small liberal arts school in Portland, Ore. that markets itself as a smart alternative to the Ivy League. But like other colleges, admission is highly competitive. The larger number of qualified applicants, says Reed President Colin Diver, allows colleges to be more choosy and more aggressive in going after the best and the brightest.

"Over the last five years we've almost doubled the number of applications and we've obviously made it harder to get in here," Diver said. "They're trying every trick in the book. To try to attract the very best students so yes, it's a very competitive environment right now."

Parents, Diver says, are competitive, too.

"Too many of the stressed out parents are the ones who care more about being able go to the country club and brag about their daughter getting into Princeton than whether their daughter really should go to Princeton," he said.

For their part, kids are trying every trick in the book to market themselves to the nation's top schools — not only with good grades and good college board scores, but joining clubs, and participating in sports, anything to help them stand out in the crowd.

The application process has gotten so competitive an entire cottage industry has sprung up around it and some parents are dropping up to $10,000 or even $20,000 on coaches to teach their kids how to best market themselves to schools like Harvard.

College Coach is one of the largest of these companies and not the most expensive by far. It charges $3,000 to $4,000 for help in navigating the college admission maze.

Lloyd Peterson, who worked in admissions at Yale before coming here, says half the families he counsels walk in the door with visions of Ivy.

"If the kid's done their homework for three or four years, captain of the tennis team, you know, I'm looking at Harvard, Princeton, or Brown, absolutely, five out of 10," he said.

Peterson says his job is to find the right match for college and kid.

"I think a lot of what we do around here is really help families manage expectations," he said. "My child is bright. My daughter's very bright. We don't know if she's admissible To Harvard, or Boston University. We help them weigh through that."

For Primmer, whose company offers College Coach counseling as a corporate perk, the experience was eye opening.

"It really is a lot more competitive than I anticipated it being," he said.

At the top end of the scale in college coaching, Michele Hernandez says her objective is simple: to get kids into the school they want.

"Every year, 90 to 100 percent get into their top college choice," she said. "Last year, I had seven out of seven kids get into Dartmouth, three out of four got into brown, three out of three got in to Princeton. I spend 50 to 100 hours per each student before they apply, doing applications with them."

Hernandez has admissions experience at Dartmouth. She's written a best-selling book. And she has a success record she boasts about on her Website. Hernandez charges $40,000 for her services and starts working with kids in eighth grade. The only thing that could go wrong, she says, is college admissions officers finding out that an applicant is using her; but that, she says, has never happened.

"I'm pretty good at hiding my tracks," she said.

That's not all kids and parents are up against.

In his new book, "The Price of Admission," Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Golden says that the odds of getting in to places like Harvard, Princeton and Brown are even greater than the official numbers if you're not connected or famous or rich.

"The school will say a one in 10 chance, but in reality, since the alumni children may have a one in four chance, the kids of big donors have a one in two chance, the actual kid who doesn't have a connection may face a one in 20 or one in 30 or one in 40 chance of getting in," he said. "It strikes at the very basic American notions of fair play and equal opportunity and upward mobility."

Golden charges that top schools reserve 40 percent of their slots for what he calls children of preference. For example, Al Gore's son got into Harvard. George Harrison's son went to Brown, Ralph Lauren's went to Duke and the Bass kids got into Stanford.

Based on his research, Golden said not all of them deserved it. For Primmer, the whole thing is quite disillusioning.

"A great message to be able to give my own children is if you just do it right, you're no better or worse than any student walking in," he said. "Knowing that's not really the case is a little difficult."

But, he admits, he'd play a card or two if he had them to play.

"I certainly wish they could fit favorably into the ultra rich group, but that's not gonna happen," he said.

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