Swanky sports as the golden ticket to Ivy League admission have been very much in the news recently. At the end of October, actress Lori Loughlin surrendered to authorities to do two months in a federal lockup for trying to cheat her children’s way into college with fraudulent claims of athletic prowess. And in its November issue, the Atlantic published a feature on the crazy-rich parents who are convinced the path to fancy-school acceptance is success in obscure upper-crust sports. Squash, anyone? Fencing?
The Atlantic retracted “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports Among Ivy League-Obsessed Parents” after the magazine discovered a fabrication and the author proceeded to lie about it.
Who knows what to believe from the Atlantic article? The magazine assigned the story to Ruth S. Barrett, the married name of a onetime journalist who was caught plagiarizing and fabulizing when she worked for the New Republic under her maiden moniker, Ruth Shalit. The Atlantic admitted, in a Tolstoy-length mea culpa, that its editors were complicit in hiding from readers that Barrett was actually the disgraced Shalit.
As delightful as that tempest in a teapot may be, it’s worth noting that the Shalit-Barrett article is wrong in a way entirely divorced from the author’s novelistic tendencies. The people who think sports are the way to get their children into highly competitive colleges show a shocking lack of imagination. I’ve always suspected that the rare skills schools are looking for are less likely to be in sports than they are in the arts. And so I called up an admissions officer at an Ivy League school and posed the question of whether music might be a better entree into elite education than athletics. My takeaway? Forget spending a fortune on years of soccer camps and clubs — the clever and ambitious parent will invest in a bassoon.
Before I go on, there is an important caveat for all the tiger moms out there: Berate your progeny over their keyboard technique if you will, don’t give them dinner until he or she has perfected a Paganini caprice, but according to the Ivy admissions official I spoke to, the plain truth is that “violinists and pianists are a dime a dozen.” That is, the hedges, unless the applicant is already touring as a virtuoso concert artist.
Since it is unlikely any one youngster will prove to be a prodigy, the prudent parent will buy junior at least an oboe, if not a bassoon. The double-reed instruments (oboe, English horn, bassoon) deliver a trifecta: They are, if not obscure, certainly not commonplace, they are hard to learn, and every orchestra needs them.
Consider Harvard. It may not offer a degree in musical performance, but it does have a historically significant student orchestra. Founded in 1808, what’s now known as the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra is advertised as “North America’s Oldest Symphony Orchestra.” The success of such a venerable enterprise is likely to count for more with the university than winning at water polo. That means gold stars on the application folder of young musicians skilled at instruments needed to fill out the ensemble.
How does it work? According to our friend, the admissions officer, “There is someone on the admissions staff who goes to the music department to get the list of players they need.” It may not always be a bassoonist: Some years, the orchestra might be short on clarinets or trumpets.
Or French horns. You need them for everything from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Strauss. Strauss in particular: No orchestra can perform “Till Eulenspiegel” without a highly capable (and fearless) French hornist. The horn is notoriously difficult to play, and its solos tend to be designed as tests of nerve. Conductor Simon Rattle famously said, “You never eyeball a horn player. That’s one of the real rules. You just don’t. They’re stuntmen. You don’t eyeball stuntmen just before they’re about to go near death.”
In our age of fragile snowflakes, an admissions office looking for students disinclined to wilt under pressure would start with the French horn players.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
