WHEN HE WAS 8 years old, Michael Wang decided he wanted to go to Harvard. “I don’t know if it’s the Asian stereotype,” he told me, “but I saw it as an avenue to social mobility.” Though he wouldn’t have thought of it in these terms when he was 8, Michael meant the sort of upper-echelon mobility familiar to graduates of elite colleges. Specifically, he wanted to be a neurosurgeon. Because he was that sort of kid, he read several peer-reviewed articles about cloning and checked the authors’ credentials. When he saw that many of the researchers had gone to Harvard, he knew that was the college for him.
From that point forward, Michael’s parents made it their life’s work to help their only child achieve his goal. Michael’s dad—who goes by Jeff—had a sense of what it would take. He’d come to the United States from Shanghai in the 1980s as part of the wave of Chinese students who had emigrated to the West when Deng Xiaoping implemented the Four Modernizations following Mao Zedong’s death. Jeff got a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, worked in banking for a while, and then transitioned to tutoring students in math and science. Today he runs a Mathnasium franchise in Union City, California, where Michael grew up. Many of his students went on to top colleges, and Jeff watched and emulated the parents’ tactics. Sociologist Annette Lareau would call it concerted cultivation. Yale Law professor Amy Chua might say that he became a Tiger Dad.
In fifth grade, Jeff persuaded the school district to let Michael take algebra. Each day, he picked his son up at his elementary school and drove him to the middle school for his advanced math class. In seventh grade, he collected Michael at the middle school and drove him to a local high school to take Algebra II. By his sophomore year, Michael had finished BC Calculus. He ended up taking 15 AP courses. Michael’s 4.64 GPA made him salutatorian of his class. He got a perfect score on the ACT and nearly aced the SAT, too, with scores that put him squarely in the 99th percentile. He also played piano, debated at a high level, and founded a math club. In the fall of 2012, Michael sent off his college applications—about 25 in all—with optimism and the satisfaction of knowing he’d done everything within his power to increase his chances of getting into a top college.
To say he was disappointed by the replies would be a vast understatement. By any ordinary standard, Michael did quite well, and he’s soberer about the experience in retrospect, but at the time he felt devastated. Yale said no. Princeton said no. Stanford said no. Harvard put him on the waitlist. Then it said no. Columbia did the same thing. He wasn’t consoled by Berkeley’s offer of a free ride or by Penn’s and Georgetown’s offers of partial scholarships. “I was definitely disappointed receiving that many rejections,” Michael told me when I spoke with him for my new book, (from which this essay is adapted). “I thought to myself, ‘What more can I do at this
