Why This College Applicant Turned Her Yard Into an Admissions-Themed Horror Show

As spooky decorations go, skeletons are ho-hum. But a glow-in-the-dark skeleton typing a college-application essay? That I just had to see.

It all began on Wednesday morning, when a friend emailed me after spotting a house that was still decked out for Halloween. Its theme, she knew, was right up my alley: the horrors of applying to college.

After work, I hurried to the Metro and took the subway to the city’s northwestern border. I walked through a quiet neighborhood, turned down 41st Street, and spotted the two-story brick house. Sure enough, a handmade sign by the walkway said, “College admissions.” Another, invoking Dante’s Inferno, bore a hellish greeting: “Abandon hope all ye who enter.”

The front yard contained an eyeful of terrors, each a clever expression of precollege anxiety. An inflatable dragon towered over its hapless victim — a mannequin representing a tuition-paying father hung face down amid gold coins spilled from his pockets. Lo, the “Dragon’s Den of Debt.” Beside that stood an oversize replica of a multiple-choice bubble sheet. On this version of the SAT (the “Scary Aptitude Test”), the options weren’t A-B-C-D; they were S-C-R-E-A-M.

The folks who live here, I figured, must have strong feelings about the nerve-wracking ritual orchestrated annually by powerful colleges, enrollment consultants, marketing firms, and testing companies. Families — the most important players of all — have an intimate view of the whole wicked affair, the toll it takes on teenagers, and how it warps the virtues that academe supposedly cherishes. Yet their insights often go unheard. Curious, I climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door.

Inside, Rebecca Kades, 17, was studying for her calculus exam the next day. She greeted me with a cautious smile, and I explained my nerdy connection to higher ed. A senior at nearby Woodrow Wilson High School, she welcomed my questions about the sinister display on her lawn. “Here,” she said, “I’ll turn it on.”

The push of a button ignited strands of colored bulbs. The dragon’s eyes glowed red as its great wings moved up and down. Strobe lights flashed. From an unseen source came the recurring crash of horror-flick thunder. Oh, this was cool.

Ms. Kades, who has long brown hair and deep, expressive eyes, crossed her arms against the chilly air, surveying her creations. Each Halloween, she explained, she and her parents go all out. Last year the family juxtaposed “Game of Thrones” with election-season politics: They put a Donald Trump mask and necktie on a mannequin otherwise made to resemble a dreadful White Walker.

This past March, just after taking the SAT for the first time, an exhausted Ms. Kades considered all the exams still to come — Subject Tests, the SAT again, who knew what else. “I thought, Holy crap, I have to take more tests,” she said. “That was, like, terrifying.” And then came the inspiration for this October’s theme. “We should do college admissions,” she told her parents later, “because it’s a scary process.” On Halloween they spent the final hours before sundown getting all decorations just right.

As Ms. Kades gave me the tour, dry leaves crunched under her thick hiking boots. First, she explained, trick-or-treaters had to pass beneath an illuminated arbor representing the start of the recruitment process, after which life is never the same. Then they walked through a makeshift archway of PVC pipes to which she had affixed college brochures. She had received hundreds of mailings, sent from the netherworld of dubious slogans: Dive into the Columbia Blue. … Discover Your Best Self (at St. Mary’s College of Maryland). … Rebecca, The University at Buffalo is a top choice for talented students like you. What are you waiting for? Connect with us now.

“From the second you take the PSAT, they’re constantly after you — blah, blah, blah,” Ms. Kades said, looking up at the brochures. “At first it’s really nice, but then it all feels super-insincere, which makes me a little bit more hesitant. They’re saying this to me — and to 95,000 other students.”

When you knock on a stranger’s door, you never know who might answer. Over the past 20 years, I’ve interviewed scores and scores of high-school students. None were more thoughtful than Ms. Kades, who offered refreshingly wise appraisals of how the admissions process affects students.

First it induces skepticism. When admissions officers visit her high school, she often hears them say the same thing. “They’ll never admit that another college could be right for you,” Ms. Kades said. When classmates with less-than-amazing SAT scores got letters from Harvard University and other super-selective colleges, she thought, To what end? Was it all a ploy to lower the acceptance rate?

In the halls of her school, Ms. Kades can practically taste the allure of selectivity and prestige. It shapes many students’ decisions about where to apply and enroll. “There’s this internal pressure, but your peers put pressure on you, too,” she said. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to go to such-and-such college? That mentality is really dangerous. Sometimes people don’t choose a college that’s right for them because they’re concerned about other people’s perceptions of it.”

The competition among high-achieving students can strain friendships, Ms. Kades has learned. Everybody knows that a prized college will accept only so many students from a given high school. “It feels like a zero-sum game,” she said.

Under a starless November sky, I asked Ms. Kades about standardized tests. She got a 1500 on the SAT. Though that might impress colleges, it didn’t impress her. Colleges, she believes, put too much stock in the SAT and ACT. “My test scores don’t actually show that I’m smart,” she said. “They just show that I understand how testing works, that I can see the patterns. Because they’re standardized, they don’t allow for any ingenuity.”

Ms. Kades has thought a lot about ingenuity. In eighth grade, she got sick and missed six months of school. A rare chronic illness left her unable to write, read, or even watch TV, because of sensitivity to light and sound. So she and her mother made up stories together. As her health improved, she kept imagining plots for her protagonists in a land of magic, writing the story down by hand.

Eventually the story grew into a fantasy novel, 430 typed pages long. Her intention was to complicate the notion that one hero or heroine can change the world. She’s now revising the story for the third time.

The manuscript, “The Fool’s Power,” has taken up a lot of her free time. Yet as college draws near, she’s had to weigh her passion for writing against the kinds of extracurricular pursuits that colleges tend to emphasize. It’s always good to be involved in clubs, she’s heard teachers and college counselors say, doing lots of different things.

Though Ms. Kades had no interest in bowling, she joined her school’s bowling team, just to add something to her résumé. After a while, she quit. “It was an insincere thing, dishonest, disingenuous,” she said. “My opinion is that you should be doing one or two activities that really matter to you.”

Ms. Kades refuses to rush her applications essays. She intends to write about how her continuing illness has shaped her, reminding her to help others who might be suffering, inspiring her to become more creative.

Fittingly, the centerpiece of the Halloween display depicted the act of writing. Ms. Kades and her parents placed a full-size skeleton, with a mortarboard on its skull, in a tiny school desk in the middle of the grass. The accompanying sign said: “Fleshing out the Uncommon App.” The skeleton’s arms hovered over a motion-activated typewriter, whose keys, as if enchanted, spelled out a message: “H-E-L-P M-E.”

Washington’s upper Northwest quadrant is mostly white and wealthy, an epicenter of college angst, the kind that sharpens the claws of parents seeking greater advantages for their already advantaged children. Around here, college consultants and test-prep tutors do quite well.

Ms. Kades’s mother, Mary Giovagnoli, didn’t want to play that game, thinking it would only inject more anxiety into the household. Still, she understood the temptation. Around 7:30 on Wednesday, she came home from work carrying groceries and boxes of soda. She explained the pressure that even low-key parents might feel: “There’s this nagging part of you that says, ‘Am I doing everything I could for my kid?’ "

For a while we chatted on the porch, where a miniature Butterfinger wrapper remained from Halloween. “The whole process starts in seventh grade,” Ms. Giovagnoli said, shaking her head. “That’s when they hear that everything they do is going to have an effect on the college they go to.”

She looked at her daughter, sitting beside her, and smiled. “I worry that all the numbers, and doing this and doing that to get into college, sort of squelches students’ creativity,” she said. “The irony is that colleges say they want that creativity.”

Admissions-Themed Halloween Decorations

1  of  4

The Interview

In “The Interview,” a witch, representing an admissions officer, talks with a high-school student. “You have to say just the right thing,” Ms. Kades said. “Be unique, but not too unique.”

André Chung

2  of  4

The Scary Aptitude Test

The “Scary Aptitude Test” conveys how stressful standardized tests are for students. The letters on the oversized Scantron sheet spell “SCREAM.”

André Chung

3  of  4

Fleshing Out the Uncommon App

In “Fleshing Out the Uncommon App,” a skeleton types an admissions essay, which many applicants agonize over. To the right, an arbor displays some of the many college brochures Ms. Kades has received.

André Chung

4  of  4

Dragon's Den of Debt

The “Dragon’s Den of Debt” represents many families’ concerns about the high cost of college. The dragon has upended a tuition-paying father, spilling gold coins on the ground.

André Chung

1  of  4

The Interview

In “The Interview,” a witch, representing an admissions officer, talks with a high-school student. “You have to say just the right thing,” Ms. Kades said. “Be unique, but not too unique.”

André Chung

1 of 4

Ms. Kades figures she’ll apply to a dozen colleges. She really likes Carleton, Chicago, Williams, and Yale. Though she probably will continue writing, she plans to major in math and history. She wants to go somewhere where she can get to know professors, she said, “where people don’t look at me like I’m crazy for being curious.”

After taking a couple of campus tours, she swore them off — for now. “Tour guides have such a strong effect on how you perceive a college,” she said. She didn’t want emotions, good or bad, to sway her thinking until it was finally time to choose.

A few feet from the porch was a scene depicting an admissions interview. A witch hung menacingly over a small figure in a Wilson High School T-shirt. “You have to say just the right thing,” Ms. Kades said. “Be unique, but not too unique.”

It was almost 8, time for dinner. Then Ms. Kades had to get back to calculus. I thanked my hosts for their time and shook their hands. After they went inside and closed the door, I stood in the yard with the fire-eyed dragon and the typing skeleton, pondering the absurdities of the process.

Ms. Kades — a delightful, well-read young woman with an electric mind, who likes discussing the Norman conquest of England and the nuances of King Lear — had recently taken the SAT a second time, hoping to top 1500. Not because she wanted to, but because she knew her score might not be high enough to land a spot at some of the colleges she was considering. It was simple math.

Sure, in the end, Ms. Kades will be just fine, wherever she ends up. But what about other students she knows, the ones whose parents aren’t so relaxed and supportive? The ones who had made top-five lists of colleges as freshmen and never veered from them? The ones who will soon get early-decision rejections from places they had fixated on? Who among them, I wondered, might have sacrificed a novel, a song, a painting, an elective course, or even just their own sense of perspective, on the altar of Getting Into a Top College?

After a few minutes, I left the ghoulish scene and walked down the empty street. Half a block away, I could still hear the sound effects from the yard, thunder as relentless as the admissions process itself.

Stop. Just listen. The noise is everywhere. The adults who govern the bizarre ritual are constantly telling applicants what to do, how to think, when to jump, and why it’s never quite enough. All the messages they transmit, about what counts in education and what matters in life, can encourage and inspire teenagers — or frustrate and frighten them. Whatever the message is, have no doubt, they hear it. They hear it.