Professor Van Ry

Michele R. Mahoney, assistant director of graduate admissions at Wheelock College, was startled to hear an applicant’s father on the other end of the line.

She had left a message for his son, an applicant to the master’s-degree program in social work. The father explained that he had returned her call because his son was busy doing music therapy with elderly people in New York.

He went on to compare his son to the prodigious cellist from the film August Rush, arguing that his son’s artistic gifts made up for relatively weak academic credentials.

“We don’t even have a degree in music,” she remembers thinking.

Thus began one of the many uncomfortable encounters that graduate admissions officers, not used to parental meddling, say they are facing ever more frequently. <Read more.>

Via Benjamin Mueller, The Chronicle of Higher Education.