“I didn’t realize you have a daughter who’s old enough to go to college,” I replied, gallantly.
“College?” She sounded genuinely horrified. “We’re trying to get her into nursery school!”
The rat race starts young in America, where parents are increasingly convinced that success requires a degree from an Ivy League college, admission to which requires a top-notch high school, which you can’t get into without a first-rate elementary school, which of course is impossible if you haven’t been to the finest nursery school. Thus the competition at the best places for tiny tots has come to rival the cut-throat gamesmanship of shows like “Survivor.”
I was reminded of this the other day by Manhattan’s latest Wall Street scandal. It seems that Jack Grubman, a megastar telecommunications analyst at the Salomon Smith Barney unit of Citigroup, had been talking up the value of AT&T shares in the fall of 1999–even though it now appears he was privately dismissive of the company’s prospects. His alleged motivation may partly have been to get his twin daughters into one of New York City’s toniest nursery schools.
According to news reports, Grubman’s generosity to AT&T (in upgrading his recommendation from a “hold” to a “buy”) apparently prompted Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill, an AT&T director, to put in a few calls to the school, run by the cultural institution known as the 92nd Street Y. Citigroup also donated a million dollars to the school, but they and Weill deny that Grubman’s research reports had anything to do with it. The twins, of course, got in. A few months thereafter, Grubman returned to his original dim view of AT&T stock, downgrading it once more.
Grubman’s ethics are the subject of investigation. But what strikes me as more interesting are the strings he needed to pull to get his twins into nursery school. After all, at the time of their admission, coinciding with the high-tech boom, he was one of the most powerful men on the Street. His word could make or break fortunes. Yet that wasn’t enough to get his kids into the preschool playroom of his choice.
The Y nursery school takes only 65 students a year, from many times that number of applications. Indeed, since it considers only the first 300, desperate parents can be found by their phones at 8:59 a.m. on the first Monday after Labor Day–frantically thumping the redial button to be sure they’re included among that number. Money helps. (The Y nursery charges the parents of its 3-year-olds a hefty $14,400 annually.) So does fame. (Woody Allen takes his toddler there; so do a clutch of television personalities, from Katie Couric to Connie Chung.) Rejection is seen as a social catastrophe. (“My 2-year-old stared blankly at the principal when asked about his favorite fairy tale,” a friend laments, half ironically. “Now he’ll never make it to Yale.”)
It’s also evidence of parental failure, since parents are interviewed along with their babes. Many hire consultants to train their 2-year-olds to give the right answers to questions. (One such outfit, Smart City Kids, offers a 2 1/2 hour workshop on preparing your kid for preschool admission. Fee: $195.) Parents often burnish their own credentials–only to help their offspring, of course. Fathers wax eloquent about their admiration for the school’s educational values; mothers promise to read Aesop to their daughters at bedtime. One single mother, afraid her unmarried status might handicap her child, persuaded a friend to pose as her husband. (The kid got in.) A few weeks after she paid the fees, Single Mom told the school she was getting divorced.
Weekday mornings, the street outside the Y nursery is clogged with sleek, black chauffeur-driven limousines depositing their charges for their daily doses of Play-Doh. The scene is repeated at key rivals: All Souls, Brick Church, the Episcopal School and the intimidatingly named Park Avenue Synagogue Early Childhood Center. Preschool used to be fun; these days it’s called a “developmentally oriented readiness program.”
The very idea that there are “hot” nursery schools to rival the top 10 colleges boggles the mind. After all, how much difference can a preschool make? Plenty, swear parents all over New York. One friend called the week after his son was born to say he’d already begun thinking about nursery school. “I can’t afford to screw up on this,” he confessed. “I’m making inquiries. I’m told the best ones groom their kids to pass the ERBs.” ERBs? They’re the nursery-school equivalent of college entrance exams. You need to ace them to get into elementary school.
