To Weissbourd, shows like Dance Moms are a symptom of a broader societal malaise. It’s an example of how ego-driven society, and by extension, teenagers, have become, thanks in part to the pressures placed on them by parents and colleges. The Harvard initiative Weissbourd co-directs—called “Making Caring Common”—is aimed at changing media messages and school policies in order to promote concern for others among youth. Essentially, he hopes to make kids into better people and America a little less like Dance Moms.

Weissbourd was shocked when, a few years ago, his research team asked 10,000 middle- and high-school students to rank what was most important to them: achieving at a high level, feeling good, or caring for others. Almost 80 percent picked high achievement or happiness as their top choice, while just 20 percent chose caring. The majority of the teens thought their parents were more concerned about achievement or happiness than caring for others. As one such budding Objectivist put it, “If you are not happy, life is nothing. After that, you want to do well. And after that, expend any excess energy on others.”

The students’ self-involvement spurred Weissbourd and his colleagues to try to tweak their perceived reward structure. For the past several years, he’s been pushing college deans to make changes to their admissions processes in order to de-emphasize laundry lists of achievements and activities. Instead, he wants to promote the idea that simply being a great person can help you get into a great school. And early signs suggest it’s working: Several schools, including top colleges like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale, have made changes to their applications to better accommodate students whose concern for the common good is their most outstanding quality. The changes may reflect on the admissions decisions these universities make as they process applications in coming months.

The college-application process, always a bit of a rat race, has in recent years become ever more tortuous and with an ever-dwindling piece of cheese at the end. High-school seniors and their families are seeing elite schools’ admission rates plummet, so they are applying to more and more colleges, spending hundreds on admissions fees, and piling on activities to get an edge. “When people are anxious, it’s easier to latch onto quantity rather than quality,” Weissbourd says.

Many high-schoolers do volunteer, but to Weissbourd, it seems the public service doesn’t always come with pure intentions. Many well-heeled students find themselves in a "community-service Olympics," as he calls it, jetting off to an exotic country to build houses for a week and signing up to be treasurer of five or six clubs when they return. “One of the things we're saying is that it doesn't advantage you to go to Belize,” he said. “It's just as good to work in a local soup kitchen.”