STAFF EDITORIAL
With many early admission decisions coming out in these next few weeks, teenagers across the country are bracing themselves for what could be either the biggest triumph or the biggest disappointment of their lives thus far.
In recent years especially, major emphasis has been put on high schoolers enduring the college admissions process. The prestige and name recognition of colleges have overruled aspects of the college search process such as fit and happiness at a particular institution. In recent months, the high focus on prestige has been brought into the spotlight. The “Varsity Blues” scandal demonstrated this emphasis where wealthy elites and many celebrities paid money in order to have their children’s standardized test scores altered and recruitment schemes were orchestrated to portray applicants as athletic recruits to institutions such as the University of Southern California and Yale. This makes it clear that those with money, connections, and influence have leverage in the college admissions process and use it in order to gain their children access to schools simply based on prestige over fit.
The college admissions process also comes with a major pricetag and in most cases can simply be a rat race full of anxiety and dissatisfaction. Nearly every college has an application fee at around $70 to $80. For students who choose to apply to ten or twelve colleges, that could come out to be nearly $1000. Furthermore, college entrance exams can be extremely costly as well. AP tests cost nearly $100 each exam and each SAT sitting costs $50. For high-achieving students, multiple AP exam administrations as well as SAT sittings are beneficial in getting the best standardized testing portfolio. After all tests have been taken by the fall of your senior year, students must also pay a fee when sending SAT scores to each college to which they apply. Additionally, if students wish to submit an art portfolio it is an extra fee as well. Students are constantly running into roadblocks, getting confused in the process, and competing with their friends all while fostering rumors regarding rejections and scores. This pits students against each other and turns the high school experience into a battlefield of stress, decay, and panic. Students are overloaded with stories, data, comparisons, and aspirations that they find themselves questioning what it means to be a high schooler in today’s world. Does that just mean trying to get into the most elite college?
In reality, the prestige of a college matters far less than most believe. There is a fundamental misconception in the way people approach prestigious schools. It’s true that graduates from elite schools are more likely to be more successful in their future careers than graduates of less selective institutions. But is these students’ success indicative of the school or merely the caliber of students who are accepted into that school? A 2002 study by Stacy Berg Dale and Alan B. Krueger compared career success of students who attended elite universities to similar-caliber students who were also accepted into these elite universities but opted to attend a less selective school. They found that students from both groups ended up making about the same income in the future. Since students from both groups were both qualified enough to get into the same prestigious institutions, it was their own intrinsic qualities, like hard work and intelligence, that led them to eventual success. If prestigious schools only take students who they believe will be successful in the future, it seems that these successful students are more of an asset to the school than the school is to the students. It seems as if the only thing truly of value these schools have to add to their students’ resumes is a name brand: i.e. “getting into Harvard” is more valuable to a student than “getting a Harvard education.”
As for actually getting into highly selective universities, students nowadays know that most of these schools use the process of “holistic admissions,” in which multiple criteria besides academic achievement are considered during an admissions decision. There is something wrong with how it is being practiced in the current U.S. college admissions process. Well-roundedness is “out” and hyper-specialization is “in.” Many colleges look for students who demonstrate passion and dedication in a specific area of study. Though an excellent idea in theory, this pressures kids to find a “spike” in one very specialized field of interest and mold their entire personality around this field.
Colleges often look for students who have taken initiative to pursue their interests by doing impressive things like starting a nonprofit, conducting research, and landing a great internship position. For students who have done these out of their own self-motivation and passion, these can be some truly valuable experiences, not just for college admissions but for life in general. But nowadays so much of this is a result of parents pushing kids to follow their instructions or a Prepscholar blog post telling students that they need to publish an award-winning research paper to have a chance at a top school. We as a society praise ourselves for making processes like college admissions more egalitarian, when in reality access to resources plays a huge role in the ability of a student to do these impressive resume-building activities (like having a nearby university to conduct research or a family connection to a member in an industry willing to give an internship position to their niece or nephew).
It is understandable that schools want ambitious, self-starter students, but when so much of this supposed initiative is outside pressure, especially from parents, it seems like a corrupt system that rewards those who know how to game it. For us personally, nowadays, when we see a student who does something otherwise laudable like volunteer at a hospital or launch an app, we cannot help but hesitate and question their true motivations—the college admissions process has made us cynical, and we hate it. It seems like these learning opportunities have been reduced to a ploy to gain admission, and that is truly sad.
In order to remedy the college admissions process, which we now see corrupts students and is influenced by corruption, transparency is key. Colleges should not be able to hide how much legacy, athletic recruitment, donations from a family member, or any other special situations factor into admissions decisions and high schools need to emphasize that attending an elite college does not make you an elite person. For many, the college admissions process has turned high school into a competition, a charade to always seem put-together, high-achieving, and appealing to universities. This has transformed the coming-of-age process of high school into figuring out who a college wants you to be rather than who you want to be. It has turned high school into a failed rite of passage for many by taking away the sense of unique individuality students possess when they enter high school and in many cases lose when they endure the college admissions process. We need to teach students that their future success is not dependent on where they go but rather who they are.
With many early decision admissions decisions coming out in these next few weeks, teenagers across the country are bracing themselves for what could be either the biggest triumph or the biggest disappointment of their lives thus far.
It seems as if the only thing truly of value these [ultra-prestigious] schools have to add to their students’ resumes is a name brand: i.e. “getting into Harvard” is more valuable to a student than “getting a Harvard education.”