Survivor: Teenagers vs. College Admissions

“How to Get into College (with Pictures) - WikiHow.com”.

My screen is flooded with pictures of 4.0 GPAs, 1600 SATs, 36 ACTs, animated teenagers engaging in community service work, students filling out job applications and building resumes. High schoolers in the United States face four of the most pressure-filled, intense, anxiety-inducing periods of their lives as they enter their freshmen year. Feelings of unworthiness, failure, and strain have become normalized by this age. There are plenty of articles written about why our current college admissions systems perpetuate mental health crises in addition to unhealthy, strung-out lifestyles of adolescents and yet each year, the stakes only seem to get higher. We each play a role in the continuation of this diseased cycle of pushing kids to their limits, encouraging them to put their heads down and check off the boxes WikiHow tells them will get them into their dream schools.

Our current college admission process has distorted any idea of what it means to be talented, successful, and most importantly- worthy. In many ways, our current system seems secretive- an unknown, inconsistent, unfair set of unachievable “requirements” to even be considered for admission. The mental toll this system takes on America’s youth will have after-effects that outlast any foreseeable future. Being deemed as not enough during these formative years of a person’s life damages their self-perception, breeding future leaders who are constantly seeking the approval of others. In order to reform our college admission system, universities should abolish the holistic admissions system and instead adopt three unique formats of applications offering more flexibility, in addition to limiting the acceptances of non-merited legacy applicants through a legacy-blind and lottery system.

America is currently facing a crisis in relation to the increasing amounts of acute mental health disorders, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, in our adolescent population. The current system of college admissions requires attention from both students and parents from an early age, seemingly pushing for students to start preparing earlier and earlier as each year goes on. This intangible weight that students begin to bear as early as middle school has led to an increase in patterns of suicidal behaviors at many high-profile, college preparatory schools. Poplar Grove, an upper-class town in Illinois with a population of about 5,000 people, was the focus of a study conducted by the American Sociological Association in which they attempted to understand the relationship of high school pressure to suicides in the community. Within the last 15 years, Poplar Grove High School lost 16 of its current or former students to suicide. It is important to acknowledge the demographics of this area, as well, being that it is a primarily White, upper-class community with only 5% living below the poverty line. Considering these statistics poses an important question of why someone who likely had a life made for them would choose to harm themselves in such a permanent way.

The stark increase in loss of lives due to thoughts of unworthiness and failure, combined with overburdened students, serves as a call to action for immediate change. Our current system encourages students to compete not only with their peers but with themselves at all times. The inconsistency of our admission systems across all different universities leads students to feel as though there is always a possibility of rejection even if they were the “perfect” applicant. Suggesting a standardized format of admissions for every college and university would provide the clarity desperately needed by high school students for them to be able to work hard towards their goals while still allotting time to find themselves during this process.

In more recent years, universities have developed application reading processes called the “holistic approach” of admission. This movement by universities was meant to give students more flexibility in showing their interests and strengths in an application but the approach is extremely flawed. Rice University describes its holistic admissions approach as a “process which examines the entirety of an applicant’s academic prowess, creativity, motivation, artistic talent, leadership potential, and life experiences.” While the intention of this method might be to embrace different talents, a prospective applicant to Rice University is now pressured to excel in each of those six wide-reaching categories.

The new stress of needing to be engaged and successful in all these diverse talents pushed families with resources to build the “ideal” applicant using their wealth and accessibility to opportunities in these areas. Mitchell L. Stevens describes this manipulated preparatory process saying, “affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children”. With resources to offer your child ACT tutoring, after-school activities such as club sports and charity leagues, or sending them to a well-respected private school automatically places them at an advantage. Natasha K. Warikoo, author of The Diversity Bargain, talks about her own naiveness to her privilege during this process when acknowledging that her “peers were not even in the game.” This “game” refers to the competition within the population of upper-class Americans whose lifestyle encourages the fabrication of experiences and opportunities universities are looking for. In order to deconstruct this current discriminatory system, universities must commit themselves to offering different styles of applications catered to display different students’ strengths instead of grouping all applicants into one pool, forcing them to excel in all areas of their application.

In the newly proposed system of college applications, there would be three different styles of application a student would choose from. The first would be for a student whose grades, test scores, and academic honors are their strengths. The second style would be for a student whose strengths lie within their personal essays, recommendation letters, and their positive role within their school community. The final style of application would be for the applicant who feels they lie between these two extremes, having balanced their academics and personal development well yet not exhibiting flawlessness in both of these areas. In order to build a class that is inclusive of all types of students, readers would choose to accept an equal amount of applicants from the three differing applicant pools. Providing more styles of applications that highlight certain strengths in a student would encourage students to spend time in high school doing what they actually are interested in, aiding the current mental health concern rooted in the expectation of perfectionism. While a holistic approach is important when building a class, the current system perpetuates and reinforces this ideal that we have to be exemplary in all aspects of our lives, setting an unachievable norm that leads to feelings of failure and disappointment among America’s teens.

While ensuring a diverse population is a key factor in building a successful university community, another equally essential component is a student’s predicted “fit” into the school. Many of America’s elite universities stress the importance of “feeling at home” on campus and becoming a part of the school’s “family”. An essential part of building this spirit comes from traditions and legacy on campus. In order to ensure this community and tradition continues to be built, universities are attracted to accepting legacy students whose parents, grandparents, or other relatives attended the university. Currently, in the United States, forty-two percent of private universities consider legacy in their admission process. Not only does this become a relatively “safe acceptance” for the university expecting that the student will adjust well to the climate of the school, but it also provides ammunition to a continued effort made by universities in fundraising. Looking at a case study of Harvard Admissions from 2009 to 2015, it was found that legacy students were accepted at a rate five times greater than non-legacy students. Donors are essential to the success of a campus and legacy students play a role in this dynamic. However, the current admission process for legacy students skews universities’ numbers of merit-based acceptances. Oftentimes students whose relatives attended or donated to the school get a leg up in the admissions process. In order to ensure that legacy students do not makeup too much of a class, all universities should adopt a legacy-blind style application in their first round of admissions followed by a lottery system.

The process would mean that certain legacy students would be accepted in the first round of admissions but purely based on their own merit as their status as a legacy student would be unknown to the reader. After the first round of acceptances are made, the legacy students who were not accepted would be put into a lottery system in which universities would have an allotted quota of acceptances to give to those legacy applicants who did not get in on their own merit. This new process would help to curb the growing issue of wealth disparity within a class as prioritizing legacy students discriminates against first-generation college students and those who are not connected to the university. Considering Harvard’s admitted population once again, we see that “43 percent of white admits to the College are athletes; legacies; on the Dean’s or Director’s lists”, while only sixteen percent of non-white applicants have ties to Harvard. Within historical context, the majority of those attending university centuries ago were white, wealthy men. Putting an overemphasis on legacy students feeds into discrimination against equally, if not more, qualified applicants who might differ racially or financially. Affirmative action is a poisonous component of the current system students go through in order to find a university that best suits them. Statuses such as legacy, race, and financial standing all encourage this idea that a certain type of person deserves to go to an elite university more than someone of equal merit.

In our world, we live in constant limbo juggling outsiders’ opinions with our own desires and dreams. Our society has built a construct of what success looks like, what beauty looks like, what happiness looks like. The drive to be successful, get good grades, be a charitable person, eat healthy, play sports and instruments has tainted the true gifts of upcoming generations. Colleges and universities have a duty to redefine their idea of what it means to be a multidimensional human being, embracing the different definitions of success. Admission readers are playing a quintessential role in choosing who the next leaders, activists, politicians, artists, scientists will be in our world. These choices should not be taken lightly and surely should not be made based on a score on a standardized test that has been so fabricated through the powers of money, status, and race. If universities truly want to build a class that will fall in line with their inspirational mission statements, they must adopt an admissions process that will embrace the differences of every kind of student. Critics of this new policy may argue that encouraging a more welcoming style of application would inundate admission readers but I argue that as a society, we owe it to each applicant to give them the proper consideration they deserve after years of hard work. If the quantity of applicants is the issue, universities must expand their admissions teams to help disperse the job. In order to achieve this reform, college applications should be split into three different styles, each showcasing different strengths of students, in addition to using a legacy lottery and legacy blind system to ensure that students of all capacities are given an opportunity to challenge themselves in a university setting.

As humans, difference is what makes us strong. Difference is what makes us grow. Difference is what makes us evolve into a population better suited to improve the exhausted systems of America that continually favor classism and racism. I challenge us, the survivors of this destructive and demeaning system, to change what our norms have become so that no teenager ever has to believe that they are not worthy of believing in.