The sentiment of sickly anticipation as you await your college decision is all too familiar to any recent high school senior: the preoccupation with checking your email; the pitted feeling in your stomach as you spot an alert from that college; the tremors convulsing as your finger hovers over the “View Update” button; the unidentified moment of nauseating dread as you wait for a second stretching into infinity; the jubilant euphoria when the letter begins with “Congratulations!” and the crushing disappointment when it reads, “Thank you for applying to our university. I am sorry to tell you………”
Unfamiliar with the latter experience? Don’t fret. The website, Ivy Hub: Rejection Simulators From the World’s Top Universities, has got you covered. Simply perform a google search to relish the sickly sweet words these colleges employ to nurse the deep wound that they have just delivered.
I, however, will be staying far away from the website’s wily charms. You see, the experience of crushing rejection that it so graciously offers to simulate is fresh in my recent consciousness. As a rising college freshman, the college admissions process has consumed the last year of my life, and to recourse back to any aspect of it would be to relive its anxiety-ridden havoc.
Because wishing to obtain entrance into America’s most prestigious universities no longer stems from the desire to broaden your mind by immersing yourself in life-altering educational experiences. Instead, the American college admissions process has subverted the original purpose of obtaining a college education altogether, devolving into a rat race of attaining social mobility and leading to the monopolization of higher education into an elite privilege based on factors totally out of your control.
But clarifying this truth does not alter the fact that college admissions are now increasingly tied with students’ inherent sense of self-worth. The heightened fear of social embarrassment triggers high school seniors to double the number of their college applications, driving down the acceptance of rates of the Top 20 universities, which offer only the same 2000 spots to the 50,000 plus applicants vying for admission. The elevated rates of rejection incited by this process further perpetuate the current mental health crisis plaguing America’s teenage population. As experienced educator Dawn Denham puts it, “Too often students believe they have to pad their resume; this causes stress and competitiveness within one’s class, and can encourage crippling self-doubt. And our young people already experience more anxiety and depression than in the history of this country.”
The ramifications of this emotional turmoil are not limited to the mental sphere; on the contrary, they are accompanied by treacherous physical consequences. Craving respite from these tumultuous circumstances, teenagers seek solace in destructive behaviors, such as underage drug and alcohol consumption. Students become entrapped in a “work hard on the weekdays, party hard on the weekends” culture, a toxic, self-effacing life cycle that culminates only with their own destruction.
This pernicious rhythm is reflected in my own experience. The months of January, February, and March were characterized by the most extreme stress that I have ever experienced. I lost weight, experienced perpetual morning sickness, and developed palpitations. Having turned in my last application in December, I remember becoming addicted to my email, constantly waiting for an update to my application status. As my social media accounts became inundated with videos of people celebrating their acceptance to their dream schools, my heart grew heavy with the dread that I would never be in the same triumphant position.
It’s easy to feel as though your college application serves as an ultimate embodiment of you. But that could not be farther from true. Your humanity is far more dynamic and complex than that which can be encapsulated by a twenty–five-page pitch of your life. Avoid comparing yourself to others, no matter how illustrious their accomplishments may seem. After all, there is no way you can fathom all the innumerable intricacies that hide behind their blossomed dream.
Differentiate your worth from your work. Remember that admission to such highly selective universities is just that: highly selective. As you contend for a spot in their incoming class, recall that you are entering a competition where all statistical calculations suggest imminent failure.
2022 marked the advent of yet another year with record-low admission rates. The least selective of the Top 10 Universities, Rice University, had a whopping admission rate of 8.56%. This figure is nearly three times the admission rate of the most selective of these schools, Harvard University, which boasted an admission rate of 3.19% for its incoming class of 2026.
Such statistics play a tremendous role in what makes failure in the college admissions process so devastating: it strikes America’s top students–the ones who are accustomed to attaining success–and shatters their self–confidence in the process. And the idealization of college admissions decisions discounts the fact that there is an unpredictable element to what colleges seek, which varies from year to year. Although it’s tempting to succumb to our innate human proclivity to quantify our self-perception, we must keep in mind that such values of measurement are arbitrary; we are the ones who assign them value.
But the fault is not merely of an educational system that idealizes entrance to a prestigious university as the rational and expected culmination of years of hard work; the process of evaluation itself is deeply flawed.
It begins with the sensationalization of admissions decisions. A public statement issued by the ivy league University of Pennsylvania in the wake of the decision to withhold admissions statistics for this year clearly showcases this mania. Associate Vice Provost and Dean of Admission Whitney Soule affirmed, “We’re focusing not on how hard we are to get into, but on those young people that we chose.” Although such a sentiment may have been uttered in good faith, the implicit understanding that presumably low admission rates boost the university’s desirability is clear.
Furthermore, colleges’ unrelenting quest for prestige has blurred admissions criteria, especially for Ivy League universities. Their historical prominence grants them a degree of ethos that enables the implementation of blurred admissions criteria, whose haziness is masked by promises of “holistic admissions.”
Like most issues in contemporary times, this crisis is further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The omission of standardized testing as a factor of consideration has triggered more competitiveness in the admissions process.
This phenomenon is not entirely a bad thing, as it allows the admission of an incoming class that is more representative of systemically disadvantaged groups of American society, such as those residing in impoverished communities. While it appears that standardized testing will continue to be optional in the foreseeable future, how this policy will shape the admissions cycle in the coming years remains unclear. And the option’s existence itself is deceptive because most students admitted to the Ivy League schools submit test scores. What was supposed to be a shift in the direction of accessibility actually made these schools more elusive–and thus, more desirable—than ever before.
Additionally, this reformed process increases reliance on far more subjective criteria for assessment: the essay. Although some seniors innocently presume that the essay is the only unadulterated component of the application process, this is merely wishful thinking. In fact, Shawn Abbot, vice provost for admissions, financial aid, and enrollment management at Temple University, comments, “[The common application essay] is arguably the most manipulated piece of the process. I’m one of the people who are increasingly suspicious of the role it should play.”
And he’s right. A Stanford study found that essay content is more strongly correlated with a person’s socioeconomic status than standardized test scores. As people mobilize their financial assets to obtain access to exclusive editing services, which “on the low, low end will run you 200, 300 bucks an hour; on the high end, you’re talking about $500 to $1500 an hour,” college admissions committees end up with the same problem they were trying to avoid in the first place. It also creates a paradox of impressiveness: as applicants try to impress harder, college admissions officers become more and more skeptical.
The process rigs itself.
In the center of this conundrum lies a single corrupting factor: money. The college admissions’ structure inherently favors the wealthy. Legacy and billion-dollar endowments are often used to secure spots that would otherwise go to meritorious candidates.
Similarly, applying through the quota of niche sports is a more discreet means of securing admission, yet no less exploitative of superior financial positions. For example, more than 75% of students accepted to Harvard through the ALDC window–athletes, legacies, donor relatives, or children of faculty—would have been rejected if it were not for their connections.
It’s an American scam of rich-kid sports. Niche sports such as water polo, squash, crew, lacrosse, and skiing require formal training and expensive equipment, automatically putting the avenue out of reach for 90% of America.
Interestingly, Harvard offers no formal sports scholarships, fashioning sports quotas into a “form of affirmative action for the affluent.” The current sports recruitment strategy is a “shell game for maximizing the population of rich students who will pay the full ticket price of admission,” It deliberately seeks players from sports that are rare in low-income public schools, plays a large role in determining who gets hired in America’s elite professional services, and ultimately, creates a “vast machine for replicating privilege”
College admissions structures’ inherent preference for the wealthy directly addresses the classist foundations of higher education in America. Entrance to highly selective universities functions as a means of attaining social capital and for middle and lower-class Americans, social mobility. Graduates from prestigious universities have a higher likelihood of getting hired by the private sector, where pay is substantially higher, creating a perpetual cycle of insurmountable generational wealth.
Worst of all, the whole process is built on an entire conspiracy predicated on net worth and greed that betrays the American promise of a meritocracy.
The solution does not merely demand an absolute inversion of the higher education system in America but also a return to those American values that appear to have long been forgotten: belief in the sheer power of hard work and the possibility of climbing to social and financial heights unfathomed by one’s ancestors.
It also requires deconstruction of what we value about a college education in the first place and a reevaluation of the allure of prestige.
After all, “prestige, in its original French terms means . . . deceit.”
Advikka Anand, the Sun's summer intern, is a 2022 graduate of St. Andrew's Episcopal School and is headed to Duke University this fall.
