With yet another college commitment day right around the corner, high school seniors are trying to locate the school to call home the next four years.
In an interview with Katie Couric for Yahoo! News, Frank Bruni, New York Times op-ed columnist, addressed controversies surrounding the increasingly difficult ?college admissions process.
“We are a brand-obsessed society, and colleges have become brands,” Bruni said. “We’ve also become a country in which there is a bigger and bigger chasm between the have’s and the have-not’s. A lot of parents and their kids believe that the stakes at ending up among the have’s are higher than ever.”
Everyone wants to be the one to have that child with the Facebook status that reads, “Harvard bound!”
But what’s more ?important is acknowledging the selection of a college is not definitive of your intellectual ability or your future successes. You are not your ACT score, you are not your GPA and you are certainly not where you go to school.
Regardless of the standards in which applicants select colleges, panic and anxiety in the process have been rising exponentially throughout the past few years. As Bruni noted, “we’ve created a world in which kids are so eager, so determined to stand out as distinctive in an ?admissions essay.”
High school students are urged to maintain good grades while participating in extra-curricular activities with leadership positions inside and out of school, not forgetting to balance some degree of volunteer work and possibly a part-time job — because less is definitely not more when it comes to ?college applications.
There’s a constant pressure to rise above your peers in a way that will market yourself to potential colleges. These activities and more are simply elongated in college, where classwork loads are much denser and students are solely responsible for how they spend their time.
Many choose a college because of its affordability or location.
Others pick universities that give them remarkable scholarships. Every selection process differs based on individual needs, and it’s unreasonable to assume a single “top-notch” college ranked number one on lists across the board will be the perfect home for everyone.
Bruni recalled a conversation with a young woman who had gotten into Yale. She was joking with her friends and discussing what would happen if a bus of Model UN students — some of the best in their class — had crashed, leaving seats open in the admissions process for other students to have a chance to get into college.
If students are fantasizing such dark situations to make a seemingly painless process more realistic, there’s a flaw in the system.
In a perfect world, colleges would evaluate effort presented by potential students in their classes and how they made a difference in their community, and not place the value of 12 years of schooling within a few numbers and a 250-word ?personal statement.
snvanden@indiana.edu
