Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
Please make it stop.
The high-pressure college admission insanity is verging on ridiculous. The parents are rabid. The kids are somewhere between highly-trained seals who can perform on command but may not be able to think for themselves, and freaked out lumps of carbon, hoping the extreme parental pressure will turn them into diamonds. Private college counselors are being hired, theoretically, to help guide high school students through the college application process. I imagine most parents feel it’s necessary simply because it’s available and if they don’t hire a private counselor, they won’t have done absolutely everything in their power to get Little Sally into the very best college. They can’t stop now—they’ve been working at getting Sally into an Ivy since before she was in the womb. She had the best Petri dish, the best play group, the best preschool, the best primary and secondary schools. If they don’t do everything to get her into the best college or university (and by best I mean schools with names that are familiar even to starving children in third world countries who have more critical things to think about) she could end up in some private, unheard-of liberal arts college or, god forbid, some state school in the middle of America where they eat potatoes and watch football. Because everyone knows you can only be adequately educated at an elite school—the other three thousand schools are just there to fill in some voids we had on the landscape.
What size font do I have to use to get people to understand that where a student matriculates from the ages of 18 to 22 doesn’t matter enough for it to be the life or death situation some parents are making it out to be? I’m barely keeping the foul language reigned in. School is good. Knowledge and the whole concept of learning how to learn (which is the main reason for going to college) are excellent reasons to aim for higher education. If a person feels that college is where they want to be, then by all means, jump on in. Yea school. The problem I’m having (besides holding back the foul language) is understanding how and why parents these days are so totally involved in their kids’ college admissions process. The parents are frantic and the kids are basket cases. Is everyone really so worried that Sally won’t get into at least one school? Is there that large a discrepancy between the number of college-bound seniors and the number of freshmen spots in the 3,000-plus colleges and universities across the U.S.?
I’ve looked and looked, and there is nary an article or a statistic that mentions too many college-bound high school seniors for the number of freshmen slots at colleges and universities in the U.S. I would imagine that if there was, in fact, a shortage of spots for incoming freshmen, panic would ensue and it would be all over the news. I did come across several articles about helicopter parenting and hyper parents and kids being too stressed out to take a lunch break or a yoga class. Basically, only a very tiny (but oddly loud and incredibly jumpy) portion of the U.S. population is involved in this insane Ivy Game. I want to not care at all, but I have vicarious nausea and stress for the unfortunately fortunate offspring of the helicopter parents. Run, kids. Run far, far away. But first, by all means feel free to jump through their hoops and get into the elite school your parents were aiming you toward. Let them pay for your exorbitantly overpriced education (since they really seem to want to). And then, when you’ve been educated within an inch of your life, maybe they’ll land the damn helicopter and you can have your life back.
More Disturbing Articles to Read:
Anxiety Rising on U.S. College Campuses
Education Statistics
Posted by Alexa Harrington
