The Nightmare Of College Admissions

Billie Eilish sings, in Everything I Wanted:

I had a dream

I got everything I wanted

Not what you’d think

And if I’m being honest

It might’ve been a nightmare

To anyone who might care

Thought I could fly

So I stepped off the Golden

Nobody cried

Nobody even noticed

I saw them standing right there

Kinda thought they might care

She captures what is being played out among those like her throughout the nation ––mostly young, female –– who are going through a mental health crisis of frightening proportions.

According to suicide.org, more than one in five of high school girls have seriously considered suicide. Eleven percent of ninth grade girls have attempted suicide with nearly 4% making attempts that required medical attention. Every 100 minutes a teen takes their life, and suicide is the third leading cause of death among teens. The CDC reports that rates of depression and suicide have been rising steadily and rapidly, with similarly increasing numbers of males and economically disadvantaged students experiencing depression and suicide.

Many have tried to explain or analyze the trend. As reported in discoverymood.com, abused and neglected teens, those with family history of depression or untreated mental health or substance abuse, and those suffering trauma such as death or divorce are more likely to suffer from depression, but that does little to capture the scope of the problem. Why are those with none of these pre-morbidities experiencing such common feelings of helplessness and hopelessness? Why are those, as Eilish sings, who have it all experiencing the nightmare of depression, anxiety, stress and suicidal ideation?

Economic uncertainty and isolation, propelled to unimaginable depths due to a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, certainly are worsening factors. There is one thing, though, that is driving this trend that we, as educators, as parents, as those in the media and those in the college admissions community, can do something about: the pernicious trend to push students harder and faster, from a young age, to excel in the college admissions sweepstakes.

Many of the students who I talk to who are depressed, anxious and frequently suicidal describe the same feelings. They describe being out of control, of unrealistic expectations, of fear that any setback, from a bad grade to a poor athletic performance, will be indelibly etched in their future aspirations and ambitions. They describe the feeling of being on a treadmill that is going faster and faster until they simply can’t keep up.

Each of us has our part in this destructive process. As for parents, they see college admissions as the evidence of successful child-rearing. There is a confluence of several characteristics of this generation of parents, described by Bonnie Raskin, Program Coordinator for the Institute for Educational Advancement, as a sense of entitlement, a suspicion of authority and a bad habit of living too vicariously through their children. One former admissions director describes the results: the most anxious, stressed out, sleep deprived, judged and tested generation in history – a generation trained to please adults.

The media certainly has done their part to make this problem worse. The repositioning of higher education in the public mind as the ultimate goal of status gained by association is not merely observed by the press, but is actively promoted by it.

“Fear, anxiety, myth, secrecy, false precision, hype and educational irrationality characterize the admissions landscape,” notes Lloyd Thacker, founder of the Educational Conservancy, in his book College Unranked. “The way the media is shaping our perspective about this critical life transition is simply wrong and misinformed and very few voices have emerged to put the brakes on this runaway train.” Students and their parents will continue to game the system for, in the view they get from the media, that is the only choice they believe they have.

Perhaps the greatest cause of mental health consequences from perceptions of college admissions are the actions of the college admissions community. The most dangerous words I hear from college representatives, not just of the most selective colleges but from colleges way down on the pecking order that want to emulate them, is that students should take “the most demanding schedule available to them” if they want to be considered for admission. The most selective colleges keep raising the bar for even being considered for admissions simply because they can. Students feel the need to take more rigorous schedules, get better grades and test scores, demonstrate excellence in more and more areas, just to stay in the running. One needs to look no further than youth sports to see that we as a nation are pushing kids too hard, too fast and too soon.

Is the genie out of the bottle, and is it impossible to get it back in? Perhaps. But that does not mean that we cannot take meaningful steps to change things. A study by UNC Chapel Hill found that students who took more college level courses such as AP or IB in high school did better in college…up to a point. After 5, the correlation actually went down. UNC-CH has since noted that taking more than 5 such courses will not aid one in admissions.

If we truly care about our children, we all –– parents, counselors, the media, the college admissions community –– need to get together to tone down the mania around college admissions. Our children’s lives, in the most literal sense, depend upon it.