Recently, my friend who is in college nonchalantly told me that “October is when it gets brutal,” because the common Early Action deadline of November 1st suddenly feels a lot closer on this side of September 30th. Yep. Thanks. It’s not like I wasn’t already painfully aware of the ginormous fire-breathing dragon of college applications crouching at the gateway to the rest of my life.

Looking around me, I realized almost all of my friends who were applying to undergraduate college had that same feeling of anxiety about the process – the queasiness, the crack of doom on the horizon. But perhaps, there’s another way to look at this application process. Here are four ideas that I hope might help you defeat the mirage of the dragon:

1. Rankings, cost inflation… obsession?
“I think U.S. News and World Report will go down as one of the most destructive things that ever happened to higher education.” –Adam Weinberg, President of Denison University.

I first visited the U.S. News website for ranking colleges in 8th grade, when I was selecting my classes for high school. Yet, last week, when I quoted Weinberg during my senior conference, my counselor nodded enthusiastically at his criticism. The truth is, the method that U.S. News uses to rank colleges biases strongly towards rich colleges with rich students. Graduation rates, which are closely correlated to family income, are weighted 35%; institutions that emphasize access, social mobility, and provide a more cross-sectional portion of society for incoming students, lose out big time on this metric. “Expert opinion,” a multiple choice survey of top academics and high school counselors that is wildly subjective and often left unanswered by administrators who cannot be expected to be familiar with all the colleges on the list, is weighted 20%. 

And yet, year after year, U.S. News, with its tidy lists that squeeze out all sense of nuance and appeal to our tendency to oversimplify, maintains its stranglehold on the admissions process. There is a conviction that an education from a school ranked No. 5 instead of No. 20, or a school rated 4.7 instead of 4.5, must somehow be better, more enviable, more valuable. Or that anything below No. 25 is just not worth looking at. It’s ridiculous, and to John Tierney, these rankings give us the same frenzy, the same adrenaline rush, that “Cheetos, soft drinks, lotteries, or articles about the Kardashians” do. These rankings, along with the steeply rising cost of college* in recent decades, can make college feel like some kind of elite commodity. But colleges and their diverse students, professors, and opportunities are not products; they cannot be flattened into numbers, any more than students can be. 

2. Trust in your story…
“When I went to college thirty of forty years ago, I said to my dad, ‘What’s the Ivy League?’ And he said, ‘That’s just a bunch of snooty girls, you don’t want to go there.’ Today he would say, ‘We absolutely must visit the Ivy League.’ It’s become a whole different thing.” –Jennifer Delahunty, former dean of admissions at Kenyon College.

“Interviews don’t matter at all. They just want to make sure you’re not crazy.”

“Melina’s essay about her national gymnastics team got her into seven schools.”

“You have to have a focus. Look at Jalisa, she has, like, nine science awards and activities. What did you do during high school again?”

“Don’t write about sports, for goodness sake. It’s too cliche.”

“Noah’s interview got him into his dream school. He just made such a strong impression.”

“Colleges like well-rounded kids. Don’t lean into any one discipline too much.”

It’s so loud! It seems there is always someone smarter, stronger, with a better resume, or someone with advice about what worked for another student, a technique you should also try to weasel your way into a college. This rising chorus of advice often contradicts itself. Worse, it can create a gaping hole of self-doubt and anxiety. All of a sudden, it seems like everyone else is just so prepared. Wait, should I have joined that club? Should I have volunteered more hours? Should I have spent more afternoons studying and planning for this moment? Am I supposed to know what I’m doing?!!

Probably not. Instead, try to be proud. Be proud of everything you did do in high school, instead of anxious about what everyone else seems to have done. Trust in the strength of your story, and trust yourself to display it through essays, interviews, or activities in such a way that the right college for you will see that strength. Also know that college admissions depend heavily on what you did between the ages of 15-17. Give yourself enough credit to realize that this will be but a small part of your life, yet still a part that is too precious and nuanced to be flattened into a thousand words and a resume. 

3. … and know that this is only one page.
“Does a prestigious college make you successful in life? Or do you do that for yourself?” –Peter Osterlund, University of Chicago.

My mother, who works in software engineering, recently hired someone to her team. In the car, she told me about the skills they would bring to their table, and what everyone on her team had said about them. And then, since it’s always on my mind these days, I asked her, “Which college did they go to?” She paused and responded, “I’m not sure. I’m sure I read it at some point; I just don’t remember.” 

When you are thirty, you will be as far from graduating undergraduate college as you are now from being a 4th grader. It is not an exaggeration to say that employers will not care about which undergraduate college you attended a decade ago. And the irrelevance doesn’t just begin there. After almost every semester in college, you can consider transferring and applying to a different one. After undergraduate college, there are a thousand ways to get to the graduate program you want, where the quality and quantity of opportunities from campus to campus will differ much more than in undergraduate school. Or, if you start your own enterprise, if you take a gap year, if you take care of yourself, if you find your passion, if you become a teacher, astronaut, chemist, poet, athlete, technician, landscape designer, musician, actuary, actor… The opportunities are endless. Undergraduate college is only the first opportunity, and the determination to take advantage of that opportunity is much more important than where you end up doing it.

• In Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, he cites a study from Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research that found that:
  “Graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7% greater than graduates of less selective colleges… [However,] someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn state but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn.” (Is it the school, or the upbringing and drive to get there, that results in success?)
• In May 2014, Purdue and Gallup released an annual report based on thirty thousand college graduates. The first paragraph reads,
  “There is no difference in workplace engagement or a college graduate’s well-being if they attended a public or private not-for-profit institution, a highly selective institution, or a top-100 ranked school in U.S. News & World Report.”

This is your story. You can write one so full of friends and family and happiness as well as opportunities and risks and successes, that which college you attend will be nothing more than a footnote. 

4. It’s college!
“Despite all the challenges facing higher education in America, from mounting student debt to grade inflation and erratic standards, our system is rightly the world’s envy… We have a plenitude and a variety of settings for learning that are unrivaled.” –Frank Bruni, author of Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be

Despite the pressure, college admissions should be a time of hope and anticipation for the rest of our lives. Strip away the US News rankings, the overbearing parents, the peers whose resumes seem to never end, and what we’re really doing is choosing where we would like to spend the next four years of our youth. And they are all good options. Should we choose to make them so, they are all great options. 

Through previous grades, I have observed enough emotional roller coasters of college admissions for a lifetime. I know people who ended up at their seventh or eighth choice college, but when they got to that college, they had fun, they explored the possibilities, they tried new things, they made friends. And now, it barely matters, because they’re incredibly lucky and grateful, and they are amazing young people who will help build our future. They are exactly where they need to be. 

Recommended Reading/Watching in the name of Perspective, Deep Breaths, and Lower Blood Pressure:

1. Frank Bruni: Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania** (2015) (212 pages; at the time of this writing, available at Nichol’s Library!)
   1. Or, if you’re just looking for the gist, an opinion piece from the same author on the New York Times.
2. American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
3. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal (2019) (100 minutes)
4. The Dangers of Getting Personal Statement Feedback From Too Many People (2 minutes)

*Over the past three decades, the greatest change in the college application landscape is the cost. From 1989 to 2016, the cost of college grew 8 times faster than wages. There are a host of reasons for this inflation and several possible solutions, but it is also a reminder that the ability to be obsessed with universities that are perceived as elite is “far more privilege than curse.” The obsession means we have a choice; it means that we not only get to go to college, but we get to choose which one; and that in this choice, we get to consider our own preferred fields of study and campus locations as well as financial and family considerations; it’s an amazing privilege. 

**Inspiration for the title of this article!

Coming 11/5, since I’m realizing how long this blog has become:

“It’s a jungle gym, not a ladder.” An exploration of the most prestigious circles in the world – from Fortune 500 to American Presidents – and which undergraduate college their members hail from.
“My fear is that these kids are always going to be evaluating their self-worth in terms of whether they hit the next rung society has placed in front of them at exactly the time that society has placed it. And that’s dangerous, because you’re going to slip and fall in your life.” –Former governor of New York, Chris Christie.