Every day, senior Joseph Sun stares at overflowing to-do lists, test scores and essay drafts, trying to navigate the complicated system of college admissions that seems to seek perfection in all areas. Each year, seniors like Sun compete in a system where grades, extracurriculars, leadership roles, Advanced Placement classes and nonprofits have become less about genuine passion and more about constructing the picture perfect narrative appealing to the system, reducing authenticity to nothing more than a box to check to climb higher on the invisible leaderboard.
APPLICATION GAMIFICATION: Passion and Authenticity
According to Janet Cochrane, a Paly college advisor, the modern conversation surrounding college admissions revolves around creating a narrative through showing one’s entire character.
“(One) reason why colleges like (narratives) is because it’s much more memorable when you read a story, because they read thousands and thousands of essays,” Cochrane said. “They want you to show, not tell, and a story is more compelling than a student just regurgitating all the stuff that they’ve done.”
Mary, a former admissions officer and college counselor who requested a pseudonym for privacy reasons, said even though college admission is intended to be a positive experience, certain strategies turn the process into a game.
“In any kind of system where you have rules, it’s very easy to want to figure out how to get the very best outcome,” Mary said.
Mary said there is a common misconception that people participate in activities purely to boost their resumé, however most don’t because of lack of motivation.
“Eighty to 90% of the time, students actually do what they want to do,” Mary said. “It’s really hard to get yourself to do something you don’t want to do for a long period of time, and at the level that you know colleges would expect you to do it at, so most people just kind of revert back to what they want to do.”
Even with genuine passion, it’s difficult to form a narrative. Senior Joseph Sun, who has done debate for four years and science research for two, said because of the commonality of these extracurriculars, pressure to differentiate yourself has become intense.
“Now I have to tie all (it) together into one cohesive narrative: a character, basically, that I have to portray myself as,” Sun said. “That definitely feels like characterizing yourself as something that you’re not.”
Paly class of ‘24 graduate Sidd Sen said despite wanting to be a doctor since age 10, he realized his application didn’t back it up. So instead of competing with thousands of other applicants who had the coursework, extracurriculars and other experiences to prove they were passionate about a major in pre-med, he decided to pivot to an entirely different path.
“What I have done is business,” Sen said. “I had a ton of business experience (and a good)business resume, so I knew I’d get in for business. And that’s exactly what I did. I applied to all my colleges for business … Once I got here, I declared my second major to add on pre-med.”
Sen said he has heard of students doing similar things.
“Everyone wants to be the next big software engineer in Silicon Valley,” Sen said. “So many of my friends had no desire for CS (computer science), and yet they took CS classes, made GitHub portfolios, (and) taught at coding schools, just so that they could get in for CS, (even though) that might not be aligned with their actual interest.”
Stanford sophomore Jennifer Levine said people often feel pressure to amplify only the admirable parts of themself.
“When you’re going for a job interview or talking to someone you like or you want to be friends with, you don’t show them every part of yourself,” Levine said. “You show the best parts, the funniest parts, the most charming parts … I think the issue is when the character becomes a value judgment on who you are, rather than just a facet of who you are.”
MISCONCEPTIONS & UNHEALTHY ATTITUDES: The Root of Stress
While some believe colleges used to care about only academics, Cochrane said elite colleges have always used a holistic model to evaluate applications.
“What are their character traits, what kind of activities are they involved in, are they passionate?” Cochrane said. “It’s always been like that, but I think because there’s more pressure now to do whatever strategy you can to get into the colleges, there may be a new buzz about crafting a story.”
Even for non-elite colleges, holistic review is not new; the policy became standard between the 1990s and 2000s. According to a 2003 study by College Board,“increasingly, institutions are interested in understanding as much as possible about the students’ personal qualities and contextual background, as well as their traditional academic qualifications.”
Although there has been little change in a holistic approach, obsessions with college prestige have become more prominent. Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and the co-founder of Challenge Success, a national program to improve student well-being, said the perception of a college’s prestige being correlated with admission difficulty was caused by a shift in population demographics and an increase in college applicants in the 80s.
“There’s something called the US News and World Report that decided to rank colleges based on ridiculous criteria that nobody even really understands,” Pope said.
In a 2018 research paper, Pope and Challenge Success debunked the notion of rankings, which she said has overemphasized the correlation between the selectivity of a college and a student’s success.
“The ranking doesn’t mean anything,” Pope said. “It’s how good of a fit it is between you and the college. Does that college offer your major, does that college offer the extracurriculars that you’re interested in? Does that college offer the things that you want to get out of college? So people who are just applying to name schools — it doesn’t make any sense.”
STRESS
Such misconceptions about the nature of college can generate stress for students. David Hawkins, the Chief Education and Policy Officer at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, said for many students, the belief that success can only come from attending a top college causes exhaustion.
“The toll we’ve most often seen is burnout,” Hawkins wrote in an email to The Campanile. “Many of these students are ‘programmed’ from day one to think that getting a vaguely defined ‘good’ college is an end unto itself or that not getting in represents a failure that will forever hinder their ability to flourish.”
According to a study done by the Pathlight Mood and Anxiety Center, 52% of college applicants say that it is “the most stressful academic experience they’ve faced.”
Wellness center therapist Debra DeWit said this stress can come from a variety of internal and external factors.
“Everybody creates their own worldview and puts those expectations on themselves,” DeWit said. “Sometimes those are external, sometimes they come from perceived pressures of the world. Or maybe they’re explicit things, like, ‘oh yeah, my parents want me to go to this school … so that’s what I’m gonna do.’”
For instance, Hawkins said parents can have a large influence on their child’s stress levels.
“Sometimes, over-involved parents exert undue stress and influence on their children’s application process, other times, under-involved parents contribute a different kind of stress,” he wrote. . “However, I will note that there are a great many families that are supportive and work to minimize stress during the college application process.”
Levine said despite her parents’ attempts to not exert too much pressure on her, academically driven students are more susceptible to stress.
“I think it just exists in the culture of being in high school and being an academic kid, like someone who likes school … you’re expected to go to a top school,” Levine said.
Beyond parental pressures, the internet has had one of the biggest impacts on the college admission culture in the past few decades.
Pope said high speed letters from college admissions is unprecedented, and has intensified peer pressure.
“You watch people opening up the computer to find out where they got in,” Pope said. “You have kids in the middle of class screaming that they got in somewhere. You used to get notified in an envelope in the mail, in the privacy of your own home, where you open that up and you contemplate what the reaction is.”
Maxwell Zhang, a Paly alumnus and a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, said pressure also comes from online discussion of past acceptances.
“I think especially in Paly, just like certain group chats, for certain communities, news spreads really fast,” Zhang said. “I think that’s where I first got introduced to the pressure.”
Levine said she tried to keep her application to Stanford a secret, but people found out anyway.
“It just felt very stressful because it felt like there were a lot of perceptions about me that I had to fulfill or meet,” Levine said. “That is a very strange thing, to perceive yourself in the way that other people do. It messed with my mind, for sure.”
And peer pressure isn’t limited to decision day. Ketan Altekar-Okazaki, Paly alumnus and UC Berkeley sophomore, said he feared falling behind his peers.
“You don’t want to fall way behind them to the point where you feel like you have to play catch up,” Altekar-Okazaki said. “So, that adds a pressure, thinking, ‘Well, I have to be able to do this, or I have to get this certain grade in order to be able to get into elite schools.’”
Ultimately, Levine said college admissions has become a measure of self-worth for many students who feel they aren’t “good enough.”
“Kids are inherently competitive,” Levine said. “We’re all insecure when we’re teenagers. I think that teenagers feed off of each other. If someone is stressed out about something, everyone becomes stressed out about it.”
COLLEGE POINT OF VIEW
According to Pope, students need to strike a balance between authenticity and strategic planning. Trying to game the system is a wasted effort because of the unpredictability of admissions decisions.
“(Colleges are) building a class: they’re looking at fielding sports teams, they want enough people to be in the music department along with the math department,” Pope said. “They’re looking for people from every state, they’re looking at different financial situations, so you can’t game the system. Don’t think of it as crafting a story as much as, ‘How can I show my authentic self, who I really am, put my best, authentic self forward, and then see if someone thinks I’m a match.’”
Hope Murtaugh, a college counselor and former admissions officer, said students shouldn’t take rejections personally.
“Inside the admissions office, (decisions) are actually very thought out,” Murtaugh said. “It’s very opaque to the students and the family, because there is no rationale behind a rejection, but there is a lot of rationale behind an acceptance.”
And this means things like expensive summer programs don’t necessarily provide an advantage, according to Cochrane.
“Colleges are just equally as interested in students who have to work at Baskin Robbins over the summer,” Cochrane said. “It doesn’t have to be really expensive summer programs that only wealthy families can pay for. Colleges see through that advantage, and that’s pretty clear.”
Similarly, Murtaugh said it isn’t difficult to identify a fabricated essay.
“You can tell when something doesn’t ring well,” Murtaugh said. “You develop a correlation from SAT score to fluency in an essay. Admissions officers do develop a sense of when something doesn’t ring well.”
Mary said admissions officers refer to other elements of an application to back up the story.
“So admissions officers are definitely looking for some red flags,” Mary said. “One of the ways that they try to check whether or not your story is believable is that they look at teacher recommendations. Mostly, they look at your teacher and counselor recommendations to corroborate the story.”
Mary added that colleges aren’t to blame for the gamification of the system.
“I just think that there’s just no way to come up with a perfect system, because they have to come up with a rubric that you can evaluate all the candidates against,” she said. “You can’t just have randomness. It’s actually not as random as you would think.”
REIMAGINING COLLEGE: Does it really matter in the end?
With the endless buzz around college admissions, Zhang said despite how much elite colleges are revered, the prestige of a college is not the biggest determinant of your success.
“Once you get to college, you realize that, yes, there are certain benefits that you get from being a top some number, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter,” Zhang said. “It matters how much you push yourself. The effort that you put in at college matters a lot more than the college that you get into.”
Likewise, Levine said getting into an elite college doesn’t guarantee fulfillment.
“I know people at Stanford who aren’t super happy, and they still get all these great things, but I don’t think that it’s the right fit for them,” Levine said.
A 2014 study of more than 30,000 U.S. graduates found that “where graduates went to college … hardly matters at all to their current well-being and their work lives in comparison to their experiences in college.” And yet, “only 14% of graduates strongly agree they were supported by professors who cared, made them excited about learning, and encouraged their dreams.”
With this in mind, Levine said college applications should be an opportunity for highschoolers to explore, not to fake their way to said prestige.
“College applications should be a way for you to explore what you might want to do in the future, not something where you show that you’re a fully fledged human at 17 or 18 and that’s all you have to give,” Levine said. “You are someone who has space to learn and time, and so you want to show them that you are going to be the best person to take advantage of whatever they have.”
And Sen said that even though the admissions process is a game in many ways, authenticity is still crucial.
“You shouldn’t be naive and just say completely what your passions are, and just hope that without any strategic spin, you’re going to beat out other people who are trying to cut you out,” Sen said. “That being said, I think honestly, the most believable stories are the ones that start on truth.”
Ultimately, DeWit said students should reflect on why they are feeling so much pressure, and go easy on themselves when things don’t pan out.
“That takes a lot of practice, but giving yourself that kind of compassion and patience with yourself now will serve you in the long run for when things don’t go your way and it feels like the world has bigger consequences,” DeWit said.
Reflecting on his high school experience, Altekar-Okazaki said he wishes he hadn’t been so unforgiving of himself.
“I wouldn’t say I put in the most work throughout high school, but there were definitely times where I was really hard on myself,” Altekar-Okazaki said. “I wish I could have been a little bit nicer to myself and not put so much pressure on myself to do well.”
And, despite her admittance to Stanford University, Levine said she thinks her passion and curiosity would have allowed her to thrive anywhere.
“College anywhere can be a really incredible and transformative experience,” Levine said. “I truly think that would have been the case for me had I gone to any school. I think I would have been able to find people that I love and classes that I was interested in and a career that I wanted to pursue.”
Pope said with over 4,000 colleges in the United States, anyone who wants to go to college can find the right fit.
“Where you go to college does not determine your success as a person,” Pope said. “It doesn’t even determine your financial success. If you go to college determines that, but not where you go. It’s how you go to college that actually makes a difference in the long run.”
