College Admissions

[Narces]

Stressed for Success?
March 30, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST (David Brooks)

Many of you high school seniors are in a panic at this time of year, coping with your college acceptance or rejection letters. Since the admissions process has gone totally insane, it's worth reminding yourself that this is not a particularly important moment in your life.

You are being judged according to criteria that you would never use to judge another person and which will never again be applied to you once you leave higher ed.

For example, colleges are taking a hard look at your SAT scores. But if at any moment in your later life you so much as mention your SAT scores in conversation, you will be considered a total jerk. If at age 40 you are still proud of your scores, you may want to contemplate a major life makeover.

More than anything else, colleges are taking a hard look at your grades. To achieve that marvelous G.P.A., you will have had to demonstrate excellence across a broad range of subjects: math, science, English, languages etc.

This will never be necessary again. Once you reach adulthood, the key to success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing yourself passionately to them.

The traits you used getting good grades might actually hold you back. To get those high marks, while doing all the extracurricular activities colleges are also looking for, you were encouraged to develop a prudential attitude toward learning. You had to calculate which reading was essential and which was not. You could not allow yourself to be obsessed by one subject because if you did, your marks in the other subjects would suffer. You could not take outrageous risks because you might fail.

You learned to study subjects that are intrinsically boring to you; slowly, you may have stopped thinking about which subjects are boring and which exciting. You just knew that each class was a hoop you must jump through on your way to a first-class university. You learned to thrive in adult-supervised settings.

If you have done all these things and you are still an interesting person, congratulations, because the system has been trying to whittle you down into a bland, complaisant achievement machine.

But in adulthood, you'll find that a talent for regurgitating what superiors want to hear will take you only halfway up the ladder, and then you'll stop there. The people who succeed most spectacularly, on the other hand, often had low grades. They are not prudential. They venture out and thrive where there is no supervision, where there are no preset requirements.

Those admissions officers may know what office you held in school government, but they can make only the vaguest surmises about what matters, even to your worldly success: your perseverance, imagination and trustworthiness. Odds are you don't even know these things about yourself yet, and you are around you a lot more.

Even if the admissions criteria are dubious, isn't it still really important to get into a top school? I wonder. I spend a lot of time meeting with students on college campuses. If you put me in a room with 15 students from any of the top 100 schools in this country and asked me at the end of an hour whether these were Harvard kids or Penn State kids, I would not be able to tell you.

There are a lot of smart, lively young people in this country, and you will find them at whatever school you go to. The students at the really elite schools may have more social confidence, but students at less prestigious schools may learn not to let their lives be guided by other people's status rules — a lesson that is worth the tuition all by itself.

As for the quality of education, that's a matter of your actually wanting to learn and being fortunate enough to meet a professor who electrifies your interest in a subject. That can happen at any school because good teachers are spread around, too.

So remember, the letters you get over the next few weeks don't determine anything. Picking a college is like picking a spouse. You don't pick the "top ranked" one, because that has no meaning. You pick the one with the personality and character that complements your own.

You may have been preparing for these letters half your life. All I can say is welcome to adulthood, land of the anticlimaxes.

[tigmarque]

This is so true.

In high school grades were everything. You needed to compete to get to uni but once you're in your marks mean nothing.

I can't understand why people (parents especially) place so much emphasis on your high school grades. If you don't go as well as you expected or as well as you wanted, it's not the end of the world. It's only the beginning. You've just opened yourself up to more opportunities - paid apprenticeships and vocational learning for example.

When we were in year 12, the schools in my boyfriends area were having a large problem. Students were succumbing to the stress and quite a few had committed suicide because of it. High school is not the end of the world and it's not "all that". You don't need fantastic high school grades to be successful. You don't need to please your parents that badly.

Your senior high school year can be the most fun filled time of your life, not the most stressful.

[xNat]

I've seen that article before. I think the day that it got out there were about 50 copies of it circling in my senior class. The problem with senior year is that you're told your entire of your high school career that it's going to be the biggest and the best year of your life but you've got to have the good grades as well so what most people do is they try and have that great year by having fun and then try so hard to gave good grades as well. That's when most people trip and fall....
.. Heck, I know that I've tripped and fallen a load of times this year and it's still not over yet.

[BlazingAzn88]

I KNEW IT......i told my friends to relax bout school ya kno? like be more like me...relax and slack....its not that hard to get A's in H's or A's....im just realli realli lazy. They puttin all this pressure on themselves...i keep tellin em NOBODIES GONNA CARE IN THE FUTURE....o well theyre life not mine....

[`PunkieMoi]

erg, good thing i'm not going any time soon

[ChenRKO420]

I am going to hs next year so i need some tips on how to survive while i am there because I get 75 n 80 on math n i consider that low so i need some tips...ur rite my cousin is in Penn State n i didn't noe until I really get to noe him...................ur a smart guy maybe we should talk sometime

[liberaljulee]

i know how you feel.. but my parents really didnt care about my grades because it was expected of me.. but when it came to my other siblings when they received high marks.. it was a big deal.. oh well i'm in college now.. so i have to care about that now

[imported_brokenacoustiks]

my parents expect me to my best. they grew up pretty poor so they expect me to achieve really high academic marks and go to an ivy league college. i received my freshmen second semester report card and i had two b's and i was really hurt by their looks. i felt like i let them down. i know it's not the end of the world but it makes me stressed beyond belief. everyone tells me to chill and enjoy high school but i can't. i have to please my parents and getting straight A's is a TON of work. next year i'm taking three AP classes just to bring up my grade.

[my_papaya]

I settle too much. I'm very lazy. I get too many B's, and rely on my IB/AP classes to give me extra ten points, but more so, I take them just to make it clear to colleges that I like to challange myself.

[loveDREAMreality]

wow. that article is really meaningful. i mean, im quite worried two years into the future when im going to apply to colleges. i SCREWED up freshman year, and all my junior/senior friends, they say, "OH, college admissions people dont care about freshman year ... unless you got like fs or something." but then again, the private school i go to, EVERYONE is so darn competitive, and people like me, [im the type that's intellectual but doesnt really apply herself ... aka minimal studying effort] they think i get the grades that are out there, but really, i dont have the determination.

it's kind of expected in my ethnic community that everyone get super good grades.

my parents have kind of loosened up as well, seeing my freshman year grades, &compared to freshman year my sophomore year grades [at least for first semester] kicked butt. even though they're not as good as my competitive classmates.

but then again, i go to school cause i have a real passion for speech and debate. like, i might be stressed and tired of school the whole day, but the end of the day, when i walk into that room, even a little speech, or one debate it can just CALMMM me.