Life’s Thick and Thin
The new school year has barely begun, but for many high school seniors it already feels like the week before finals. The annual College Sweepstakes is underway, a marathon that for most will last into April, testing their nerves and mettle, not to mention (at $50 to $75 an application) the limits of their parents’ bank accounts.
Just to boost the pressure, the cover story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, “The Early-Decision Racket,” details how the process of applying early to a single school, which many colleges encourage, distorts the admission process, favoring the richest students. Earlier this month, U.S. News & World Report ran its annual college rankings, renewing a long-simmering debate among educators, students and parents over which school is “the best” in the nation and whether it is even possible to determine such a thing. This year U.S. News ranked 1,400 colleges and universities nationwide and decided Princeton is the best. Two years ago, it gave the nod to Cal Tech.
Even students with the wisdom to ignore such lists have reason to worry. This fall many colleges discovered that more prospective freshmen than they expected accepted their admission offers, prompting administrators to scramble to find extra housing and schedule extra classes. Some of these schools now say that next spring they will have to be even more selective in their admissions if they are to avoid overflow. Biting your nails yet?
Getting into a top college has always involved more than a bit of serendipity. Never more so than now. The percentage of students graduating from high school and the number of graduates are steadily climbing, but the number of freshman seats at colleges has not kept pace. This pinch, combined with many campuses’ aggressive marketing campaigns, has meant that schools like the University of Southern California, which once scrambled for students, last year received more than 26,000 applications for 2,800 freshman slots.
Little wonder that by April high school students and their parents feel that life hangs in the balance as they wait for thick envelopes (signaling acceptance) or thin ones (rejection) from their first-choice colleges.
Maybe this is a good time to restate the obvious: Deciding which college to attend is not the most important decision in life. There is rarely one route--one college, one job, one achievement--to a happy and contented life. As the novelist Daphne Du Maurier noted, “happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.” Come fat envelopes or thin next April, life will go on. We promise.
