TS Eliot was right, if you are a high school senior: April is the cruelest month.
This is the time of year when most college acceptances and rejections go out, the time of year when high school students all over the country worry about whether their incoming mail is fat (stuffed with information and forms for accepted students) or thin (more or less courteous rejection letters saying, in effect, it isn’t you — it’s us).
It can be a brutal occasion. At Pundit High back in those antediluvian days when I was still a promising young sprout it was particularly tough; everyone in the school could look into the glass door on your mailbox and see how fat or thin your letters were. That was better than in the slightly older days; before the mailboxes were installed, the students in a form (Pundit High speak for grade) used to gather at the foot of a staircase while the class president called out your name and tossed you your mail in front of everyone.
But even for those who don’t endure the special humiliation that comes with getting the news in public, the college admission process is hard. It’s particularly hard on a lot of young Americans because the college admissions process is the event that demonstrates how much they are surrounded by hypocritical lying weasels.
I am, of course, referring to teachers and parents. Ever since American kids can remember, they’ve been surrounded by a doting chorus of adults telling them how special, how wonderful, how talented they are. Life, they keep hearing, isn’t about competition. It is about sharing.
Then comes the college admissions derby, when many kids (especially those from the upper middle class families and schools where the self-esteem religion is most fervently practiced) discover that their parents and teachers don’t believe a word of all that tripe they’ve been dishing out all these years.
Life, these lying weasels now tell their kids, is incredibly competitive, and you’ve got to run faster and smarter than the other kids or you will end up humiliated, scorned and relegated to Podunk State Community College while your classmates go on to the Ivy League. And if you go to a bad college, you will end up in some lousy job living in a tiny house and your parents and teachers all think that is a terrible idea.
Grade inflation and self esteem chitchat fuzz the harsh edges of the real world, but then come SAT scores and the competition for college admissions and scholarships. It turns out that you don’t live in Lake Wobegone: a lot of kids are below average, and you just might be one of them.
In many cases, for the first time in their lives, students come into contact with the tough realities of the competition for success when the college process begins. The teachers are no longer putting all the kids’ drawings up on the wall and giving everyone gold stars. Suddenly, some kids are winners and other kids — aren’t.
The college admissions process is not an easy one, but the contrast between the idealized, soft edges world American kids are raised in and the tough and competitive world they enter as adults makes it even harder.
It’s natural that parents want to shelter their kids from harsh realities, but competition and striving for real excellence (as opposed to the Lake Woebegone kind) aren’t actually that alien or disturbing to kids. Winning and losing are part of the kinds of games that kids love to play, and educators through the centuries have seen the importance of harnessing that human drive to compete in order to motivate kids to learn. A more competitive childhood — and a more realistic classroom environment that puts more stress on achievement and less on vain and empty self-esteem — will help kids learn more, and prepare them for the shocks of real life.
That isn’t much help for the kids now facing the results of what, for many, is the first real brush with the way much of society works. For them, for the kids waiting for the envelopes to arrive, or struggling to come to terms with the envelopes that are already here: relax.
The college derby may be your first encounter with real competition, but it won’t be your last. And just because you didn’t do as well as you hoped in this contest, doesn’t mean you are doomed to fail for the rest of your life.
Often, the people who do the best in life are those who struggle a bit early on. The college process rewards people who know what they want early on and settle down to get it. People mature at different rates; there are some people who are already 40 by the time they turn 15, and these kids often do very well in the college process. Others take a little longer to settle down and do significantly better in college than in high school. These students often do much better when it comes to the grad school and job competitions later in life.
The college process measures how tall you are at 17. Some people have done most of their growing by then; others still have a growth spurt or two in the future. The process is also imperfect and subjective; admissions committees often make mistakes.
If you aren’t happy with how this particular round ended up, use this experience to prep yourself for the future. Don’t think about it too much now while you are dealing with the emotions of getting the news, but when you’ve had a little bit of time to process things, start thinking about what you can change so that next time you will have a better chance of getting what you want. A failure isn’t a failure unless you fail to learn from it.
Also, the college admissions derby isn’t a test of how good a human being you are. It is about what kind of student you will make. The kids with the best grades, and the kids who work hardest and most successfully to please adults, often do not turn out to be the happiest, most successful and most useful adults. I used to tell my students at Yale that 99 percent of the students who graduate from Yale are never heard from again.
The college admissions process these days is tilted to “smooth” kids: kids who naturally like to please adults, color between the lines, and generally behave in predictable and acceptable ways. The quirky kids, the ones who question authority, challenge the conventional pieties of the adults around them, hate some subjects and love others, and study and learn for love rather than duty or ambition: these kids are often passed over by admissions committees.
I’ve heard from people connected to top colleges, and even scholarship programs like the Rhodes, that they worry about selecting and turning out staffers, bureaucrats and followers rather than trailblazers, leaders and innovators.
That doesn’t mean that failing to get into the college of your choice means you are inevitably destined to change the world; innovators and trailblazers have to work hard to achieve anything. Slackers posing as unappreciated creative geniuses are all too common on college campuses.
There is something else you should remember. I’ve been saying this to students for decades and it is still true: what you do in college is much more important than what college you do it in.
In virtually every college in America, there are more interesting students than you can get to know in four years. There are more worthwhile organizations than you will have time to join and more interesting and rewarding activities than you will have time to get involved with. There will be more good courses in the catalog than you will have time to take. There will be more good professors than you will be able to get to know. There will be more good books in the library than you will have time to read.
Whether your envelopes are fat or thin (and I hope everyone gets fat ones this year, and lots of them), the time has come to stop thinking about college admissions and to start thinking about the much more interesting and important subject of what to do in college.
American education has its problems, and if the world appointed me the Exalted Grand Poohbah I would make a few changes — but even so, four years to study and try out activities and ideas is a wonderful opportunity. Most people spend too much time trying to get into the right college and not nearly enough time trying to get the most out of the college in which they have enrolled.
And for those of you who believe, as I do, in a God who watches over our lives and cares what happens, remember this: things don’t happen by accident. There is a reason why you’ve been accepted where you have been and a reason why other doors have closed. You may not understand those reasons now, but the chances are that as the weeks and months go by, things will begin to make more sense. Look ahead with an optimistic attitude and an open mind, and you will find that even very painful disappointments often turn out to be blessings in disguise.