The Truth Behind College Admissions: It's Painful, but It's Brief

Frequent fights with parents and college counselors prove that there is no question about it: college admissions is the toughest part of the process. Ever since US News and World Report began releasing annual college and university rankings based on a variety of criteria, those top ten schools have been chatted up to a level of seeming Godliness. But what defines “best” for one student may be an entirely different set of criteria for another, and ultimately those who just don’t quite make the mark – oftentimes for reasons that no one but admissions committees can understand – end up beating their heads against a wall wondering what exactly they did wrong.

Most upcoming college students can’t help but feel this way. With the same single-digit percent of students getting into all of the top twenty schools, leaving everything below this “marker of excellence” for the rest to take up, the college admissions process leaves a hostile charge in the air. No one needs the option to choose one from amongst five Ivy-League schools, but this is more often the case than any single student having just one top-notch option. And this is often credited to the fact that those few are the ones who work the hardest, excel the most, and sleep the least. But maybe that’s just not true.

The fact of the matter is that college is a rare success, and that so many Lamorinda students go on to college at all is something worth celebrating. But students don’t always see it that way. With competition amongst peers made so thick by the demands of college rankings and admissions statistics, the chance to understand how unique the whole thing is never receives proper reflection until our time is up and college is somehow suddenly behind us. And by the time we reach that point, we won’t even remember which schools we applied to.

What is often forgotten or unmentioned entirely to those going through the admissions process is that, for the most part, everyone forgets about the schools they didn’t get into as soon as they get to where they’re going. With the small exception of a few transfer students, who undergo a process entirely unique on its own, college-goers tend to forget the horrors of the admissions process entirely once they reach their final destination and find it all to be entirely realistic. This, I promise you, is not specific to the “best” schools in the country.

So chin up to all who just went through the process and may feel unsatisfied with the options at hand – in the end, college is college and ought to be treated as such.