You’re running a marathon, but the finish line is continuously being pushed back, and all the other competitors around you are seemingly being given headstarts. This is the reality for many Masuk Panthers. While high school students are working harder than ever to get into college, colleges are making it harder than ever to actually succeed. This brings up the overarching question, should students continue attempting to meet the limitations colleges give, or push back against the rising expectations and restrictions colleges are progressing to have?
Senior Panthers recognize these new found expectations and restrictions forced upon them as they’re the ones having to live it everyday. They live with the constant stress of believing that even all the hardest classes and impressive extracurriculars are not enough. Senior, Caleb Drew, said, “When it comes to academics and classes, I have felt behind, especially with APs. Like, I’ll talk to my friends, or I’ll talk to other people, and I’ll hear what APs they took, or how many they took, and like, oh, shoot. Maybe I should’ve stepped up my game or, oh, I definitely could have taken on more than I did.”
The notion of being behind is already difficult to manage, but now you have to add on the expectations others have of your abilities along with what you believe colleges want to see, only magnifying the feeling. Senior Lam Pham said “When you perform really high, people have an expectation for you.”
Not only do these feelings get to you, but they also affect your work ethic and how you choose your day to day activities, “People are a lot more, college oriented now.” Pham said, “They don’t go with what they want to do,” Conveying the sad truth of what we already know: people will push their own interests into a corner to do things that will make colleges do a double take on their resume.
“I have two siblings who are either in college or graduated, so it’s definitely, super real. Like how much it costs, it’s super expensive. So it’s motivated me to work harder.” Senior Matthew Colberg said, therefore verifying the statement that restrictions like the rising tuition of colleges influenced yet another thing a student has to do. Colleges are climbing in price thus creating yet another restriction on the accessibility for higher education.
While working hard and challenging yourself is something we should all aspire to do, it always gets to a point. That point is easily spotted, though not easily avoidable. “There’s definitely been times where I sort of lose motivation from it, and I guess feel burned out. I feel like I’ve definitely felt that.” said Colberg. With the mindset of challenging yourself due to so many added expectations and restrictions it becomes difficult to be able to remove yourself from that hole since that’s what it takes to get into a good college in this day and age.
“I do think there is some genuine involvement,” One of Masuk’s new guidance counselors, Mr. Rosengrant said, “but I do think that some people try to bolster their resume as they kind of get closer to the college application process.” In spite of the reality that being active in your school community is very rewarding, when the only reason you’re doing it is because you know that colleges won’t pay mind to you any other way, it becomes a more of a burden.
A common theme emerging is that many students will only do what looks good on their college resume out of fear that the consequences of not doing so will lead to a deferral, waitlist, or worse of all rejection. With colleges becoming more selective students try and do the most that they possibly can, turning this into a cycle where students will try and do so much to get into a college, colleges will notice that, and then colleges will raise the bar. One clear example of this cycle is at University of Chicago. The Crimson Education reports that in fall 2006, UChicago had an acceptance rate of around 38%, in 18 years that number dropped to 4.48%; this is an 88.21% decrease in how many students were admitted. How can we expect students to continue to live up to these newfound standards where a 4.0 GPA isn’t even enough?
As colleges continue to make access to higher education more difficult, students will continue to overwork and burn themselves out in order to obtain scholarships or even just the bare minimum, which is already ridiculously high in order to reach that level of higher education. Now, the question shifts from: should students just accept these increasing limitations or retaliate against them, into why are we letting colleges make something as simple as an education be pulled out of reach? Although the idea of having everyone that exceeds the regular expectations in select colleges seems good, the reality of it is a target in motion: unachievable in the long run.
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