The Trouble with “Deserving”: Why College Admissions Decisions Don’t Determine Your Value
Around this time last year, one of my students watched with dismay as his prep school peers received acceptance letters from some of the country’s most elite universities. His application process was ambitious, and while he was accepted into several excellent programs, he had difficulty fending off the feeling of defeat when thin envelopes arrived from the Ivies.
Social media was abuzz with congratulations offered to those accepted into Ivy league schools, and one repeated phrase caused him the most frustration: “You deserve it!”
He couldn’t shake it. “Don’t I deserve it too?” he wondered. It was hard for him, now, not to feel that his effort had gone to waste. For years, he had worked endless hours and gone beyond the pale day after day in pursuit of his dream schools. Wasn’t this supposed to be a meritocracy?
His feelings stemmed in large part from a culture where education is seen primarily as a means to an end, and in high school that end is college. It wasn’t that he had forgotten why he chose to pursue certain activities or dedicate himself to one academic study or another. It was that rejection, especially when you’re young, can make you question your path. And if that path is predetermined and doesn’t pan out, you feel duped, fooled, and swindled.
Rejection, especially when you’re young, can make you question your path.
Part of the privilege and joy of working with young people is watching them grow and discover new facets of themselves. College applications present a unique and time-bound opportunity for meaningful self-reflection, and when students undertake the task with integrity and commitment, their lives become richer and more nuanced. With a holistic orientation to the process, they can develop a stronger relationship with their purpose in life, and ultimately make better use of their time after high school.
So it was with this student. He had tirelessly crafted his personal statement, recounting difficult personal challenges, which he deftly connected to broader social issues he was seeing in the world. His revisions were thoughtful and his standards were high, yet his own. He wrote supplemental essays on topics that added dimension to his intellectual life and community commitments. His written work was superlative, and he submitted his applications knowing he had reached a clarity of expression he hadn’t captured before.
But his grades and test scores were middling. Despite thoughtful leadership in school activities, diligent studying, and teacher accolades, his admissions outcome left him feeling like the system couldn’t see him as a whole person. He worried he might never be recognized as an excellent student because the numbers worked against him. Meanwhile, other students who coasted through multivariable calculus and scored high on their SATs without studying apparently deserved their admission to the Harvards and Stanfords of the world. Deserving, it seemed, had little to do with effort or one’s capacity to grow.
When we say, “You deserve it!” we intend to express our congratulations and to celebrate another’s happiness. It’s a noble intention, but the notion of deserving is misleading. It doesn’t really exist in the way we often mean it, and certainly not in a way that’s equitable. How can one person deserve and another not?
If you’re a senior in high school, these next two weeks may be the most anticipated of your academic career. As you await your admissions decisions, the culture in which you live may subtly be sending you two very conflicting and problematic messages: 1) It’ll all work out for the best, but 2) Getting into the best school will determine your value in the world.
It becomes especially difficult to reconcile these two messages when we start buying into the rhetoric of deserving. It’s a slippery slope: if they deserve it, but I don’t, then they must have more value. If it worked for them, and not for me… maybe I’m deficient.
If they deserve it, but I don’t, then they must have more value. If it worked for them, and not for me… maybe I’m deficient.
There’s a much larger (and very important) critique to be made of the pressures surrounding higher education in the United States, but that critique is almost irrelevant to the experience of high school students currently subsumed in the admissions process. Countless articles critique that pressure well, but in the meantime it behooves us to remind ourselves, and our students, of some complicated truths:
Telling a student they deserve something is a poor substitute for offering them the praise and recognition every human needs.
We all seek authentic recognition of our worth. Deploying the narrative of deserving, even with the best intentions, creates a false dichotomy of those who deserve good things and those who don’t.
The farther adults get away from high-school age, the more difficult it may be to empathize with a process that has become increasingly stressful. But consider that The Huffington Post now maintains an Academic Pressure column. The American Psychological Association has tracked spikes in mental health challenges for students who increasingly experience severe distress from academic pressure. During a meeting last week, an acquaintance shared that she put her son’s name on a Silicon Valley kindergarten waiting list while she was gestating.
The fever pitch is real, but it’s vital to remember that every student, regardless of academic achievement, has immeasurable value — full stop. When the narrative of deserving becomes coupled with how we perceive our own worth, we have obscured the true purpose of education.
College is not the end of the road, and few paths run straight in one direction.
The first time I applied to college, I was rejected everywhere. In 2004, I was was in my final year at an affluent public high school where small graduating classes regularly sent a half dozen students to Harvard each year. Some of the schools I applied to were a good fit, and others weren’t — but none accepted me. I took two years off (another story for another time), re-applied, and went to Stanford where, after significant introspection, I was better prepared to take advantage of my education. Getting rejected the first time was one of the most pivotal moments of growth in my life, but it was entirely devastating at the time.
I would be the first to look skeptically at any anecdote as evidence that we can live easily outside the lines. My story is complicated by numerous sites of privilege and circumstance, and I don’t intend to generalize from it. However, we should remember that deviating from the norm is fundamental to our growth, not just because others have forged their own way and survived, but because it is in the nature of human experience to seek freedom from restrictions on our sense of worth.
Each of our paths will at some point veer, and likely more than once. It is inevitable. Embrace the unexpected, focus on the value of the process, and you will find that thoughts of deserving and undeserving begin to slip away. In their place, cultivate your own genuine sense of worth, unconstrained by the pursuit of acceptance.
(Luke Taylor is the Director at Spark Prep. He works with students across the US and Southeast Asia as an admissions coach.)
