The Problems with the Culture Surrounding College Admissions and Schools
A High School Junior’s Musing
At the end of each semester, my friends and I would anxiously wait for our transcripts. Since grades usually came out during the 6th period (P.E. for many of us), we would lie around the plastic grass on the field, phones in our hands, hoping for straight A’s.
Whenever one of our friends received a B, though disappointed, we would joke around, “Haha, no chance for Stanford. Only chance to go to a community college.”
Or when one of our friends received an A in a difficult class, we would rejoice saying, “Ivy League grades right here! Possible to get into Harvard?”
I realized that these jokes poked fun at how absurd it was to get into these elite colleges and our innermost desire for being admitted in. But, it also resembled something even deeper: the culture surrounding education and college admissions.
I find this culture to be toxic, promoting thinking that diminishes our sense of decision making and behavior that stigmatizes non-conformist students.
Do you remember the College Admissions Scandals of 2019? A few dozen privileged and wealthy parents believed that it was imperative that their children attended these elite colleges, going as far as to bribe officials and cheat on standardized tests. The scale of these scandals shows the extent of this harmful culture on rationality.
To understand my line of thought, we shall examine this culture through three primary questions.
- What is this culture, and how is it flawed?
- What is the impact of this culture on students?
- How can we change it?
What is this culture, and how is it flawed?
As a student who always sought high achievement, I’ve always wondered, “Why do we care so much about going to elite colleges? Why did we care so much about our academic results? Why do we seek to look ‘perfect’ on admission papers?”
Answering these questions came down to how we perceive being successful.
There is a success story in education: children go to school to learn valuable skills and knowledge. They eventually attend college, pursuing their passions, to prepare for the workforce and earn a high-paying job.
Many communities, especially Asian American ones, believe that if their students follow this path, they would live a rather fulfilling life.
Unfortunately, as Sir Robinson, creativity expert, and educationalist, describes it, “Life is not linear; it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.” [1]
Some high school students may drop out, take the GRE (or the CHSPE for Californians), and begin working. Others may take a leap year to immerse themselves at an internship or perhaps attend a vocational school.
These students are equally successful compared to those who attend college immediately after high school. After all, a four-year college is just one mode to help prepare students for lifelong sustainability and flourishing.
There are many different routes in education that have been forgotten in this success story, influencing people of the community to be scornful or discouraging to non-conformists (e.g. those students who attend community colleges). Many students and parents are so firm in their beliefs (their obsession with college) that it is dictating how they live their lives… for the worse.
Part of the reason we are so deeply enthralled by this story stems from our “narrow view of intelligence” as Sir Robinson claims.
In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Professor Bransford writes,
“In his theory of multiple intelligences, Gardner proposed the existence of [eight] relatively autonomous intelligences: linguistic, logical, musical, spatial, bodily, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and [naturalistic]. The first two intelligences are those typically tapped on tests and most valued in schools… ” [2]
Our emphasis on linguistic and logical intelligences (those associated with subjects such as STEM, Mathematics, and Language Arts) had made us believe that college is the only pathway, making us disregard alternatives such as vocational programs and apprenticeships.
What is the impact of this culture on the students?
This culture is changing how students think, making them entity theorists.
As explained by How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,
“Children who are entity theorists tend to hold performance goals in learning situations: they strive to perform well or appear to perform well, attain positive judgements of their competence, and avoid assessments. They avoid challenges that will reflect them in poor light. They show little persistence in the face of failure. Their aim is to perform well.” [2]
Because they are performance orientated, what I find is that many students around me attend classes and participate in activities that do not interest them to increase their acceptance rates. Some of them are not pursuing their passions but instead seeking to look better on college admissions.
What’s worse is that the community promotes this line of reasoning and behavior, reinforcing this culture.
When I asked my counselor to remove me from AP Language and Composition, she was reluctant dropping me from the class, telling me that “Colleges look for rigorous classes you took on your transcript.” On my school’s Advanced Placement Online Program sheet, its purpose states, “To increase access to Advanced Placement (AP) courses NOT being offered at [my high school] and enhance student eligibility for competitive college admission.”
It isn’t implied that these classes are used to improve ourselves. Had my counselor said, “You should take this class because it is important,” or had the placement sheet included, “To increase learning opportunities for students,” it would have conveyed an entirely different message.
Because students are forced to do things that they do not enjoy and pressured to look appealing for colleges, they are stressed out.
According to Sir Robinson in You, Your Child, And School,
“In study after study, high school students list as their greatest stressors worries about their academic performance, the relentless pressures of testing, concerns about getting into a good college, and parental pressure to excel at school and distinguish themselves as extraordinary…” [3]
Just this year, our school put on our ID Card, a National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and a Crisis Text Line.
In this act, my school had acknowledged that their own students are stressed out to the point of mental deterioration, but they still allow for this culture to proliferate and hurt their own students.
What I find ironic is that after doing all these activities to be accepted in college, many students have no idea what to major in.
W.C. Lewallen in their 1995 paper, Students Decided and Undecided About Career Choice: A Comparison of College Achievement and Student Involvement, writes,
“Undecided students comprise an estimated 20–50% of students entering- college.” [4]
Additionally, NACADA, the global community for academic advising, added,
“Undecided/exploratory students represent a significant proportion of the entering student body at most colleges and universities. Many other students (between 60% -75%) who begin university studies as declared in majors, change their majors at least once before they graduate.” [5]
We need to realize that everything we do in education should help prepare students for their lives, pursuing their passions, and carrying out their moral responsibilities. Education isn’t supposed to prepare students to look like a worthy candidate for college.
How can we change it?
In order to create a healthier culture, we need to first see what type of student we want to nurture: competence motivated incremental theorists.
As described by How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,
“Children who are incremental theorists have learning goals…They regard their own increasing competence as their goal. They seek challenges and show high persistence…”
Just as children are often self- directed learners in privileged domains…young children exhibit a strong desire to apply themselves in intentional learning situations. They also learn in situations where there is no external pressure to improve and no feedback or reward other than pure satisfaction- something called achievement or competence motivation.” [2]
In other words, we want to encourage students to do things they enjoy and to seek challenges that benefit their learning.
Secondly, we have to transform higher education by making all colleges top quality.
In this context, I will define a quality college as one that helps their students graduate (increase degree completion rates), fulfills the purposes of education, fosters critical thought, and offers education by highly trained professors.
Now, you may be wondering, “What does this have to do with changing the culture?”
As you have seen from the section above, students are infatuated by the idea of attending an “elite” college, realizing that these colleges offer the best education. As a result, students are doing whatever it takes to get in. This is a problem that stems from the competition in the application process.
By making all colleges high quality, we reduce that competition to go into elite colleges because these institutions (e.g. Stanford, Harvard, M.I.T.) would be, for example, no different from state colleges (e.g. UCs, CSUs) or even community colleges in educational quality. Students could go wherever they pleased.
A medical student could go to any medical school, knowing they would be provided with high quality education. An engineering student could go to any engineering school, knowing that they would be provided with high quality education.
Reducing competition and improving the quality of colleges will allow students to focus on building themselves instead of their application. They won’t be pressured to do well for the sake of college acceptance, but instead for the sake of themselves.
I am basing my solution from schools in Finland, a country with one of the most successful education systems in the world. Their primary/secondary schooling systems are set up in a way where they are all of high quality.
Quoting from Ms. Rinkinen, a Finish ministerial adviser and educational affairs, “We want our schools to be equal and have equal opportunities to arrange the education. Therefore, also the finance system needs to be equal and treat equally all the schools.” [6]
Now, this begs the question, how do we make colleges “high quality?”
I recommended redirecting funds from unimportant sectors such as the subsidies from the fossil fuel industry and our nuclear weapon program into colleges that need help. [7,8,9]
Will it work? What will it do?
Changing the quality of colleges on a national scale has not been done before, but certainly, it is possible. In the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), billions of taxpayer dollars were put into the K-12 system, dramatically changing everything within a few years (though for the worst). If we had the same impetus NCLB had, I believe we can transform these colleges.
By accomplishing this goal, along with removing stress from students, there would be no end to the economic boost. It is, after all, one of the best long term investments.
According to Professor Deming from the Harvard Graduate School of Education,
“… A number of papers find that increases in the quantity and quality of schooling boost earnings, even when these increases are not observed by employers. One example is compulsory schooling reforms. In studies such as Angrist and Krueger (1991), Meghir and Palme (2005), Oreopoulos (2006) and Aryal, Bhuller and Lange (2019), young people are legally required to stay in school longer, and this increases their earnings years later even when it does not lead to increases in degree attainment. Another example comes from Arteaga (2018), who finds that a reduction in coursework requirements for economics and business degrees at a university in Colombia reduced wages. Since employers were not aware of this curricular reform and it did not affect selection into university or graduation rates, the earnings losses are almost certainly due to learning losses. ”
“…The economic return to a college degree is still near an all-time high of around 14 percent per year — double the long-term return on stocks.” [10]
The more educated students are, the more likely they are to earn more money and pay higher taxes. It then goes back into the system, paying for their education.
It’s a win-win. The culture would change to promote healthier mindsets and decisions. Students would have more opportunities to become more knowledgeable and trained, enabling our country to flourish economically and socially.
SOURCES:
- Robinson, S. (Director). (2010, February). Bring on the Learning Revolution! [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_learning_revolution/transcript
- Bransford, John D. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Acad. Press, 2004.
- Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2019). You, your child, and school: Navigate your way to the best education. New York: Penguin Books.
- Lewallen, W. C. (1995). Students decided and undecided about career choice: A comparison of college achievement and student involvement. NACADA Journal, 15(1), 22–29.
- Undecided and Exploratory Students Advising Community. (n.d.). Retrieved July 18, 2020, from https://nacada.ksu.edu/Community/Advising-Communities/Undecided-Exploratory-Students.aspx
- ABC News (Australia) (2020, January 31). Why Finland’s schools outperform most others across the developed world | 7.30 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xCe2m0kiSg
- Mehta, A. (2019, January 24). Here’s how many billions the US will spend on nuclear weapons over the next decade. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.defensenews.com/space/2019/01/24/heres-how-many-billions-the-us-will-spend-on-nuclear-weapons-over-the-next-decade/
- Subsidies Are the Problem, Not the Solution, for Innovation in Energy.” Mercatus Center, 15 Sept. 2019, https://www.mercatus.org/publications/government-spending/subsidies-are-problem-not-solution-innovation-energy
- Nuccitelli, Dana. “America Spends over $20bn per Year on Fossil Fuel Subsidies. Abolish Them | Dana Nuccitelli.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 30 July 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jul/30/america-spends-over-20bn-per-year-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies-abolish-them.
- Deming, D. J. (2019, June). The Economics of Free College. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://econfip.org/policy-brief/the-economics-of-free-college/
