College Admissions Stress
Nora Barry
For The Inquirer
This time last year, Lower Merion High School senior Brett Redmond thought he was headed to the school of his dreams — the University of Maryland.
“I lived in Maryland for summers and weekends my whole life,” he said. “I was a big sports fan and I watched all their basketball games. I just always wanted to go there.” According to his mother, Sue, he’d want to stop and get a Terp hat or shirt every time they went out on their boat in the Chesapeake. “That’s all he wanted.”
Redmond’s grades were good, his test scores were good, and more importantly, he had participated in a weeklong, highly competitive summer engineering program that required students to go through an application process similar to college admissions. Everything pointed to yes. But last February, Brett learned Maryland had rejected him. “I saw it online and I was shell-shocked,” he said. “...I didn’t know what I was going to do after that point.”
Redmond’s experience will echo that of many high-school seniors this month as they begin to receive word about their college applications—the culmination of an already stressful admissions process. “There’s a myth that you have to be good at everything [to get into a good college],” said Dr. Ken Ginsburg, a pediatrician who practices social adolescent medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He said that pressure to excel is creating a generation of students more subject to stress from college admissions than ever before.
Ginsburg believes parents need to teach their children that ultimate success will be based on their love of learning, how they work with people, their ability to be resilient — not which college they get in to. Plus, what we originally believe is our best option doesn’t necessarily turn out that way. Redmond, who only wanted to go to Maryland, ended up going to Penn State, pledging a fraternity and changing his career focus. He says he loves it. “Everything happens for a reason,” he said.
Ginsburg, author of “Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding your Teen Through College Admissions” and “A Parents Guide to Building Resilience in Teens,” has his own admissions story. An undergraduate student at University of Pennsylvania, he planned on attending Penn Med school. “My father went to Penn Med, my grandfather went to Penn Med. I didn’t get in to Penn Med. So I went to New York and on the train I met my wife. Now I teach at Penn Med.”
Cigus Vanni has also noticed stress from the college application process is on the rise. Vanni, who has been a guidance counselor at Cherry Hill East High School for the past seven years, used to work in admissions at Swarthmore College and now gives free lectures on college admissions. The source of the stress sometimes comes from parents, he said. “They don’t understand the college landscape. They think it’s either too competitive or it’s the same process it was 30 years ago. Neither of those extremes is true.”
Many parents have the perception that they’re going to fail their children if they can’t help them attain a better lifestyle. “Parents feel their children will not be more successful than they are unless they go to the best college,” Ginsburg said. “And there are professional parents who define their success by the bumper sticker on their car.”
Both Ginsburg and Vanni suggest taking a pre-emptive approach by looking for colleges that are the best fit, not necessarily the most prestigious. Acceptance into college is a rite of passage, says Ginsburg, and “if we promote the myth that success is dependent on which envelope arrives — that’s harming the child because they’re beginning initiation into adulthood with failure.”
But how do you handle the student who still believes there is only one, true fit? Joe Havlik, a guidance counselor at Harriton High School, gives them “the relationship” talk. “I tell them applying to college is a lot like courting. Love is out there — but if you fall in love and it doesn’t come true, be prepared to have your heart broken and keep your options open. Don’t fall in love with only one school.”
Some of the stress these students feel is due to what guidance counselors are calling “the perfect storm”. The class of 2009 is one of the largest graduating class in more than 30 years and these students, on average, send out between six and ten applications—generating a record number of applications and a record number of rejections. “You can do absolutely everything that is expected and simply not be admitted because admissions is a quilt, not a blanket,” Vanni said. “Admissions offices put together a series of patches. There are athlete patches and legacy patches — up to 50 percent of the patches are taken up by specialty cases. By the time they finish all the patches, there might not be space for you.”
A new patch on the quilt this year will be the economy. The average investment portfolio has lost between 20 percent and 40 percent of its value in the past six months, according to Tom Belisari, a certified financial planner at Key Financial in West Chester. The 529 college saving funds managed by Pennsylvania also were down an average of 30 percent, and those losses are already having an impact on the ability of currently enrolled students to pay tuition.
“We’re hearing, informally and anecdotally, there has been an increase in unpaid bills at colleges,” says Barmak Massirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
If your child has been accepted into a program you can no longer afford, Ginsburg advises a straightforward discussion. “When you talk about finding the right match, that match includes the realities of life’s circumstances,” he said, adding, “It doesn’t do good to shield them from reality.”
Ginsburg believes that college admissions stress has both physical and emotional implications for students. “You have a generation of kids who are made to believe they have to be perfect in order to get into the college of their choice,” he said. That quest for perfection is resulting in physical ailments such as eating disorders, anxiety and headaches. Ginsburg’s research has led to his involvement with the organization, Challenge Success (www.challengesuccess.org), an outgrowth of the Stressed Out Students project at the Stanford University School of Education. The Challenge Success mission statement expands the definition of success for children to include character, health and creativity, as well as achievement.
Resilience is another key ingredient for success, according to Dr. Ginsburg. And students do bounce back. Redmond’s advice: “Don’t stress about it. That’s the worst you can do. You’ll end up fine.”
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