As spring goes on, more and more seniors are making college decisions. Many people are excited to go to ACC, MSU, or CU Denver, but other students spend their senior year stressing over whether they will get into Brown or UCLA.
I’m not immune to this harmful mindset either, I applied to Yale and the University of Virginia. Of course, it would be cool to go to a prestigious school. However, focusing too much on the name of where you go is a toxic mindset that exists among many high-achieving students at LHS.
Any time you sit in awkward silence with a senior IB student, the chance that they won’t ask what colleges you applied to is very slim. It seems to be the only thing that people talk about sometimes.
When someone gets into Harvard or Cal Poly, the whole class will end up finding out about it in about 5 minutes. But when someone gets into CSU or Colorado Mesa, you don’t see that many people bragging. Some people I know consistently talk down these schools and make fun of people attending them, without realizing how privileged they are.
Students in the IB diploma program are predominantly white and upper middle class, with college-educated parents. Blessed with all these factors, affording and attending a “good” school seems like the expectation.
But at the end of the day, the majority of kids at this school can’t afford to go to a top 50 school. It’s America, some students can’t even afford community college.
Every time I hear a scathing comment like “oh, he got rejected from Washington so he’s going to Boulder”, I get frustrated. After 13 years of grueling education, no one deserves to be belittled for making it into a school. It’s difficult no matter what. It’s scary to think about what’s next no matter where you go.
Both this year and last year, I have heard people lying about where they are going to school. Usually, they say they are going to an Ivy League, but end up somewhere else. Some of these lies even end up on the LHS seniors’ Instagram page. Whether they are done for humor or to genuinely deceive people, they perpetuate the fact that where you go matters.
One of the many, many reasons that colleges are able to rip off so many Americans is the value tied to top 50 schools. Ask any college counselor and they’ll tell you about “safety schools” and “reach schools”. To raise your chances of acceptance, they might advise you to apply to quite a few reach schools. Each school charges an application fee on top of the tens of thousands of dollars per year it would take to go there.
I think that application fees are a problematic barrier that prevents underprivileged students from even trying to go to these “prestigious” schools. $80 is a lot to apply to a school you don’t even know if you will get into.
Fee waivers are available for some but imagine applying for a fee waiver at every school you want to apply to. That is a lot of unnecessary effort that working-class families don’t have time for.
If you are fortunate enough to get into and afford a really nice school in another state, that’s great for you. I am probably in that boat as well. I think it’s awesome to hear about people getting into their dream schools.
But at the end of the day, it is not a competition. You are not superior to other people just because your college is higher on a US News “best universities” list. You should not be more likely to succeed and be financially stable just because you go to Boston University. Grow up.
