Hindsight = 20/20

[MWolf]

@Johnny523

@tkoparent

Watching the US admissions process from my somewhat protected perch in Asia, I was shocked by the extent to which the process seems to have kind of overtaken the rest of high school in the US. I didn’t start reading CC until sometime in S19’s junior year, by which time his course was more or less set, but I could feel how difficult it would be to avoid getting caught up in it all in a US school environment. In our case, we basically followed a strategy that would have been appropriate when I was growing up - do your best, have some fun, try and figure out what you like, what you are good at and where you’d like to spend the next four years. It was pretty stress-free and everything worked out fine.

It is still just like this for most kids. CC gives a very skewed view of it because it is filled with the top students and their parents who are applying to elite schools. There a lot more kids like my S20, who took one AP class and a few honors classes, whose only EC is a part-time job as a lifeguard, and is only taking four classes his senior year and one is gym. He got into all 4 colleges he applied to and is going to U of Arizona next year with a very nice merit scholarship.

Well, we’re writing this on CC, for parents and kids who come to CC forums for advice, so it does not matter how relevant it is for people who are not on CC.

In any case, it’s not only the kids on CC. It’s true for kids across middle class high schools, and upper middle class high schools. My brother’s kids attend a good high school in the LA area, and the obsession with college starts for many of the kids from freshman year. The stories of student breakdowns from trying to keep up a 4.0 average while doing 10 ECs, repeating SAT to improve their score by maybe 10 points, and then spending 40 hours a week on ECs. There are school districts where the students, on average, take the SATs 3 times. There are those schools where most students re taking 12-15 AP classes. These are stories that make the news ever so often, but then disappear.

It’s not the majority, maybe 10%-15% of all high school students. That’s still 1.5-2 million kids.

It’s also not all that new. In the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse”, from 1995, the older brother, Mark, does everything to “look good to colleges”. While that was less widespread back then, it was a recognizable stereotype.