Rejection and college students

Parents Forum
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An interesting column on the challenges facing kids at elite schools today (and young people more generally). https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/opinion/rejection-college-youth.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Hk8.2edf.2tZLN9IOU77S&smid=url-share

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Thanks for sharing. Definitely worth a read.

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Thanks for sharing this column, @Thorsmom66.

Some of the statistics shared were kind of shocking relating to the number of applicants to spots (for clubs, seminar classes, much less internships, etc).

Below are a few quotes that really struck me:

It seems we’ve created a vast multilayered system that evaluates the worth of millions of young adults and, most of the time, tells them they are not up to snuff.

For all the students and families that are seeking an acceptance to a Top X school, I hope that they realize this:

Several of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a superselective college, the rat race would be over. On the contrary, the Hunger Games had just begun.

Of course, this does not mean a Top X experience is a bad thing for everyone. But it takes people with the right mindset to thrive in that environment:

One student’s quote in that Crimson article leaped out at me: “You jump through this huge hoop of getting into Harvard, and you just want to jump through more to get this adrenaline going again.” The competitive game is its own reward.

Based on reactions and comments I sometimes see, this rings true to me, whether it’s about who got into a highly rejective option or who seems to have it worse than prior generations:

People who have suffered rejections become, on average, more aggressive, less empathetic, have a harder time with self-control.

I have to disagree with this part, however:

And in this column I’m not even trying to cover the rejections experienced by the 94 percent of American students who don’t go to elite schools and don’t apply for internships at Goldman Sachs. By middle school, the system has told them that because they don’t do well on academic tests, they are not smart, not winners. That’s among the most brutal rejections our society has to offer.

This is obviously written from the lens of someone who strongly values academics and intellectual pursuits (i.e. was teaching a seminar at Yale and is writing a column in the NY Times). I can’t believe that 94% of kids are feeling as though they’re not smart or not winners because they don’t attend a Top X school, much less that they’re feeling that way by middle school. That said, however, there is too big of a percentage of kids who do feel that they’re not good at school/school’s not for them by early adolescence. I think that says something about how our society conveys our values and how we educate our youth, and the things it’s saying is that we need to consciously make some changes.

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I have a hard time feeling sorry for students at colleges with an acceptance rate under 10%.

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They also only talked to students at “elite” schools:

I had phone conversations with current college students and recent graduates, focusing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclusion might be strongest.

So I agree, I also wasn’t so convinced by that part of their argument about the larger set of students that they didn’t even bother to talk to.

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Agree with this. We live in flyover land and most of the kids here are happy to go to the local CC or public U. Many eventually work for some local small business, work a trade and start a family relatively young. They have satisfying lives. To the extent there is this level of competitiveness would be youth sports and maybe Greek life. I think this obsession with elite schools and working for Bain/Goldman is a coastal and large city phenomenon.

My D went to a SLAC, but was on a STEM track. I don’t get the sense that there was any extraordinary cutthroat competition. Getting her first job was not easy, but she got good help from her professors and alumni network. She subsequently played it forward with students graduating later.

S went to an Ivy, but chose not to do these competitive clubs. He thought it was ridiculous for students to be judging each other in this fashion. He did ECs he enjoyed, like club sports and community service, and just made sure he had good grades. He is at a well known bulge bracket firm.

I tend to think of the all the applications for limited spots similar to what we see in college applications. Online applications with algorithms doing the first sort just encourages the deluge of applications, including from those with no real shot at a client facing position at Goldman or MBB.

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I am going to come across as being cold and callous, but my primary thought as I read this was… boo hoo. David from Williams will be just fine, as will Rachel from Yale.

The kids who apply to the most elite schools and get in might do well to remember the old saying “careful what you wish for.”

Having said that, there is also a lot of truth in the article that applies to regular kids too. My son attended Binghamton, which is obviously not elite, though it is highly regarded in New York at least. He’s on his second job post grad. He applied to around 100 jobs before landing his first one. I think that is just the way it is now for a lot of more desirable jobs. If someone from Harvard wants to go into social work, I doubt they will have to submit a hundred job applications.

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Agree that so much of this is fueled by the idea of a handful of schools being gateways to the big financial services firms. And obviously there’s some truth to the perception. But that’s an awful indictment of the past forty years of “winner takes all” American capitalism where a $2M home in a coastal suburb is the default goal and financial chaos awaits everyone else.

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In my neck of the woods (and I live in an urban area in the Northeast, allegedly ground zero for elitism) a kid is MUCH more likely to suffer emotionally for not being pretty enough, popular enough (or at all), not having the funds to do the hair/limo/makeup before prom, or for not being athletic enough (and this now holds for both girls and boys… not just a “football player” phenomenon now. The girls need to be gymnasts or competitive swimmers or something).

So yeah, rejection stings but the notion of a kid being scarred for not getting into Skull and Bones or making it into a competitive chamber orchestra… they’ll survive.

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Please share your interpretation of this article’s message. My takeaway was simply: That it is hard to be young today due to receiving multiple rejections (schools, clubs, & jobs).

We live in an age of information. College applicants, club applicants, and job applicants should all understand the odds against acceptance because of the vast information readily available online.

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“I should close by reiterating the fact that the people I’m writing about here are the meritocracy’s alleged winners. The valedictorian class. The golden children. Are they just whining through their privilege? Maybe a little. Young Americans who came of age in 1860 or 1916 or 1932 or 1941 weren’t exactly living on Easy Street.”

It’s hard to feel sorry for them.

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This is so reminiscent of “Excellent Sheep”.

I have travelled in these hyper-competitive circles (and still do), and part of it is fed by a combination of the adrenaline rush of the hunt and bagging the prey, fear of “dropping” out of the elite, the social hierarchies at these institutions that define and perpetuate what’s desirable, etc. The pride/superiority one feels at being at an elite institution goes hand in hand with the worry that being at anything less will result in being looked down upon. As in, got a job at Citibank rather than Goldman. So ridiculous.

At the same time, I live in a community that has little interest in any of this, and everyone is just fine. Going to Rutgers (especially as an athletic recruit) is the golden ring. Kids get jobs – not at McKinsey or Goldman.

Which is all to say, we can choose which sea we want to swim in. The most rejected kids are the ones who repeatedly aim for the top of the pyramid - for any myriad of reasons. My guess is that some of the reasons are genuine and authentic, but many have almost certainly come from the other fish in their chosen sea.

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My interpretation of the article was encapsulated by this:

“We are the most rejected generation,” he said.

He’s right.

The columnist admitted that he had focused on individuals striving for elite outcomes, but that a lot of this is true for many, some of which were mentioned in the article and some of which I’ll extrapolate:

  • The number of people who have to apply for tons of jobs that are not $$$$/famous/highly coveted
  • The number of people who get no reciprocation when they express interest on a dating app
  • The number of people who get no “likes” on a social media post
  • The number of people who apply for clubs (including robotics clubs in public elementary schools or club sports at whatever age they’re starting)
  • The number of people seeking acceptance by the “cool kids” (not a new phenomenon)
  • The number of people seeking any friends (a worsening phenomenon)

I understand the “cry me a river” folks’ reaction to the people in the article aiming for these elite outcomes. It is a bit of my gut reaction, too. But, there’s two things that change my feelings.

  1. The vast majority of the kids who come on CC (or at least who post on CC) are kids who are aiming for these “elite” outcomes. And just as I referenced the “no man is an island” concept from John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” for young people who are struggling, these gunner kids have their own areas of struggle, and feeling sympathy and a desire to help them is a sign of our own humanity.

  2. This article gives food for thought (and talking points to posters who try and share the reality of what life might be like if students actually achieve the outcomes they’re aiming for) for us as a society. If we don’t like the impacts of this mentality and these processes, then maybe there’s something we can do to change the conversation in our own communities about what attitudes, behaviors, achievements, and life outcomes are valued and respected.

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Random thoughts:

I agree for many people graduating with a college degree is a life-changing event of which they and their families are justifiably very proud, and you definitely do not need to go to one of the most selective few four-year colleges in the country for that to be true. Indeed, I always find it distressing when an article that is nominally opposed to such elitist attitudes casually embeds them anyway.

I also understand that there are many, many kids who face much worse problems than the ones this article is describing. That being said, I like to be consistently pro kid, and I do think the relentless peer competition/Hunger Games mentality is bad for almost every kid, no matter how otherwise advantaged they may be. And of course a lot of that is coming from their peer culture, which is extremely hard to deal with.

But sometimes some of it is coming from parents or other adults. And those people are perhaps a worthy audience for some tough talk about the messages they are giving to kids and why those messages end up being unhealthy and often counterproductive in the end.

Finally, this is not the most coherent thought, but I do think there is something to the idea that the ease of applying for things online is not always working out to the benefit of many people, both applicants and entities with positions to fill. It is great to reduce costs of searching for and applying for positions, but when that turns into what is arguably too much applying, not so good. And yet this is a type of collective action problem because if you unilaterally decide to apply less, you may with some reason feel like you might be at a disadvantage (although not always as much as some suggest).

One conceptual solution to this problem is to use these great information and communications technologies to enable more of a matching system, similar to Questbridge, NY public high schools, medical residencies, and so on. I don’t think this is technologically difficult, but it may require some acceptance of new norms in some areas. But I think there is promise in the idea that sort of system could become a lot more common.

Indeed, on a very deep level, such matching programs are basically a replacement for the old human matching practices that were common in college admissions, jobs, marriages, and so on. People are rightly skeptical about how such systems can favor established insiders and serve to exclude others for lots of invidious reasons. But technology may allow us to capture some of the positives of a matching system while at least avoiding most of the negatives.

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I am Gen X, so my opinions are seasoned with that particular generational point of view. Other people’s mileage may vary.

Here’s what I think:

  • 1st gut take: Be careful what you ask for.
  • 2nd gut take: Suck it up, buttercup.
  • my sister did a summer in high school at Harvard. Her take on that experience? “The students are Harvard are neurotic & way too turbo.”
  • my sister also went to a very highly ranked law school & had classmates who’d done their undergrad at Ivy League institutions. All of the Ivy League’ers, when it came time to take the bar exam, thought they’d be able to coast just because they thought they were smarter than everybody else. Many of them failed it and had to take a 2nd time. Meanwhile, my sister went to a public flagship state university and passed the bar exam the 1st time around.
  • in my opinion, there can be a very elitist attitude amongst top 20/top 25/Ivy League students. An attitude of “We’re all smarter than the rest of you plebians. We’re better than you.” Gag me with a spoon.
  • If they all want to work for Goldman Sachs, then fine. Go for it. But good luck having any sort of personal life.
  • Good luck getting through college and surviving Goldman Sachs without needing Xanax and getting addicted to Adderall.
  • Parents who raised all of those neurotic kids to the point where the adult kid has an anxiety attack because they didn’t get 100% on a test…those parents need to do some soul searching because you really didn’t do your kid any favors by not allowing your kids to NEVER fail at anything.
  • there’s been far too much helicopter parenting. If your kid never had screwed up, they’ll never learn how to be resilient.
  • there’s multiple paths to happiness and success in life. It doesn’t all reside in the gallows of Goldman Sachs & other Wall Street institutions.
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I have long thought college admissions would benefit from some type of matching system or at the least a quota on applications to certain selective schools (e.g. Common App only allows a student to apply to 3 to 6 schools with admissions rate below X%). A lot of unnecessary/wasted time by both institutions and applicants would be saved. In the old days of paper apps, applicants could only do 4/5 applications and the admissions rate for HYPS was around 20%.

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I’ve been thinking about this particular element with respect to college admissions. I actually like that MIT and Georgetown among others have their own application. They are (were for Georgetown) INCREASING friction. You had to want to go there to bother with the application. Rutgers went to the Common app and saw their application numbers soar. The reduced friction means that everyone has to deal with an increased burden. Students have to pay more to apply to more schools because they are less likely to predict acceptances. Schools have to go through more applications and hire more people to read them for students that are individually less likely to enroll. The reduction in friction from this standpoint is a net loss to many participants (of course, not to all participants).

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Yes, an increasing tendency for the economy to move toward “winner take all” (where most of the gains from economic growth have been accrued by the top few percent of income and wealth while the economy has been zero sum for the rest) creates more incentive to strive to enter the ranks of the elite than before. Hence the increasing competitiveness for anything seen as a stepping stone to the ranks of the elite.

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Yup, not dissimilar maybe to UCAS where the limit is 5 schools, only one of which can be either Oxford or Cambridge. You’d need more options in the US by nature of the size of the population and number of colleges, but I like the idea of something like this. It would reduce the artificial pressure on application numbers at the same time as reducing the “spray and pray” approach.

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Yes and no.

I can’t be the only boomer on here who knows-- fill in the blank- a librarian married to a social worker who own their own home, sent their kids to college, take fun- if not luxurious- vacations, and seem optimistic about their financial futures. Or it’s a nurse whose partner is a HS history teacher. Or an insurance adjuster who never married. Or a sales rep for an auto parts distributor married to a midlevel manager who works for the department of public works managing snow and sanitation.

These are real people- of all ages, so not just boomers ready to retire. And they don’t all live in Duluth where one could argue that the housing costs replicate the 1950’s more than the 2000’s.

So I don’t REALLY buy the “winner takes all” argument. Yes, a hedge fund manager married to a neurosurgeon is going to have more “goodies”. So if you need a lot of goodies, don’t get that MSW or the teaching degree.

But honestly- CC makes it seem as though these lovely, educated people are all living under a bridge because they were on the losing end of the winner takes all competition. It’s society’s ratcheting up of expectations that seems to have messed with everyone’s head, not the actuality of the economy.

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