By Chris Satullo
I had no idea young people were doing this, but now that I’ve been told…well, of course they are.
Among high school seniors, it’s apparently a huge thing: the college acceptance video, posted on social media.
With a friend or parent holding the iPhone, set at a dramatic angle, a teenager logs into the admissions portal of their “dream college,” spends a theatrical moment displaying Himalaya-high levels of anxiety and excitement, then clicks the link to discover…”OMG, OMG, I got innnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!” Much hugging and squealing with joy ensues.
For some highly-impressed-with-themselves teens, this video documentation of the college admissions process has a next level. Like LeBron James saying he’s “taking his talents to South Beach,” they make an Insta production out of announcing which one of the many elite colleges that accepted them will be graced by their presence the next fall.
But Zach Gottlieb has three words for his high school peers: Stop. Just stop.
Gottlieb is the unusual high school junior from California who founded Talk with Zach, a platform that invites young people to talk about their stresses and concerns. He set it up as a response to Gen Z’s distressingly high rates of anxiety disorder, depression, eating disorders and suicide.
In a piece now featured on The Atlantic’s website, Gottlieb writes:
“Studies have shown that social-media comparison leads to depression, anxiety, and poor self-esteem, and at a time when teens are feeling especially vulnerable as decisions roll in, their social-media feeds are filling up with these videos.”
He writes that this is crazy and damaging. He underlines what should be an obvious point, but one that flies over the head of many anxious, impressionable teens: Only kids who get into the college of their dreams post such videos. No one is going on TikTok to tell the world that Princeton just tossed their app into the reject pile.
A lot of factors fuel this widely documented mental health crisis among Americans under the age of 30. Social media’s toxicity is a huge one. And stress over the college admission quest, with kids’ own ambitious fragility compounded by their fear of disappointing their (often) over-involved parents, is another biggie. Plus, admission doesn’t end the stress. It just sets up four or five (or six) years of next-level fretting about majors and career prospects, with the looming loan debt from the $35,000 average-annual-cost of college hanging like a dark cloud over every semester.
A college degree has ceased to be a no-brainer financial boon – and the kids sense it. Social media and the ambient prattle about “safe spaces” and “trauma” have taught them to catastrophize even minor setbacks and stresses. The concern that you and your parents may be sinking as much as a half mil into a bad investment that you’ll spend your life paying off is an actual, big, hairy stressor.
Gottlieb’s brave and bracing advice to his peers put me in mind of a talk I used to give annually to students of two teacher friends of mine. One taught at a gleaming public high school on Philly’s affluent Main Line; the other at an elite prep school near my then-home in the city’s northern burbs.
The classes were usually full of juniors and seniors. I’d ask them, “So, how many of you are sweating out college applications now?”
Every hand would go up, accompanied by grim eyes and pursed lips.
“Let me help you calm down about all that,” I’d say. Then I’d share some pertinent stats. I just now consulted Google to update them:
Do you know how many students end up graduating from the first college they attend? For guys, that percentage is in the low 40’s; for women, it inches up near 50. Some never graduate, sure, but a whole bunch end up leaving that “dream college” they agonized so much about getting into, then find themselves happier and more successful somewhere else.
Do you how many students actually stick with their first declared major – in other words, knew exactly what they wanted to do in life when they entered as freshmen and never wavered? (Or, maybe, could never escape their parents’ dreams for them.)
About one in five.
Yes, about 80 percent of students change majors at least once, and a substantial cohort changes three or more times.
To me, that’s not indecision. It’s wisdom. Changing course as you learn more about yourself and the world is, as they say near Harvard Yard, wicked smart.
Do you know what’s one of the main factors in whether students stick with their original college? Their compatibility with their first-year roommates. In other words, the luck of the draw. Something that has nothing to do with the course offerings, amenities and college rankings that kids obsess over while perusing college websites. This syndrome was so pronounced that colleges a few years back began trying to counter it by giving the incoming class Eharmony-like questionnaires to try find suitable roommates. Which probably works about as well as Eharmony.
So, bottom line, this college conundrum you and your parents are so worked up about? It’s not a math problem; it can’t be solved by finding the one correct answer. And that’s OK. This choice is not final and wrong choices aren’t fatal.
You’re 17 or 18. Very, very few people know at that age exactly who they are or what it is they might do in life that they will absolutely love.
Even more important, no one – no one, let alone a pimply teen – can predict with confidence what they’ll be doing in the world, or what the world will be doing to them, in five years.
In college – yes, back in the dark ages – I dabbled at learning Fortran and COBOL, punching codes into computer cards to feed them into a mainframe to solve simple math problems. Little did I imagine that in a few decades I’d be working as a journalist in a digital world constructed out of Python and Ruby on Rails and ruled by things called Google and iPhone. I don’t know Ruby on Rails any more than I knew Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, but my college dabbling did help me be conversant and comfortable in the brave new world the crazy coders were building around me.
Back in that Watergate era, I was just a boring kid at an old-fashioned liberal arts college who settled on the bland, what’s-the-point? major of Comparative Literature. I didn’t double-down on any career path or professional school quest because I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do and didn’t want to be forced to choose at a time when I still was applying Clearasil every night before bed. Instead, I dabbled, explored and learned how to learn. I took courses on Mozart and Moliere and the Lorentz transformations. (And, yes, annual college costs below $5,000 did make that approach less anxiety-producing.)
As it happily turned out, every day at college I learned something that I ended up putting to work as a journalist years later. I didn’t exactly love college; I was a public-school kid at a preppy place where I never fit in. I might have been happier elsewhere, but I might have also been more miserable. I left with no lifetime friends (it was my first newsroom that bequeathed me a bounty of those) but with a love of learning and pretty good grasp of how to learn. A decent net return.
So I’m with Zach Gottleib on this. Always have been.
Students, parents (grandparents): Don’t twist yourself into knots about the arbitrary decisions that the very ordinary, fallible people who work in college admissions offices make, based on some labored words on an application form. Remember: The goal is an education, not a backyard barbecue brag. Whatever the invisible admissions lords decide, you (or your kid or grandkid) will get in somewhere. And that campus will include smart people and good mentors, people who can guide you and help you and mold you, if you put in the effort to find them. (A tip: The people who really love to teach, instead of just do their own research and rack up publications, often hang out at the less-elite places.)
One final point: I’ve spent decades running news operations. In that time, I’ve interviewed hundreds of young applicants, hired dozens upon dozens. And never once did the college name on the application, or the reported GPA, lead me to hire someone.
No, what mattered was how they wrote, how they thought, what they read, how curious they were, how passionate about the work.
What matters is you. Not where you “got in.”
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia