VOICES
Prestige, privilege and pompous entitlement: The debased world of college applications By Tanya Wan | Photography by Hannah Yuen | Layout by Ningjing Huang and Nathan Wu
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t 3:42pm, your cell phone buzzes with notifications: from friends, classmates, even in the year-wide group chat. Your hands go clammy, your breathing hitches, and the icy fingers of dread skitter their way down your spine. DUDE THE MATH TEST IS OUT. You swallow, compose yourself. check schoology lmao [insert the name of a teacher] posted them. The nape of your neck sticky with sweat. And, worst of all––how did u do? It doesn’t matter what happens next in this story, really. Because the phenomenon that precedes it is rooted in something much more significant––and pervasive––than we give it credit for, and one that is particularly familiar to absurdly privileged students from affluent families. Evidence of how deeply it has embedded its claws in society range from a minor rush of nerves (as depicted above) to shocking rates of extremely poor mental health amongst students that, in some cases, may even culminate in suicide. Academic pressure. Of course, there exist a myriad of reasons why students may experience stress or poor mental health, and plenty more that factor into the umbrella topic of academic pressure; none of this aims to negate that. For the sake of this article, however, I will be exploring one more specific to the CIS community that infiltrates the lives of its high school students: college applications. 34 XH26.indd 34
ISSUE 26
As the prospect of undertaking the International Baccalaureate looms near, it has become starkly apparent that students––myself included–– are ravenous for admission to prestigious universities in the US and the UK. Given the choice of lopping off a finger in exchange for an unconditional offer to Harvard, I feel fairly certain that some of us would take it. And, really, the sheer amount of extracurriculars, service organisations, and internships that students willingly take on in pursuit of the prestige promised by these universities may well be worth the equivalent of an amputated finger. But why, exactly, do students feel compelled to work so hard for their college applications? Maybe it’s because we want to satisfy our parents, who have long nurtured the fever dream of toting the name-brand universities their children attend like designer bags: “Oh, Cambridge, your daughter too? Yeah, I was going to send little Jeff off to Berkeley, but I much preferred the varsity lacrosse programme over at Stanford.” In 2018, a survey conducted by a local NGO, the Hok Yau Club, discovered that 40% of pupils reported experiencing pressure from their parents over their academic performance. (And surely that is a conservative estimate.) Or maybe it’s the toxic, meritocratic culture of competition that has been nurtured in us over the years; the deferential respect we often see shining in the eyes of respected adults at
XIAO HUA 27/5/2022 7:23 AM
