Prestige, privilege, and pompous entitlement: welcome to the debased world of college applications

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

At 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. 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

the rare sighting of an Oxbridge specimen; the notion that going to a ‘good’, or renowned, university carries inherent advantages spanning a lifetime. Studies, however, demonstrate that the presumed benefits of attending prestigious universities (e.g. higher wages) are exaggerated. It depends on your major: going to an elite university is useful to students going into business, but plays little to no difference for students going into science.

The idea that ‘top-tier uni = better wages, better life’ also fails to account for the fact that students attending elite universities likely have more access to social networks (and therefore employment) and unpaid internships (generally easier to undertake when you’re living on daddy’s trust fund). For the majority of people, actually going to college matters more than which college you go to. The illusion of upward social mobility thanks to prestigious universities is counteracted by the fact that such prestigious universities admit very few poor students to start off with. Less than 2 percent of students studying at Harvard and Princeton manage to ascend from the bottom of the income ladder to the top.

Top universities such as Yale and UPenn carry bloated endowments (US$30 billion and US$14.5 billion, respectively) that could easily accommodate a larger student body and subsidise education to prevent the growing rate of student debt. But they don’t. In fact, they simultaneously manufacture and perpetuate their fragrant brand of elitism while aspiring students watch on in horror as acceptance rates plummet. Yale Daily News columnist Caleb Dunson went as far as to advocate for the outright abolishment of Yale––the institution, the business, the brand––because of its deliberate exclusivity, capitulation to affluent legacy families, and practice of “parad[ing] [women and people of colour] around for diversity photos and social justice brownie points”.

When even a student of your own critiques the entire belief system on which the educational institution is built, there’s gotta be something wrong with it. Similarly, American philosopher Michael Sanders makes the argument in The Tyranny of Merit that “in practice, most colleges and universities do less to expand opportunity than to consolidate privilege”. And the more you ponder the rampant exclusivity and starknaked elitism attached to these prestigious universities, the truer his words ring.

Once, a college counsellor told me something along the lines of: “It’s not always easy, you know. I had this brilliant student once, really exceptionally bright, and she applied to Cambridge for medicine.” I leaned in, anxiously anticipating the punchline—she didn’t get into any university at all? She had to take a gap year? A pause, presumably for dramatic effect. Then: “She got into King’s College London instead.” King’s College London, as in Russell Group University King’s College London, as in one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the UK King’s College London, as in ranked 17th overall for medicine worldwide King’s College London, as in horrifically mediocre notCambridge King’s College London.

When social expectation and an individual sense of entitlement have reached a level where anything that is not Harvard, Stanford, Oxbridge, or equivalent is considered subpar, what is left for students to do but strive, blindly? To assume positions in a diverse array of clubs and societies for the sake of the title, the extra line of words in a resumé? To slog away at personal statements containing overwrought humble-bragging littered with buzzwords and, frankly, BS? Of course, there are worse things in life—such as not having access to an education at all, for one—but if this is the pedagogical utopia that so-called developed countries have come to, replete with empty childhoods and “holidays” replaced with internships, we need to seriously rethink our definition of “utopia”. The competitive nature of Chinese/Asian culture is also partially to blame for this phenomenon. As Tan Eng Chye, deputy president at the National University of Singapore, explained to USA Today: “Education is an established path toward success.” By extension, admission to a good university is perceived as an investment in a child’s future. And as Taiwanese eighthgrader Hung Kuo put it: “People in Asia have a thinking about I can’t lose, I have to fight with other people or something, I have to get a very good grade.” It’s a lonely path to walk, paved by the irrational and degenerate hurry to fill in the blank spaces on our CVs; in extreme cases, students may even feel inclined to discard some of their ethics, reason, and even humanity along

the way thanks to the toxic, vindictive nature of overblown academic competition.

Of late, the umbrella term of “at-risk youth” has grown to include adolescents from affluent families despite––or perhaps also because of––their obvious socioeconomic advantages, which add to the expectation that they continue performing, achieving, and exceeding. Psychologist Madeleine Levine referred to this phenomenon as a “mental health epidemic of privileged youth”; looking around myself, it’s evident that this most certainly applies to wealthy students at international schools.

We go to community service and take photos. We sign up for things and bite off far more than we can chew. We partake in superficial activities and describe, in vivid detail, how ‘humbled’ it made us feel. In a way, elite education is a brutal priming for the corporate workforce. New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni articulated it best, describing students manic in the pursuit of admission to revered universities as “emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions”. The ‘game’ often seems to dictate that you either play or get played––win or lose––thereby coercing students into this unhealthy, insidious paradigm.

Similarly, Dublin Times guest writer Sally Rooney once wrote that “[with] academic life…I thought about things only as hard and as thoroughly as my grades required. Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.” If service hours were not logged, would you still participate? If your university applications weren’t at stake, would you still try so hard? Probably not––at least not as much as we do now. It’s hubris, it’s hypocrisy, and we don’t talk about it nearly enough.

Universities seem to expect students to become fully-fledged human beings with talents, hobbies, and a Nobel prize or two when they apply. The leaders of tomorrow, I suppose, shouldn’t need to catch a break. “Just be who you are,” as the common catchphrase goes. But this assertion of universities’ expectations is patently untrue. It’s not be who you are; it’s be the version of yourself that most fulfils expectations. Be the version of yourself that sacrifices the best part of your teenage years in exchange for––what? The delusion of prestige? The perpetuation of privilege? What really makes a worthy contender at a top university, as such? Is it the perfunctory social involvement, or the fraudulent SAT scores (à la the college admissions scandal)?

Many academics and institutions have proposed remedies to this mania. One brilliant example: Many application officers have admitted that it is exceedingly difficult to identify amongst candidates who, exactly, is more “talented” or “full of potential”. In the 1960s, a Yale admissions officer noted that “You sometimes have the nasty feeling that you could take all the thousands of [applications]…throw them down the stairs, pick up any thousand, and produce as good a class as the one that will come out of the committee meeting.” And if this should be possible in theory, why not implement it in practice? In the process of admitting students, take the applications, remove those that do not fulfil a broad academic threshold, and award the remaining applicants through a lottery system. (Let’s not kid ourselves; meritocracy is a joke.)

Eliminate the SATs from all applications––what’s the point of standardised testing when expensive private tutoring exists?––and set a cap on the number of courses and activities students can participate in, or at least the number that universities will consider. Get rid of legacy and donor students, or at least be transparent about it and disclose the amount of cash being thrown at the university in exchange for a slot. Also put that money towards something other than furthering the reek of elitism. Tax the universities properly and enforce punitive measures on those who do not accept a certain number of students (at least 40%) from low-income households, AKA income-based affirmative action.

The most terrifying thing is the knowledge that, in less than a year’s time, I will be curating college applications of my own, rotting away at my desk, planning out my next move in this ineluctable game of chess. Forgive the melodrama; my dread is great, and all-consuming. There will be blue skies out there, and the sun will shine as the wind carries the music of children’s laughter and birds’ chirping into my room. And there I’ll be, playing the game that is all we have ever known in this vast and echoing prison of our own making.

Happenings

Photography by Evelyn Kwan