The Teenage Stress To Impress

by Kalani Gaviola,

Tired eyes and slumped shoulders. Nights spent working late and mornings rising before the sun to get finished with homework. Report cards with all A’s and backpacks overflowing with too many books: These are the staples of your honors and highachieving students, who thrive on compliments and relish in distinctions. They are doing well in high school, flushed with extracurriculars and the most demanding classes, and plan on working even harder when they leave high school and embark on their futures.

But the real, pressing question is where that journey takes place, and students are more competitive than ever.

A stark 11% incline in applicants at competitive colleges accepting less than half of applicants (according to Forbes) and mounting expectations for young people have made getting into college -specifically higher ranked colleges- extremely difficult. Acceptance rates for highly recognized schools are steadily decreasing as well. in 1995, Harvard accepted 11.8% of applicants, University of Pennsylvania accepted about a third of their applicants, and Princeton accepted around 14% according to the Harvard Crimson. Last year, Harvard accepted 3.43% of applicants, University of Pennsylvania accepted 5.68%, and Princeton accepted 3.98%.

More ‘realistic’ public universities display similarly slim acceptance rates. PRHS Crimson senior destinations across 2019-2021 show a total of 18 seniors going to UCSB, three seniors for UC Berkeley, and five seniors for UCLA, the most applied to college in 2021 with around 168,000 applicants.

The pressure is undoubtedly present online, too: there are thousands of high school stats videos on Youtube, thousands of forums dedicated to “chancing” students, and endless opportunities to compare oneself to teenagers that you will never meet.

Overextension manifests in high schoolers through going to extreme lengths to be a perfect applicant. Instead of following one’s passions, one will do what looks good for college, something admitted to be true by sophomore Elie Chavez these schools and these schools,” Chavez said.

Chavez certainly is a competitive student with a G.P.A. of 4.6. She also plays softball, volleyball, is a leadership student, and is involved in student government on top of her four honors classes. She confesses to have felt pressure to start activities only because they would look good for college, while ignoring activities that could be done “for fun.” She “has literally no time for it” with all her homework on top of her extracurriculars. Most nights, not including time for eating, sleeping, and getting ready, she estimates getting less than an hour of free, stressless time.

Chavez knows there are problems here.

“We’re… stressing too much and worrying about everything so early on. And it’s like this should be a later problem,” Chavez said, and statistically, she’s correct: according to a national survey from the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and the Yale Child Study Center, the most common feeling associated with school is stress, with nearly 80% of students from the survey in agreement.

Here’s the biggest problem, though: People are stressed about getting into college, but according to College and Career Counselor Tara Walker, there’s a lot of misinformation: “About half of… (the colleges in the country) accept more than half of their applicants… So actually, in fact, it’s not hard to get into college. It’s just hard to get into the hard colleges.”

So, we see two responses to lofty college expectations: Either students overextend on things they don’t enjoy, or, more commonly at PRHS, according to Walker, they do the work but shoot too low, only applying to schools they know with limited reach schools because of how they perceive the difficulty of certain colleges to get into.

But either way, misinformation gets to both groups. Over-extenders do activities they don’t enjoy to look good for colleges, but according to Walker, once you get to a certain level, it’s completely out of your hands due to institutional priorities.

“(Colleges have) a billion different things that they’re trying to round for: diversity and different rules of thought… on top of the intellectual standard,” Walker said. “So, for example, Stanford, let’s say they have... 50,000 applications for 1000 spots... Let’s say, 10,000 are four point something crazy (GPA) with a million great activities. So how do you pick? So (to combat that) they’re very picky.”

On the other hand, under-estimators usually don’t know what colleges will be good for them outside of popular choices. They ignore schools that are better for them, but not as well known. This phenomenon is also spurred on by the media, and comparing oneself to others online and at other high schools. They unknowingly pass over many colleges that will admit them.

“Once you’re in the top portion of our school, you’re competitive. Colleges look at our school independently from other schools… because we have different populations… different amount of AP classes, a different amount of students that qualify for free or reduced lunch,” Walker said. (continued on 07)

Ultimately, the most important thing is to remember that what college one gets into, competitive or no, is not indicative of self-worth, and though the system of choosing such an important part of one’s careers early is flawed, there is more to life- especially in high school- than others’ (even colleges!) opinions.

Senior Sarah Krumme, ranked in the top 5% of her class, dreams of going to Stanford or Pepperdine, takes AP classes, and participates in a multitude of extracurriculars including choir, tutoring, leadership, creative writing club, FNL, NOSB club, JOOI club, and international club on top of taking care of her family and working.; For her, however, the thought of college applications isn’t exceedingly overwhelming because she “loves what (she) does in school and (her) extracurriculars.”