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#collegedecisionreaction #college #fall2021reaction
THE PROBLEM WITH COLLEGE DECISION VIDEO CULTURE 48,884 views • April 8, 2021 KRITHIKA VENKATASUBRAMANIAN, RAISSA JI
20 | THE PROSPECTOR
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It is not a college application season without hundreds of “College Decisions Reaction Videos” accompanying it. From reacting to Harvard, to UMich, to Kentucky State, these light-hearted videos can be a source of entertainment, reassurement and information. However, the culture of posting these videos is not as beneficial as it seems. These videos can leave viewers expecting too much or too little from their own college admissions process and can be demoralizing sources of misinformation. Many YouTube channels take off when their creators post a “College Decision Reaction” video, as these videos typically gain a lot of popularity. Subscribers subsequently ask for their “stats” (GPA, standardized test scores, etc.) and what extracurriculars they participated in; multiple videos usually follow describing all these things, with clickbait-ey titles such as “How I got into Stanford with a 3.0 GPA!” or “The One Thing UPenn is Look-
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ing for in an Applicant!” Although these seem like innocuous titles, they often mislead those watching them. YouTubers who make these videos present themselves as a repository of college admissions know-how, using their perfect grades and test scores to pull prospective students to watch their videos. Some college YouTubers go as far as to start their own essay editing programs or college consulting businesses, all accompanied with a hefty membership and fee. This is problematic in many ways. College admissions are known to be a crapshoot, so even though general advice on how to “get into top schools’’ is fine, college Youtubers simply have no grounds on giving advice as to how they got into prestigious schools because of their lack of knowledge and data. Additionally, some Youtubers have even been exposed to plagiarizing their essays, therefore making them even less reliable to offer essay ed-
