For high school seniors who apply to college – and their parents, who go along for the ride – the selection process is like the Hunger Games.
More and more schools report an admissions rate of less than 10%. The most selective schools are admitting less than 5% of applicants.
Members of Generation Z – born between 1997 and 2012, according to the Pew Research Center – play the game of life by their own rules. They approach college in vastly different ways than earlier generations did. Similar to how they approach jobs, they want their college experience to be meaningful.
A father wants to give advice. But is anyone listening? As my wisecracking 13-year-old daughter informs me, things are different today than when I was a teenager “way back in the 1950s.”
I was born in 1967. I’m a proud, card-carrying member of Generation X, I inform her. Unfazed, she responds: “Whatever, Boomer.”
When I applied to college, I wanted to get as far away as possible from the dusty farm town in Central California where I was raised, without falling into the Atlantic Ocean.
Today, it seems, many students are focused on where they want to live for four years. Not surprisingly, Southern California – with nearly year-round sunshine – is a huge draw.
This year, the University of California at Los Angeles received almost 150,000 freshman applications. That is the largest number of applicants to any four-year college or university in the nation, according to news reports. UCLA admitted fewer than 13,000 students, giving it an admissions rate of 8.6%.
The UC campuses at San Diego, Irvine and Santa Barbara were likewise flooded with more than 100,000 applicants each.
Republicans love to poke fun at California because they see our governor as an underachiever who can’t get it right and every new proposal as more unrealistic than the one before. For instance, a San Francisco reparations plan on the table could pay each eligible applicant up to $5 million.
In that case, could folks in red states please stop sending their kids to college here? Hundreds of thousands of California natives – whose parents pay a fortune in state taxes to help fund public universities – are being squeezed out.
Meanwhile, that deafening sound you hear is the propellers of an army of disgruntled helicopter parents. News reports detail how deans of admissions at selective universities are being bombarded with angry calls from parents demanding to know why their perfect children were not accepted and what the schools are going to do to make things right.
As the parent of a high school senior who applied to about 15 schools and experienced the whole gamut – accepted to some, rejected by some, wait-listed by some – the past month has been excruciating.
Still, it is a good thing the admissions process is not run by the parents of applicants. Everyone would be admitted and given a gold star. My wife and I have three kids, and “my better 7/8” is convinced that each one of her offspring deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Not me. I love my kids to the moon and back. But I also see their character flaws, which is not hard to do since they get most of them from me. Tends to procrastinate? Doesn’t follow rules? Always late? Trouble with authority? Resists conformity? Hello. That’s me.
Besides, if you accomplish all your goals, you need to set higher goals. I breezed through my years in the classroom. But in my career as a journalist, I’ve been knocked around a lot. This includes being fired, laid off or otherwise shown the door 15 times in nearly 35 years on the job.
So, when my kid doesn’t get accepted by a college she was excited about, I wrestle with it. Half of me wants what any parent wants – for my children to have a life absent pain or disappointment. But the other half sees the value in having life deliver, now and then, a left hook that sends us to the mat – as long as we get up and finish the fight.
I hope my children have lives filled with good things. But there will be some bad things, too. I’m trying to teach them that, on the bad days, they need to follow a code of conduct: Don’t scapegoat others. Don’t make excuses. Don’t let yourself off the hook. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. And, most important of all, don’t give up.
Going to a prestigious university might put you on the path to success. But these valuable life lessons will take you further down the road.
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