Say No to the College Terrors

Why are American parents and students already (and always) fretting about getting into the “right” college?

It isn’t the job market. It’s the anxiety of high-achieving parents, transmitted to their high-achieving (and growingly anxious) kids.

These parents often are reduced to terror, misery or ecstasy depending on whether their college-bound children finally receive the correct envelopes in the mail on April 1 (or earlier if they choose to apply early action or early decision).

So says Frank Bruni, author of the book “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania,” which is especially relevant as a new crop of high school seniors begins the applications process.

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The battle — and Bruni says it is a battle — for gaining entry to an elite school actually starts for many some 14 years before college, when the prospective baccalaureate is barely out of diapers.

He recounts how his 4-year-old was rejected from a top New York preschool because the boy wasn’t precocious enough to tell a story about a toy frog. It may not be quite that brutal in the hinterlands, but in New York City, where demand far exceeds supply for anything worth having, parents spend their days terrified.

The demand to excel early calls to mind a New Yorker cartoon of two mothers pushing strollers in Central Park. One says to the other, “What are his scores?”

A Zero-Sum Game
The problem is that there are simply more smart kids, domestically and internationally, applying to the same top schools every year. For some, the numbers just don’t add up in their favor.

The widespread acceptance of the Common Application for schools makes it extremely easy for kids to apply to myriad schools. The application is an undergraduate college admission form used to apply to any of 517 colleges and universities in 47 states and Washington, D.C., as well as in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and United Kingdom.

As a result, some institutions have become even more selective, with Stanford University, for example, accepting less than 5 percent of its applicants.

Related: How to Thrive at College

The other 19 out of 20 students weren’t slackers. It’s just that Stanford already had admitted its informal quota of budding chefs, student linebackers, top-tier oboists, students from unbelievably wealthy families who might donate a library or two, and the “legacies” — offspring of alumni parents.

The trouble with trying to get your kid into an elite school, and crying bitter tears if he or she doesn’t get in, is that top schools are no guarantors of success, Bruni, a New York Times columnist, writes and have others before him have noted.

Don’t Dismiss Smaller Schools
Failing to gain admission at a top-flight school, however, isn’t always a failure. Far from it. Assuming students apply themselves, often being a big academic fish in a small academic pond makes a huge difference in people’s lives — and for the better.

That’s a point also made in Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, “David and Goliath.”

Bruni tells the story of a young woman who was tops in her high school at science and couldn’t get into Harvard. Just as well. At Harvard, she would’ve been in the bottom quarter of students in her major and might’ve become so discouraged that she would’ve given up the field.

Instead, she went to lesser-known St. Lawrence College, where she was No. 1 in her department. She grew and benefited from the intense attention from her admiring professors. Success awaits her.

Related: The Truth about Freshman Year

Moreover, the scoreboard by which schools are ranked — the U.S. News and World Report Guide to Colleges and Universities — is so wildly inaccurate as to give stigmas to outstanding schools.

Bruni’s case in point, Arizona State University, the, er, party school, is acknowledged by everyone from Playboy magazine to, well, everyone you’ve ever known. Turns out that ASU, like many state schools, has a program for academically gifted undergraduates, replete with small classrooms and dedicated faculty.

An ASU student whom Bruni interviewed for his book reports she received a phenomenal education.

So the only question becomes, what do you actually do when you get to college? Do you think of it as a trade school where you can learn skills that will allow you to compete from Day One? Or do you give in to your desire to study something seemingly unattractive to the marketplace, like art history or English literature?

The choice is each student’s. But at today’s prices, students and their families should certainly make the most of any opportunity.