Arielle Turner said when she was unsuccessful in getting her Girl Scouts Gold Award, her mother was “freaking out.”
“She started yelling at me and telling me that I needed to take it seriously,” she said. “I needed to go to the library and start volunteering.”
Turner, a senior at Narbonne High School in Harbor City, about 30 minutes away from UCLA, said she and her friends understand that outstanding grades and extracurricular activities are now the norm for students who want to apply to competitive colleges.
“A lot of (my friends), they do a lot of stuff after school,” she said. “All of them feel the pressure to get into college.”
With a 4.2 grade point average, Turner is taking four Advanced Placement tests and took community college classes over the summer.
“The first thing colleges look at is your test scores and grades,” she said.
She and many other high school seniors this year are applying to UCLA. The application for admission opened online at the start of the month, and students can file their applications from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30.
UCLA received a record number of applications for fall 2007, and with more prospective students applying, the admissions process is becoming increasingly difficult.
Elizabeth Gong-Guy, director of UCLA’s Student Psychological Services, said the competitive environment for admissions is now global.
“There are young people in many … countries who see academic overachievement as the one surefire, most certain way to achieve economic success and stability,” she said.
Isaac Rose, a first-year economics student, said some of his high school classmates and their parents took college admissions very seriously.
“Some people’s parents wouldn’t let them study with you (if there was a curve),” he said.
Rose, who started a progressive liberal club, ran track and was captain of his cross country team in high school, said he remembers a classmate who suffered a nervous breakdown over the college application process.
“(He was) so worked up about getting into college that he couldn’t handle it,” he said.
Rose’s older brother Gabe Rose, who is president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council at UCLA, said despite the small age difference, his college application experience differed greatly from his brother’s.
“They are taught that their whole existence … is based on getting into these colleges,” Isaac Rose said. “I think it’s kind of a shame of what society is doing.”
But Rose said he believes the competitive admissions process will only create stronger applicants.
“Of course, competitiveness makes people try harder,” he said.
Gong-Guy said she is unsure of whether the increasing competitiveness of college admissions is positive.
“I don’t know if there’s a way to say if it’s good or bad,” she said. “We’re one of the institutions of higher education where leaders will matriculate, and that’s a big responsibility.”
She added that she does not believe that UCLA should lower its standards of achievement to accommodate the increased interest from prospective students.
But journalist Alexandra Robbins said she believes the pressure to get into college is becoming increasingly unhealthy.
“I think the pressure on students has increased exponentially in the last 10 to 15 years,” she said. “This kind of pressure, along with the high-stakes testing atmosphere, is destroying the U.S. educational system.”
Robbins, who is the author of “The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids,” said she has interviewed hundreds of students in the course of writing her book.
“One of the most common themes was sleep deprivation in order to fit in all the of the academic, athletic and extracurricular activities,” she said, adding that some students she followed slept three hours a night.
Determining the driving force
Jeenah Park, who graduated from UCLA in spring, said that in high school she and her peers accepted that they needed to overachieve in order to get into college.
“No one told us that we had to do it; it was just the culture, it was just expected,” she said. “That’s what all your peers and older friends have done.”
Turner said her parents have been a large motivation in her striving to get into college, but she said society also suggests that she will not be successful without getting into a good college.
“Society now (says) you have to go to college if you want to get a good job,” she said.
She added that motivation is different for every person.
“It just depends on who you are (and) how you were raised,” she said.
Robbins said she believes that while some students may be self-driven to compete with their classmates, sometimes the push comes from parents.
One student she interviewed was beaten by his mother because he failed to do well in an eighth-grade math competition, Robbins said.
But she also placed significant blame on the government for focusing on testing to the point where students feel they are only identified by their educational statistics.
“The emphasis on testing is leading students to panic about their scores,” she said.
Robbins said she disagrees with summing up an entire educational experience with a test score.
“Students can be judged by teacher or professor evaluation, grades, what they’ve done outside of the classroom,” she said.
Finding solutions
Gabe Rose said college admission was not his primary concern when choosing his high school extracurricular activities.
“My philosophy has always been “˜you do what you like and it will wind up helping you,'” he said. “You can’t tailor what you do now to some future goal, because at what point do you do what you want?”
He said he believes high school students should focus more on their passions than just getting into college.
“I wish that the attitude would be more pervasive,” he said.
Robbins said she believes parents and educators could all take steps toward relieving the pressure on students to overachieve in order to get into college.
“Families have to realize that it’s a myth that the name of your school dictates your success in life,” she said.
She also suggested that high school administrators could delay start times and remove class rank.
She said she believes college administrators should drop standardized test requirements and stop early decisions, which UCLA does not offer.
But she said both parents and educators could boycott college rankings from magazines, which she called a “sham.”
Specifically, she said she does not believe the rankings accurately reflect the undergraduate experience.
“The rankings don’t mention whether the students are actually happy,” she said. “It is a marketing tool that really feeds on the frenzy that families are experiencing right now, in which they believe they need to get into a selective school in order to succeed at life.”
Instead, she suggested that student input be the primary source of information when ranking schools.
“It’s ridiculous that schools are being ranked (when) students aren’t being asked anything,” she said.
But Park said the increasing competitiveness is a sign of society’s progression and is unlikely to change.
“I don’t think it’s something that we can change,” she said. “We always move forward.”
She said the education system is evolving, which will lead to more improvements in the system.
“Schools will never go back to what it used to be … (they) will change for the better,” she said.
Robbins said students should not focus solely on looking impressive on their application.
“You’re going to be happier long-term if you spend your student years learning what you like to learn and doing it,” she said. “If you try to mold yourself into a perfect applicant for a school instead of doing what makes you happy, then eventually you are going to either get rejected and realize you are wasting your time, or you are going to get accepted and realize you have no idea who you are.”