May I rant?
Apparently, while Pierogi Zbylut was collecting acceptances to every elite school in the country, said elite schools were busy rejecting the rest of the qualified students out there, those students with names containing less z’s. One of the elementary school friends from the Rockies game has a little sister who’s headed off to college next year, and this girl’s college-rejection story makes me truly furious with the way our country deals with college admission. My friend’s sister — let’s call her Emily — was rejected from Dartmouth. Nothing shocking on its own; I’m among the ranks of prospective Ivy Leaguers who was flat-out rejected from the Big Green. Emily, however, was the the valedictorian of her high school (one of those truly hard high schools that have difficult admissions processes all their own), was a successful two-sport athlete who was being recruited by Dartmouth, was involved in a million activities, AND had a father, sister, and several cousins whose brains were filled with knowledge in Hanover, New Hampshire. Now I understand as much as anyone that the college admissions process is a crapshoot, and that there are a ton of factors that go into it, but SERIOUSLY? If a girl like that isn’t a shoe-in, something’s wrong. Maybe Pierogi can pass his Dartmouth acceptance on to Emily, since he won’t be needing it at Haaahvahd.
For a speech class I took a couple of years ago, I spoke about kids growing up too fast (taking full-time language classes at age four, for instance), and I feel like the college admissions process is just part of the screwed up way we are forcing kids these days to do everything and be perfect. A high school student shouldn’t have to spend all of her free time studying for AP tests, captaining a sports team, working on a student government campaign, volunteering with refugees, and curing cancer just to get into college. Give ‘em some time to breathe, America.
And to the Emily’s of the world: it’s their loss. Anyway, I hear New Hampshire’s like really, really cold.
[Posted by Mallory]
1 Comment
July 26, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] I’ve written before about how the college admissions process mystifies me. I also don’t often understand employment decisions, or acceptances into all sorts of programs (Teach For America, for instance). In each situation, someone has to make a decision based on relatively little information, and they must choose from among many, many applicants or candidates. It’s always sort of a fluke. It’s a hard job, and I certainly wouldn’t want to do it. [...]