Not getting into your dream college doesn’t mean your life is over
100% agree. But in a world where people's egos are caught on social media, and college acceptances go viral, some part of young people's brains gets fractured by the process of working really hard for people's respect and feeling like you lost it all.
Just my $0.02 as an Ivy league student that lost it all and wound up here, and took wayyy too long to come and appreciate the incredible experience.
Taking a loss in life doesn't ruin you forever at all! But being written about in the WSJ may permanently alter how a young person identifies themselves [even though their identity should keep evolving].
I wish colleges emphasized more than competition. There should be clearer guidance from public school counselors -- it should be completely normalized and encouraged to go to any college whatsoever, given how few people have ever done that in history, but it feels like that major accomplishment is being cheapened for people who are in the 2nd or 3rd generation to attend college and are looking to be 'upwardly mobile' in trying economic times.
During COVID I went home and worked a few manual labor jobs, which was very tough, and also showed me what the real world of America is like -- gritty, tough, kind and complicated. If you're a sheltered person, it's hard to understand the living contradictions of the average person -- one very interesting stat to me is that the majority of American households will make over $100k in at least one tax period in their lifetimes, yet the median income is well below that. That suggests to me that America has a lot of people going broke and going for broke, and that durability/winning/identity is a lot more complicated than I thought it was at 18.
Anyway it's tough to have that experience if you're thinking you're a 'meme'. I greatly feel we should try and expand our flagship schools and am very enthusiastic about the College of Engineering here, which educates more incredible engineers every year than Stanford, MIT, CalTech and Carnegie Mellon combined.