All day today I was struck by how the entire senior class seemed to be wasting away intellectually, crushed beneath the mental burden of college applications with ED / EA deadlines looming and the SAT so recently behind us. I described myself as “on edge” this morning, after my math test; several of my friends agreed. A better example still came at club soccer, when another friend described herself as having an “angry day.”

I’ve seen individual cases of college related stress, but this is the first occasion I’ve seen the entire class suffering all at once. At the senior photo we took this morning, a fistfight over an inconsequential point very nearly broke out. Patience needs some time to replenish itself.

This is funny as it comes right after I sent a series of email to Joe Malchow and his Dartblog about the way Exeters CCO humanizes the process and makes it less awful… which is still true.

Everyone is just under a lot of stress.

My e-mail to Joe after the break.

From Joe’s post, emphasis mine:
> > Filling out forms in triplicate and sending registered mail and
> > obtaining various forms of legal identification are not torturous
> > things, and neither is sitting down in an armchair and figuring out
> > where, among your options (if you are so lucky as to have options),
> > you ought to go to school. None of these things is sadistic, even if
> > your “CCO” is DOA. They’re basic things that a person ought to be able
> > to do. But I know where Sam is coming from, because I imagine what
> > makes these things seem sadistic is the acidic atmosphere of
> > competition at a place like Exeter, yes?

No-o-o.

There is no particularly unique competition at Exeter; this may surprise
you as much as it surprised me when I first came here. No, what makes
college admissions sadistic is the dehumanizing of prospective
applicants as each individual is encouraged to turn themselves into sets
of numbers–this many APs, or that many points composite SAT, or such
and such extracurricular leadership-hours of work. These days more and
more college admissions offices are recognizing the harm they have done
to young people and are trying to reverse course (see Marilee Jones of
MIT).
At information sessions they will remind applicants that they “want you
to have a life” and so forth. The ’sadistic’ quote is something I took
from a Yale student at the multicultural open house I went to a short
while ago; more specifically it refers to the selection from the
school-side of things, as for every applicant offered admission at top
schools there are many more equally qualified who must be rejected.

The applicant’s perspective reveals a different kind of trouble, the
negative obsession instilled in many of us by US News and the amplifying
effect of colleges saying “we are so hard to get into therefore we are
so good therefore you will be rejected.” Combine this with the number of
applicants, which is peaking soon, and the number of schools those
applicants each apply to, which is continually increasing, and you have
a recipe for frequent disaster.

I’m sorry I didn’t offer this example before: The Exeter CCO looks over
the entire docket sent out to any one school and makes sure that no
counselor says the same thing about any one student that anyone else
might say–they make sure that everyone appears as a distinct individual
in their written recommendations etc. It’s that sort of effort which
makes the college admissions coming from Exeter feel/ less/ like we are
competing with one another and more like we are all just applying at the
same time to many of the same places.

I don’t know where you’re looking at it from, but colleges do their
share to make the process a more arduous one than it need be, having
bought into the short-term marketing effects of rankings binging etc.

That’s half the reason I write on my blog–because I want to get across
to an audience of many admissions officers and marketers that they need
to think of prospective students more as living people and less as numbers.

Thanks again,
Sam Jackson

Ta da.