12 Less Obvious Anxiety Sources of College Admissions and Enrollment
What frustrates me the most about universities is how they assure their applicants that it’s easy, simple, and maybe even fun to apply! They’re encouragements suggest to me just how out of touch admissions counselors and university bureaucrats are from the needs of families. Many students and families navigate the admissions process without stressing too much, but for tens of thousands of others, this process is ripe with anxiety, stress, and worry.
I’m continually reminding students (and particularly parents) that everything is going to be okay. There are many common sources of worry, like whether you will get into your dream school or if your SAT is good enough.
Let’s set aside typical sources of stress around course scheduling, preparing for standardized exams, applying for summer programs, and building the resume prior to applying. Consider a few non-obvious but common examples after finishing their essay drafts and applications that I confront each week of how stress manifests itself into counterproductive behavior.
Consider essay overediting. Students break already-polished essays by “trying to make better” something that didn’t need changing. Their essays become a convenient punching bag to project their uneasiness. If they can just find that perfect semicolon placement, their emotional brain reasons, then it will finally be complete. No college essay or any piece of writing will ever be perfect. Perfectionist writing tendencies are an extension of a fear of not meeting society’s impossibly high expectations.
Students often continue reinserting unrealistic colleges onto their list last-minute, a practice I call application creep. They succumb to their parents’ pressure, whose family friends post online and gossip about where their child is applying. In his landmark book The Paradox of Choice (2004), Barry Schwartz argues that having as many as 4,000 colleges and university options produces the counterintuitive effect of making us miserable. Access to so many choices produces anxiety and suffering because applicants want to find the perfect fit and fear missing out if they choose incorrectly. Because students are often unable to limit their search to four or five schools, some apply to 20 or 30 under the mistaken assumption that more options will make them happier.
Another phenomenon is constant-refresh syndrome. After students submit their applications, they stress even more because the decisions are now entirely outside of their control. There is no action they can take to “improve their chances,” and some may be inclined to email their admissions counselors obsessively. Students refresh their emails and application portals, reread and scrutinize already-submitted essays, and sift through hundreds of daily posts of other stressed-out students in online communities such as Reddit’s Applying to College (A2C) or College Confidential (CC).
Students also worry even when they get their way. A recent A2C thread reads, “I stressed about not receiving an interview from Yale. Now, I’m even more worried that they’ve offered me one.” Two other A2C posts plucked at random today capture the irrationalities of worries translating into time management inefficiencies. “When you check A2C and realize you’ve seen all of the hot posts already so you just sorta scroll through everything from today mindlessly” and “A2Cers be like ‘I’m so stressed and have no time to write these essays’ but then spent thirty minutes a day checking up what’s up on A2C.”
The problem with college admissions is the worries stay the same, only the target changes. Check the front page of A2C on any given day of the year, and you’ll see dozens of the same kinds of worried posts, albeit with different targets. Social media more generally amplifies the stress and accelerates limitless desires to consume information. More distractions also mean less time to get actual work done.
You might think April and May, once all decisions are released, would provide some reprieve, but no. Anxious students worry that a C in AP Calculus AB will result in a university rescinding their offer. One student emailed me after already gaining admission to their first choice three months prior. They stressed whether the program would revoke their offer due to a typo on their resume’s work section. Purgatories such as waitlists, deferrals, appeals, and “letters of continuing interest” drag out the process that exclusively serves university needs, which I discuss in another video.
College admissions is a misinformation factory. It produces confusion and suffering, a predictably repeating cycle that not even a global pandemic can slow. It’s an insidious system perfectly tailored to expose flaws and open wounds, especially for perfectionists, risk-averse life planners, and micromanagers terrified of uncertainty. The issues that affluent families confront seem less about college literacy and cultivating a college-going atmosphere, absent in many low-income and rural schools where I used to visit. Instead, their issues are almost entirely psychological, with a secondary concern about their child composing the highest stakes essays they may ever write.
Student anxiety makes the process way harder than it needs to be. When I share reasonable advice, worried students often promptly ignore it. They wonder: Do I have enough volunteering hours? Am I applying to the “right” major? What happens if every university rejects me? Will my essays ever be good enough? What can I do to add to my resume? What students believe will alleviate their suffering—receiving an interview or even gaining admission to their dream school—produces another cycle of worry about something in the future. One of my most well-adjusted clients, who sees through the madness and has a genuine thirst for learning, wrote to me: “With the interview coming soon and Yale’s decision coming back on December 15th, my anxiety has increased. I’m prepared for the absolutely probable denial of admission, but I am nonetheless hopeful and pray at least twice a day to get in.”
Even after gaining admission, admitted students second-guess whether they should have applied to higher-tier schools that their classmates are bragging about on social media. Some report problems finding future roommates after interviewing many prospects. Students have a Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) for enrolling at one university rather than another, doubly so if they opt for community college. YouTube “admissions decision reaction” videos intensify envy from students who didn’t gain admission.
The anxiety cycle continues after college enrollment. After enrolling, students’ worries shift to making A’s, changing their majors or university, getting their preferred classes, gaining leadership positions, securing internships, graduate school and fellowship applications, and job interviews. Harvard’s most selective student organizations, such as Harvard College Consulting Group or the Crimson Key Society, admit fewer than one in eight of their applicants. The metrics and targets change after high school in part because the questions asked by your teachers, parents, and friends also change. “What’s your top school?” turns into “where are you applying to intern?” Before you’ve finished your internship, an academic advisor asks about your graduate school or fellowship plans following graduation. Our society always asks what’s next rather than what’s right now. Alan Watts writes in his 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, “If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp.”
Our system isn’t setup to help students cope. Schools universally require Physical Education classes, while none from elementary through to medical school require or even offer Emotional Education classes that teach mindfulness or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques. People of all ages lack the vocabularies and coping techniques to identify when suffering arises. The cycle continues indefinitely until a midlife crisis, corporate burnout, or some other post-college catastrophe forces someone to take a step back and reconsider the world and their place in it. Many people go their entire lives without breaking the circle.
College admissions burnout raises the risk for future midlife crises and failed relationships. Living and traveling abroad introduces me to hundreds of people who chose to exit this system to cope with the crushing pressures of twenty-first-century living. I meet the investment bankers, management consultants, marketing executives, doctors, and lawyers in their thirties and forties wandering the planet looking for their life’s purpose. They, presumably, had many of the same dreams when they were teenagers, only for them to be brushed aside. Or they realize their childhood dreams resemble nightmares in adulthood. The harsh reality for many students is that gaining admission to their dream school is just the start of their problems.
