“There are parents who make it their life mission to get their kid into an Ivy League school. By the time they get to high school, there’s no time for any kind of life,” said Amy Sack, a clinical psychologist who serves as president of admissions consulting firm Admissions: Accomplished.
She said that many parents seek her services as early as seventh grade, but that she does not take on students that early.
The Solutions?
While counselors, education experts, and admissions officials alike acknowledge the problem, there is no agreement on potential solutions.
Suggestions have ranged from selective schools expanding their enrollments to colleges simplifying their applications and better explaining their admissions processes. By encouraging students to take a gap year to recuperate, the Harvard admissions office also took part in the debate in a paper entitled “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation.”
Earlier this year, McPherson and Sandy Baum—a professor emeritus at Skidmore College who works as an analyst for the College Board—published a piece online advocating increased enrollment at highly selective colleges. While acknowledging that such an aim would be difficult to achieve, they said that a coordinated move to increase class size could alleviate stress among applicants.
Still, counselors suggest simpler solutions that they believe could greatly ease stress without a complete overhaul.
Michael Goran, director and educational consultant at California college counseling firm IvySelect, suggested that colleges trim down the number of supplemental essays that applicants must complete.
“Do schools really need three supplemental essays?” he asked. “Perhaps limiting it to one supplemental essay would make life a tad easier.”
Goran suggested that colleges provide students with clear information about how their admissions processes are conducted.
Sack said that she believed that universities need to stop encouraging unqualified students from applying. One student who scored below 500 on all three sections of the SAT received a letter from Columbia University in New York encouraging him to apply, Sack said.
“They’re never going to take a student with those numbers,” she said. “His parents called me and said they didn’t realize he was an Ivy League candidate. They didn’t know anything.”
Fitzsimmons’ support of the gap year focuses more on dealing with stress than preventing it. He argues that taking a gap year, or taking time off more broadly, provides some students with a necessary break.
He said that it’s an opportunity to have a “reality check to see if you’re using your life in a way you believe in.”
Despite all of the problems caused by stress, Fitzsimmons still insists that the increased pressure is a byproduct of increased access to a tertiary education.
“The democratization of higher education really meant that more and more people wanted to go to college,” he said.
—Staff writer Justin C. Worland can be contacted at jworland@college.harvard.edu.