Recess to Résumés: Are We Preparing for College Too Soon?
College pressure doesn’t start with applications. For many students, it begins years earlier with grades, comparison, and the fear of falling behind.
The pressure surrounding college is shown to begin years before a student ever fills out their applications. Students from sixth to tenth grade are already hearing about the importance of getting the most perfect grades, building a strong academic record, and preparing for their future. By the time some of those students enter high school, anything below an A+ can feel disheartening, and a low test score can feel like a threat to their future. Extracurricular activities start to feel less like something they want to do— and rather something they think they need for a college application. This raises an engrossing question: Are juniors and seniors actually the ones most stressed about college because they’re going through the application process, or can younger students sometimes experience just as much anxiety because they don’t fully understand what’s coming for them?
Interviews with students from 7th to 12th grade, along with two therapists who work with young people, suggest that this answer is very complex. Younger students may experience stress because of skepticism, perfectionism, comparison, and expectations about their future. Older students face a different kind of pressure, since college is no longer something that's 100 miles away.
Teen Personalist Therapist Tania McLean-Nicholas explains that younger students often hear, “You need the best grades for college. You need to be perfect for college.” At the same time, most of these students don’t have a complete understanding of how college admissions work which can make grades seem much more powerful than they really are. Students may begin to think that academic success means getting everything right rather than making errors along the way, asking for help, and improving. New Roads Upper School counselor Rose Laven also believes uncertainty plays a key role. She explains that it's normal that younger students may feel anxious because they have less clarity about their futures.
The experiences of younger students can demonstrate that this pressure doesn’t affect everyone in exactly the same way. New Roads seventh grader Emilia Rokach explains that she does compare her grades with her friends, but college itself hasn’t become a major source of stress for her yet. When she does worry about grades, she said the pressure is more linked to schoolwork and the goals she sets for herself. If she doesn’t achieve her ideal report card grade, she doesn’t think anything significant would happen. Instead she’ll mainly feel disappointed that she didn’t reach her personal goal.
That experience however, begins to change by 10th grade. New Roads sophomores Marius Kumpat and Aimee Zhang stated they don’t feel that they have an accurate understanding of what colleges are looking for, even if they have toured some colleges. They also described pressure from schools, teachers, and parents to prepare for college and earn good grades. But Kumpat says, “I try not to think about college too much. However, SAT prep can be very stressful, even if worrying about college itself isn't.”
One area that does create more immediate stress is the PSAT. If you do well on it you can be considered for national merit, which is a big deal for a lot of students. Similar to Rokach, they also shared that grades become much more noticeable in high school since students begin paying more attention to where they stand academically compared with their classmates.
This suggests that early college stress may not always come from the actual college application process. Instead younger students can feel pressure from the idea of college. They know their grades and activities are supposed to matter, but they may not always know exactly how much they matter or how colleges will appraise them. That uncertainty may leave room for students to imagine that every grade, activity, or mistake could have a crucial effect for their future.
For seniors on the other hand, college pressure becomes much more concrete. New Roads senior Philip Nazzal stated that much of his education about the college application process didn’t begin until around 11th grade. He believes that launching students to college preparation earlier could actually reduce stress by giving them more time to understand and prepare for the process. Nonetheless, he also warned that too much preparation too early may become unhealthy if a student starts believing they won't succeed unless they reach a certain goal. For Nazzal, academic pressure has drastically affected his experience of school. He stated that he originally liked physics but gradually began to dislike the subject because of difficult tests, homework, and the pressure surrounding his grade. He described a similar experience with Spanish, where the focus became doing enough to pass instead of actually enjoying learning a new language. He also acknowledged comparing himself with classmates, recalling a conversation a couple weeks ago in which his classmates were discussing their GPAs. Those conversations made him feel as if he was constantly competing with his peers.
New Roads senior Kimberly Morera described another source of pressure: social media. Around tenth grade, she began observing more college related content online, including college acceptance reaction videos, and posts telling students about coveted internships or elite summer programs. She noticed this content often highlights the top 1% of extremely highly academic and accomplished students. Seeing those students repeatedly creates the impression that their experiences are the norm to strive for, and that everyone else should be accomplishing just as much as the student they observe on screen, which creates a vicious cycle of comparison. She also described how today there is a high achievement culture in which students feel like they always need to be “locked in” and on their way toward another accomplishment. Looking at someone else’s achievements can often make students forget about the amazing things they’ve already done. Morera’s experience also shows why the pressure becomes different as students get older. SAT prep takes up time, and junior year can bring pressure to earn awards and accolades that later appear on college applications. Throughout one particularly difficult semester, Morera shared grades slipped because she was balancing a particularly heavy workload. When she asked her English teacher what she could do to raise her grade, the teacher reminded her that the experience was part of learning and that colleges would consider the bigger picture than the small part of her academic record. Morera shares that back then it felt like the end of the world, but now in her senior year she realizes that everything ended up working out.
Overall, it seems that college stress does not suddenly begin during junior or senior year of high school. Instead, it develops and changes as students get older. For younger students, the pressure often comes from uncertainty. They begin to hear that grades matter and compare themselves to classmates. They start preparing for college before they fully understand the admissions process. For juniors and seniors, that pressure becomes more concrete as they face SAT preparation, applications, essays, recommendation letters, and deadlines.
However, preparing early and worrying early are not the same thing. Both therapists emphasized that students can benefit from exploring their interests and developing important skills without feeling like every grade or activity is to impress a college. Tania Mclean-Nicholas also stressed that grades are only one part of a student’s application and that mental health, relationships, and the ability to handle challenges matter too and should not be tossed aside.
A middle school student comparing test scores, a freshman worrying about joining enough activities, a sophomore watching college acceptance videos, a junior studying for the SAT, and a senior submitting applications may all be experiencing different stages of the same pressure. The stress does not necessarily belong to one age group more than another rather, it simply can take different forms.
Preparing students for college earlier may be helpful, but making them feel as though they must be perfect beginning in middle school and onward is not the same as preparing them. It means that students need accurate information about college, but they also need room to make mistakes, discover what they truly enjoy, and experience school as more than preparation for an application and just live in the moment. College is an important part of a student’s future, but it should not make them feel that everything they do growing up has to be perfect.
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