Stress and the University Process

hang on i'm not parsing this well: do you mean applying for university should not even be a blip?

You know, like high blood pressure, panic attacks, that sort of thing.

...but, like all stress, it shows up more in high pressure situations.

Stress... it's like the Consumption of our age or something.

Adolescence is stressful. Maybe you've forgotten. All sorts of semi- horrible things happen as blips, and then they get outgrown. What they is saying is that this is something that is way beyond the normal stress of just being adolescent.

i remember it being stressy, and had a lot of pressure on me, but it doesn't compare with stress of adulthood.

i applied to university nine years ago -- i suppose some things must have changed since then, but pressure to do things like these was there. in the uk there's been grade inflation ph34r for as long as i can remember; every year the proportion getting a-grades goes up -- so of course universities are going to look to the "hinterland".

any case otherwise they'd just get nerds who spend all their time studying. but the argument in favour of grade inflation is bound up with the current idea that 50% of people ought to be university graduates; the old system was about singling out an academic elite.

xpost sure the COST of going to university is the main off-putting element for "non-traditional" (ie poor, or at least sub-middle-class) students, not media stories about the stress of being a student?

the town i grew up in was still small and rural enough that pretty much everyone stayed in-state. thus, in a weird way, i was attractive to more competitive schools, w/o the high school stress that some of my college classmates dealt with. ie - i had friends who, after a few terms at university, couldn't believe how easy it was compared to high school. i, on the other hand, accustomed to 2-3 hours a WEEK of schoolwork, was getting punched in the nuts every night.

in the year or two after i went to college, people at home would ask if i was at a bible school or something (they hadn't heard of dartmouth). just a year or two after that, there was some kind of out of state explosion, and my HS started sending kids to stanford, nyu, mit, little colleges in Maine, whatever. places that had, in years previous, only seen one or two of our students every five-six years (hi Dan!), if at all.

the money and means are there for those willing to track it down but the article was implying that more and more students don't believe that and don't even try.

I was the only one in my graduating class to go away to a university and was (and still am) the only person on either side of my family to go to college. I had no stress other than from myself b/c no one in my family knew or really understood what I was trying to do. None of classmates/friends saw it as an option either. I was a good student with great grades, activites and better than average test scores. With all of that and being "non-traditional" I found free-ride offers from more than one school.

Her roommate at college is a sad piece of work. She's taking 21 hours, works at Applebee's, sleeps three hours a night and spends hours on the phone crying to her boyfriend.

a huge problem in america. however, if you're super smart, you've got basically two choices:

a) get into a really competitive school with a huge endowment, like princeton. their policy, as of late, is total loan amnesty. that is, you apply for need-based financial aid, get it, and then princeton pays it off for you. a friend of mine went there and paid something like 10k for her whole education.

b) go to a less competitive state school with a huge endowment -- SCHOLARSHIPS. state schools love smart kids, and have all the resources in the world for the student who's after them

...unfortunately, if you're sorta strapped (or your parents are), small new england-y liberal arts/niche/hippy schools are out, since they cost upwards of 40k a year, now, and don't have the endowments to subsidize their students.

maybe, but i think that's more of a cultural thing, like 'college isn't for people like me'

this must be a UK/US thing because here there's effectively no state money at all and no universities have serious endowment schemes or whatever. but what we do have is cheap credit. if i were non-traditional (hell, in any circumstances), i would have severe qualms about taking on all that debt, quite rightly.

xpost

right exactly -- we don't 'do' endowments/scholarships here.

There's always that but I think the point was with all the attention "super-students" and the high-stakes app. process get those students are becoming more alienated, usually needlessly.

...Over the past few years Daniel Golden has written a series of coruscating stories in the Wall Street Journal about the admissions practices of America's elite universities, suggesting that they are not so much engines of social justice as bastions of privilege. Now he has produced a book—“The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”—that deserves to become a classic.

Mr Golden shows that elite universities do everything in their power to admit the children of privilege. If they cannot get them in through the front door by relaxing their standards, then they smuggle them in through the back. No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra “hook”, from rich or alumni parents to “sporting prowess”. The number of whites who benefit from this affirmative action is far greater than the number of blacks.

The American establishment is extraordinarily good at getting its children into the best colleges. In the last presidential election both candidates—George Bush and John Kerry—were “C” students who would have had little chance of getting into Yale if they had not come from Yale families. Al Gore and Bill Frist both got their sons into their alma maters (Harvard and Princeton respectively), despite their average academic performances. Universities bend over backwards to admit “legacies” (ie, the children of alumni). Harvard admits 40% of legacy applicants compared with 11% of applicants overall. Amherst admits 50%. An average of 21-24% of students in each year at Notre Dame are the offspring of alumni. When it comes to the children of particularly rich donors, the bending-over-backwards reaches astonishing levels. Harvard even has something called a “Z” list—a list of applicants who are given a place after a year's deferment to catch up—that is dominated by the children of rich alumni.

xpost

it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: the non-traditional student *isn't far wrong* in imagining they'll be surrounded by rich white folk. that's a powerful cultural thing.

Fuck college.

Two groups of people overwhelmingly bear the burden of these policies—Asian-Americans and poor whites. Asian-Americans are the “new Jews”, held to higher standards (they need to score at least 50 points higher than non-Asians even to be in the game) and frequently stigmatised for their “characters” (Harvard evaluators persistently rated Asian-Americans below whites on “personal qualities”). When the University of California, Berkeley briefly considered introducing means-based affirmative action, it rejected the idea on the ground that “using poverty yields a lot of poor white kids and poor Asian kids”.

?!?!?

fucking cantabs

I was told to my face at an interview for a prestigious university that if I didn't get in, it would be because I didn't have an alumni relation. Alumni relations was the first thing I was asked about in two interviews. Obviously mine was the case of being "on the cusp" so that alumni relations became the make-or-break issue, but I still think it's kind of fucked up.

Most people I know go to public schools because they cost less. I actually pay less to go to a private school, although the obvious trade-off is being THE POOREST PERSON HERE LOL. So at least part of the issue of large private universities having mostly upper class student bodies is definitely the belief that these schools do not give aid to lure in students of other economic backgrounds, when in some cases they actually do.

There's wasnt really a decline in buying power, since it was moved up to a level that was unsustainable in the first place.

"And it ties into the whole 90s-00s thing of middle-class people who want to be just like the rich people on the teevee -- "buying" houses they can't afford (and spending the rest of their life in debt complaining about how "the middle class get screwed"), buying vehicles that are way too big for them, going on the type-a warpath to ensure little Autumn and Hunter get into "only the best" schools no matter what kinda dumbshits they are."

Exactly. It's not so much that people arent able to reach the American Dream anymore so much as the American Dream has changed. Now it inludes a hummer, a minivan, and a car for each kid, a maid or two, a TV for each room, an ipod for grandma and grandpa, etc. Now in order to maintain that dream Autumn and Hunter either need to make it into Yale and MIT or keep up the facade by going in debt up to their ears. And I know liberals and conservatives hate to hear this part, but that includes the government too (Social Security, Medicaid, Military, etc.), its worse for the US though because the consumerism invades every asset our life (business, personal, government, etc.). Consumerism is the biggest economic if not overall (I would say overall) problem the US faces in the coming years. It threatens to topple our economic superiority (and in turn, our military eventually).

I think performing well wherever you go, is more important than going to a school at the top of list. Sure, if you can get into a top school, and you like it for things other than its high rating, it would be good to go there, but I just don't see how it's necessary.

yes, and GETTING INVOLVED WITH SHIT other than just your classes, is a biggie, and I never did any of it. All those extracurricular activities, organizations, clubs, esp leadership positions, are a big deal. And not just for the resume-padder aspect, but actually in the sense of, hey, I DID something. Being active, trying to make stuff happen and put things together--I really wish schools would stress this more, or incorporate it into the curriculum more explicitly, or that I was as into it at 18 as I am now.

It's only recently that I've understood the value of college as (ideally) a kind of 4-year time out where you have nothing to do but figure out how do really DO something you WANT TO DO, not "learn" per se, like a really advanced extra high school or something. I didn't have that attitude at all when I was there.