How Did We Get Here?

I joined a Facebook group for parents of college-bound kids a few months ago, and I was not prepared for what I found there.

What I found was grief, honestly. Not panic exactly, but something quieter and heavier. Parents describing kids who had done everything right for years, the grades, the leadership, the athletics, the service, everything a teenager could possibly be asked to do, and who were still ending up rejected or waitlisted, still trying to understand what it meant. One parent wrote that her daughter had been so overwhelmed by the process that she was crying some mornings just trying to get dressed, standing in front of her closet unable to move, and dozens of people responded immediately, not with advice, just with recognition, the way you respond when someone has finally said the thing you have been feeling in your own house but hadn't put into words yet.

I typed the word "stressed" into the search bar out of curiosity, and then "frustrated," and then "devastated." Hundreds of posts came up for each one. These are kids who are barely old enough to drive. Should it really look like this for them?

And running underneath all of it, from parent after parent, the same question with the same exhausted disbelief: how did it get this bad, because it was not like this when we went.

I don't think they're wrong.

A Performance, Not a Process

I work in higher education and think about institutional systems for a living, so you would think I would have seen this coming when my own kids started approaching college age. But watching it as a parent has been disorienting in a way I was not ready for.

What I'm seeing doesn't look like a process anymore. It looks like a performance. A years-long, meticulously constructed performance that starts earlier and earlier and demands more and more and still guarantees nothing. Kids aren't just doing things they love, they're building narratives, thinking about how sophomore year reads in the context of a senior application, being coached and positioned sometimes since middle school. And somewhere in all of that I keep wondering where the actual kid went, and what this sustained pressure is doing to their sense of themselves, their relationship with learning, their mental health.

This has grown into something nobody planned, and it is consuming childhoods in a way we are going to be reckoning with for a long time.

The System Is Not Innocent

The colleges aren't innocent in this. Acceptance rates have become a prestige metric, which means some institutions have real incentives to drive up applications even for spots they never intend to fill, because a lower acceptance rate signals selectivity, which drives up more applications, and the cycle keeps going and serves rankings more than it serves students. The kids who can't afford the test prep and the coaches are running this race with less and competing against more, and I don't know how to look at this system honestly and see anything other than one that has quietly decided access belongs most to the people who can most afford to perform it.

A Beginning, Not a Verdict

None of this is an argument for protecting kids from competition or disappointment. Those things are real and important, and learning to lose and keep going is part of growing up. What I'm questioning is the proportion of it, the weight we have attached to this one decision at this one moment in a person's life.

Because college is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of everything. It is the start of figuring out who you are outside your family, of building something that is actually yours. Where you go at eighteen is one early chapter in a long and unpredictable story, and I have watched enough people over twenty years to know that where you start is far less determinative than how you grow.

But we are not treating it that way. We are treating it like a verdict, as if the decision made by an admissions office that has never met your child somehow defines what is possible for them. And kids are internalizing that, arriving at the threshold of their adult lives already exhausted, already measuring their worth against an outcome they couldn't fully control. That is what feels wrong to me. Not the competition itself, but the finality we have given to something that is actually just a beginning.

A Reckoning We Keep Avoiding

The parents in that Facebook group aren't catastrophizing. They're paying attention. And what they're seeing is a system that has gotten completely away from whatever it was supposed to be, with nobody who has the power to change it seeming to be in any hurry to do so.

I don't have a solution. But the question of what this is doing to a generation of young people, to their mental health and their sense of self and their relationship with their own worth, is one that higher education needs to start answering honestly. Not with a policy statement. With a real reckoning about what we have built and who it is actually serving.