Dear High School Seniors,
I know you weren’t expecting a commencement address. It’s still April, and you haven’t even gotten to throw up at the prom yet.
But you are at a crossroads. In a matter of days, you will get letters from colleges you applied to. Some will be thick. You will like those. Some will be thin. You won’t like those so much.
I am here to say don’t fret if that letter is thin. You will survive. You may even prosper.
It seems incredibly hard to get into colleges these days. You wouldn’t think so, given what they charge. You can run an airport on their room and board bills.
Yet last year places like Princeton and Brown had nearly 20 percent increases in applicants from the year before. The University of Chicago jumped 42 percent. You’d think they were giving away diplomas, instead of asking for your house, your keys and your first-born.
But even worse than the financial burden on your parents is the implied standards they are setting for you kids. Today, excellence isn’t enough. Gandhi would be put on a waiting list. I was lucky. My daughter was able to be accepted at Boston College in the class of 2012 that had over 30,000 applications for 2,250 places.
When I was applying to college, you needed good grades, a decent test score, and one Jesuit willing to forget the time you pulled the fire alarm and write you a recommendation.
Today, you need to cure cancer.
Preferably before your junior year.
And the application itself? Some universities use the “common app,” which permits millions of kids to stuff their credentials into the same essay question.
But let’s talk about those questions. They ask you to write about an experience that changed or influenced you. And instead of writing what really comes to mind (a first kiss after football practice or, in my case, the time a classroom wall collapsed on my fellow Xavier Alum, Louie Franco – still one of the singularly funniest moments of my high school days), you may feel compelled to write about saving manatees from extinction off the Gulf Coast. Even if you never did save manatees. Because you heard about some kid who actually did save manatees, and he also carried 100 pairs of pajamas to victims of Hurricane Katrina, and he also plays jazz bass (upright) and in his spare time finished a sequel to “Catcher in the Rye.”
Oh, and he scored 36 on his ACT.
I’m not sure such uber-students really exist. But people talk about them. You hear about them getting in to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford. So much so, that good, intelligent, ambitious kids don’t even want to apply to those places, because they don’t feel “special” enough. It’s as if schools today put out a vibe: “What, you don’t know how to reconstruct a hydraulics system? You should have studied harder — in grade school.”
Well, Seniors, relax. Because here’s the thing. When you get older, you realize college doesn’t make you, you make college. Many an Ivy Leaguer is now lying on a couch, and many a community college grad is running a profitable company.
Ironically, just as elite universities have become so precious in their selection, they are being debunked as the only way to success. The Internet has changed everything about information flow.
Remember Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting” who taunts a Harvard student by saying in 50 years he’ll realize he “dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a (bleeping) education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library”?
So believe in yourself. You can springboard from any decent school. Open those mailboxes. And if choice No. 1 doesn’t come through, just remember, even Michael Jordan watched two players picked ahead of him in the NBA draft.
What’s that? … Who’s Michael Jordan?
Thank you, and good day
The Valley Viewpoint 