Meet the high-performing high school senior: In his school hallway, he rushes past classmates like an Olympic speed walker, not thinking about Friday’s football game or about the beautiful girls excitedly chatting or even about his own hunger, despite having had to finish an essay instead of eating lunch. His head is filled to the brim with integrals and logarithms, with Supreme Court cases and the Federalist Papers, and he still needs space for irregularly conjugated Spanish verbs.
With bags under his eyes and a heavy backpack, he calculates how many more hours of community service he has to do to meet his National Honor Society requirement, knowing that all the hard work will pay off when he puts his achievements on a college application. He struggles through each day, repeating his mantra: “It’s worth it.”
This time of year, thousands of high school seniors across the country chant the same mantra, toiling to improve their transcripts and resumes as the time to apply to college grows nearer. The application process is a frenzy, involving meetings with college counselors, limited scholarships, application coaches, and too many due dates to remember for a variety of universities that are more competitive than they’ve ever been.
Elite schools like Brown, Stanford, and Northwestern have become legendary meccas of education, whose names alone make many American students’ mouths water. But with all the grades, test scores, sports, extracurriculars, and awards necessary to have a chance at any of these schools, is it worth it in the end?
While high-ranked, competitive colleges will provide an enriching education and life-long opportunities, the seemingly unique experience that their names evoke is not always worth the required money, time, and endless pressure.
The first thing that should dissuade most applicants to elite schools is tuition. In 2008, only five U.S. schools had a total cost of over $50,000 per year (without financial aid), but by 2009, 53 more colleges had joined that club.
While some graduates earn enough out of college to pay back their student loans in a few years (as opposed to a few decades), post-college salaries are determined primarily by the college major, not the college itself. While math and science majors from most schools attract higher-paying job opportunities, liberal arts majors from the nation’s top schools will be sitting on their loans for quite some time. On average, psychology majors make $35,000 out of college and $54,000 with 10 to 20 years’ experience, whereas computer engineering majors, regardless of their school, make on average $60,500 out of college and $104,000 with 10 to 20 years’ practice. A profitable major likely will fix your financial troubles much more effectively than an elite diploma.
The National Bureau of Economic Research did a long-term study of 6,335 college graduates, which revealed no gap in salaries between graduates of colleges with high SAT requirements and graduates of less selective schools.
I am not saying no one should attend expensive, high- ranked colleges. If you have visited, toured, researched, and dreamed about Princeton or Dartmouth, then by all means, build your resume, fill your savings account, and have the education of a lifetime. But such schools should not be everyone’s goal. Ask yourself: Do I belong at an elite school?
For many students, the answer is “no.” Elite schools are generally smaller than many high schools, lacking a broad diversity in majors, organizations and sports, with a student body that inaccurately represents Americans as a whole.
Plus, studies show that many students rejected from elite schools are more successful than those accepted because they possess the most important traits: motivation, ambition and desire to learn, qualities that no university can teach or destroy.
Kerry Martin (kerrywmartin@ ) of Greenwood Village is a junior at Cherry Creek High School.
