How to Push Back Against Toxic College Application Culture: Parenting Tips for High School Families
It was 10:17 pm last October, and my 17-year-old daughter Mia was leaning against our kitchen counter picking at soggy Cheerios, her cracked laptop open to the Common App. She’d just muted her grade-level group chat and crossed her arms, jaw tight. “Maya got an early interview at Princeton,” she said, not looking at me. “Everyone’s posting about it. And someone made a shared spreadsheet. It lists where everyone’s applied, how many reaches each has, what their SAT score was.”
I wiped crumbs off the toaster oven and waited. She’d been quiet all week, turning down movie nights with her cousin and skipping her usual weekend hike to work on applications. “I only have two reaches,” she said finally. “Everyone else has at least four. Someone commented on the spreadsheet that my list is ‘underachieving.’”
That’s when I realized we’d already let the toxic culture creep into our house. I’d read posts about it, nodded along when other parents complained, but I didn’t expect it to show up as a shared Google Doc that made my kid feel like she wasn’t enough before a single acceptance letter even came.
I used to play the game a little, too. When other parents asked where Mia was applying, I’d lead with the two reach schools just to get the question over with. I’d caught myself scrolling through local parent Facebook pages, comparing Mia’s extracurriculars to the kids who’d posted about their Ivy League acceptances that spring. It didn’t matter that I’d spent years telling Mia that school fit mattered more than name—when the pressure got loud, I was still defaulting to the rules everyone else was playing by.
We didn’t fix it overnight, but we started with small, concrete changes that didn’t require big interventions or throwing out all her applications. The first thing we did was make a no college app gossip rule for our dinner table. Any time anyone brings up another person’s application, acceptance, or list, they put a dollar in the old coffee can we keep on the windowsill. At the end of the month, we use the money for takeout or ice cream. It’s a silly, low-stakes consequence, but it makes everyone stop and think before they start comparing. Last month, I slipped up and mentioned a classmate’s early acceptance, and I had to put in five dollars (I’d had a long day, I deserved the penalty). We now have enough for two large pizzas next weekend.
The second thing we did was rewrite Mia’s school list priorities to put her goals first. We taped a printed note to the back of her laptop that listed three things she cared about for every school she applied to: hands-on field work for environmental science, small class sizes, a hikeable trail within 10 minutes of campus. She’d almost taken her top-choice public university off her list because a friend said it was “too easy to get into” and not impressive enough. That note reminded her every time she opened her laptop that she wasn’t applying to school to impress that friend—she was applying to a place where she could do the work she cared about. I didn’t just tell her “it’s what you want that matters”; we put the reminder where she could see it every single day.
After that, I started changing how I answer the question “Where is your daughter applying?” Instead of leading with the reach schools to avoid judgment, I say, “She’s studying environmental science, and she’s really excited about a program that lets her do river restoration work right off campus.” Most of the time, that shifts the conversation away from prestige and to what she actually cares about. If someone pushes for names of top schools, I just smile and say “We’re happy with whatever fits her goals.” It’s a tiny change in wording, but it stops the whole comparison game before it starts.
A few weeks into the application season, I volunteered to help with a college application workshop at our high school, and I saw how far this toxic culture seeps down. A 15-year-old sophomore came up to me asking how to add more activities to her resume, because her mom told her she needed 12 extracurriculars to get into a good college. She’d already quit the art club she loved because it “didn’t look good” on applications, and she was thinking of joining debate even though she hated public speaking. That’s the real harm of this culture, I realized: it’s not just senior year stress. It’s kids giving up the things they care about years before they even fill out a single application, just to check a box someone else made.
We also set a hard rule that after 9 pm, Mia charges her phone outside her bedroom. She used to scroll the group chat until 1 am, re-reading comments and comparing her progress to everyone else’s, and then lie awake worrying she wasn’t doing enough. Moving the charger down the hall took two minutes, and it cut out that late-night anxious spiral almost completely.
Mia got her first acceptance last month to that public university she loved. She sent a quick text to her close friends, posted a 24-hour Instagram story that just said “one down!” and went back to baking cookies for her little brother’s birthday. The shared spreadsheet? Last I heard, it hasn’t been updated since mid-November. Most kids stopped caring once the rejections started rolling in, and they realized the list didn’t change anything.
Mia still has moments where she sees a friend’s post and gets a little tight-lipped about her own list. We haven’t fixed the entire toxic culture, obviously—we just changed how it works in our house. The coffee can still gets dollars added to it every week, and we still stop each other when we start slipping back into comparison. It’s messy, it’s not perfect, but it keeps the focus where it should be: on what our kid actually wants, not what everyone else says she should want. And right now, that’s enough.
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