How to Push Back Against Toxic College Application Culture: Parenting Tips for High School Families
Last Tuesday, I stopped by my neighbor Mia’s kitchen after school to drop off a batch of chocolate chip cookies my kid had baked for her daughter Lila, a senior. Lila was hunched over her laptop, hood up, and when I leaned in to say hi, I counted 12 open browser tabs: eight college admissions blogs, a Common App draft, a Reddit thread titled “Chance Me for Ivies,” and a color-coded spreadsheet ranking every extracurricular by its “admissions impression score.” Mia pulled me into the hallway a minute later, voice tight, and said Lila had cried for two hours the night before because a friend got an early action interview to Harvard and she hadn’t even gotten a confirmation email from her top reach school.
I’ve worked part-time as a college advisor at our local public high school for seven years, and my own son is wrapping up his applications right now, so I see this version of stress every week. Last month, a junior in my advisory told me he’d quit the school jazz band he’d played in since ninth grade because it “doesn’t look good on apps” — he wanted to free up time for a more “impressive” summer research program. Another mom confided recently that she’d fudged her kid’s application to say he was first-generation college because “everyone else tweaks something to get an edge, right?” This isn’t just normal application stress anymore. It’s a culture that turns four years of high school into a checklist for a resume, frames every other kid as competition, and convinces teens that one 650-word essay and a list of activities will determine the rest of their lives.
Most of the big systemic changes we need to fix this are out of our control as parents and advisors. But there are small, concrete changes we can make in our own homes and with our own kids that cut through the noise right now. The first one I tell every parent about is the “one question max” rule for college apps at dinner. At my house, I can ask my son one single question about applications per meal. If he wants to talk about it, we talk. If he shrugs and says it’s fine, we move on to talking about his video game clan or the bad pizza the cafeteria served that day. When I told Mia this, she stared at me and said she asked Lila about applications at least three times a day, just to “make sure she’s on track.” That constant checking doesn’t keep kids on track — it just makes the whole process feel like the only thing that matters about them, which is exactly what the toxic culture tells them.
I also do a quick exercise with almost every kid I work with, that I did with my own son and with Lila a few weeks after that kitchen visit. I hand them a blank piece of paper and ask them to write down three things they did in high school just because they enjoyed it, with zero thought about how it would look to an admissions officer. No “I led student council” unless you actually loved leading student council, not just because it looks good. Lila sat there for five minutes, then wrote that she spends every Saturday walking around the old town cemetery taking photos of gravestones, writing down the stories of the people buried there, for a tiny blog no one but her aunts reads. She’d never put it on her activities list because she thought it was weird and unimpressive. I told her to move it to the top of her list, and write her personal statement about it. She wrote the whole thing in two afternoons, no crying, no rewriting it 12 times to make it sound “perfect.” It was just her.
Another thing I encourage families to do is remake your school list around three simple questions, instead of obsessing over rankings and “reach status.” First: does this school have the program the kid actually wants to study? Second: can we pay for it without taking on more than $10,000 in total student debt? Third: can the kid see themselves living there for four years? If a school checks all three boxes, it’s worth applying to, no matter what US News says it’s ranked. My son wanted to apply to Stanford just because half his friends were, but when we ran it through these three questions, it didn’t make the cut. Our in-state public university has one of the top environmental science programs in the country, it’s a third of the cost, and he loved the field research opportunities they offer undergrads when he visited last spring. He crossed Stanford off his list, and hasn’t thought about it since.
I don’t do the fake “it doesn’t matter where you go” speech, because that just dismisses how much this matters to kids right now. Instead, I tell parents to use this line when their kid is spiraling: “I know this sucks right now. This is just one step, not the whole story.” It acknowledges their stress without feeding into the idea that this is make or break. I also tell kids to delete any college app social media accounts and chance me threads from their phones for the season. My son deleted the college admissions subreddit after he spent three hours reading about a kid with a 3.9 GPA who got rejected from every Ivy and decided he was going to end up working a minimum wage job forever. He hasn’t gone back, and says his stress level dropped by half.
Last week, Lila submitted her early action application to that in-state public’s history program. She brought over a printed copy of her personal statement to show me, full of stories about a 19th century teacher she found buried in our town cemetery who started the first all-girls school here. It reads like her, not the perfect applicant everyone says you need to be. She still has bad days. She still texts me when she sees a friend post an acceptance on Instagram and feels that twist in her stomach. We haven’t fixed the entire toxic culture that got us here — there will always be parents bragging at the grocery store, rankings that make great mid-tier schools feel like consolation prizes, and pressure to perform instead of be yourself. But for the kid right in front of you, you don’t have to play the game the way it’s written. You can slow down, you can let them be a person instead of a resume, and that’s enough, for now.
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