How to Combat Toxic College Application Culture: Practical Tips for Parents
The kitchen light was yellow, crumbs from chocolate chip cookies scattered across the table, when I rounded the corner with two mugs of peppermint hot cocoa last October. My oldest Lila was hunched over her laptop, Common App open to the activities list, FaceTime glowing on her phone propped against a cereal box. “I’m deleting all my extracurriculars and starting over,” she told her best friend Mia. “Mine look so lame next to yours. 12 AP classes? Starting a whole non-profit? What do I have? Two years of JV volleyball and barista shifts at the bookstore downtown.”
I froze in the doorway, mug in hand, and didn’t interrupt. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of talk from Lila and her friends that fall. For months, I’d watched her scroll TikTok during lunch, pausing to show me reels of college application “gurus” breaking down what “top admissions officers actually want” — 8+ impactful extracurriculars, a personal essay that tugs at the heartstrings, a 4.0 unweighted GPA. Every other post warned that even one B on your transcript could sink your chances at a “good” school, and that a rejection from your top choice meant you’d wasted four years of high school.
I sat down across from her after Mia signed off, and pushed the cocoa toward her. She slid the laptop toward me, jaw tight, waiting for me to say what every parent says: Oh, honey, that’s not true, your activities are great. Instead I said, “Read me each activity, and tell me why you did it. Not why it looks good, why you did it.”
She rolled her eyes, but did it. JV volleyball: “Maddy begged me to try out, and after every away game we’d stop for milkshakes. I wasn’t good enough for varsity, but it was fun.” Barista shifts at the bookstore: “I wanted money to buy concert tickets and new art supplies, and I love talking to the regulars. Mr. Henderson comes in every Saturday for a black coffee and blueberry muffin, and he tells me stories about his time in art school in the 70s.” Third grade Sunday school helper: “The kids draw me monsters and rainbows every week. It’s the best two hours of my whole month.”
When she finished, I asked her to cross off any activity she’d do over again if she got the chance. She didn’t cross a single one off. “All of these are things you chose because they mattered to you,” I said. “Why are we acting like they don’t count just because some stranger on the internet says you need a non-profit to get into college?”
After that, I started talking to other parents at school pick up and soccer games, and I realized how widespread this toxic culture is. One mom told me her son had skipped his grandma’s 80th birthday party to take the SAT for the fourth time, just to try to bump his score 30 points. Another said she’d paid $500 an hour for an essay coach who rewrote most of her daughter’s personal statement, because the coach said her original story about working at her family’s taco truck was “too boring.”
I picked up a few small, concrete things that worked for our family, and I’ve passed them on to other parents who’ve asked. The first is the “why check” we did with Lila’s activities list, which you can do in 15 minutes on a Sunday afternoon. When your kid is panicking that their list isn’t impressive enough, walk through every activity and ask them why they did it. Any activity they chose for a real reason — fun, money, connection, curiosity — is worth keeping, no matter how “small” it looks. Admissions officers read thousands of lists; they can tell the difference between something you actually did and something you padded to impress people.
The second is a hard household rule: no college app talk, no scrolling college app content after 7 p.m. It doesn’t matter how close the deadline is. After 7, we talk about TV shows, bake cookies, go for walks. This keeps the whole process from taking over every part of your family’s life for six months. Before we made this rule, Lila was going to bed stressed and waking up stressed, and every dinner conversation circled back to deadlines or test scores. The cutoff didn’t eliminate the stress, but it gave us all space to breathe.
The third is to intentionally plan a visit to one or two non-name-brand schools that actually fit what your kid wants, before they get decisions back. Too many kids see less selective schools as consolation prizes, because the toxic culture tells them only top 20 schools are worth going to. We visited our in-state school 45 minutes from home, and Lila got to tour the art education program she’s interested in, sit in on a drawing class, and eat lunch with a current student. By the end of the day, she said it felt more like “her” school than the fancy private school she’d been stressing over.
I also stopped saying the generic line “it doesn’t matter where you go” because Lila never believed it. It does matter, a little — you want to go to a school that fits your budget and your goals. Instead I started telling her the specific truth: I got rejected from my first choice college, ended up at my second, and that’s where I met your dad, and that’s where I got the internship that led to the job I have now. The worst case scenario isn’t that you go to a “lesser” school — it’s that you spend six months of your only senior year of high school miserable and stressed over something that won’t matter half as much as people say it will.
Lila got her rejection from that top choice school back in March. She cried for 45 minutes, ate a whole pint of mint chocolate chip, and then pulled up the acceptance letter from the in-state school. She’s been busy planning her dorm room and texting her future roommate about going to the state fair this fall. Some days she still sees a friend’s Instagram post bragging about an Ivy acceptance and gets a little twisted up. We just pause, walk through why she chose the school she’s going to, and then go get ice cream. We didn’t fix the whole toxic culture. We just fixed it for our house, one small choice at a time.
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