March 30, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Stressed for Success?
By DAVID
BROOKS

any of you high school seniors are in a panic at this
time of year, coping with your college acceptance or rejection letters.
Since the admissions process has gone totally insane, it's worth reminding
yourself that this is not a particularly important moment in your life.

You are being judged according to criteria that you would never use to
judge another person and which will never again be applied to you once you
leave higher ed.

For example, colleges are taking a hard look at your SAT scores. But if
at any moment in your later life you so much as mention your SAT scores in
conversation, you will be considered a total jerk. If at age 40 you are
still proud of your scores, you may want to contemplate a major life
makeover.

More than anything else, colleges are taking a hard look at your
grades. To achieve that marvelous G.P.A., you will have had to demonstrate
excellence across a broad range of subjects: math, science, English,
languages etc.

This will never be necessary again. Once you reach adulthood, the key
to success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across
fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing
yourself passionately to them.

The traits you used getting good grades might actually hold you back.
To get those high marks, while doing all the extracurricular activities
colleges are also looking for, you were encouraged to develop a prudential
attitude toward learning. You had to calculate which reading was essential
and which was not. You could not allow yourself to be obsessed by one
subject because if you did, your marks in the other subjects would suffer.
You could not take outrageous risks because you might fail.

You learned to study subjects that are intrinsically boring to you;
slowly, you may have stopped thinking about which subjects are boring and
which exciting. You just knew that each class was a hoop you must jump
through on your way to a first-class university. You learned to thrive in
adult-supervised settings.

If you have done all these things and you are still an interesting
person, congratulations, because the system has been trying to whittle you
down into a bland, complaisant achievement machine.

But in adulthood, you'll find that a talent for regurgitating what
superiors want to hear will take you only halfway up the ladder, and then
you'll stop there. The people who succeed most spectacularly, on the other
hand, often had low grades. They are not prudential. They venture out and
thrive where there is no supervision, where there are no preset
requirements.

Those admissions officers may know what office you held in school
government, but they can make only the vaguest surmises about what
matters, even to your worldly success: your perseverance, imagination and
trustworthiness. Odds are you don't even know these things about yourself
yet, and you are around you a lot more.

Even if the admissions criteria are dubious, isn't it still really
important to get into a top school? I wonder. I spend a lot of time
meeting with students on college campuses. If you put me in a room with 15
students from any of the top 100 schools in this country and asked me at
the end of an hour whether these were Harvard kids or Penn State kids, I
would not be able to tell you.

There are a lot of smart, lively young people in this country, and you
will find them at whatever school you go to. The students at the really
elite schools may have more social confidence, but students at less
prestigious schools may learn not to let their lives be guided by other
people's status rules — a lesson that is worth the tuition all by itself.

As for the quality of education, that's a matter of your actually
wanting to learn and being fortunate enough to meet a professor who
electrifies your interest in a subject. That can happen at any school
because good teachers are spread around, too.

So remember, the letters you get over the next few weeks don't
determine anything. Picking a college is like picking a spouse. You don't
pick the "top ranked" one, because that has no meaning. You pick the one
with the personality and character that complements your own.

You may have been preparing for these letters half your life. All I can
say is welcome to adulthood, land of the
anticlimaxes.

Copyright
2004 The New York
Times Company | Home | Privacy
Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back
to Top