What a Popular TikTok Channel Reveals About the Stress of College Admissions
Daniel Lim reads by way of the resumes of potential faculty college students with the excited patter of a colour commentator at an NFL sport. On his well-liked TikTok channel, the Duke University senior highlights the seemingly countless quantity of ultra-achieving college students who fail to land acceptances at selective faculties, or, extra typically, who win some bids and lose others.
“This valedictorian with a near-perfect SAT score got rejected by every single Ivy League school he applied to,” he says in one recent video, in a tone of disbelief. “Let’s look at his application and see what happened.”
It seems that this nameless pupil Lim’s describing — with an SAT rating of 1570, trophies in state and regional championships for gymnastics, expertise in live performance band since fourth grade and membership in honor societies — says that he was rejected from Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Yale, Cornell, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan. The pupil says he acquired into Penn State University and the University of Maryland.
Lim, who has greater than 200,000 followers, says that almost 2,000 highschool college students have despatched him their faculty purposes — together with the checklist of establishments they utilized to and the outcomes of their makes an attempt — for him to share and riff on in his movies.
He’s half of a genre of social media making an attempt to make sense of who will get into which selective faculty — and why — at a time when touchdown a ‘Yes’ from a selective faculty is tougher than ever.
Statistics present it truly is tougher to get into faculty as of late, if you happen to’re making an attempt to get into a selective one. If you take a look at the high 100 universities and the high 50 high liberal arts faculties, the median SAT rating it takes to get in has risen considerably since about 35 years in the past, in accordance with an analysis a couple years in the past in Education Next.
College counselors work to emphasise that discovering the proper faculty needs to be about discovering the proper match — and the reality is that the majority U.S. faculties, particularly neighborhood faculties, admit most of the college students who apply. But regardless, many college students and households understand selective faculties as the ticket to extra alternative. And at a time of rising faculty prices, college students try to get into state flagship universities that provide high-quality choices at a fraction of the value of personal faculties, or to land at Ivy League colleges with large endowments that may afford to supply more-generous monetary support than different establishments.
So the course of has excessive stakes. And but it will probably seem to be a sport.
And the guidelines of that sport maintain altering.
The pandemic led extra faculties to make SAT scores optional, placing extra emphasis on so-called “holistic” critiques of candidates. And admissions officers say there’s widespread misperceptions about how that course of works.
“A lot of people think if a school has a 5 percent admit rate, they have a one in 20 chance of getting in, which is not what it is,” says Nathan Mathabane, affiliate director of faculty counseling at Woodside Priory School, in California, and a former admissions officer at Princeton University. “Some students will have an 80 or 90 percent chance of getting in and many students will have a 0 percent chance of getting in.”
And a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer time hanging down the consideration of race in faculty admissions has thrown much more uncertainty into the course of, as even faculties themselves search to shortly change their processes to adjust to the regulation.
So college students are turning to TikTok and different social media platforms to fill the data void about whether or not, why and the way they’ve acquired a shot at touchdown a spot at a selective faculty.
Another instance that Mathabane factors to is a Reddit channel referred to as “chance me,” the place candidates submit their credentials and ask the web to foretell what their chances are high of moving into the faculty that they assume works greatest for them. And some of the feedback find yourself being unkind, or come crammed with misinformation about the course of.
“I think it’s super toxic,” Mathabane says of the web site. “I don’t think there’s anything that you’re going to get from these sites that is going to improve your college search, full stop, and it probably will only stress you out more.”
But Lim argues that his movies, which he additionally posts on YouTube and Instagram, can assist college students really feel much less alone in a aggravating course of. And he says he can relate, from the stress of his personal faculty search.
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we discuss with Lim about what he’s realized from seeing so many faculty purposes and from the reactions to his movies, and we hear from Mathabane about how admissions is altering.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you take heed to podcasts, or use the participant on this web page.
