Why are teens losing their minds about college applications? This senior thinks she knows why

Personal essay by Mary Frances Ruskell, CNN

(CNN) — I spent my freshman year of high school despairing that I hadn’t invented a synthetic human heart, launched a tech start-up, written an opera or raised $10 million for charity.

I ran track, sang in a cathedral choir and taught little kids how to kayak in the school’s outdoor club. I was plenty busy. Where in the world had I gotten the idea that I was supposed to be doing those other things to get into college? Why did I think that I was running out of time — at age 14?

I’ve heard a lot about how social media creates unrealistic beauty standards, body images and lifestyle expectations among teenagers. But there’s another form of comparison egged on by social media: over-the-top extracurricular activities. The pressure I’ve felt to create a nonprofit and invent a solar-powered car that can drive underwater did not come from my parents or teachers despite what documentaries such as “Race to Nowhere” suggest. It came from college admission videos on social media.

I don’t mean videos on essay writing tips, standardized test study hacks or the self-taped, quasi interviews attached to some applications. I’m talking about a specific subset rampant on YouTube and Instagram Reels, videos dealing only in analyses of college acceptances and rejections. The format has been perfected to keep people viewing and clicking.

In these videos, students or, far more often, content creators outline a student’s background. They lay out their activities, grades and test scores, inevitably stellar and impressive. Then comes the hook: They outline every single school the student was rejected from, one by one, and the schools that accepted them. Often, the rejections are in big, red boxes, and the acceptances in green. The rejections are almost always shown first — lengthy lists naming Harvard, Duke and Georgetown universities and the like.

What hope is there for regular students?

Take this example: On Instagram Reels, a video posted by @limmytalks discusses a student who has voluntarily submitted his information to this college admissions content creator. The student’s stats are impressive: He’s played piano since age 5, been in orchestra since age 10 and founded a math club tutoring other students. Intimidating but not impossible.

But there’s more: The content creator @limmytalks points to the student having more than 100 million views for all online content, memorizing 1,001 digits of pi, and holding the Guinness World Records title for solving a Rubik’s Cube upside down (called a rotating puzzle cube on the Guinness site). Literally hanging upside down, legs hooked over a bar and dangling in the air.

In the video, @limmytalks takes guesses about where the student was accepted — acceptances are in bright green letters, rejections in glaring red. The results are in the video’s caption. The student was rejected by Harvard, Yale University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Southern California, New York University, Johns Hopkins University and Tulane University. He was accepted into great schools, too, such as Duke, Boston University, UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley. But his rejections were listed first.

The comments are full of people despairing over their own chances. After all, there can only be one Guinness World Records holder for solving a Rubik’s Cube upside down, and if he gets rejected from so many highly selective schools, what hope is there for a “normal” student? And before you think students applying to schools with acceptance rates above 10% are spared, there are also videos touting the tagline, “Where did this AVERAGE student get in?!?”

On Reddit, high school students post on the subreddit r/applyingtocollege, familiarly known as A2C. Kids list their “stats” and ask for feedback from Redditors on their chances of getting into particular schools.

Comparisons linked to depression, low self-esteem

There are also videos on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram from students who film themselves opening emails from schools, recording their reactions in real time to rejections and acceptances. Often, their parents, siblings or friends are with them, with their reactions being filmed, too. The videos are alternately inspiring and heartbreaking. There’s something addictive about the emotional highs and lows, the shock and celebration, and the pathos of students rejected by their dream schools, choking on sobs, with their mothers at their side trying not to cry.

You feel compelled to watch, and science has documented how social media leads us to compare ourselves with our peers: In the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, study authors Adele Samra, Wayne A. Warburton and Andrew M. Collins write that social media stimulates comparisons because of the abundance of content with which to compare oneself. The most damaging type of comparison is what they call “upward,” in which the subject is judged superior to oneself. These comparisons especially are linked to low self-esteem and depression, the authors noted.

The classic example is comparisons of self to models, actors and influencers, dangers I think most people know about. But being bombarded with stats of fellow high schoolers to judge oneself against also falls into the “upward” comparison category. And when those stats are followed by a long list of rejections in bold red font, it can be devastating.

The comparisons happen in school among classmates, too. The college counselor at my high school told me that she’s seen kids not apply to certain universities after hearing that fellow classmates whom they considered to be better students were applying. She also said that her students who have gone to Ivy League universities or other prestigious schools didn’t hold world records or have any other “crazy” stats. Those students took the most rigorous classes, had a mixture of service and activities inside and outside school, and worked part-time jobs.

“They’re doing something significant,” she told me. “It could be like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, could be Girls State. They may have a project. It might not be to cure cancer, but it’s a project that has changed the life of someone in the community.”

What she said sounds doable. We shouldn’t all be losing our minds, right? Still, my counselor said that in over 10 years of college counseling, today’s students seem more stressed than ever before.

I’ve stopped watching those videos on YouTube entirely, so the algorithm quit suggesting them. Instagram, however, is a different story. It feels like there’s no escape. The videos load instantly when you’re scrolling. You don’t click on anything; they just start playing.

So I began actively blocking the creators of these videos every time they came across my feed. For this article, I used other people’s Instagram accounts to view the reels, partly because most creators are blocked, but also because I didn’t want Instagram’s algorithm to think I wanted to see more of them.

‘The ones that tend to go viral are the crazy ones’

I learned from Kyungyong Lim, the man behind @Limmytalks, that he actually doesn’t want his videos to make kids anxious. He suggests students block him if his videos create stress. “Take what you can that’s helpful, and call it at that,” he suggested via email.

Lim stumbled into the world of college admissions videos by accident. He made some TikTok videos for an internship interview process. He didn’t get the job, but discovered he enjoyed making videos and started posting, hoping to “go viral once.”

He mentioned in a video that he attended Duke, and one day a student emailed and asked if Lim would read his Duke application. Lim ended up posting the kid’s application, trying to predict what the results would be, and it did go viral. After that, more high school students began sending him their applications.

For Lim, the goal isn’t about going viral anymore. He said he wants to democratize the college admissions process. “It’s to the universities’ benefit to keep the admissions process vague. This way, no one questions anything,” he said, but he added he believes applicants and their families deserve to understand the process.

Lim pointed out that he posts all types of applications, but “the ones that tend to go viral are the crazy ones. The average ones never reach the masses. This is just the way that human behavior works — it gravitates towards the extremes.”

The waiting game

What of the high school students who find his videos panic-inducing? Don’t just watch the videos that show up on your page courtesy of an algorithm, Lim advised. “Watch other videos that you missed that are on my page,” he said. “And if all else fails, then block me.”

Rationally, knowing that you’re only seeing a small, curated portion of the thousands who attend universities doesn’t completely eliminate the anxiety. I can rationalize all I like. I remind myself, from what I’ve seen of older friends who have gone through this process, that you can’t base your chances of college application success off what someone else has done. Making comparisons is useless with so many factors and such an array of activities and achievements.

I know it wasn’t always this way. When my mom applied to college, she said that she just looked at a few guidebooks and picked out schools that offered merit scholarships. My dad decided to apply to colleges that looked like Welton Academy from the 1989 movie “Dead Poets Society.” They didn’t have nearly the amount of information teenagers now have, and as a result far less fear.

Today, high schoolers can compare themselves with the entire world, not just the kid sitting at the desk next to them. We have access to the numbers, too, and admitted class profiles, SAT score spreads, acceptance rates, all just a Google search away. This information makes it seem like there should be a perfect formula for success in college admissions, but I really don’t think there is. While researching this essay, I watched a huge amount of these videos, and I realized that it doesn’t matter the stats, activities and awards that get read off — the acceptance and rejection results are impossible to predict.

That realization led to another: comparing myself with the kids in these videos only led to a totally pointless regret — that I can’t go back in time to freshman year to become a different person, and even if I could, there is still no formula or perfect combination of activities I can pinpoint that guarantees acceptance.

I don’t think there is one universal solution to this social media dilemma of comparing yourself with others. While some students find the college admission videos anxiety-producing, others see them as democratizing and helpful. My solution for my own happiness and well-being has been to just block dozens of Instagram accounts. (I had already deleted TikTok entirely.) I learned that it was the constant reminders that made me feel terrible — out of sight, out of mind.

Comparing myself with others can’t and won’t change anything. I tried my hardest and submitted my best work in applying to schools. I know it’s sounds like a platitude that gets spouted often, but those efforts are really all I could do. The rest is a waiting game and out of my hands. Somehow, that’s comforting.

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