TOW #22 - College Admissions Shocker!

This time of the year, as a junior in high school, I constantly hear about college news from seniors, whether they got accepted, rejected, or waitlisted. Although I'm not directly experiencing it yet, I can somehow feel some secondhand stress from those dying to hear back or dying because of the sad news that someone got rejected from their dream school. Because college admittance seems to get rougher every year, Frank Bruni, writer of the New York Times, wrote a satire against this phenomena that criticized top-tier colleges, especially Stanford University, for having almost impossible standards for accepting students. Because of the current college application system and the high expectations for admission, Bruni's argument that college admissions are ridiculous can be viewed true.
Top-tier colleges like Stanford have extremely low admission rates because of the high achievements that many students seem to make. Bruni jokes, "The thousands of rejected applicants included hundreds of children of alumni who’d donated lavishly over the years, their expectations obvious in the fact that they affixed their $50,000 checks to photographs of Emma playing an obscure woodwind in an Umbrian chamber orchestra or Scott donning the traditional dress of an indigenous people for whom he tailored a special social-media network while on spring break." From the perspective of someone who has played an obscure woodwind instrument before and is currently playing one of the most played instruments, the violin, I can say that people have pointed out the academic advantage of one instrument over the other more often than they have pointed out the music or intellectual advantage. Also, there are many articles that attest that the secret to being accepted to Stanford is to have a basically nationally recognized accomplishment that no one has achieved before, like a new scientific method. Even though a student could be academically and intellectually gifted, these high standards prevent such students from being admitted. The acceptance rate has gone even farther down to 4.7% as of 2016.
While Bruni's mode of writing was obvious satire, the many rejection letters to academically and intellectually talented students are real. Although Stanford has the right to keep their own standards of what kind of students and how many students they can and want to accept, this can often be frustrating to capable students who have potential and could have a perfect life without Stanford.