COLLEGE MATTERS. That’s what our parents tell us when we get into high school; that’s what our teachers insist when we slog through review sessions and classes; that’s what our peers speak up about when talking about taking engineering, or law, or medicine.
And as I reach the midpoint of my summer break, caught between SAT tutors and physics reviews and vocabulary words I will never ever need to use in my life, I’m starting to realize how tiresome it is to parrot the phrase along—college matters, college matters, college matters. That’s all I’ve ever heard; I guess it’s true.
But beneath those two words there’s a whole system of turning screws and gears that leaves high school students like me breathless and terrified, unsure of who we are or what we’re going to do. Because when others say that college matters, what I hear is how all of these disparate parts—math grades, report cards, parent-teacher conferences—are going to decide, somehow, my eventual fate. My path is being set out before me, right at this instant, and the road to employment is paved with admission percentages and standardized scores and recommendation letters. Every single thing I do now will determine the next four, eight, 12 years of my life, and to be honest, that weight is crushing.
This fact finally dawned on me when I took the SATs, the standardized test used for applications to American colleges, last May. In one of the initial sections of the exam, I got stuck: I couldn’t figure out what the hell “onerous” meant. I marked a circle, moved on, and realized after submitting my paper and checking a dictionary that I’d gotten the question wrong. That was 20, maybe 30, maybe even more marks from my final score—the score I’d be using for applications to colleges abroad, the score that’d determine where I got in, what course I took, how the next four years would proceed.
It was terrifying.
I drove home with my friends, dejected, the syllables haunting me like broken road signs—the pathway of my life, my career, my eventual death all hanging somehow on the seven letters of some word buried in the bowels of an English class where I fell asleep instead of listening to the teacher. I didn’t know what to say, so all of us who’d taken the test just compared answers and resigned ourselves to all the questions we’d gotten wrong. And with the sheer number of us that were stationed in that testing center, I can say with certainty that I wasn’t alone in this hollow standardized regret, not alone in the way I felt like crap because of a system that valued grammar and mathematics over individuality and passion, a system that punished my worth and my future for the trifles of not being able to memorize the dictionary or not knowing the difference between present-progressive and past-perfect.
But the thing is that whenever a teenager like me brings up this whole empty feeling, the response is always the same: College matters. Work hard. Study well. Get into a top school. Get a good job. Move forward.
And the cruel thing about the college system is that it’s designed for compliance. If one decides to rebel and to value something other than that which is required of one, if one pursues one’s love for coding, or theater, or poetry, instead of memorizing the grammatical rules necessary for an entrance exam, then one’s future is absolutely shot. Not because the things one loves aren’t valuable, but because the way other people value one is based primarily on a standardized test score that is churned out after a month of crammed studying focused on words and obscure rules that one will probably never use again in one’s life. And when the student tries fighting back, it’ll eventually dawn on the student that rebellion doesn’t work because rebellion isn’t valued. If one fights, one will be refused admission; colleges will close their doors; relatives will whisper disappointed rumors at family reunions; one will feel like a failure.
But, most cruel of all, colleges won’t just make the student feel like a failure. Despite all their machinations, they will still promise the student happiness and success. With Ivy Leagues and exclusive courses and scholarships all paraded around as the epitome of student achievement, one, a torn and battered junior high school student, will not stop to ask whether a “high-quality education” really matters. The system’s been drilled into one’s brain, and the promise of a full scholarship at Harvard/Stanford/Ateneo/UP is the dopamine-pumping carrot at the end of the cold college machine. Why fight it? No one else is.
And even as I type these words out, even as I desperately beg for some sort of change in what we value in our college application processes—both nationally and internationally—I’m starting to feel like I won’t win. This article is ineffectual in the grand scheme of things, because the college system is a compromise we’ve all chosen to make. It’s efficient, it’s easy, and it pumps out lawyers and doctors and businessmen with surprising speed, until we forget about all the student debts and the crippled self-worths that make their way out of doors wielding esteemed diplomas.
And what comes after the graduation ceremonies?
These newly minted, debt-saddled academic professionals, having been given the credentials they need to succeed in a world where their personal value is reliant on their undergraduate degree, tell their kids that college matters. They turn their noses up at dropouts and vagrants; they politely pity the poor who can’t afford the admission fees and tout scholarships as a solution; they churn out, in the great machine, children who will value the same things they do—SAT scores, extracurricular activity, and “holistic growth.” This is cruel, this is wrong, but this is easy, especially when the light at the end of the tunnel is success. (They just forget to tell you that there are far more people than there are tunnels.)
So, please, take a look at the sheer amount of power we give a college diploma, by affirming that worth lies in stable careers and prestigious work—doctors are successful, lawyers are successful, venture capitalists are successful, and if you follow the trail of socially-determined success you go back to college courses, standardized tests, junior-year students who are unsure how to proceed but are told by peers and teachers and parents that, yes, college matters.
Why?
Because we have decided to make it matter. We’ve let the way we value college govern worths and destinies. We’ve let numbers in critical reading tests and acceptance letters written by aging admissions officers determine our choices and our futures. We are active, willing participants in a system that is so strange and so out-of-touch that students who have forgotten what the hell “onerous” means can scratch out a circle, miss a vocabulary question, and make a mistake that will affect the course of the rest of their standardized, college-damned life.
Ethan Chua, 17, is an incoming fourth-year high school student at Xavier School San Juan.