The college admissions process can feel overwhelming for many students. Between grades, extracurricular activities, rankings, and application deadlines, high school students often experience intense pressure about their future. In this article, Alexandra Bowman shares honest college admissions advice for high school students navigating stress, burnout, and the pressure to attend highly ranked schools.

If you’re in the spring of your junior year, you’re probably quite aware that your time to complete your “portfolio” of your grades, extracurriculars, and everything else that you’ll soon present to college admissions officers this fall is running out. And if you weren’t aware of that, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.

Especially when it may feel that your entire conscious life was leading to this moment – all your activities and learning were leading to what you’ll get on your knees to present to the College Admissions Gods – it goes without saying that this is a wildly stressful time in your life.

And I don’t mean to make fun of that perspective. That is exactly how I felt during my junior and senior years of high school. All those projects, all those assessments – all that chest-pumping stress to finish everything and eke out the best grades you could when you were putting your heart and soul into everything you were doing – were all leading to right now.

But there is so much that’s wrong about that, and the associated idea that your job right now is to get on your knees and beg for admission into the highest-ranked school as possible. More than can go in one essay.

But let’s hit three of the highlights: three truths that may help you think more healthfully about what it is that you’re supposed to be doing as you prepare to apply for college.

Very quickly, my name is Alexandra Bowman, and I am a college admissions consultant contracted with four different educational consulting firms based around the United States, including two based in New York City. I hold a master’s in English from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s in English and Art from Georgetown as well. I used to serve as a Georgetown University undergraduate interviewer before I started working with private students and had to quit (that’s the rules).

There is so much that can and should be said regarding each of the points I will delve into here. I hope to elaborate in future writings.

The Ranking of Your College Is Absolutely Not the Sole Determiner of Your Success

First, your college’s “National Ranking,” or how the school as a whole measures up to other schools as a whole, is an extremely dubious statistic. That ranking potentially reflects truth at a bird’s-eye view – a top 20 school is probably of a different quality than a top 50 school – but within Top 1-15 and 15-30, it’s extremely difficult to say that one school is “significantly or generally better” than another.

To be honest, as I’ve seen over the last 4 years of being a college admissions consultant, how often the U.S. News and World Report’s handiwork crops up in students’ thinking, particularly in their most fear-based thinking, the more I think that more people need to be speaking out against them as a purveyor of dramatically overgeneralized information and arbiter of fear.

Second, if any ranking does matter, it’s your major department’s ranking.

For example, if you are trying to study art, Stanford’s art program is ranked #32 in the country by U.S. News and World Report, while the City University of New York’s Hunter College’s art program is ranked #23. While #32 is nothing to sneeze at, you might not be getting the best art education at a school with “name zing.”

It would be deeply unwise to fall over yourself to get into a school that might be “highly-ranked” but doesn’t have the resources that you need it to in your area of study.

You have to ask yourself – what am I pursuing? What do I actually want out of my college experience?

Ask yourself – am I trying to get into the best school for my interests and career? Or am I trying to prove to myself that I can get into one of these 10 schools for some other emotional reason?

Do I want to get into an Ivy League or top #15 school for what they will actually offer me? Do I actually know what they’re going to offer me? Or am I letting their branding and name zing tell me something that isn’t quite the truth of what they will offer me?

These schools are businesses. Remember that.

Don’t believe me? Check out this list of the highest-paid university presidents in America. The top 5 salaries are above $3 million.

Your “Best” Is Not What Exhausts You

It’s easy for high achievers to think that they essentially have no limit – no “best” in the sense of what “doing their best” looks like. As a result, they do absolutely as much as they can without regard for their health, boundaries, or strategic paths to their broader goals.

The truth is that each person does have a “best.” If you are getting sick all the time, or are going into extreme mental health lows on the regular, or are generally miserable, you are probably operating at a level that is not your “best.”

It took me a long time, and lots of pneumonias and flus, to accept this.

You could be working smarter – investing more time in the things that matter most, rather than scattering yourself and only doing a little in a lot of different areas.

You could have a specific goal in mind other than “get into the highest-ranked school I can,” because again, rankings absolutely do not tell the whole story.

If you do believe that “your best” is exhausting yourself, you will not be able to keep that going forever. Maybe not even another year.

Your “best” must be a series of habits that can be held long-term.

If You Are Not Honest About Who You Are and What You Are Interested In

If you are not honest about who you are and what you are interested in, your applications, if you do pass the admissions officers’ B.S. detectors, you will likely be unfulfilled and out of place at your college.

When I was in 8th grade, the destination for “the smart kids” was to apply to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I loved English and art – I’d founded a Lord of the Rings fan club at my middle school – but I was terrified of not “being where I was supposed to be.”

I applied to TJ and got in.

While I got all As and Bs at TJ, I was miserable. I was clearly not where I was supposed to be. This was a school for people who loved science. They already knew how to code. I was limping through as best I could, and doing a lot of crying in the evenings and weekends. Our English classes were spent editing science papers. If you did express an interest in English, in my experience, you were treated a little bit like a second-class citizen.

I do truly believe that you can be interested in both science and English. It can be done.

(CW: Around the time I was at TJ, I also developed an eating disorder that took me, and the hair loss I developed as a result, several years to recover from.)

I transferred back to my base school in my sophomore year, and immediately jumped into taking AP Art at my high school, and got a 5. I got almost all As. I applied to Georgetown as an English and Art major and was accepted.

I might add that there were at least two friends of mine from middle school who stayed at TJ – and I don’t know what their majors or goals were, or their full stories – but they also ended up at Georgetown.

Again, I don’t know their stories, but generally, I believe it’s true that the most grueling path is not always necessary to get where you want to go. You do not need to pick the grueling path for its own sake.

While I definitely haven’t completely absorbed those lessons myself – there were versions of this lesson that it took me several years after graduating from my master’s program to implement – I think this story is an essentially perfect summation of what happens when you do what you “think you’re supposed to do” out of fear and a desire to measure up to other people.

When I was a Georgetown interviewer, I interviewed numerous students who had their talking point ready for what they wanted to study, but they had no idea why they wanted to study it. Further, their biggest reason why they wanted to study at Georgetown specifically was that it was a really good school.

You think the admissions officers don’t know that?

Very little that’s good comes from fear.

What Is the Point of College, Anyway?

What is the point of college, anyway? Why are you doing all that suffering in high school?

You’re supposed to get the education that will help you find joy, fulfillment, and if you’re lucky (these days in particular), financial success. Your hard work now and smart college selection strategy are supposed to give you those things.

I know that the financial element is different for everyone – some people need more money than others to support themselves or their family.

But at least consider this: if you don’t like what you do, it will be much harder to do it well.

Conclusion

The college admissions process can place enormous pressure on high school students, especially when rankings and prestige become the primary focus. Alexandra Bowman’s reflections offer an important reminder that success is not defined solely by elite schools, burnout, or fear-based decisions. Authenticity, long-term fulfillment, and choosing a path aligned with your real interests matter far more in the long run.