Editorial: How prepared are students for college?
Knows how to explicate a Petrarchan sonnet, yet can’t refill a tank of gas; knows how to ace the SAT without breaking a sweat, yet can’t deposit a check; wins national acclaim in three different extracurricular activities, yet can’t prepare a single meal. Clearly there is a distinction between book smarts and street smarts – a difference between pure academic knowledge and practical common sense.
In a school like Peninsula, where academic excellence is the norm and high standardized test scores are expected from the entire student body (our API has risen almost linearly in the past seven years), it seems at times as if book smarts are much more common, and to some extent, promoted, than street smarts. In an effort to get into colleges with brand-name recognition, students often sacrifice their social lives in order to find time to cram in that one extra prep class, to take one more AP course, or to form and “lead” one more extracurricular activity.
However, in reality, how many students on our campus, if left alone, would be able to operate sufficiently on their own for a day? A week? A month? In particular, of the seniors, many of whom will be heading off to college in a few months to live alone, how many right now know how to perform essential tasks like doing the laundry?
In high school, so many students are sheltered from the harsh realities of the world around them, and they effectively lose (or rather, they never gain) the ability to handle themselves responsibly and maturely in potentially compromising situations. In college, where alcohol is much more prevalent, where drugs are more easily accessible, and where parental guidance is virtually nonexistent, many students have difficulty in coping with peer pressure.
The question then arises: How prepared are students for college? It’s one thing to be able to solve differential equations or analyze critical reading passages while sitting in a classroom, but it’s an entirely different story to successfully live independently in a new environment. It is not unheard of to hear stories of college freshmen coming back home because they were unable to handle their newfound independence and the freedom that comes with it.
Colleges have started taking the initiative in this nation-wide problem. According to Ken Park, an admissions officer for the USC Marshall School of business, “we look not only at the extracurriculars but how it is communicated in an interview.” Colleges are now starting to seek students who have developed social skills, whereas in the past, they searched for students who exhibited academic superiority. One of Stanford’s essay prompts even calls for students to write a letter to their future roommate, which forces kids to look intrinsically at their social habits.
In the end, common sense really isn’t that common, especially in academia. In an effort to develop a higher GPA to get into a better college, students too often sacrifice the chance to develop social expertise or learn how to take care of themselves.
