How much importance do colleges give to tardies in high school?

Applying to College
21

@TomSrOfBoston‌ (re post #17):

During the height of the “Occupy Movement,” a protester was interviewed in Battery Park’s “tent city,” near the overall Wall Street financial district. This young Millennial was decrying American capitalism, wealth disparity, and the fact that s/he had graduated from a “good” (unidentified) private college, but had signifiant unsustainable debt, and had been unable to find a “meaningful” or financially viable job (although s/he majored in Fine Arts). S/he indicated that all college graduates should receive a government stipend and debt forgiveness, and s/he further explained how passionately s/he wanted to castigate the Wall Street plutocrats, but “they arrive hours before I do, and depart long after I leave.” She saw absolutely no irony in that flat, lucid declaration. S/he perceived no connection whatsoever between decisions made/actions taken and their concomitant consequences. including:


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Voluntarily assuming a large debt
Majoring is a discipline that has limited – principally, poorly compensated – career opportunities
Believing that long working hours and success are disassociated

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I can’t make this stuff up . . .

22

@GA2012MOM‌
Hah! Syllabus… HS doesn’t work like college. You realize that in HS, most teachers assign the work the same week it is due? There is no “planning ahead”, doing the work from a syllabus ahead of time. If my week is crazy busy and I am assigned something due two days from now, there is no way I can change that, I have to suck it up.
Yeah, many of us play the “I am so stressed” card, but have you considered the possibility that we are so stressed because… we actually are?

You know why I am stressed? Because I put it on myself. I know I can do the work involved, and I know I can do it well. If I didn’t want to be stressed I wouldn’t be in honors classes, and would be happy with C grades, but I’m not. If being willing to put in the extra effort to do something well and better myself because of it isn’t putting on my “big boy pants” and sucking it up, I don’t know what is. Sorry for trying to be responsible about my future.

I won’t defend the OP’s significant number of tardies, but please do not assume that when HS students are stressed out it is not because they aren’t working hard, or that staying up until 1am is the result of poor planning or study skills. Oftentimes, staying up until 1am is the result of someone who wants to get a good grade and is willing to put the extra effort in.

23

Sorry, still don’t buy it @ARandomGeek. Yes, I realize what HS is, my kid went through it and didn’t bitch and moan about it. She went to a top UG , and now is in medschool. Let’s see, this week, she went to the gym prob 4x, went to two days of orientation for her next clerkship, did some shopping, cooked great meals including making bread and fresh pesto, oh and took a shelf exam for her last clerkship in Psych and afterwards had a meeting regarding her research. Yesterday drove 3. 1/2 hours to a friends country house for a couples weekend. And while doing all that put in MANY hours of studying. She was prob asleep by 11 pm every night. So…are you going to say you need to be up till 1 or 2 for HS stuff? Sorry if I come across harsh, but all the whining by kids these days is unnecessary. If kids can’t manage HS, good luck in college.

24

Smh to all the people citing historical examples that have almost no bearing to this topic. Sure, nobody is denying the struggles that previous generations had to go through, but that shouldn’t diminish from what we students have to go through in order to meet the exponentially growing demands of high school life. College applications are all relative – schools select the top students from a pool of applicants from the same time period under relatively the same global circumstances. Thus, those applying during the Great Depression will have ALL faced the challenges of the recession. If that leads to a decline in grades for some people, it will most likely be the same for everybody. There may be a few exceptions, but for the most part, all Americans will have suffered in one way or another from the Great Depression, thus leveling the playing field in college admissions, and in this case, lowering the standards for EVERYBODY during the time period

Aside from the historical references, it is a given fact that our population is growing at an exponential rate. The more people there is in one generation, the greater number there will be in the next generation. However, the size of schools and number of spots offered to admitted students still remains relatively the same. Hence, the demand for those spots are soaring straight up. Come the next few decades, there may even be twice as many applicants then as there were years ago. I don’t think you can say the same thing about the number of spots that colleges can offer. I don’t want to appeal to stats in a logical argument, but the apparent rise in GPA/ SAT scores/ quality of EC’s speaks for itself.

Every challenge a certain generation has to face is all relative – everybody in that generation will be affected. Thus, the negative consequences balance out. Even for our current generation, this generalization is applicable. However, the extraneous variable here is population. As the years go by, more and more people will apply, and the greater the competition.

25

@ARandomGeek‌ (re post #18) and @alexphan202020‌ (re post #23):

“I’m not saying the pressure was not high in previous generations, of course it was, but it seems like our generation is expected to perform above even previous generations.”

You miss my fundamental point and, therefore, you are entirely incorrect.

While I believe many in your generation may well work VERY hard scholastically and feel more pressure regarding college admission than did past generations, that is only one relatively minor element of life. This was – and is – my critical, overriding focus in posts #8 and #12.

You act as if academics – and the whole “college endurance drill” (including ECs, standardized tests, and much more) is the ONLY thing that is important – while, in fact, it is inconsequential compared to vital things that your generation is blessed (and rather indulged) not to be greatly aware of.

In post #12, I listed some very difficult situations youngsters in our nation have had to overcome during the last approximately 80 years. Let me review some of these things in starkly practical terms:


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During the Great Depression, my four grandparents frequently – and actually – did not know where their families’ next meals would come from;
During the Second World War, my parents’ generation – including kids of your age and younger – were killed and horrifically wounded in combat . . . sometime they literally did not expect to be alive in five minutes;
During the Vietnam War, while only in my very early-twenties, I was forced to make actual life and death decisions, not only for myself, but also for about 75 other young men who were engaged in close combat;
During the major economic upheavals of the last 40+ years, I’ll wager your parents (and certainly others of their generation) suffered and worried about losing jobs (including health insurance, retirements, and much more), about adequate saving for your education, about finances for their “senior” years, and quite possibly about costs their parents’ final years.

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Now, @ARandomGeek‌ and @alexphan202020‌, the crucial point here is that many in your generation work very hard to achieve excellent university admission – and that’s great – however, that is also laughably trivial when compared to: (1) not having a roof over one’s head or a meal on the table; (2) not knowing whether one will be killed or seriously wounded; and (3) not being sure if the financial foundation one has long-struggled to built through thrift and hard work will disappear in a few months, due to economic circumstances beyond the individual’s control.

Sincere congratulations to you, and to other in your generation, for your academic dedication; but, don’t delude yourself with the ludicrous idea that such efforts are the most stressful, most daunting, or most challenging that kids have ever faced. They simply are not.

26

Good grief, historical references? I don’t know what your idea is of “historical” but I don’t think that 7 years ago fits that bill. The only difference is that schools increasingly told ALL kids from,elementary on that you are all “special” snowflakes. Hey…let’s give everybody a ribbon for participation! Doesnt matter who won or was the high achiever. My favorite is letting kids play t ball but there is no score, everybody is a winner! Puhleeze, that is not how the real world works and I think so many kids these days have drank the koolaid only to get a dose of.reality about the time you apply to college and find out you really are just a small fish in a really big pond.

Sorry for the tangent, but the last things kids need these days are for the adults around them to blow smoke up their boo hinies, only for them to get a cold dose of.reality.

27

@TopTier‌ I never said that the struggles of modern day students are “the most stressful, most daunting, or most challenging that kids have ever faced.” What I am saying, however, is that getting into college today is harder than it was years, if not decades ago. At least academically, students are expected to achieve at high and unprecedented scholastic levels in order to even be considered by the most selective institutions. That can only be done through hours of studying. I must say, I enjoy reading your points though.

@GA2012MOM‌ I’ve never experienced what you described, and even if so, those external influences don’t necessarily have to define a student. In brief, I don’t think you can generalize that all students are unprepared to handle the cold dose of reality, just because of the few instances where everybody is treated as a winner.

28

@alexphan202020‌ (re post #26): Your posts strongly imply that secondary school academics (and related college admissions) are life’s metric for young peoples’ challenge and difficulty, as well as the “only” important thing. Factually, they are not. My references to the Depression, to World War II, and to Vietnam had NOTHING whatsoever to do with scholastics or with university acceptances. Rather, they focused on truly perilous and daunting matters. You clearly missed that key point in post #23. When a family is without food and shelter or when young men are being killed in firefights, understandably no one cares about GPAs, AP classes, SAT results, or whether MIT favors a particularly type of EC.

I simply urge you to place your efforts, your successes, and (for that matter) your failures in a practical, realistic context, rather than perceiving the world as revolving only around you and what is significant to you (and to many of your peers).

29

I don’t really believe that you can compare the stress people felt during the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam and the Cold War, etc. with what kids feel in school today. There’s basically no comparison and the former situations are clearly much more demanding and stressful.

However, I think there’s a bit of an existential dilemma with what young adults today face. There’s no reason for us to be doing what we’re doing.We’re in this gigantic, endless rat-race where you’re competing with some faceless person for some seat in a class (that ultimately means nothing) so that you can hopefully get a job to pay off that probably needless debt. You’re not working because your family is starving at home and you’re doing what you need to. You’re not trying to survive another day. We’ve gotten past the point (at least in America) where there is any real danger to our lives. Actually, the biggest danger to our lives is caused by first world problems such as a sedentary lifestyle, excess of eating, smoking, drinking, or whatever else causes premature death.

Depression is rampant. There’s nothing that acts as a driving force for why we should achieve high grades or do well. Basically all we hear about are stories of people who worked hard, got into Harvard, and now are unemployed with thousands of dollars of debt. That’s not a story anyone wants to hear. Is there more to that story? Almost definitely, but often times there seems like a lack of a correlation between hard work and success.

In Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he asserts that people need to feel a strong sense of correlation between hard work and success to feel like they have meaning in their work. I think today there’s just an overarching concept that you can be the best and work the hardest but things still might not work out.

I hope I don’t come off as an apologist for my generation. Truthfully, most people I know have disgustingly bad work-ethics. They’re lazy, cheaters, and self-entitled. But you don’t get an entire generation of people like that for no reason. I think it’s more of a symptom of the society we live in today than it is anything else. It’s sad because we live in what could be the greatest time to be alive, but it doesn’t seem to feel that way. Depression and suicide are sky-rocketing, people are becoming more self-centered and unable to think for themselves, and preventable deaths in general have surged tremendously.

30

I think we’ve gone way off track from the OP’s question, but perhaps the message should be for everyone to lighten up a bit. A teenager who’s frequently late for his first classes of the day is not doomed to a life of failure and alienation, folks. Maybe he’ll set Wall Street or Silicon Valley on fire, but - ya know - not everybody can or should do that, and it’s possible to lead a gratifying existence by following different paths. He has stated that he manages to get good grades, and we’ve all agreed that it probably won’t kill his overall college prospects. In all likelihood, his Circadian rhythms will evolve over time, and he’ll manage to be where he has to be when he has to be there. I’m bewildered by the intensity of hostility toward a teenager who’s late to school.

31

I’m sure there are kids these days who worry about not having a roof over their head or not being in a good position financially. Just because most people on CC are upper middle class doesn’t mean everyone is. And back then, there were probably some who didn’t have to worry about these things.

32

@micmatt513‌ (re post #29): Thank you for an excellent post. However, I take respectful exception to one statement that seems to be rather naïve: “We’ve gotten past the point (at least in America) where there is any real danger to our lives.”

I understand it’s not fashionable, especially among most youngsters, to perceive a world where strife and armed hostilities are likely. Obviously, history suggests that war is near-ceaseless and even a superficial review of current global conflicts indicates there’s a “lot of shooting going on.” In addition, I’ll provide only one example of a possibly grave risk to the United States – although there are many others – that seems especially relevant. In the last months, the savagery of ISIS toward individuals of many nationalities and faiths has been breathtaking. At the same time, some suggest the West’s attempts to preclude Iranian development of nuclear weapons has not succeeded. What potentially might happen if a crude, inefficient nuclear – or even a chemical, biological, or radiological – device become controlled by ISIS? Could an American city be targeted and attacked? While no one has definitive answers to such questions, to suggest that “We’ve gotten past the point (at least in America) where there is any real danger to our lives” seems to me to ignore reality – both seriously and dangerously.

33

@Ga2012MOM (post #11) I strongly disagree. During sports season, it is often possible to not come back home until around 8 or 9 pm when you have away games. The workload per day for the average AP class at my school to keep an A is about 1 hour for each class. So if you take 4-6 AP Classes (completely possible for students in the top 1-10%), you can easily be staying up after 1 am- not to mention various extracurricular activities such as Scouting which you need to spend time out of school for.

34

I was reading back through this thread and I just want to extend a personal apology to @GA2012MOM‌. In my previous posts I was extremely disrespectful to you and I deeply regret that. I apologize for my actions, I simply find it difficult as a student to take the position that staying up until early in the morning is the result of poor planning. While I admit that this is undoubtedly the case with many students, and probably is the case more often than not, I believe that there are exceptions. Still, it’s not good either way you spin it, lack of sleep is not very good for anyone’s health :slight_smile:

35

I wanted to amend my previous post (#29). Upon re-reading the OP, I see that he did not even say that he was often late to classes, but rather “to school.” Many high schools have home-room or other non-academic sessions first thing in the morning, and so a student might be casual about arriving on time for those, while still making it to his actual classes. This is precisely the sort of student who may end up thriving in college, provided he takes instructors’ policies seriously.

36

@woogzmama‌ (re post #34): “This is precisely the sort of student who may end up thriving in college”

On the other hand, this is also “precisely the sort of student” who may sleep in until 1000 or 1100 daily – with no parental peskiness to disturb his slumber – and consequentially fail his 0900, 1000, and/or 1100 freshman survey classes, soon being dismissed for academic deficiencies.

Neither you nor I have the slightest idea what the future will hold for the OP, but his self-acknowledged past performance doesn’t suggest that he’ll necessarily attain a stellar attendance record.