Shout-out to the students who posted their 2022 college decision reaction videos to YouTube this year! Highly entertaining and also very enlightening — really shows the Wild West nature of this year’s college admissions cycle.
Thank you for for being vulnerable enough to share these very personal and pivotal moments in your lives (and, for showing us your “ugly cry” too 
). I rooted for you all.
What a roller coaster ride it was.
Best of luck to all of you!
PS. SPOILER ALERT (if you haven’t watched yet)…
I haven’t watched any videos posted by international students yet so I can’t comment on those. But, is it me or did it seem like there were so many kids across the U.S. this year who were either waitlisted or flat out rejected from their “target schools,” only to be admitted to their “dream schools” on Ivy day or to Stanford the following day? Seemed like it was almost every video (though I know it’s not a truly representative sample, by any means).
No, this year isn’t an anomaly; happens every year. It’s a “holistic admissions” effect.
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Really? This is the first year that I watched any of these videos. My first thought was this could not be a representative sample. Seeing students turned down at schools like Northwestern, Northeastern, NYU, Johns Hopkins, or some of the UC’s, etc. but then getting admitted to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Stanford, etc. struck me as odd.
I’ll admit they are a guilty pleasure too. The reactions with friends and families there show what it means to the families, how much pressure there is, and the emotional release an acceptance can provide. Some comments can make you cringe, while often the students take rejection pretty well. Most probably published the results only because they did really well, but they’re still interesting because at the start of the videos they had little idea how it would turn out.
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This is a self selected group of applicants who got into their “dream schools” that are posting these videos. I know many high-stat students this application cycle that were first denied by what should have been match colleges and then also subsequently denied by these “elites”. Naturally, you won’t find their reaction videos online.
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One of the most “real” I saw was a student who got rejected from the Ivy type schools and ended up choosing a school ranked in the 40s over Berkeley (OOS).
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