Where is the line between taking a student’s college planning seriously, and taking it too seriously? One way to find that balance is to look for the effective dose.
In pharmacology, the effective does of a medicine is the dose or amount needed to produce the desired effect. If you’ve got a headache, you’ll need to take an effective dose of Aspirin before you’ll feel any relief. Not taking enough will be akin (from a pain-relief standpoint) to not taking any at all. But there’s also a certain point at which raising the dose no longer increases the effect. Taking 10 Aspirin doesn’t bring you ten times the relief and might even have negative health effects. At a high enough dose, pretty much any substance can be unhealthy or even dangerous. Responsible medicine recommends the dose that will help without hurting.
Clearly, a student’s education and future deserve to be taken seriously. But when that focus stops paying back benefits and starts producing unhealthy side-effects, you’ve exceeded the effective dose.
A student who challenges herself and studies hard is within the effective dose. A student who is so overworked that she hasn’t slept more than four hours a night in the last semester is exceeding it.
Some prep for the SAT or ACT? A good dose. Becoming a professional test-prepper, spending more time with a tutor than you do with your homework or your jazz band or your family? Now you’re exceeding it. You won’t get a corresponding leap in scores, and you’re also likely damaging your college admissions health by sacrificing grades, activities, and sanity.
A student who asks a teacher for help is within the healthy dose. A parent who wages academic war with the counseling office to raise their student’s chemistry grade from a B to an A is exceeding the dose.
Playing baseball because a student likes being on the team even though he doesn’t get a lot of playing time is a healthy dose of pre-college activities. Plodding ahead through an activity a student hates for fear that quitting will reflect negatively on a college application is an over-dose of college planning and likely won’t be effective.
A student who believes she’s found her dream college, who uses her desire to attend as motivation to succeed in high school, that’s a healthy dose. But if she starts believing that the only way she’ll ever be happy is to attend this one school, if she spends her high school years anxiously trying to satisfy a (non-existent) magic formula for admission, especially in pursuit of a school that denies most of its applicants, she’ll be exceeding the recommended dosage.
Remember, the effective dose won’t always be pleasant. Physical therapy can sometimes be painful for the patient, and a student who wants to succeed might frequently need to do things he or she doesn’t necessarily want to do.
But done right, an effective dose of college planning should produce healthy benefits—learning, growth, increased confidence, enjoyment, and an excitement about college.
Is your current college planning producing more harm than benefit—anxiety, fear, loss of confidence, even dread? The best cure might be to change your dosage.