After the school shooting in Florida this week, I was feeling something I hadn’t felt since 9/11—that writing, teaching, or even thinking about college admissions was somewhere between trivial and offensive in light of recent events.
On the evening of that fateful day in 2001, I couldn’t imagine giving my scheduled talk on college admissions at a local high school later that night. Who even cared about early decision and college essays and the art of application presentation? The world seemed to be falling down around us.
But because parents never get to stop being parents, it was my mom who reminded me that those kids were the future of our country, that it would be up to them to restore the safety and confidence in our country, and that there was nothing wrong with talking to them about college admissions on “a day like today,” as she put it. That’s typical of my mother. She spent 30 years as an English teacher at a public high school, every day of which she approached with the mantra that it was all about the kids. Whatever it took to reach, teach, reassure, and inspire, that’s what you do. For the kids.
And as usual, she was right. Those students showed up that night, and so did I.
There’s no pithy college admissions lesson to be extracted from a tragedy where 17 high school kids go to school one morning and never come home. But there just might be a reminder for all of us to keep things like SAT scores and class rankings and admissions decisions from prestigious colleges in perspective.
The world needs kids who will grow up to be kind, thoughtful human beings more than it does kids who proved they’ll relentlessly prep their way to higher test scores. It needs more kids who can lead responsibly, who will reach out to the person in crisis, and who seek out the thorniest, most challenging problems to solve a lot more than it does a student who plodded their way through community service hours just to add them to their resume.
Transcripts and class rankings and even college applications don’t encapsulate young people. When the adults in their lives reduce kids’ value to numbers, accolades, or which colleges say yes, we’re making their journey to adulthood all about their outcomes, not about the kids themselves. What really matters today and tomorrow is that they’re happy, healthy, good people.
Their future is also our future. And the stakes are too high not to make this time all about them.