As the world becomes increasingly populated, it simultaneously becomes increasingly competitive. The college admissions process is a kind of funnel for this competitiveness, a checkpoint through which only a certain few may pass.
The desire for a college degree, particularly an American college degree, is clearest in countries such as China, where the population boom has created a new degree of competition as parents begin investing time and resources into their children’s college degrees from birth. Kids have less and less leisure time and the cost of college preparation is rising rapidly.
Often, early college investments come in the form of elite, international high schools that follow either the American system or the International Baccalaureate system. These schools, set up primarily for Western children whose parents have jobs abroad, are contributing to an international global elite with which hardly any local students can compete when the time comes.
These children’s parents start earlier and earlier to ensure their children’s futures are inundated with opportunity, sending them to various locales for school or for travel—the perfect Common App material. There is tremendous pressure to be someone extraordinary, someone who has made a difference in the world by age 18. If you haven’t spent time building houses in Thailand or feeding children in Africa, it seems as though you have not accomplished much yet.
There is a worrisome trend that volunteering is becoming something that people do not because of a genuine desire to somehow contribute something to the world, but for the personal gain it can bring—in short, for another line on your resume.
The disparity between selfish and selfless service is best exemplified in the difference between anonymous donations and sponsorships. The former has no social reward and so maintains a greater degree of authenticity. However, sponsorships, whether private or corporate, are inherently structured to give the donor some kind of reward, whether it be publicity or some other perk.
There is the stereotypical idea of some upper-middle-class, suburban white kid going to Africa to help hungry children and then posting all the amazing pictures on Facebook. This kind of “volun-tourism,” which rarely helps alleviate the situation in the long-term, perpetuates the idea of the “white savior,” which is a problematic notion that, nevertheless, has survived into the twenty-first century and is even found in the endeavors of today’s youth, namely us a few years ago when applying to college.
All of this is not to say that volunteers should stop doing all the work that they are doing, which of course has had a positive impact on the world. There are certainly other benefits to this “volun-tourism” pre-college application style of making a difference. For one, it is a positive thing in and of itself, no matter how little it actually accomplishes, and secondly, it opens many people’s eyes to real issues that people around the world are facing. However, perhaps volunteering and “making the world a better place” should be seen as less of a public endeavor with tangible rewards for the volunteer (like photo ops, public recognition, and additional resume-building), but as more of an internal experience.
Our society places a lot of value on concrete achievements, like becoming a CEO, starting your own company, helping to eliminate hunger in Africa, or getting accepted to an Ivy League school. This view, while it has driven and still drives a lot of the competition, innovation, and change that we see in the world today, also has its costs–one of which may be a depreciation of authenticity.
What would the world look like if we harnessed all of the energy directed towards achieving public recognition and turned it instead into an even more efficient system of positive change? Maybe there would be more prosperity at home and domestic issues would not be swept under the rug in exchange for more glamorous projects. Maybe people would be more likely to focus on the small things, giving themselves every day to spreading optimism and making change right in front of their noses.
