For many high-achieving high school students, high school is nonstop pressure. From AP classes, clubs, internships, and volunteer hours, high-achieving high school students’ schedules are packed to the brim. This highly packed schedule that these students tend to have is often referred to as “college maxxing.” This term captures every decision that high-achieving students make to improve their chances of getting into a top-tier college. Every move they make is to impress college admission officers.
Senior Vrayas Pila expressed his desire to get into a top-tier school. “I feel like everything I do has to help me get into a really good school,” Pila said. “I sometimes wonder how it would be if I didn’t treat high school like a business and instead really enjoyed my four years here at PV,” Pila expressed. As college admissions rates continue to decline year after year, students have to find unique ways to stand out to college admissions.
With an increasing number of students taking the ACT and SAT, extracurriculars and academic rigor have become more important than ever in college admissions. Because of this, extracurriculars are starting to feel less meaningful.
More and more high school students are making clubs and non-profits just to put them on their college resumes. These clubs and non-profits that high schoolers are founding and creating are tending to become non-existent as soon as these kids go to college. The true meaning these non-profits and clubs are being founded for are starting to be forgotten.
Junior Shuban Nanisetty voiced his opinions on extracurriculars becoming less and less meaningful. “I think that extracurriculars that are done just for the college app are meaningless. I think that extracurriculars should be done for the true meaning they have for the community or for the school,” said Nanisetty.
As for the average high school student, college maxxing will increase the amount of stress in their lives. Students will always compare themselves to others, wondering if they will ever achieve anything in their time in high school and in the foreseeable future. While college maxxing can make students very focused on what they want to achieve, it increases stress among the student body.
Although college maxxing is used as a way to get into top-tier colleges, efforts put into extracurriculars and academics should not just be done for the college application. They should be completed for the personal contentment of the one doing the extracurricular. With “CollegeMaxxing,” everything is to impress admissions officers, and students will live and potentially die by the ideology of “CollegeMaxxing” to go to a great college and pave a better future for themselves.
