Your Teen Is a Product, and College Is the Buyer

The brochure is heavier than it has any right to be. A sharp, chemical gloss smell rises from the page, and I feel a familiar crick in my neck-a tightness that has been my companion for days. My sophomore, Alex, is staring at two columns on a legal pad with an intensity I last saw in a surgeon on a medical drama. Column A: Model UN. Column B: Robotics Club. He isn’t weighing passion or interest. He’s running a cost-benefit analysis on his own soul for an audience of strangers who will hold his future in their hands in 26 months.

He mutters something about the “narrative arc” of his application. He’s 16.

The entire four-year experience of high school has been distorted into a single, frantic, extended audition for a handful of admissions committees. The goal is no longer to become an educated person; it’s to build a “perfectly curated product-the Ideal Applicant of 2026.” A product that is “well-rounded but spiky, passionate but pragmatic, a leader but also a humble team player.” A product that doesn’t exist in nature.

The Architects of Anxiety

I used to blame the colleges, those gilded fortresses of higher learning with their single-digit acceptance rates. I imagined a smoke-filled room where a character I call Stella W.J., the official “Thread Tension Calibrator,” would meet with her board. Her job is to ensure the admissions process is just difficult enough to feel prestigious but just attainable enough to keep the application fees flowing, a stream that brings in a reported $676 per student at some elite schools when you factor in all the services. Stella adjusts the dials, releases a new cryptic essay prompt, and watches the nationwide spike in teenage anxiety with a cool, professional satisfaction. But blaming Stella is too easy. It absolves the rest of us.

We, the parents, are the willing co-conspirators. I confess: I’m the one who suggested the Robotics Club. Alex has never expressed a single flicker of interest in robotics. He likes charcoal drawing and old maps. But I’d read an article, one of 46 I’d bookmarked that month, about how STEM activities provide a “quantitative counterbalance” for humanities-focused students. So I pushed. I saw his transcript not as a record of his intellectual journey, but as a stock portfolio that needed diversification. I turned my son’s life into a spreadsheet, and I’m the one who taught him the formulas.

I hate that I did that. I also know I’d probably do it again tomorrow, because my fear for his future is a more powerful motivator than my belief in a holistic education. The system is designed to make hypocrites of us all.

The Audit of Existence

An audit of a child’s entire existence, where every hobby, every friendship, every summer job is scrutinized for its potential contribution to the final application package. We’ve taught our children that “the value of an activity is not in the doing, but in the documenting.” Did you build houses for the homeless? Great. But did you get a photo with a local official for the club newsletter and can you write a 236-word supplemental essay about how the grain of the wood taught you about systemic poverty?

This reminds me of the old shipwrights. A master shipwright didn’t learn their craft from a book. They spent years feeling the wood, understanding its stresses, learning the language of the grain. Their education was a deep, slow, embodied process of mastery. There was no certificate at the end, just a seaworthy vessel. The proof was in the product, not the paperwork. Today, we’re “building kids who are experts at assembling the paperwork for a ship they’ve never learned how to sail.” They have the blueprint, the certifications, the perfectly worded mission statement, but they’ve never been to sea.

The Cost of Performance

This relentless focus on performance has consequences. We’re seeing unprecedented levels of anxiety, burnout, and depression in teenagers. They are “running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace for four straight years, fueled by caffeine and fear.” They learn to optimize, to calculate, to perform. What they don’t learn is how to sit with a difficult idea, how to be bored, how to pursue a flicker of curiosity down a rabbit hole for no other reason than the sheer joy of the chase. We’ve stripped the slack from the system, and with it, the space required for genuine intellectual growth.

And what is the prize at the end of this grueling race? Admission to a university that, in many cases, will continue the same transactional process. Students arrive on campus, exhausted and hollowed out, only to begin the next four-year audition for consulting firms and investment banks. The product simply moves to the next stage of the supply chain. I’ve spoken with college professors who lament that they have classes full of the most accomplished, credentialed, and intellectually inert students they’ve ever seen.

Recalibrating Success

Breaking this cycle feels impossible, like “trying to stop a tidal wave with a bucket.” The institutional momentum is too great. But the seeds of change don’t start in the admissions offices. They start at our kitchen tables. They start when we ask our kids, “What did you find interesting today?” instead of “What grade did you get?” They start when we give them permission to quit the activity that looks good on paper but deadens their spirit. It involves finding educational frameworks that prioritize this kind of authentic learning. For some, the answer has been to step outside the conventional structure entirely, exploring options like an Accredited Online K12 School where the curriculum can be tailored to a student’s actual interests, not just the perceived preferences of an admissions officer.

It’s about recalibrating our own definition of success. The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t decry the system while simultaneously doing everything in our power to game it for our own children. At some point, we have to be willing to accept a “less ‘prestigious’ outcome in exchange for a more intact child.” It’s a terrifying trade-off, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that a specific set of 16 elite college logos are the only valid tickets to a successful life.

But that’s a lie. “It’s a brilliant marketing campaign, but it’s a lie.”

I once met a man who was a master stonemason. He never went to college. He spent his days listening to rock and carving gargoyles for cathedrals. He was one of the most intellectually curious and fulfilled people I have ever known.

The current high school environment actively works against this discovery. It demands they construct a facade before they’ve even laid the foundation. We need to give them back their time, their curiosity, their right to be 16 and utterly, gloriously uncertain.