Dealing with Disappointing College Admissions. What Helps?

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Reena Ninan:
Episode 210, Dealing with Disappointing College Admissions. What Helps?
It’s a part of the year, I feel it. It’s still a little cold, but spring is around the corner. I’ve got my fake plastic flowers in the background here to keep me upbeat, but it’s also the time of year when people are dealing with college acceptances and rejections.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
For high school seniors. This is spicy business time. No question. No question.

Reena Ninan:
So walk us through what the moment is now for parents who aren’t going through it right now mid-March.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Kids can be in a lot of different places at this point in time. Some kids applied early, it was resolved one way or another early. It could be December, January, that all got sorted. Other kids, lots of kids are still waiting to hear about to hear or have some information, are waiting for more information. And it’s not resolved for many families. Many families are at the point where they’re going to resolve it in the next couple months and they’re waiting to hear back from schools and it’s, Reena, having been through this as a parent, it’s so hard. It is just so hard. And I had worked caring for families, caring for families through this process for literally two and a half decades before I went through it myself and even still I was like, oh my gosh, this is so much more stressful than I ever dreamed it could be.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah.
I’m dreading it. I’ve got middle schoolers, but I’m already dreading it. And I have to say part of the reason we did this was we got such great feedback in our inbox emails from parents who loved our episode on October 1st, 2024, episode 187, Getting Into College with Rick Clark. He was awesome.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
He was awesome. So for families who are coming to this wherever you are, if your kid is not a senior and you are just starting to wrap your head around the college process or trying to wrap your head around the college process this episode and also that fantastic episode from October with Rick, we’ll give families a lot to go on.

Reena Ninan:
But what we wanted to dive into today, and we’ve got two different letters, we’re going to take one before the break and one after is our focus on disappointment with colleges. It’s crazy to me the percentage of acceptance rate at some of these schools.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And if it goes the way you want it to go or your kid wants it to go, you don’t need our help.

Reena Ninan:
That’s right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s when things don’t pan out as hoped.

Reena Ninan:
That you need the help.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. I’m going to go ahead and read you this letter. It says, Dear Dr. Lisa, thanks for your insightful podcast. My son and some of his best friends have applied to the same very selective reach colleges. They all know the chances are slim for admission. What do you advise for helping them navigate the new terrain? If one or more gets accepted at these schools when others don’t, how can they preserve their friendship and sanity through it? Thank you. I know so many parents are dealing with this, but I hate that the chances are slim of getting in. Is that really true when you’re looking at landscape across America?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
For the reach colleges, the ones that this person’s talking about? Yes, and Rick talked about this, and it’s worth revisiting that there probably 20 schools that people talk about a lot where the admissions rates can be like 4%, which means 96% of kids are getting turned down and those admissions officers will tell you 98% of the kids they’re turning down are completely qualified. For the kids that this writer is asking about. Yeah, I mean these are longshot and “longshot” actually in some ways doesn’t even do justice. These are moonshots, right? I mean, these are very, very hard schools to get into.

Reena Ninan:
Wow. I’m just curious, what do you say if your kid doesn’t get in and one or even more of his friends do, what’s the best way to be supportive?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, this is going to stink and you know that I always fall back on. Just start with empathy. Just be like, oh buddy, that stinks. I’m sorry. The other thing that we have to or start to actually become very aware of when our kids are applying to college and then when the admissions results are coming in, the kids know each other really, really well. They’ve been in school together for a long time. They know the character of their classmates, they know the work ethics of their classmates. And I will tell you, you see in the spring with college admissions, a great blooming of cynicism among high school seniors because a lot of times they’re like, wait, they took that kid. So it may not even be their friend, but they’re like, that kid’s a joker. She’s always phoning it in. It doesn’t make sense to me that that kid got in and I did not get in.

Reena Ninan:
So what do you say to that, Lisa? Because it’s true. I mean, first off, it doesn’t end. It happens in the corporate and adult world too, right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, absolutely. So coming to this as adults who are pretty far away from this process in our own lives, I think it’s helpful to be prepared for the fact that kids aren’t just like, oh gosh, you got in and I didn’t. Doing that against a backdrop of a lot of information that can inform how they feel about who got in and where.
And I think the reality, if I’m going to channel Rick Clark, I think the reality is who knows what the colleges are looking for. Maybe they needed a rower from Minnesota and so they took a rower from Minnesota, even though all that rower’s classmates were really, really, you took that kid? And so I think it can be part of a bigger and critically important conversation exactly for families like this, which is it comes to a point where this is a very, I won’t go so far as to say random process, but I’m pushing up against random process.

Reena Ninan:
Really?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It comes to a point where there’s a huge, huge percentage of the process that is out of all of the kids’ control, especially if they’re applying to these highly, highly selective schools. One of the things that this family can do that all families should do, if their kids are looking at schools like this, they should get out ahead of these questions about, I’m going to use finger quotes deserving kids get in. Or if you do all the right things, you’re going to get in. And they should just say, listen, colleges are working with their own boxes. They’re trying to check and we don’t know what those are. You can position yourself to be a viable applicant, but beyond that, you need to let it go. You need to let it go. These admissions rates are so vanishingly small that a very sort of opaque process takes over. And if you get in, frankly you worked hard and got lucky, and if you don’t get in, you worked hard and you didn’t get lucky.

Reena Ninan:
I feel far less anxiety hearing you say that because I think on students as they’re applying the pressure’s like, what did I do wrong that I didn’t get in? And that’s not the case, but we don’t have those conversations with our kids. Look, it’s out of our hands. And it’s not that you’re a bad kid or not a good kid or didn’t do enough.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That if you’re going to apply to these very, very tiny admission schools, that’s going to happen. And the other thing, Reena, that informs this has changed very dramatically in a generation.
I went to Yale. I would never get into Yale today, no question. No question. I know what I did in high school and when my older daughter was applying to colleges, she is a far better person than I will ever be and also a far better student than I was. And I said to her, apply to Yale. Don’t apply to Yale and then we’re going to go buy you a lottery ticket. It is a completely different ball game than when I lucked my way into that school.

Reena Ninan:
Do you think saying that took the pressure off of her? How’d she respond when you said that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. She’s like, I’m not applying. I’m like, that’s fine, that’s fine. Don’t do this to yourself if you don’t want to. And so I think it’s just a place we want to be when kids are applying to schools like this, which is encouraging, supportive, and totally realistic about the limits of their control.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, what about the reverse? What do you do if your child gets into the right college that they wanted but their friends don’t make it?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. Okay. So at home you can celebrate freely, right? And I think at home you shouldn’t say, yeah, you got lucky, right? I mean, clearly kids have worked very, very hard to even make this a possibility. And so I think at home you can just say, fantastic, we’re thrilled for you. Good work. And leave it at that. I think then the question about coaching the kid about how they go back to school. So this letter writer obviously is so foresight, so much foresight, so much empathic approach to this. My hunch is that her kids are really empathic kid too, but it might be worth saying, how do you want to handle this at school? See what the kid comes up with. Kids come up with stuff that is better than we would’ve thought of. Good point. And if the kid’s kind of stuck, you could say, well, what about some version of what we all worked really hard? And it does come to a place where there’s a randomness to how they make these decisions. It broke my way that we all know I’m not a better student than the rest of you. I mean, there can be graciousness in this. There’s nothing to be gained by that kid at that point about flexing on it. They got what they wanted they got.

Reena Ninan:
But I feel like when teens are very emotional and especially when things don’t go their way, even with their good friends, things can turn. So I just like, what do I say to my kid to prepare them If I’ve got my shining moment that I’ve been working hard and I know we’ve all been working hard, but is there something that softens the blow a little less for the other kids?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think you can soften the blow for the other kids. I mean, I think that that’s just like they have to find their way through it. I think that this is advice I’ve given before. It’s highly clinically sophisticated. You say to your kid, just don’t be weird about it. So not so clinically sophisticated love, but just be kind, warm. Don’t make it a bigger thing than it has to be. Interactions. Those are dances. And so if your kid goes in weird about it, then their friend who maybe didn’t feel weird about, it’s going to feel weird about it. So just really encouraging kids. Just be gracious, be kind. Imagine what it must feel like from their side. You got what you wanted. We can celebrate that at home all day long, but these are your good friends and you want to be good to them.

Reena Ninan:
There’s a whole other component to this because from when we got college acceptance letters, which is online and the social component of the celebrations and this, and it can be so isolating too. What’s your advice with giving kids advice on how to deal with college rejection or acceptance online?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So this was something that I was surprised to see as a parent and felt ambivalent about as a parent when my daughter went through the process a few years ago where kids either post very like, yay, I got into what’s it? What’s it? Or in a loving and well-meaning way, their friends post on their behalf like celebrating one another’s admissions. This feels great, of course for the kid who got what they wanted. I’m not saying we tell kids not to do that. I’m not saying kids shouldn’t do that, but I do want families to be aware that that is in the landscape of things. And that might be a time where we say to a kid, you didn’t get what you wanted. Sometimes when things have gone, and I know there’s going to be a lot on social media that I don’t want to see, that’s when I take a break.
Do you want to take a break? You don’t have to look at all that if you don’t want to. They don’t. They don’t have to look at it if they don’t want to. And the other thing I will say, Reena, as we’re talking it through, for the kid who didn’t get in and who’s watching all their friends get in or feels like it feels like everybody else got in, which it’s very rarely that black and white, but if it feels like that, I think let them be sad, be really supportive, and then probably not all in one conversation you can come back around and say, I’m really proud of you for all that you’ve done. I also got to tell you, I’m so proud of you for finding a way to be gracious to be a good sport at a time when I know you’re hurting and your friend got something you wanted, and that’s really, really impressive. And not everybody could do that.

Reena Ninan:
Why is that important to say that to them in that moment?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Because it is hard. It is hard. I think kids can be disinclined to do it. They can be sort of sour grapes and salty, and while we understand where that behavior is coming from, I will say I don’t think that’s actually what we ideally want from our kids. As parents and caregivers, we want them to be their better selves even when they don’t get what they wanted or worked for. And so I think sometimes we can reinforce the behavior we’re looking for by praising it and especially when a kid has to do something extremely hard, whether it’s working for a teacher they can’t stand or being gracious with a classmate who got the thing they wanted. I think those are especially the moments when kids need us to say, I see what you’re doing. It is very impressive and it is not easy and I’m very proud of you for doing it.

Reena Ninan:
In general, do you find that friendships break up over this, that there’s a rift? How do you deal with that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it takes a lot of different paths. I think a lot of what starts to happen is that kids get to college and that shapes their future friendships. There’s some friendships that endure from high school, some friendships that don’t. It has not for me, seemed to be tied to where kids landed.

Reena Ninan:
So just because in general they might go through a rough patch. It’s not necessarily a friendship deal breaker you found can move past this at all even though it’s so painful.
I guess the last thing I want to ask you, how do you deal with your sanity for your kids and yourself in this process? Right? Gosh, you went through it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is hard. It is hard. Okay, so it’s time limited. The other thing, and I’m actually going to quote Rick Clark, he said something so helpful. He was like, do not talk to other families in your cohort. Everybody has lost their minds. He said, talk to families a year ahead of you, two years ahead of you because they will consistently tell you, yeah, it did not go the way my kid wanted. Yeah, my kid ended up at a school that she was never even thinking about and it’s fantastic and she’s happy and he is having a great time. So I would say if you want to keep your sanity as a parent or caregiver through this, talk to families who are two or three steps ahead. Colleges are wonderful places, Reena, they are wonderful places. That is true of all of them, whether they have some super shiny name or not. And once the reality of the college sets in where your kid goes, it’s almost always if the kid will let it be a good reality.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. Also, I will tell you I am amazed at 45 looking at the colleges many people go to who are in boardrooms and that quite frankly they’ve risen to incredible positions. And they didn’t do the Ivy Leagues.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They didn’t do the Ivy Leagues, which is to say one more thing. One more thing that I always tell high school seniors when I am talking with them about college. I’m like, listen, once you get to about age 25, nobody knows where you went to college anymore unless you’re bringing it up.
That what you did in college, what you made of the opportunity that will endure. But where you went starts to fade. It really starts to fade. And you know that from experience. I often am saying this in school settings where I will point to the teachers in the room and say, your teachers who spend all day every day with each other and know each other well and like each other a lot, they dunno where they each went to college and the teachers will nod and the kids are shocked. It’s really helpful to give kids this perspective because where you sit as a high school senior is this is everything where I go to college will be tattooed somehow on my face for the rest of my life and I just got a tattoo I don’t want. Reassure them that is what it is for the time that it lasts and then they can decide what happens with it after that.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, I want to read this next letter that we got about that disappointment. Hello, Dr. Lisa and Reena. I had a very disheartened 18-year-old daughter that didn’t get her first choice college. She was hoping to go to a big city but is now left with options that keep her in small cities here in her home state where she doesn’t have much in common with most of the student body and is refusing to consider those options. She’s feeling so down as she watches her friends in town get so excited about their college admissions. As a mom, I’m very sad. I just don’t know how to cheer her up and help her get past this disappointment, be open to the options she has and to move on. Nothing I say seems to help. What do I do with gratitude?
Where does this mom start? How do you help? What does she need to know?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay, so here’s what’s not going to be helpful. I’m going to Monday morning quarterback how the decisions were made about where this kid applied and then we’re going to go to what can help this family now, but knowing that so many of our listeners are entering this process, not all the way through it, I think there’s a lot in this letter that is educational about how to do it. So what it sounds like just from way the letter is written is that there was one school the kid was hoping to go to and then the rest she really didn’t want to go to.

Reena Ninan:
That’s right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
This is not how I think most college guidance people would tell you to do this because it ends up with outcomes like this where if then you don’t get the one, then you hate the whole thing. I think good general guidance is kids should apply to multiple schools they truly want to go to, and they should probably do this at various levels of admissions intensity.
So intensity or tightness, how hard admissions is because what you want is for the kid to have options. Either they get into one of their reach schools that they wanted to go to, that’s easy, or they don’t get into any of their reach schools, but they go down to the next tier or a tier that is more viable for them and they have two or three choices that are actually schools they legitimately want to go to. You want to build your admissions applications with the understanding that there’s no guarantees about any of this and it feels really lousy to not get in where you really super hope to go. But even worse than that is feeling like then you have no choices. To back into something

Reena Ninan:
She feels backed into it and not only backed in, she’s like, I’m not going. I don’t want to go.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No.

Reena Ninan:
So how should this family proceed?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay, so they have a few options at this point. One option is go look at the school she got into because sometimes, and I think there’s lots of ways to do this and I think this can be a very good way. Sometimes kids will wait until they get in places to go look at them. And especially when budgets are tight and traveling to schools is expensive. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do because why go visit a school that may turn you down where if you haven’t gotten into it, so one thing that they could do as a half step is just be like, let’s just go look at the schools because this kid also has this idea. No one on those campuses will be like me. Right? That’s also in the letter. Okay, these are big schools are big, big enough. One easy solution if it happened to work is they take a drive. It sounds like these are all in state schools and they go look and the kid’s like, oh, oh, this is more viable than I thought it was. Right? That would be easy.

Reena Ninan:
So let’s say you’ve tried the option of revisiting. What else works?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Another option you could do is to say, why don’t you go in and look into transferring? And this can sometimes dislodge a moment like this for a kid. Like, okay, so I’m not stuck wherever I start. And there’s something kind of neat that happens around transferring, which is that sometimes kids are like, I don’t want to be at this school. I’m definitely transferring. But there’s a long window between when you apply to transfer and when you get your results. And I’ve known plenty of kids who are like, oh, actually I got in the end of the place I wanted to go, but now I want to stay here so that can happen. There is a legitimate concern that I cannot fix that a kid who’s going to a school with every intention of transferring out of that school is never going to invest meaningfully in that school. That is a real possibility. The rationale for going would be that she gets to go with her cohort. And if that means a huge amount to kids, sometimes it does. All my friends are going to college. I am not going to be the one who stayed here.
That would be the solution to that problem. But it’s not a perfect solution to that problem. If the kid is like, I’m going to go barely unpack at that school because I’m hoping to be out of there before too long.

Reena Ninan:
Do you think there’s ever an option where you force a kid to go? Because it’s tricky, right? They’re not in kindergarten, they’re 18 now.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think you force teenagers to do basically next to anything because by their nature they don’t like being forced to do things and by their nature they will. I have clinically seen kids blow stuff up that they actually might’ve wanted just because they felt forced into it. So I would not be a big fan of forcing, which opens the other option, which is like take a year. Take a year.

Reena Ninan:
So you suggest a gap year could be good.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m the world’s biggest fan of gap years.

Reena Ninan:
I will tell you I wasn’t until covid happened and then now you’ve helped me. We’ve had so many guests and experts at why this could be great for some kids, but I also worry they love the gap year so much they don’t come back, which is a worry many parents have.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, okay. But first of all, I think that’s percentage wise low for kids who are, if they’ve applied to college once and they meant to go and they’re really disappointed they didn’t get in, I think your odds are pretty good. That kid will go back to college. I also think there’s an important question to raise of if a kid doesn’t want to go to college and is so heavily invested in what they’re doing and they’re growing and thriving, we assume college is necessary for every single kid. That’s an assumption that can be challenged.

Reena Ninan:
Very true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
We don’t need to, the kids also enlist kids also go into the workforce. I mean, there’s lots of ways that this can play out to lead to healthy thriving adulthood. So I think we have to be careful of assuming that that has to happen.
Gap years, help kids grow, help kids take better advantage of college when they go there, can help a kid like this go somewhere they really mean to be. The disadvantages are feeling out a step with one’s cohort. Kids don’t like that. Sometimes. There can also be the issue of who’s going to support the kid through applying again. And one thing I want our listeners to know is that at a lot of high schools, your college counselor is still your college counselor even after you’ve graduated. And they will work with your kid on admissions even if your kid is an alum of the school.

Reena Ninan:
So resources, this is not unchartered territory.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Not unchartered.
And I can’t say every high school will offer this as a service because clearly if you’ve got a whole new cohort of kids they’re trying to care for, but I don’t want parents to feel like, but we got in with the support of your school or with the support of your guidance counselor and now we don’t have it. So you have to go this year. That’s not necessarily true for all families.

Reena Ninan:
So what if you choose a gap year to stay back? Isn’t it difficult if you see your friends are off to college and then you’re not going off to college? How do you deal with that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, it feels bad. Yeah.
It just feels bad. And especially it feels bad, if it wasn’t your plan, right? Exactly. Right. I mean this kid, it wouldn’t have been her plan to do that, and she may feel like, oh man, everybody’s getting their dreams come true and I’m stuck here in my family’s house. This is really where we get to something. We’ve talked about that. I love how themes come back. Themes come back, helping without fixing. We can’t fix this. The kid’s going to be maybe really sad about it. That doesn’t mean we can’t hope. That doesn’t mean that we can’t say, oh yeah, this must feel really crummy to see your friends doing the things you wanted to do. You’ll do them soon, but you’re having the right reaction, the feeling you’re having makes sense. Our willingness to just sit with a kid in that kind of discomfort, I mean, this is not life or death, it’s just unpleasant. That goes so far in helping kids both withstand it and feel that they can withstand it.

Reena Ninan:
Time, Lisa time is what you’ve made me realize is having that time with your kids. Sometimes they come up with their own understanding and battle plan of how to proceed forward. That surprises you, but I think investing in that and having those conversations make a difference.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely. And there’s something else that I just want to touch on here, and I really saw this differently after going through the process. You can’t help but be caught up in this as a parent that we’re appropriately focusing on this girl’s disappointment and reaction, but you’re going to feel down about it too. You’re going to feel sad. Before I went through this as a parent, I was like, well, that’s the parent’s narcissistic investment in it, right? That’s the parent just getting their own wishes and wants mixed up with their kids. I was unfair about it going through it. I was like, oh, I wanted my kid to have what she wanted. I want my kid to be happy. I love her and I want her to have what she wants. And so I was really invested in the outcome. I mean, not because I cared where she went to college, but because I wanted her to have what she wanted. And so I just hope as families go through this and feel themselves pulled in. I will say, frankly to me, quite unexpected ways. Yeah. It’s because we love our kids and so be really good to yourself. Get your own support on your own terms so that you can be there for your kid. However this shakes out.

Reena Ninan:
I’ll tell you, I feel massive anxiety. I’ve got an eighth grader and a seventh grader, but there’s something about this process and us doing podcasts on this every year since Covid started, just how the system has changed so much and it’s definitely not the same system when we were applying decades ago.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
No. It’s a different world. Different world.

Reena Ninan:
What do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, one of the things that hasn’t come up is that there’s actually two rounds of disappointment that some kids deal with, which is they can maybe not get into the schools they were hoping for. There are other kids who get into the schools they’re hoping for, but they don’t get the money they were hoping for. One of the things a lot of families are surprised by is how out of sync the admissions process from the financial support process can be, and also how disappointing how much support schools can offer can be. So as we talk about college disappointment and admissions disappointments, that’s another variable that families want to be mindful of. I will tell you, we did a fabulous episode in season one with Ron Lieber about paying for college. So families find themselves in that spot. Highly recommend that episode. We’ll put it in the show notes, but if we’re going to talk about disappointment, we have to talk about it, not just with admissions questions, but also with financial questions.

Reena Ninan:
Well, thank you, Lisa. This is really helpful to talk about. These are things that I wasn’t aware of and to know what it’s like in the process and also good luck to all the families out there. It’s such a difficult time, but I feel like everybody ends up where they’re meant to be. I really do.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It almost always works out Reena, and it almost always works out well.

Reena Ninan:
Next week, Lisa, we’re going to talk about how do I parent with an ex who doesn’t really share my values? I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.