High cost of college starts long before students get in

As the frenzied admissions season winds to a close, many students finally know where they will be attending college in the fall.

But there remains a troubling question: How much damage was done along the way?

This year's crop of applicants faced an unusually grueling admissions process. A demographic bubble has produced the largest group of graduating seniors in history, and they now are facing rejection by colleges at record rates — more than 90 percent at Harvard and Yale, for example.

There will be more disappointment this week as the May 1 admissions deadline passes and thousands who were on waiting lists learn that there are no spots left for them. And today's high-school sophomores and juniors may face worse odds. After a 15-year climb, the number of high-school graduates still hasn't peaked — that is expected to happen within the next two years.

"The college-admissions process is an initiation rite into adulthood," says Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and an author of books on teenage stress. "But if success is defined very narrowly, such as a fat envelope from a specific college, then many kids end up going through it and feeling like a failure."

Students complain about a lack of sleep, stomach pain and headaches, but doctors and educators also worry that stress tied to academic achievement can lead to depression, eating disorders and other mental-health problems.

"There are some kids who can handle it," says Denise Pope, a Stanford University educator and author of "Doing School," a book about stress and academics. "But some of these kids have had college on the brain since sixth or seventh grade or even earlier. When you have that kind of stress over that kind of time, that's where it starts to worry us."

At the start of the admissions season, Austin Grogin, 18, from Bellaire High School near Houston, applied to 12 colleges. He had strong test scores and an internship, he had organized a major breast-cancer fundraiser at his school and he hoped to attend Emory University in Atlanta. "I had countless stomachaches and headaches," Grogin says.

By April, he was checking online at least twice a day, and was stunned when Emory didn't accept him.

"At first I refreshed the page to make sure it wasn't a mistake," he said. When the official rejection letter arrived in the mail, he burned it.

However, he is looking forward to attending his second choice, the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At Princeton High School in New Jersey, Patti Lieberman, a guidance counselor, says she emphasizes stories of real students who won better opportunities — like research grants and White House internships — after going to slightly less-competitive schools.

"We try to teach them, 'Bloom where you are planted,' " she says.