Students in the Irvine area are focusing on improving their college applications over relaxing over the summer. This is most likely because of the fierce competition to get into college. Acceptance rates of all the top colleges in the U.S. have generally all risen due to most jobs requiring college degrees and also some require a masters or degree in an area of learning.

Because the competition for getting into college, the students must work harder and harder to get into college. Due to this rise in competition, the students of the Irvine community must sacrifice their summers to take required courses, prepare for their ACT’s/ SAT’s, take summer classes, fill their volunteer hours and much more.

A student from Northwood Highschool is taking Blended Online Health, competing and practicing piano and violin, Swimming and taking a Speech and Debate class. This is not during just one month either, they constantly are busy and prevented from relaxing during this precious time. What is even scarier is that this is a rising freshman. They want to attend Cornell University which currently ranks in twentieth in the top 100 colleges in the U.S. They have a slim acceptance rate of 14%. Out of 44,966 applicants, only 6,277 applicants make it. He says that the main reason he is doing all of these things this summer than later summers is “So I don’t have to do it later”. His plan is to start his activities early and finish them early as well, so that he has more time to focus on school when school gets harder during Junior and Senior year.

In the U.S. there are 50.7 million students from public schools alone (private school student population is disclosed) and there are about 4,267 college institutes. With about 65.9 percent of students going to college, that means that there are about 3,411,300 students going to college. That means that the average student population per school being 7830 students. The competition to get into a good college is harder than ever before. Some schools end up having to take more than 10,000 students. Also, the competition to get a good job is also fiercer. More than 75% of jobs require a college degree.

The high school students of Irvine are forced to sacrifice their valuable summer rest period in and in return add more work onto their load to beef up their college applications in order to be successful later on. The society in Irvine is pushing kids to rid of their break period to knock other kids out of the competition. This competitive environment is not good for anyone, but there is no real solution that would be fair to everyone.

<Josh Kim St. Margaret’s Episcopal 10th Grade>