With the Bangladeshi trend of getting on a flight as soon as you’re done with grade 12 to Canada, Europe, or the States for further studies, impressionable high schoolers would do anything to get into the top dogs of the university world that dominate the QS World Ranking annually as efficiently as they fulfill one’s social validation requirements daily.
Entry requirements delve further beyond academics: The tedious paperwork tests your endurance while introspective essays challenge your bandwidth and interpersonal growth. Every aspect of your individuality is weighed on a scale and your worth in this world is officially declared with an acceptance or a rejection by Ivy Leagues and other top universities.
And before you know it, hobbies that you would formerly like to partake in for mere fun and self-fulfillment suddenly turn into parameters that appraise your competence. The drive to make every endeavour a productive competition gets to you and you no longer find fulfillment in participating in such activities until it brings a sort of tangible approval.
Desperate to stay in the game, you grab onto whatever might help your application stand out and disgorge all over the “extra-curriculars” section with hours of perfunctory community service and voluntary work that mean nothing to you other than a free ticket to a university abroad.
Having shown no interest or participation in social causes throughout your high school life, you decide to join youth organizations in grade 12 or, better yet, create one right before your application deadlines. Understandably, the children in need of winter clothes and mental support could wait for all these years, but one’s university application cannot.
Forced to make “something” out of yourself, you find it beneficial to volunteer for community service and cultural events and milk your interpersonal development under the implied “what sets you apart?” section and diversity essay, knowing well that none of these extra-curricular activities are going to follow you into adulthood.
By the end of the essay section, you forget the real purpose behind giving back to the community or appreciating one’s culture but learn to successfully commercialize and advertise each experience you had until it lost its meaning.
It is unfair to criticize young adults who wouldn’t know any better than to run on the hamster wheel they are placed on. What is even more atrocious is the system that is built around perfunctory activism that no longer allows children to be children. Society’s obsession with top-ranking universities and the subsequent pressure on students to meet such expectations by excelling in academics as well as doing something remarkable in the extra-curricular fields at the age of seventeen and eighteen do not account for the lack of proper, beneficial grooming from a young age and opportunities needed to hone one’s skills for such personal growth in this country.
It is widely overlooked how unlikely it is for a student from a non-caucasian background with no significant wealth or connections to get accepted into one of these top-ranked universities, while a candidate, almost always caucasian, with an alumnus family member, gets in just as easily under the “legacy student” privilege.
When students are coerced into running a race they cannot win, it demotivates them from putting in the effort. When children are forced to help the community for ulterior motives, they are taught to seek profit in altruistic work.
In the process of encouraging students to be superficial and capitalize on their ability to make the world a better place, by the end of the college application process, all that is left of a candidate is a commodified bundle of meat and electricity whose only goal in life is to get into the Ivy League.
Sahiba Tasnia Tanushree works at the Dhaka Tribune.
