Avoid College For As Long As You Can
A few days ago, in response to a question from juliaallison, I said that high school students should not to go to college, at least not right away. One question a few young kids asked me was whether or not putting off college would hurt their chances for admission.
To the contrary, delaying college will actually improve your chance to get admitted to more competitive schools. You’ll have shown yourself to be an independent person. You’ll stick out from the crowd. You’ve made yourself into a nontraditional student, which is a prized category by admissions officers. Forget all that stuff they tell you about sports, volunteering, school clubs: getting out and doing something outside of academics will improve your application far more.
The fact that a lot of graduating students don’t know this is an indication of how years of schooling have trained them into teenage conformists. They’ve been taught to go along and get along. Now they fear that standing out by avoiding college after highschool will hurt their chances, which is the precise opposite of the truth.
Which, now that I think of it, is another reason to get out of schooling before going to college. You need sometime to repair the damage done to your personality. Take it.
