The wrong question

Every fall, a familiar ritual plays out in living rooms across the world. Parents hover over their teenagers' shoulders, tracking application portals with the vigilance of air traffic controllers. The question that animates these households — where will you go? — is treated as the most consequential of a young person's life. It is, according to a growing chorus of educators and admissions experts, also the wrong one.

As Matt Symonds, who has spent decades studying global university admissions, often emphasizes, the process is far less about a single outcome and far more about understanding the individual behind the application.

The college admissions industrial complex has, over several decades, achieved something remarkable: it has convinced millions of families that a child's worth can be legibly expressed as an acceptance rate. In this telling, a seventeen-year-old is essentially a portfolio of optimized signals — grades, test scores, extracurriculars carefully curated to suggest both breadth and depth, essays workshopped to the point of translucency. The goal is to be legible to an admissions officer at a handful of schools whose rankings have achieved the cultural authority of scripture.

But the rankings lie, or at least mislead. The experts who construct them will tell you as much: there is no universally best university, only the university that is best for a specific student, with specific needs, specific passions, and a specific temperament. A child who thrives at a large research institution might wither at a small liberal arts college, and vice versa. Prestige is a signal designed for other people. Fit is a fact about you.

The more corrosive consequence of admissions-mania is what it does to the years leading up to the application itself. A student who begins strategizing in ninth grade — who chooses activities not out of curiosity but out of calculable advantage — is learning something troubling about how the world works. They are learning that identity is a pitch, that passion is a positioning tool, and that authenticity is valuable primarily insofar as it reads as authentic to a committee of strangers.

Admissions officers, for their part, claim they can spot the difference. What they say they want — and there's no reason to entirely disbelieve them — is evidence of genuine engagement. Not a national championship in tennis, but a real love of the game. Not ten clubs listed on a résumé, but two or three commitments pursued with enough depth to reveal something true about a person. The story behind the activity, they will tell you, matters more than the activity itself.

What does this mean for parents? It means, somewhat counterintuitively, that the most strategic thing they can do is stop being strategic. Encourage the weird hobby. Tolerate the failed experiment. Allow failure to be instructive rather than catastrophic. A teenager who knows they can fall short and still be loved is a teenager with the courage to attempt something real — which is, as it happens, exactly what universities claim they are looking for.

Increasingly, forward-looking educators and platforms such as Sparkl are reinforcing this approach, where a deeply personalised focus on academics and SAT preparation quietly shapes more confident and authentic student journeys.

The better question, the one that survives the admissions process and the four years that follow it, is not where are you going, but who are you becoming. It is the question that actually has a meaningful answer.

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