There is a scene in Pride and Prejudice (the 2005 movie) where the characters discuss what it means for a woman to be accomplished. The snooty Caroline Bingley states, “She must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages to deserve the word. And something in her air and manner of walking.” Mr. Darcy insists, “And of course she must improve her mind by extensive reading.”

This scene keeps popping into my head as I watch my son and his peers go through this college application season. Each has spent years cultivating a resume of accomplishments similar to the debutants Ms. Austen wrote about. To be an accomplished college applicant? It feels as if each student must be a three-sport athlete with a GPA weighted above 4.0 and near-perfect test scores. They must be proficient in a language (or two) and perform in some type of artistic endeavor. They must demonstrate leadership skills in various school clubs and participate in charitable activities. 

To paraphrase our heroine Elizabeth Bennett, surely such a student would be a fearsome thing to behold.   

But I fear that we have trained our children that the purpose of high school is to build a resume to get into college. The purpose of college is to build a resume to get into graduate school, and the purpose of graduate school is to build a resume to get a job, which will lead to the next job and the next job ad infinitum. 

At some point, isn’t the purpose of life to be lived?

With the dangers of resorting to the adage of “it was better in my day”... I think it actually was better in my day. In 1996, I sent in an application to exactly one university. It was on paper. I think I handwrote it. I stuck that one-page application along with my transcript and an essay written on a state-of-the-art Apple IIE in an envelope and sent it off to Ann Arbor. A month later, I got my acceptance. Not once in high school did the words, “it will look good on my college application,” ever come out of my mouth. And they definitely did not come out of my parents' mouths. With all reverence to my parents, I am pretty sure their only involvement in college application was cutting the check for the application fee.

Now, I know that there were students with Ivy League ambitions who clearly did more than I. (Which I have never understood, as the best University in the world is clearly the University of Michigan; James Earl Jones reiterates at every home game). But most of us didn’t have test tutors and college counselors. We applied to two or three schools, not the baker's dozen that seems more typical today.

So are our kids today better off? Has this competition for top schools made them better students, better athletes, better leaders? Has it made them better people? I am worried that it has only made them better resume builders. 

Thinking back to my own high school life, the things that bring me joy are not the things that appear on my resume. Late-night talks with friends while swinging on the elementary school swings. Getting really good at hot-gluing crepe paper to homecoming floats. Sleepovers and movie marathons and midnight runs to the Village Place or Green’s.

Now, yes, I can tell you about my leadership experiences and how they helped me grow as a person — a truth universally acknowledged? — but the experience of being a teenager was more critical to who I am today than any leadership experience that I put on my college application. And for those pieces of my leadership experience (camp, BBYO) that were fundamental to who I was, it was because I wanted the experience for its own sake, not for the Austinian bona fides.

Perhaps the current college application system is a Pandora’s box — once opened, we can never go back. But I do not want to raise my children to have fearsome resumes. I want to raise them to be the best versions of themselves. And I hope that when they remember their childhoods, they will remember running around in the backyard playing flashlight tag or having an all-night marathon to watch all six Scream movies. Fearsome, indeed.