With heavy steps, you walk into school on a Saturday morning, enter your classroom, and type in the code to start the SAT test. Your life has been dwindled into one singular important moment that will determine the next four or more years of your life. And while retaking the test is always an option, the pressure of this one day, this one test, weighs on you.

You’ve just spent the past three months and sixteen years wondering how on Earth you’re going to get into your dream college. What’s more, your family and friends are pressuring you to enjoy your teenage years while you’re buried under mountains of AP and Honors classes homework and summer work, a deluge of college applications, and now the PSATs and SATs. 

And what makes this situation even worse is that, with every passing year, the pressure to achieve higher scores increases. 

For the Class of 2025, Ivy League college acceptance rates were at record lows, with the historically selective Harvard at a scant 3.4% acceptance rate. This means that, for every 1,000 people that apply, 966 will be denied. The rest of the Ivy League schools showed similar low acceptance rates.

2025

• 3.4%  Harvard
• 3.7%  Columbia
• 3.9%  Princeton
• 4.6%  Yale
• 5.4%  Brown
• 5.7%  Penn
• 6.2%  Dartmouth
• 8.7%  Cornell

However, in 2007—almost 19 years ago—the admission rates to the same colleges showed significantly higher, with 10% to 30% of students accepted to these top-notch universities. These rates seem almost ridiculously high compared to the difficulty of modern college admissions.

2007

• 9.8% Harvard
• 12% Columbia
• 10% Princeton
• 11.4% Yale
• 14.9% Brown
• 20.5% Penn
• 17.7% Dartmouth
• 30.9% Cornell

What could possibly be the reason for such a significant change in how colleges admit their students? Several factors have changed since then, but the two most notable are the increasing rate of high school graduates and the rapidly dropping average SAT scores, as shown by the graph below from The Economist.

Eliana Bieber (’26), a senior at Tenafly High School, recalls her experience with the SATs. “We actually learned about it in AP Psych last year: the reason we have SATs, ACTs, and standardized testing is to see how we would perform when in college. The higher someone scores, the more potential they have to be a better student. However, it’s important to consider that some students aren’t good test takers.” 

Bieber understands that the workload imposed upon juniors and seniors in high school, along with the added stressors of college applications and SATs, is challenging to manage. “In general, getting into college is a lot more competitive now, so maybe in the future that’s going to become even more competitive,” she said. 

Moreover, according to Bieber, many high schoolers have difficulty balancing their social lives with the demands and expectations of college preparation. 

“It kind of feels like school is a greater part of your life, and you prioritize that rather than things that you would usually have done [to relax],” she said.

With college acceptance rates plummeting lower and lower every year, the workload and number of extracurricular activities that one must take part in to get accepted into a good college have increased. According to KD College Prep, tuition prices have increased over the years, which correlates to the increasing number of scholarships students need to apply to in recent years. 

What’s more, “The expectation used to be that a college would review your application at least twice, but colleges no longer promise this. Some schools, like Stanford University, openly state that very few applications get reviewed more than once,” the same prep site states. It is now estimated that some highly selective universities will review a student’s application for eight minutes or less, according to The Wall Street Journal. Given these stressful conditions, students nowadays must ensure that every single aspect of their applications stands out, from their exact GPA to the first sentence of their personal statement.

While upperclassmen’s futures and workloads remain a difficult issue, finding balance between academic responsibilities and personal well-being can be beneficial. High schoolers may explore ways to manage stress, maintain social connections, and engage in activities that support mental and emotional health. These years are often formative, both academically and personally, and many educators emphasize that maturity and character development shouldn’t take a backseat to a number between 0 and 1600.