Chronic college admissions stress is not inevitable, and you can eradicate most of it.

lesshighschoolstress.com will help you reduce your stress.

Part 1 offers a new way of defining stress and examines how admissions stress originates, how bad it is for you, and what the four options are for addressing stress.

Part 2 provides overwhelming evidence that anxiety regarding gaining admission to the most selective college possible is unnecessary. The range of college selectivity–from those that admit 5% of their applicants to those that have open admissions–is a continuum with significant overlap, not a pyramid with discrete steps. Thus, the distance between the most selective colleges and those that are a bit less selective is significantly smaller than most people believe.These pages contain multiple ways of looking at this, including an in-depth examination of how small the differences are between the most selective colleges and their ‘backups’ on some of the criteria used in popular rankings (page 5). There’s also a clear, simple explanation for why admission to the most selective colleges is so much more difficult today than it was 20 years ago.

And there are lots of fun lists, including which universities have the highest number of students in the top 5% on math test scores (pages 3-4); where CEOs of well-known US companies went to college ; where NASA rocket scientists and currently active astronauts studied; where Mayo Clinic neurologists did their undergraduate work; and where members of the class of 2017 working as law associates at Skadden Arps completed their undergraduate studies.

Part 3 shows the perhaps obvious solution.

By Steve Becker

As a counselor at one of the country’s most academically demanding high schools for 18 years, I often witnessed the damage that chronic college admissions stress can do to the mental and physical health of students and their families. With problems like this that seemingly affect everyone, it’s easy to assume they’re inevitable and that you just have to find ways to cope.