Seniors are at a crossroads. As college application season winds down and students start making decisions about where they want their road to lead, a thorn tends to stick up in middle of the road, just out of sight for seniors right now but painfully obvious once they start college.
The thorn is that they are unprepared for college.
Students are not prepared for the stress and the accountability that comes with being a college student. Right now, especially post-COVID, students are given too many free passes. Too many reasons to turn in work late, too many voices telling them they can’t do it and should really just take things easier. Too many excuses.
These excuses are biting us hard when we go to college.
“High school, they coddle you a lot,” Janie Lambert, who graduated from Highland in 2024 and is now a freshman at the University of Utah, said.
It’s almost become too easy, especially after COVID.
A huge part of this trend is the lack of enforcement of deadlines. With COVID and the horrors of online school, a lot of people were very generous with deadlines to the point where they didn’t matter. And that was fine for online school. But it’s been four years. This graduating class of 2025 never experienced online school at Highland. It’s high time students learned responsibility for their assignments.
“I remember, junior year, like all my teachers were just really loose about late work. So, I ended up saving up all my work until the very last minute. Even in senior year, until the very last minute, and it stressed me out so much because it was just due at the end of the term,” Lambert said.
This transition into college, where late work isn’t accepted at all, is what hits students the hardest, and where they’re the most unprepared.
“I have some friends that teach in colleges that tell me more and more students are coming to them unprepared for college,” Ted Sierer, Highland’s psychology teacher, said.
This absence of accountability isn’t just teachers’ fault. Yes, enforcing deadlines comes down to them, but students also need to take their life into their own hands. Students must learn how to manage their time and to find the motivation to do their work. Because in college, your hand isn’t held. You’re forced to carve your own path, there is no safety net, they will drop you if you can’t perform to the levels they expect. So, students have to learn to perform to that level now, in high school.
Now, a deadline is still a great motivator. Let’s be honest, very few people are going to spend a ton of time doing work by a due date when they can do it later. Sure, they still have to do the work, but the allure of putting it off is incredibly strong, especially for teenagers. Which is why teachers have to start seriously enforcing deadlines with very few exceptions; and communicating those expectations from the start to eliminate the students coming in at the end of term begging for anything to boost their grade when they got what grade they received.
This system, where deadlines aren’t enforced, and students can get away with taking little responsibility in their future stems from a push to eliminate stressors in students’ lives. The idea is that if stressors are removed, students will do better.
This idea is wrong.
Stress is misjudged. Yes, it sucks, and yes, way too much of it can be a bad thing. But too little can sometimes be much worse.
“The only way we as humans grow is by going through difficulties and going through hard times,” Sierer said. “So, if we take away every hard thing students have to do, we’re kind of setting students up for failure, because life, once they leave high school, life is not going to worry about giving you hard things. I mean life’s going to come at you hard. So, I think one of the things high school has to do is give you opportunities to learn how to deal with stress and come out successful.”
By eliminating some of our last chances to make mistakes without major consequences and grow before being thrown out into the real world, Highland does us a disservice.
That disservice has dire effects. It deprives students of one of the last gifts school can give: a solid footing for the future.
When asked if she felt that Highland prepared her for college, Lambert said not at all. Highland, from the students to the staff, need to cut the excuses and save us from the same fate.
