So You're Not The Best

*This article was written for UCLA students and published in UCLA’s Bruin Review

You got into UCLA. You were a rockstar in high school — on top of the world. You won awards, topped your class, gave hope to teachers, and were the envy of the parents. You arrived at UCLA with 6,000 equally passionate individuals. These kids were told they were special, worked as hard as you did, and sport similar intelligence and drive too. And your ego had trouble grasping this new reality. You threw everything into your classes and tried your best to maintain your pride. You find minor success at a club or the occasional good grade, but you still find yourself almost collapsing under the pressure. Maybe you do collapse. Maybe you find yourself with more failure than success. And you begin to wonder if you really aren’t smart enough. Looking up to the confident upperclassmen boasting their experience and leadership, you couldn’t help but wonder if there was a fundamental difference between you and them. In high school, you would rank in the upper echelon of academic standing with a few flicks of the wrist. Here, if you stop the grind, there is a quartile of peers lurking behind you waiting for you to slip up. The gap between you and your peers can amount to a cup of coffee in the morning or a few extra hours of studying. UCLA has challenged the merit of defining yourself by your intelligence and ability to excel. The constant competition and comparison tear at your self-worth.

But, how exclusive is UCLA? How academically competent do you even have to be? UCLA only accepted 14% of the hopeful applicants in 2018. According to UCLA’s admission numbers, a student from the Fall Class of 2018 in the 25th percentile, or better than 25% of UCLA students, scored 1280 on the SAT while a student in the 75th scored 1510. For reference, the SAT is purposefully designed to make the average score around 1000. Even a student better than 25% of UCLA students is in the top 10% of U.S high school students. A student better than 75% of UCLA students is easily in the top 1%.

You might think, “Sure, UCLA is a great school for great students, but we aren’t like Harvard or Stanford, which are even more competitive.” Nevertheless, the best colleges have been receiving increasingly more applications from a global and growing population. Since 1998, the number of UCLA applications has quadrupled. Since the 1980s, Harvard’s acceptance rate has plummeted from 20% to 5% as applications increase, but the class size and campus remain constant. The growing pool of elite applicants is chasing the smaller relative size of a handful of elite universities. UCLA is as restrictive today as the most exclusive colleges back in the 1980s.

Even just being able to attend any college in the United States offers massive benefits over those without a college degree. According to a 2014 study by the University of Maine, college graduates are healthier, happier, and retire earlier with 2.4 times more in the bank. Their life expectancy at 25 is seven years longer and they are 21 percent more likely to be married. College graduates volunteer 2.3 times more and contribute 8.7 times more value to charity. They are more likely to vote and to participate and lead community organizations. They have average annual earnings of $32,000 or 134 percent higher than their peers. And all this is even before accounting for the elite status of UCLA where the worst students would be stars at most universities.

As a highly exclusive university, UCLA offers something very unique — connections to other intelligent and capable students. At UCLA, you make friends — the kind of friends that spread across your industry and serve as connections and helping hands for years to come. Perhaps in your time at UCLA, you will also meet someone special at a party, on campus, or at orientation and suddenly you are twice as rich. According to a study of marriage data, Americans are marrying peers of the same educational status at the highest levels since the 1920s.

You can attribute all these differences to work ethic, intelligence, parental sacrifice, signaling, wealth, heredity, or whatever you want. But, these differences exist. Being at UCLA indicates you are part of what social scientists call the new “cognitive elite”. Unlike the old elite defined by wealth or race, our new group is defined by our ability to excel in intellectual work. And in our increasingly meritocratic society, our opportunities are bountiful and our future is bright.

But at UCLA surrounded by equally bright peers, success and failure become completely relative. At a school composed exclusively of the top few percents, “below average” becomes a nasty place conveying inadequacy and failure. Success becomes narrowly defined along a few tracks and by design, there isn’t enough room for everyone at the top. So when the UCLA rat race leaves you behind, don’t forget how lucky you are to even be a contestant in the race. Don’t forget how saturated your friend groups are with smart, capable people. Don’t forget when you look around that by some measure you have all succeeded already. The world is always looking for smart, earnest people even if only as a manager of a Walmart. Your worst case of $20 per hour is liveable — you would be alright. It is easy to calculate success as 0’s in a bank account or standard deviations above the mean, but it is much more difficult to determine how to live a deeply meaningful and happy life. When you feel like a failure, add a few dashes of perspective and consider what success means to others and what you want it to mean to you.