According to Lick-Wilmerding’s Junior and Senior Student Dean Oscar King, the college norms are “a framework for how the seniors are going to operate during a really stressful time.” The norms change every year since the senior class is responsible for creating them. Guidelines such as asking permission before discussing college with classmates, not celebrating acceptances during school, and not passing judgment on other students’ college lists have been popular in the past. Most seniors interviewed agreed that having these courtesies written down cements them as social guidelines with more influence than simple social niceties.
College norms were first implemented in 2017 when King noticed and received feedback regarding disrespectful conversations about college admissions. He personally observed tension in the senior class as people listened to rumors, held big celebrations for early acceptances, and talked badly about each other’s schools. After multiple years’ worth of complaints, the Deans created college norms with the help of the senior class to create a more positive social environment around the college process.
King said that after introducing the norms, strife among students about the college process decreased. He saw students use the posted norms to remind each other of the behaviors they had agreed upon. Eventually, norms were sent out to the larger school community and parents in an effort to address careless behavior and affect change elsewhere in student’s lives.
For Lick-Wilmerding’s Co-Director of College Counseling Krista Klein, the norms are a way of disrupting a larger culture of toxicity around college admissions. Klein said that American culture as a whole values certain schools and education choices over others and students bring these beliefs into Lick-Wilmerding.
“There’s so much charge around the names of certain schools,” she said. “If we could get away from a culture where we had that, then these norms would not have to be in place at all.” But for now, Klein’s department views the college norms as a chance to remind students to respect the diversity of educational options that exist.
Students in this year’s senior class see norms as an e effective reminder of what positive and respectful conversations about the college process look like. According to Connor Nakamura ’20, “there are healthy ways to talk about college, and there are unhealthy ways to talk about college, and college norms promote a healthy way of talking about college. ”
Amaya Guillen ’20 agrees that the norms are useful because they help the class evaluate their actions. “When people start to be judgmental and really pretentious and uppity about specific colleges, then it’s like, ‘Okay, I think we all need to take a step back,’” she said.
Many students want this year’s norms to be even more clear and accessible, as following even clear guidelines can be very challenging.
Many seniors seemed to agree that applying to college is stressful, and dealing with peers, parents, and teacher’s questions can be too. But not all students feel the need for college norms. When asked whether college norms would be helpful at his school, University High School student Tom Newbold said, “I don’t think there’s a problem and I don’t think that there’s anything for rules to fix.”
Students at high schools without written college norms agreed that even though they had experienced uncomfortable interactions with peers, implementing rules wouldn’t help. Ben Galloway, a student at The Urban School of San Francisco, described that when it comes to the topic of college, unofficial social norms exist. For example, he said that seniors at his school don’t share test scores, except as private information with very close friends. Other rules were practiced by Newbold, who also described unwritten courtesies that their peers followed when talking about college.
Especially among friend groups, setting ground rules or observing uno social ones seemed to be a common way to minimize stress when communicating about college. “Who you choose to talk to about college is a big part of whether or not you have a good college [application] experience,” Galloway said.
Lick-Wilmderding’s social norms cultivate a community where students feel safe and supported in their process. At other schools, student’s close friends do the same.
