5.0 GPA😬? pErFeCt SAT? MILLION DOLLAR business???
These titles appear on @limmytalks’ YouTube thumbnail, a 2024 Duke graduate known for producing college admissions prediction videos of crazy-profiled applicants.
“Good for him I guess because he found a way to prey on high school seniors’ academic security but I personally stay away from his content,” one Reddit user commented under the thread “Is LimmyTalks just BS?”
Others, however, are not so self-aware of the potential implications of such videos. “It’s almost sort of addicting because you think, maybe I’ll find the one person whose criteria matches mine, who has the same SAT scores…” says Danielle Park, a “rising senior at an independent school” in an interview article on TeenVogue.
Regardless of Limmy’s intents – whether to inspire students in the admissions process or purely use his predictions as a marketing gimmick – students worldwide are propelled towards these videos through algorithmic filters, creating inevitable consequences that still seem to spiral in a perpetuating cycle of redundant stress.
Statistical evidence corroborates this phenomenon. WifiTalents finds that 79% of students use social media to “seek information about their career path” while 83% of teachers believe that such platforms benefit students’ learning.
On TikTok, attention-grabbing “college-acceptance” videos have become increasingly prominent. TopTier Admissions reveals that #collegerejection utters a whopping 65.1 million views while #collegeacceptance follows with a concerning 54.8 million.
As the August 24th SAT draws to a close, students are left hyped, anxious — and some — too depressed to even think about their results. These feelings are only exacerbated by social media platforms as a new surge of “October SAT predictions” and “Here’s How to Get a 1600” videos by non-qualified, random student users permeate the internet.
College TikTok, reels, and YouTube shorts have become our Inez. Jay Caspian Kang, in his “The Particular Misery of College-Admissions TikTok” article, labels college-admissions TikTok as “a real sense of helplessness” and an “underlayment of anxiety.”
Kang also spotlights the concerns surrounding Harvard’s affirmative-action case and controversies of Asian American applicants. Taking LimmyTalks as an example, he expresses the unhealthy promotion of Asian competitive culture and the stigma that Asians are “naturally smarter” so the bar for such applications will be naturally higher; “no matter what your resume says, the only actual determining factor for getting into college is what race you check on your application.”
While it is normal for teenagers to experience additional stress under an ever-evolving umbrella of competition, college admission on social media has done its part in over-complicating the process. In a survey conducted by Sasha Cabral in The Upstream, confidence ratings before and after viewing college admissions posts saw an almost 30% drop.
Interestingly, social media-induced stress is medically proven to be detrimental. Penn Medicine warns students of the implications of the overflow of information with the word “post-truth” – an idea in which information posted on social media are reflections of notions a user “already believes in,” not fact. This creates excessive emotions of FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out or viewing others’ lives as “more perfect” than they actually are.
So, is admission content concerning or cathartic? Josh Stephens on Medium reminds us of the drastic differences between “showmanship and arrogance, entertainment and misdirection, and advice and speculation.” Are the TikTokers reliable? What implications does social media have on race and class-based admissions? Do privacy concerns arise along with them?
Just as how complex and subjective the college admissions process is, there is no definitive answer to either question. On the brighter side, focusing on persisting in the activities you love, keeping in touch with the world physically, and acknowledging the need to balance admission credibility are some of the best ways to escape the irresistible jaws of college admissions on social media.
Written by Julia Jiang
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