Every year around this time, the same cycle plays out.
High school seniors graduate. Families celebrate. Dorm shopping begins. After years of stress surrounding grades, activities and college admissions, everyone can exhale.
But then, every September, another pattern quietly emerges.
Exceptionally accomplished students arrive on elite college campuses and begin to struggle. Not because they lack intelligence. Many were near the top of their classes. The issue is autonomy.
Over the last decade, I’ve noticed that more students are growing up in environments where friction is constantly managed for them. Schedules are optimized. Conflicts are mediated. Deadlines are negotiated. Academic struggles are quickly addressed through layers of support. Parents, tutors, counselors and now increasingly technology help smooth over discomfort before students fully experience it.
Then college begins, and much of that scaffolding disappears overnight.
No one notices if they miss class. No one intervenes when a professor is vague, a roommate is difficult or a semester quietly starts unraveling. For some students, the transition feels less like independence and more like exposure.
What makes this moment especially significant is the rise of artificial intelligence.
AI can now handle many of the exact tasks students naturally want to avoid: the frustrating first draft, the tedious spreadsheet, the ambiguity of starting something difficult from scratch. And if a student’s instinct is always to use technology as an escape hatch, they may not realize what they are actually outsourcing.
It’s not intelligence, but resilience.
I think this is one reason elite colleges are increasingly trying to evaluate qualities that are harder to manufacture. Admissions officers are overwhelmed with nearly identical transcripts, polished résumés and now, for some applicants, AI-assisted applications. That’s part of why we’re seeing more emphasis on behavioral assessments, video submissions and other attempts to understand how students think independently when the structure falls away.
After 16 years leading AcceptU, I’ve come to believe that the real work is not simply helping students get into great colleges; it’s helping families prepare students for what comes after.
The students who tend to flourish long term are rarely the ones with the most perfectly curated paths.
More often, they are the students who were allowed to develop confidence through discomfort. Sometimes that means navigating a problem themselves. Sometimes it means sitting with the consequences of a missed deadline. Sometimes it means taking on work that feels repetitive, frustrating or entirely outside their comfort zone.
Those moments often look insignificant while they’re happening, but they build the exact psychological muscles adulthood eventually requires.
The transition to college has always been an academic test. Increasingly, though, it feels like a test of whether a student knows how to keep moving forward once the structure disappears.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
