How time flies. The realization that my boy is graduating from Senior High School at the end of this schoolyear suddenly makes me feel old and terrified with the thought of having to deal with the urge to getting myself a sports car.
However, before I start looking at car brochures, our more important concern are the college admission processes, which is an important part of our son’s life journey, and that is something we’ve recently been discussing at home.
Our major surprise when it comes to college admissions under the new normal (whatever that means) was the jarring surprise that our son’s school, my alma mater, no longer coordinates college admissions for its students to the big universities in the capital city.
I don’t know if it was something they never did, but if memory serves me right, we got some form of coordination from the school when it came to college admission exams and processes when we were in my senior year of high school. This time, when we asked our son if they had been informed of any such things as it was already approaching December, he answered in the negative and of course his parents were shocked and awed, especially after a furious check on the internet revealed that many applications to the top universities in the country had already closed by now.
In a nutshell, I got the impression that my son and his friends/batchmates, weren’t being prepared for life outside their Alma Mater. Maybe we missed the memo that this is not a part of their high school’s obligations to its students, making it stupid of us as parents to assume that it was. We probably should’ve read the TOS before clicking on “agree.”
What does a Bacolod University have to gain from not helping their students getting into Manila Universities? Now that I’ve come to think of it, students who don’t get to go to Manila for higher learning will end up here and their folks we spending their college fund on them instead. And if there is anything my years of private education has taught me, it’s almost always about the money in the end.
I asked my son if they were informed of any college admissions opportunities, or if his friends talked about it. He said they weren’t informed and they didn’t discuss it. Maybe their generation just too used to having things handed to them, and their growth and maturity was stunted further by the 2+ years of isolation during the pandemic, but the bottom line is that our high school senior failed to ensure that he was adequately informed of admissions processes in the country’s top schools. That is the next logical step in his supposedly simple life so far, and for this egregious oversight, his parents had to react appropriately, which in this case is to overreact, of course, especially upon knowing that by now, we had already blown our chances for even applying to the University of the Philippines.
I asked some friends if they went through the same thing, and it was shocking, but no longer a surprise to learn that they basically had similar experiences with their graduating highschoolers. Apparently, the local school no longer encourages or helps their students in applications to schools in the country’s capital. Don’t expect assistance, just figure it out yourself.
So there we were, in panic mode. Trying to gather requirements and make deadlines so our boy can still apply to universities in Manila. In the end though, as much as it is disappointing to know that the school’s idea of preparing their students for higher learning doesn’t include other universities, the long and short of it is it was totally our fault for making the wrong assumptions. Just because it was done that way back in my day, never expect it to be the same these days. That was our job, as the student and the parent, so discovering that a high school goes the extra mile in terms of preparing its students for college, wherever that may be, turns out to be just a plus.
The moral of the story here is that we expected too much and made the wrong assumptions and now we are paying for it. Hopefully my high school monicker as the “cramming king” of our classroom can still rub off on my son and he can blitz his way into the remaining universities that are still accepting applications for admission tests.
I hope this little rant of mine is helpful to other parents out there who have incoming seniors for next schoolyear. After this senior moment experience of ours, a warning is the least I can do at this point because we’ve got to watch out for each other and our kids’ future when the schools can’t.*
