Graduation season is upon us, and with it a ritual that did not exist a generation ago. In recent years, thousands of high schools have built out something called “Decision Day”: an event where seniors arrive in college sweatshirts, assemblies are staged, matriculation lists are published, and social media accounts celebrate elite acceptances with logos and school colors. Parents film it. Administrators promote it. Local news covers it.
The ritual is presented as a celebration. It functions as something else: a public ranking of adolescents by institutional prestige, staged and amplified by the very schools that claim to be forming them.
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Walk through any competitive high school this month, and the scene is familiar. Seniors line the hallways in college sweatshirts, posing for photos in front of pennants and step-and-repeat backdrops the school has set up for the occasion. A senior in crimson draws a small crowd. A senior in the navy with an interlocking logo draws another. A senior in a sweatshirt from a state university an hour down the highway poses too, and the photo is taken, and everyone moves on a little faster. The students register the difference. They have been registering it for years.
This is a serious abdication, and it deserves to be named. We have slipped in formation. The rituals are the evidence.
High schools exist to cultivate judgment, character, and intellectual seriousness in young people. They are supposed to be formative institutions — steadying counterweights to a surrounding culture organized around visibility, comparison, and status performance. That is the entire point of a school as distinct from a marketing firm.
The school is the stager. That is what makes the ritual something other than ordinary teenage exuberance. The senior headed to a regional university learns that her four years mattered less than the classmate headed to an Ivy. The student going into the military, a trade, or community college learns that his path does not warrant the same real estate on a photo wall. The sophomore watching from down the hallway learns what the school actually values, regardless of what the mission statement says.
None of this is incidental. Schools have constructed these rituals deliberately, because admissions outcomes have become the metric by which affluent parents evaluate them. Private schools advertise matriculation lists to prospective families. Public schools in competitive districts use them to justify budgets and defend reputations. The incentive structure runs in one direction.
But incentives do not absolve institutions of judgment. A school that genuinely believed in formation would behave differently. It would celebrate quietly. It would refuse to publish ranked matriculation lists. It would decline to stage sweatshirt parades. It would treat the full range of post-graduation paths — four-year college, community college, work, service, gap years, trades — as equally worthy of dignity. It would model, in its own institutional behavior, the humility it claims to teach.
The pedagogical cost of doing otherwise is significant. Students who spend four years inside a school that ritualizes prestige learn that education is instrumental, a means to an arrival rather than a formation in its own right. They learn to curate resumes rather than pursue genuine interests. They announce their college majors on Instagram graphics before taking a single class, because a field of study has become another identity badge to broadcast rather than something to be discovered through encountering ideas.
They also learn that disappointment is hard to survive in public. That is perhaps the most damaging lesson of all. One of the central tasks of adolescence is learning that identity is not reducible to institutional labels and that meaningful lives emerge through unexpected paths. Decision Day teaches the opposite.
Adults inside these schools know this. Many teachers and counselors privately express discomfort with the rituals they are asked to participate in. Heads of school describe feeling trapped by parent expectations. The discomfort is appropriate. It should produce institutional change rather than resignation.
There is an obvious objection: students will post their acceptances on Instagram whether or not schools stage assemblies. True. Schools cannot control what students do on their own phones, and they should not try. But they can decline to bless it. They can refuse to lend institutional weight to a ranking the culture is already producing on its own. They can use the moment instead to talk about character, perseverance, intellectual seriousness, and the kinds of lives worth admiring: the very moral vocabulary schools have largely abandoned. The students will still post. The school does not have to amplify.
The fix is not complicated. Stop publishing ranked matriculation lists. Retire Decision Day in its current form. Replace it with something that honors every path a graduating senior might take. Stop treating eighteen-year-olds as brand affiliates of the institutions that admitted them.
HIGHER EDUCATION HASN’T LEARNED ITS LESSON. MY UNIVERSITY PROVES IT
Schools that take formation seriously will recognize themselves in this argument. Schools that take prestige seriously will not. That distinction matters because we have slipped in formation as a civic culture, and the institutions charged with reversing the slide have instead accelerated it.
Parents choosing schools, trustees evaluating them, and students enduring them all deserve better than institutions that taught them their worth is a logo.