David Brooks had an essay in yesterday’s New York Times titled “We Are the Most Rejected Generation.” (The headline was a quote from a college student he spoke with.) I read the piece with interest, though my professional experience with rejection, while long – stretching half a century now – is entirely self-imposed, and I can remove it from my life whenever I like: All I have to do is stop writing and submitting what I write to editors. For the current generation, at least the ones who want to get into good colleges, rejection is an inevitable part of life. Brooks wrote that many students apply to 20 or so schools, hoping that at least a couple will accept them. A friend in St. Petersburg wrote an article recently about the difficulty of getting into college in Florida; he began it with the story of a girl from his hometown who had the grades, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities that in the old days would have gotten her into an Ivy League school; she got rejected by the University of Florida. Brooks asked young people if “living in this exclusionary regime affected their personalities,” and the answer was a resounding yes. Though it’s good preparation if they want to become writers.
