Last Saturday, I woke up with one thought in my mind: go to the computer and check whether you are accepted to the school that was at the top of your list. Short story short, that dream was rapidly crushed by a single computerized letter.

I was denied with the cliché words of “we have just completed the review process, evaluating what was the most competitive group of Early Decision candidates ever to apply.” It then continued, saying, “the Committee based its decision on all the material you supplied to us, and clearly you have many accomplishments of which to be proud.” I always thought that I would never get that letter, but somehow or other it found its way to me.

When I told my friends later that day that I was denied, all of these reactions were the same. There were so many variations on “are you okay?” that I couldn’t tell you all of them. I knew that they were trying to be nice, but it seemed more like I had told them that a close family member had died, not that I had been denied from college.

While they all had different reactions to the news, I could probably guess what they were thinking on the inside. It would probably be some variation of this: “I am so glad that that isn’t me.”

Over this past week more and more people have been hearing back from colleges, and let me be the one to say that getting into college is hard. Deferrals, denials, acceptances have happened and there have also been many tears shed (mostly sad ones).

But I am not writing this editorial to tell you that getting into school is hard. I am writing this because I believe that the administration has allowed a policy that is unfair.

Over this past week, the administration, while not officially stating this in any way (in other words, these policies are not written in the student handbook), has allowed students who have not gotten into their college to miss school. They are clearly stating that if you are denied or deferred from college you can go home, mope around and not worry about missing school.

I was in the same position as many of these students who were denied. If I had heard back from my college on a weekday I would probably have wanted to stay home the next day also. The fault isn’t the students’, but the administration’s. The administration should not be giving out “get out of school free cards because you were deferred/denied.”

In one of my classes this past Friday, I was able to have a discussion with my teacher about whether or not missing school because of a deferral or denial should be permitted. He was surprised by the number of students who were missing classes because of the bad news news from college. He suggested that the the administration should have sent out an e-mail two weeks prior to people hearing back from colleges. The letter could have told students that some of them are not going to get into their top-ranked schools, and how even though it hurts to not get in, there is no excuse for missing classes.

JDS needs to start changing its thought process about college and more specifically, failure. For many of us students this is our first major rejection (besides a romantic interest). They need to start preparing us for the real world, and that starts with telling us that failure exists. We are not always going to get the preferred job, but in the end we have to push through the failure in order to succeed.