Admissions to universities are becoming increasingly competitive these days. I believe that this tendency should be considered negative, due to the difficulties it causes for both students and the administrators of universities.
It is undeniable that the pressure coming from this severe competition has a lot of detrimental effects on many students. Having an intensive desire to get into a qualified college, they are likely to be confronted with an extremely high level of stress. It is also possible that they may be completely overwhelmed by the tons of workload that they have to do in order to satisfy the requirements given by the universities. As a result, their mental health is often seriously damaged. In the worst case, if they are not lucky enough to be accepted by their wished schools, they will easily fall into the depths of despair. Many excellent high school students in Vietnam had thrown their lives into terrible situations of drug addiction or even suicide after failing to get the admissions to the top universities.
The endless competition among students also creates some challenges for the colleges. This is because they are forced to come up with really effective methods to evaluate the students in the hope of finding out the ones that best fit their aims in education. During this process, however, many universities tend to add some invalid or irrelevant criteria that make no sense at all to the ultimate goal of identifying the most competent students, namely volunteering certifications or requirements of experiences in working for a club. This leads to the significant decrease in the quality of students in the majority of colleges, and thus directly damaging their own images in the eyes of the public.
In conclusion, this essay has argued that the greater academic competition to gain admissions to universities is apparently a negative development of education, because it brings many dramatic repercussions to both students’ lives and the quality of education in colleges.