By senior year, I could summarize my life’s hardest moments in under 500 words.

Scholarship applications have trained me well.

Immigration. Financial instability. Family struggles. Every application seemed to ask the same question: What have you overcome and does it make you deserving of an education?

The desperation of that process is difficult to explain to people who have never experienced it.

When people talk about college applications, they often talk about dream schools. They don’t talk about opening a tuition calculator and realizing the number on the screen is larger than your family’s income. They don’t talk about lying awake counting the scholarships it would take to close the gap.

For many low-income and first-generation students, the college application process isn’t just stressful; it’s terrifying.

Growing up, I was told what millions of students are told: Work hard and education will open doors. So I did everything. I built my life around the premise that effort would be rewarded.

Then senior year arrived and I discovered that getting into college and being able to afford it are two   different things entirely. That is where scholarships enter the picture.

QuestBridge, Posse, the Gates Scholarship, Dell Scholars and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation do extraordinary work. They provide life-changing opportunities. But the demand for these programs reveals a reality that should make us uncomfortable.

In 2025, QuestBridge received more than 25,500 applications. Fewer than 3,000 students matched with a college through the National College Match. The Gates Scholarship receives thousands of applications annually for 300 awards. The Coca-Cola Scholars Program receives over 100,000 applications for 150 scholarships.

Again and again, the numbers tell the same story: There is no shortage of talented students. There is a shortage of opportunities.

For a long time, those numbers signified nothing.

Until I met the people behind them.

During my senior year, I sat in waiting rooms, banquet halls and scholarship interviews filled with students whose stories sounded different from mine but carried the same weight. There were students working 30 hours a week to pay rent. Students raising siblings. Students navigating homelessness. Students balancing extraordinary burdens while maintaining grades that would impress anyone.

Every single one of them deserved a chance, and that was the problem.

The scholarship process often forces students like us into an unspoken competition. We are asked to tell our stories and prove our resilience. We are encouraged to distinguish ourselves from other applicants when many of those applicants have overcome challenges just as significant as our own.

Somewhere along the way, hardship became our currency. And our futures became dependent on whether a committee believed our story stood out among hundreds of others.

I am incredibly fortunate. This fall, I will be attending college because people and programs invested in me.

I will never stop being grateful for that.

But whenever someone points to scholarship recipients as proof that the system works, I think back to those waiting rooms.

I think about the students sitting beside me.

The students who needed help just as badly.

And I wonder why, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, so many teenagers are still spending their nights at kitchen tables, turning their pain and struggles into essays and hoping it is enough to purchase a future.