Tomorrow is Judgment Day for more than 21,000 aspiring Columbians across the world. For them, the decision from the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to be released at 5:00 p.m. will be a culmination—not just of a three-month wait that would have tested even Penelope's composure, but also of four grueling years of grades, scores, and extracurricular activities. Many criticize the college admission process for being too stressful or taxing, blaming both colleges for making the process unnecessarily difficult and students themselves for being too obsessed with university. But the feelings of anxiety that many high schoolers are experiencing right now—ones we all have surely had—are entirely understandable. Fundamentally, an 18-year-old's infatuation with where he or she will be next year stems from a justified and healthy expectation: that college will be a lot more fun than high school. It is common to regard college as an exciting time because of the new social opportunities it presents. But often (and perhaps purposefully) forgotten in popular perceptions of college is that tertiary education represents new horizons for academic fun—or, from another perspective, it promises a release from the shackles of an intellectually insipid and stifling high school life. While high school is like the brain's merry-go-round, college is its Wii. Admittedly, to make the sweeping generalization that all high schools are academically uninteresting and that college is always the opposite is wrong. Some of us certainly had more fulfilling high school experiences than others. Ultimately, though, no one can maintain that any high school can compete with the world-class programs and people at a place like Columbia, even if only because of the difference in scale. Is it therefore natural and inevitable that university will be a large academic leap from high school? Not entirely. As much as we must expect that college will present rising freshmen with unprecedented academic challenges—something it has certainly done for me—we must also ask more of our high schools. Too often, secondary education sucks the fun out of reading good books and solving equations. The joy and purpose of education become lost in the torpor of everyday school. And it is too facile to blithely blame the Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs for creating a test frenzy that encourages such a bland intellectual environment. Rather, a broader and deeper societal stereotype is perhaps the reason that high school feels so lackluster. Simply put, high schoolers are underestimated. They are coddled and cosseted, pitied for having to deal with the pressures of family, grades, and social life. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which high schoolers themselves lower their expectations of themselves in conformity with their surroundings, justifying everything with the meaningless excuse, "I'm a teenager." What else besides this strange dynamic can explain, for example, the Grammy Awards' decision to let Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus subject the music-listening world to the atrocious "Fifteen," a duet about how 15-year-olds in school are incompetent, spineless doofuses? After all, there is no doubt that teenagers have profound potential—Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was a teenager. But a modern-day high school English class would probably have sucked the imagination, psychological complexity and literary beauty right out of Shelley in favor of safer five paragraph essays. (And what would Shelley think of Taylor and Miley?) It seems that the popular tacit denigration of teenagers has spilled into the world of academia, and this is squandering vast potential. We must seek to re-empower teenagers, and high school is where that empowerment can begin. Society doesn't expect teenagers to be intellectually sophisticated. Teenagers are supposed to be bundles of nerves and emotions, and they are precocious or exceptional if they are anything else. While soon-to-be graduates should feel excited about the new academic opportunities of higher education, college should not be what it is now—the beginning of real intellectual exploration. It should instead be an extension of a culture of genuine intellectual curiosity that must be laid down in high school. Granted, the view that high schoolers are already too burdened with academic pressures is sometimes accurate, even if it is condescending. And ultimately, it is up to the individual student to do as much as she can with the finite intellectual opportunities available to her at the high school level. But we must remember why so many students are so anxious to learn whether they can join us here at Columbia: we can all recall the time when we couldn't wait to gain admission into the worlds of Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles—and never return to the status quo ante. The author is a Columbia College first-year. He is the deputy editorial page editor.