Every fall, as another college admissions season begins in earnest, high school counselors witness a predictable pattern. Seniors open up the scattergrams that are a popular feature of counseling software — colorful graphs showing where previous applicants from their school were accepted, denied or wait-listed — and quickly scan for their dream colleges.
When students see who got in last year, they get nervous about their own prospects. Their response is almost always the same: Apply to more schools. Yet nearly all of the additions are as selective as what, in admissions parlance, are called “reach schools,” rather than broadening the list to schools deeper in the rankings that are more like their “match” and “safety” schools.
“Everyone’s list just gets longer,” Norma Gutierrez, a college counselor at Minnetonka High School in suburban Minneapolis, told me. Since 2019, the number of applications filed by Minnetonka’s senior class of 900 students has doubled to nearly 7,000. But “they’re all applying to more competitive schools,” Ms. Gutierrez said. It’s “rinse and repeat” every year, she added, as a new crop of parents believe their child is the exception, the one who will beat the odds and get into Stanford (or fill in the blank with any other elite school).
That mind-set makes acceptance to a highly selective college feel like a game. The rules are set by colleges, then carried out by admissions offices, and are stacked against the vast majority of teenagers. Fewer than one in 10 applicants win that prize of getting into one of the nation’s most selective colleges. If that weren’t enough, every year elite colleges move the goal line with new rules for getting across it.
Here’s the truth: We’re playing a rigged game and we need to stop. For all of our hand-wringing about the stress teenagers face, families and the counselors who advise them are willing participants in the system (especially among the affluent and upper middle class where admissions anxiety runs high). We trade admissions tips in Reddit threads, spend our vacations squeezing in yet another campus tour and treat every rejection as proof that the system is broken.
But we’re missing the bigger picture. The frantic competition that we’ve made the norm is based on a lie about what makes a college education truly valuable.
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