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 a tenth of 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.
Elite colleges have convinced us that scarcity equals quality, that a lower acceptance rate means a better education. But their own behavior shows that many of their decisions are more about manipulating the market than academic or any other kind of excellence.
Consider what happened this summer. Worried that international students they accepted wouldn’t get their visas in time for classes this fall, several top colleges, including Harvard, Columbia and Rice, extended their wait-list deadlines. A few schools even waited until the final minutes of this admissions cycle. Duke reopened its wait-list in late July and enrolled about 50 additional students, less than two weeks before this fall’s freshmen moved into the dorms.
It’s important to remember that these were teenagers already enrolled at another school, probably with a class schedule and a roommate. Many of them went to orientation and even received their first tuition bill. The wait-list is a tool elite colleges use to manage their yield — the percentage of admitted students who enroll — and ultimately to engineer their selectivity. Like airlines overselling seats, colleges use wait-lists, in effect, as a backup supply. They can hold hundreds of students in reserve without counting them against their acceptance rates until they agree to enroll.
Twenty-five years ago, when high school seniors applied to many fewer schools, yield rates among schools were remarkably similar, around 40 percent. But as applying to college turned easier with the expansion of the online Common Application, students sprayed more applications into the system each successive year.
The result is that the yield rates of the most selective colleges went up while everyone else’s dropped. Universities like Brandeis, George Washington and Syracuse had similar yield rates to Duke’s nearly three decades ago. Today, Duke’s is 60 percent, while the other schools have all fallen to around 20 percent. Each year, as students apply to more schools, the Syracuses of the world have to accept more students to maintain their enrollment and then they look less selective the following year.
Today, a school’s yield rate, like its selectivity, is a sign of status and popularity in an admissions industry obsessed with numbers and rankings. If a college’s yield rate drops as a consequence of games played by the most prestigious, selectivity naturally decreases as a result, but it doesn’t mean it suddenly became a less good school. Students at George Washington or Syracuse will get the same experience and the same professors whether this year’s yield was lower than last year’s. We treat a low acceptance rate, and as a result a higher yield, as proof of quality when it’s just a proxy, and a flimsy one at that.
So what does actual educational quality look like? For decades, researchers at Indiana University have been measuring something that matters far more than acceptance rates: how engaged students actually are in their learning. Through the National Survey of Student Engagement, they survey hundreds of thousands of freshmen and seniors about how they spend their time, interact with professors and what they think they are gaining from college.
While the survey results are not routinely made public, I asked Indiana researchers to compare data across groups of schools sorted into five tiers based on selectivity. Here’s what they found: On 18 different engagement measures, the tiers of schools were separated by just a point or two among freshmen — a gap that narrowed even more by senior year.
For instance, in a measure of “higher-order learning” — engagement in activities that promote the critical, analytical thinking central to a college education and essential to jobs in an age of A.I. — there was “no statistically significant difference” between the most selective schools (under 20 percent acceptance rate) and the next tier down (20 percent to 40 percent). Overall student satisfaction among seniors was separated by only four percentage points between the most selective and least selective schools (those with an 80 percent to 100 percent acceptance rate).
Being selective, in other words, doesn’t automatically translate to providing a more engaging experience for students.
We aren’t going to be able to change the rules of the admissions game — the elite colleges are the ones setting them. So we’ve got to stop playing. That starts with a simple recognition: With a median acceptance rate of 77 percent at colleges and universities in the United States there are hundreds and hundreds of schools where students can get a good education.
But the tools we use make the search process worse. The online college-planning services in most U.S. high schools, such as Naviance and Scoir, plot colleges on their scattergrams only if enough students from that high school applied in the previous year. In a study of one large district, students were 20 percent more likely to apply to colleges with scattergrams than to those without. It’s a feedback loop that reinforces existing choices, and a system that makes discovering more options harder than it has to be.
Some schools are trying to break that cycle. The Archer School for Girls in the wealthy Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles is the type of place set on college selectivity. But college counselors there have tried to flip the script.
Instead of focusing ninth and 10th graders on building the perfect application, they spend those early years talking about what students want out of college. By junior year, students research colleges to present to their peers — but they can’t choose from the 75 most popular choices at Archer, and they don’t reveal the college’s name until the end of their presentation. The goal is to uncover hidden gems, shift the conversation from brand names to personal fit, and have students bring their insights to parents to begin a process that starts with a student’s values, not the rankings.
That last step is critical. When you can get parents genuinely to signal to their own kids that they value fit over prestige, it helps break the arms race because parental pressure and opinion often shapes much of the college search. In a survey I conducted of more than 3,000 parents, 16 percent said prestige mattered to them, but 61 percent believed it mattered to other parents in their community.
That gap says everything about why it’s so hard to step off the playing field: Whether we’re lying to ourselves or honestly different from our neighbors, the certainty that others are chasing prestige means we fear stepping back puts our own children at a disadvantage.
And so the game continues.
Jeffrey Selingo, a special adviser and professor of practice at Arizona State University, is the author of “Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You.”
Graphics by Bhabna Banerjee.
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