Here’s why some exclusive colleges are tougher to get into than ever.
If a high-schooler you know and love struggled to get into their college of choice this year, they’re in good company. Statistics show that the most competitive colleges in the U.S. are getting even more selective — applications in general were up by 10 percent between 2021 and 2022, making for a grueling and often-disappointing experience for applicants and their families. (An expert recently called the college admissions process “completely broken.”)
Even if a student isn’t aspiring to get into Harvard (which accepted a mere 5% of applicants in 2020), it’s harder than ever to get into any school these days. Katie checked in with author Frank Bruni, who wrote a 2015 book dispelling myths about how college affects our futures, to learn why, exactly, this year’s admissions process is so frenzied.
Frank, your book from 2015 called Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be was a real reality check and an antidote to the crazy college admissions competition. Colleges have gotten even more selective this year. What’s going on here?
A lot of this is driven by economic pessimism. That pessimism has intensified — and, along with it, the sense among parents and their children that every last possible competitive advantage must be seized. These parents and children are convinced that an exclusive school could make a big difference in professional success and future earnings, and so they fight and plot like mad to get in.
Some really good students — I mean extraordinary — didn’t get into the colleges of their choice. Some got rejected by many, and some even by all of their choices. What advice would you give them?
The things that make them extraordinary don’t vanish — poof! — just because a bunch of strangers in Princeton, N.J., or Cambridge, Mass., wanted to sculpt the freshman class in a different way. This whole system is only partly meritocratic, and how students use the college they wind up attending will matter much more than its perceived prestigiousness.
Some schools are getting rid of legacies. What do you think of that trend?
I applaud it. It un-stacks the deck somewhat, making the schools in question more accessible to a broader diversity of students. Legacy admissions favor the already-privileged. They traffic in financial concerns (continued alumni donations!) and sentiment, not in equal opportunity.
Are they doing it at a big cost? Aren’t the legacies making big donations to the schools?
They might well take a financial hit. But principles aren’t free. And many of the schools in question have plenty of money.
There’s been a real effort in terms of increasing diversity and first generation students. How is that impacting the admissions process? Are colleges doing enough?
Colleges still aren’t doing enough but vis-a-vis 20 years ago, they’ve made strides. I see this in my own classes at Duke, where I teach: The students are a socioecononmically diverse group. What it means for admissions is that simply having a 4.0 from a hallowed private school isn’t as potent and persuasive as before. The context for students’ grades — how much help families could or couldn’t give them, what kind obstacles to those grades existed — factor in.
Is there anything colleges can do to help more with the process? We read every day about the youth mental health crisis and the stress of this process can’t be helping.
Those colleges that intentionally drive up application numbers by reaching out to students who surely won’t get in could stop doing that. They could speak much more expansively and bluntly about how fickle an admissions process can be and how much an admissions decision reflects a particular student’s particular utility to the school. They could, in other words, demythologize and de-romanticize the process to an extent that they haven’t, at least not enough.
Many schools have dropped the test score requirement. How has that impacted the admissions process?
As best I can tell, it has encouraged applications from students who once might have been dissuaded by their low standardized test scores. This phenomenon cuts in a lot of different ways, though. It can theoretically diversify schools in good, important ways. But sometimes high standardized test scores are precisely how potentially overlooked candidates from lesser-known secondary schools show admissions committees that they have the necessary academic bona fides, so downgrading test scores in admissions could negatively affect those candidates.
We know that so-called “top tier” schools are more competitive than ever, but what do acceptance rates look like at state schools around the country? (I often tell people that more CEOs go to state schools than Ivy League!)
I think it depends entirely on the given state school. Some of them, like the University of Virginia, are as coveted and competitive as most private schools.
