College admissions is something of an issue for a lot of high school students, to put it mildly. The number of schools most students apply to is rising steeply, while acceptance rates for top universities plummet. This feels broken and unfair to many students, and for good reason. High school students are smart (most of the time at least), smart enough to know when something doesn’t seem to be working correctly.
I see the same things working with high school students, the same questions raised again and again. There’s some hesitation to ask, which is why I’m writing this article. Students deserve to know that their intuitions are correct, so today I’m going to explain why college admissions feels broken.
College Admissions is Broken
College admissions feels broken because it is broken.
There, that was easy, end of the article.
Or perhaps you want to know more, the how and why and what brought us to this point. I suppose we’ll continue, these are questions worth asking and answering.
I should first define what I mean when I say college admissions is broken. This can be broken down into the following four points.
Students are under too much pressure concerning college admissions. The stakes are high; their entire future hangs in the balance. This is more pressure than teenagers should have to face, and it impacts them negatively. The more colleges they feel they need to apply to, the worse this pressure becomes.
The admissions process is too opaque for students. From differing requirements and judgements between schools, to misinformation online, many students have no idea what colleges actually want from them. Admissions officers often do little to clear up this confusion.
Colleges ask for materials that are unneeded, or which do not actually help them evaluate students. From pointless interviews to extraneous essays to “optional” application components, colleges are making students do more and more work. This is true of both the top colleges, and increasingly lower tier schools which never asked for such things before, but are following the lead of more prestigious institutions; whether they really need to or not.
The incentives on colleges mean that none of this will change. Because having a low acceptance rate is seen as a sign of prestige, colleges have no reason to change anything about how admissions works. This is the final and biggest problem, and the reason it’s so hard to do anything about this.
How Did We Get Here?
Pointing out problems is both fun and easy, but diagnosing their causes, and offering solutions is more difficult. However, I will attempt to do both, beginning with the causes. Why did college applications become broken in the first place?
It’s a good question, because it wasn’t always this way. When parents were applying to colleges, they picked two or three schools, had to write one or two essays at most, and that was it. There was none of the fuss that you see today, none of the stress, or dozens of essays, or students applying to every top school to maximize their chances of getting into one of them.
As with all big changes, it did not happen at once. Rome was not built in a day (except for the time that it was), and so too college admissions did not become a mess overnight. While it’s hard to get the full picture, here are the steps of how things went awry:
First, colleges started being ranked. We’ve noted problems with the rankings before, but putting colleges directly in competition with one another changed the incentives on them, and changed how they recruited students.
Then, slowly, colleges began actively recruiting students. Advertising. Trying to inflate the number of students who applied to them. This too began gradually before picking up. Colleges compete with each other to attract the best students, to draw in the crowds of applicants, on the rankings. This competition made the cycle spin faster and faster.
At the same time, the digital age began, and college admissions began centralizing. The Common App was the genesis of this, and was a good thing initially. It cut down on the number of applications students had to fill out, standardized essays and prompts, and made life easier. But as with everything, there were unintended consequences.
The new ease of applications also led to students applying to more schools. Just a few at first, but as the advertising picked up, student’s lists began expanding. From three schools, it became five. Then ten. Now students are applying to as many as twenty colleges, which is rather a lot, even with the help of professionals.
At every step, each group involved acted rationally, following their best interests. But much like navigating just by looking at your feet and hoping for the best, where we ended up wasn’t quite where we hoped to be.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Fix It?
Ok, so college admissions is broken. Everyone involved knows college admissions is broken (these are smart people). So why doesn’t anyone fix it?
The reason can best be explained through an old story. A gambler, in the old west, rolls into a new town, and sits to play some cards. He wins some, but loses more, a slow but steady decline of his funds with each hand. He takes a break from the table, and one of the locals approaches.
“Why do you keep playing, don’t you know the game is rigged?”
The gambler looks at him and replies: “Sure the game is rigged, but it’s the only game in town.”
There are plenty of clickbait thinkpiece articles which ask whether or not college is still worth it, and the answer, always, is yes. That’s because college is actually pretty great. Getting in can be a pain (as we’ve been discussing), but once you’re there, it’s a pretty good time. That’s part of what makes it so popular (plus the whole setting you up for a future of success and higher earning potential. You know, little things).
So the reason nobody has tried to fix this is because there’s no incentive to. College admissions is broken, but hundreds of thousands of students are going to apply every year anyway, because college is the only game in town. Sure some students go to school abroad, or pursue career paths outside of college, but they are by far the minority. Because, at the end of the day, nothing does compare to college, and to American colleges in particular.
How to Unbreak College Admissions
Now that I’ve outlined what I see as the issues with college admissions, how can we go about fixing them? Solutions are possible, after all, though implementing them is up to the colleges themselves. I don’t know if they’ll read this, but if they happen to be searching online for ways to make admissions easier for students, here’s what I think they should do. All of these are based on my experience helping students with applications, and seeing where they struggle most.
First, colleges need to do a better job writing essay prompts, and clarifying what they are looking for from student essays. They need to judge writing well, but their own prompts are often poorly drafted, ask confusing questions, or simply aren’t good. Essays cause by far the most stress for students, and these are among the easiest things for colleges to change.
Next, and relatedly, colleges should ask for fewer essays. Especially schools like Texas A&M, where most students who apply get in automatically due to class rank policies. The essays add nothing to the application process but stress, and can safely be eliminated. If colleges want to collaborate and all ask the same prompt, even better. We already advise students on cross applying; if colleges just started sharing well written prompts, that would also cut down on the stress.
At the same time, colleges should get rid of other application components that don’t really add anything but stress. Don’t ask for interviews, don’t ask for supplemental letters of recommendation, and limit portfolios, letters of continued interest, and all the various flotsam that accumulates for students to stress over.
Colleges should also cut down on the advertising they do to students, and stop trying to artificially inflate their applicant pool. Yes, record low acceptance rates are very impressive, but this is all just a giant headache that nobody needs.
Finally, colleges should work on increasing the number of students they enroll. This is a long term problem, as many schools are limited by space and resources, but many top schools have billions of dollars in endowments, and the world would be well served by have more students educated at top schools, and students would be served by having the chance to take advantage of these school’s resources.
These are not perfect solutions, and will not fix the problem entirely. They will, however, decrease its severity. There is no way to make a college admissions system that pleases everybody and allows a completely stress free process, but we should strive to do better in the future than we do in the present, that’s how progress happens (usually).
Final Thoughts
It would be nice for there to be simple solutions to all complicated problems, an easy fix like Alexander at the Gordian knot, cutting through the mess of college admissions and leaving something better in an instant. Unfortunately, swords cannot solve this problem. I do hope that this article has left you informed as to what I see as the biggest challenges in admissions today, and what may be done about it.
Of course, as it stands admissions is still hard, and stressful, and requires a lot of work from students. You don’t have to do it alone though, and having an expert makes the process far smoother. Luckily, I happen to know just such an expert- me. If you want to learn more about how I can help you with your own college applications, and steer you safely through the trials prepared by colleges, schedule a free consultation today. I’m always happy to talk.
