Before the pandemic, Christopher Rim’s average client would apply to 12 schools. This application cycle, the college admissions consultant said, 90% of the students he works with are applying to 20 or more schools.

“It’s an unprecedented number,” he said.

“At some level, it’s becoming a lottery, and these kids just decide to cover all their bases. They’re just applying to as many schools as possible,” Rim, the CEO of Command Education, told The Post…

“In the past I would have discouraged a student looking to apply to 20 schools because they’d be spreading themselves too thin and sacrificing the quality of their applications for quantity,” Rim said. “But in today’s application cycle, I actually kind of agree with this strategy.”

NYU, for instance, slashed its acceptance rate from 35% a decade ago to an eye-watering 8% today.

Meanwhile, Duke nearly cut its admissions rate in half, from 12% in 2017 to 7% last year.

– Rikki Schlott, “High-schoolers worried about antisemitism, SATs are spending thousands to apply to as many colleges as possible,” New York Post, https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/opinion/confused-by-college-chaos-kids-apply-to-record-number-of-schools/

My son has spent the past year applying to colleges. The grueling process began a year ago with SATs & APs, requesting reference letters, recording videos for his music supplemental applications, and beginning to draft applications essays.

A friend recently said of his son’s college application experience: “At the start, I thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ I was SO wrong!” I share my friend’s shock and began drafting this post months ago after realizing how insane college admissions has become.

As exhausting as the process has been for us, many colleges had to review my son’s applications, creating much work for overwhelmed admissions offices. Six public California universities each received over 100,000 applications in 2023!

The Many Causes of College Application Insanity

  • In 2024, 57,465 students applied to Yale, 105,000 to University of Michigan, 118,000 to NYU, 156,906 to UCSD, and 173,400 to UCLA! Even great students are now buying a lottery ticket when applying to an elite university. This explosion in applications is the result of a death spiral: Students submit more applications, which drives down acceptance rates, which drives students to submit even more applications, which drives acceptance rates even lower. Rinse and repeat. For all but recruited athletes, children of wealthy donors, and the most exceptional students (e.g., winners of international math competitions), applying to a “top-25” college is now a crapshoot. Submitting a sterling application buys you only a lottery ticket. The “holistic” criteria on which you will be judged are opaque and subjective because these schools reject ten or twenty students academically qualified to attend and thrive for every one they admit. This has produced a “positive feedback loop” between rising applications and lower acceptance rates because US News rankings are driven by “exclusivity” or competitiveness. (Biologists term this an “evolutionary arms race,” like when predators and prey co-evolve to fly faster or dive deeper through their Darwinian struggle to survive.) As Yogi Berra explained, “No one goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”
    • Admission rates have plummeted across the board over the past thirty years: The admission rate fell from 1990 to 2019 at Stanford from 19.3% to 4.0%, at Columbia from 32.3% to 5.1%, at University of Chicago from 45.0% to 5.9%, at UPenn from 47.0% to 7.4%, at Dartmouth from 26.0% to 7.9%, etc. Source
    • Many universities – esp. public universities – require applicants to apply for specific majors or departments or schools (like engineering). Certain programs are incredibly competitive. For example, the out-of-state acceptance rate for University of Washington’s computer science department is 2%, lower than Harvard’s admission rate.
    • Palo Alto high school senior Stanley Zhong had an unweighted 3.96 GPA at one of the country’s most competitive high schools, scored 1590 on his SATs, and created a powerful computer application used by many corporations but was rejected by almost every school to which he applied. Google hired him straight out of high school as a mid-level engineer! That’s how insanely competitive college admissions – esp. for popular majors like computer science and engineering – has become. Many schools are much easier to get accepted at for, say, English or history than engineering or CS.
    • Admission to the most prestigious universities is far more egalitarian and socioeconomically diverse than back in my day. As a Harvard freshman in 1987, I was surprised so many students already knew one another till I discovered many had attended the most famous private schools, which funnelled many students to Harvard. If you’re a good student at Choate, Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, etc. today, your odds of landing at Harvard are much lower because universities have expanded their search for talent globally and into communities largely ignored forty years ago. Top grades, SATs, AP scores, etc. are table stakes now for Harvard admissions, not determining factors.
  • Extreme competition for admission to Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, etc. has trickled down to schools like Northeastern and NYU, which good students used to easily be able to get into but which now have single-digit admissions rates.
    • Stiffer competition: When all the top students apply to all the top schools, the applicant pool is super-strong everywhere.
    • Evaluation risk: When a college receives 50,000 or 155,000 applications, admissions officers are overwhelmed. They have little time to evaluate and discuss each application, and they’re exhausted. So mistakes get made and unpredictability increases.
  • Financial aid & merit scholarships: The more applications you submit, the greater your odds of getting lucky with financial aid and/or merit-based scholarships.
  • Strategic rejections: Rankings like US News reward schools at which more accepted students choose to enroll, i.e., high “yield” schools. US News’s college ranking metrics incentivize schools to reject students they consider “too good” because they’re likely to attend a more prestigious school, harming their “yield.” Students have long been advised to create a college list with a balance of “likely” schools, “target” schools, and “reach” schools. But those “likely” schools – formerly called “safety” schools – aren’t always guaranteed admittance, given schools’ desire to boost yields.
  • Uncertainty over the impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling of affirmative action in college admissions illegal and colleges’ overhauled application essay questions.
  • Uncertainty about your life and academic interests: Many high school seniors don’t yet know what they want to study in college. Because many universities require students to apply to a specific school (like their College of Engineering) or to a specific department (like physics) or even to a specific departmental specialization (like computer programming or data science), one way to buy yourself time is to apply for different fields of study at different universities.
  • Uncertainty about schools’ food, party scene, vibe, housing, etc. Our family got an early start on college research by focusing our vacations the past few years on visiting colleges. But you learn only so much about a school by walking around a campus for a few hours. And many students apply to schools they’ve never even visited. Youtube provides some valuable insights into schools, but the quality/quantity/relevance/trustworthiness of the information varies widely. After my son was admitted to 13 schools, we spent two months trying to learn more. But there’s only so much you can do. You can’t visit all 13 schools. And many schools have admitted student days that conflict with other schools’ admitted student days. Back when college admission rates were higher, students could spend more time evaluating a smaller number of schools, both before applying and after learning where they were admitted.
  • Uncertainty about your willingness to attend university close/far from home. Some students know they want to live close. Others know they want to move far away. I was unsure. I wound up choosing between two schools, one close to home and the other in sunny California 3,000 miles from home. I loved the school, but hours before my plane even landed in California, I knew in my heart I wasn’t ready to move so far from my family (and our incredible dog). You learn about yourself and you preferences throughout the whole process. (I told myself I’d study hard in college and go there for grad school, and that’s exactly what I did.)
  • Uncertainty about big universites versus smaller colleges. Do you crave the big football stadium, the anonymity of giant lecture halls, and the thick course catalogue offering every possible subject or do you want to study at a small school where your teachers know your name and students all know one another and greet each other while passing between classes?
  • Uncertainty about big cities versus quieter suburban or rural settings.
  • Students with multiple passions/interests. My son wants to study trombone performance AND something in STEM, probably engineering or physics or data science. Many schools force you to apply for ONE major, though some let you attempt to add a second major or even a second degree. Few schools allow students to apply to study BOTH interests. And you must then get admitted into BOTH programs.
  • Some students apply to many schools seeking bragging rights or pride or fame. Everyone has a natural urge to feel wanted. Many want to feel important and admired and many want to brag to friends and classmates about all the schools to which they were accepted. (Many parents also want to brag about their children!) In recent years, a social phenomenon of reaction videos of students opening their admission decisions has spread wildly, intensifying the interest by some students in applying to many schools. I’ve even heard of students who were admitted by their dream school early action who then applied to many other top schools, apparently just for bragging rights.

The college admissions process is now so uncertain that students are incentivized to “spray-and-pray.” Students who can afford to apply to many schools now do, buying themselves additional lottery tickets. This system is extremely inefficient and unfair to students who can’t afford to apply to many schools (or visit many campuses to evaluate them).

The unique challenge of pursuing STEM + Music

My son faced a special challenge: Few schools make it easy for students who wish to seriously pursue both music and a STEM field. Many schools with top music programs expect students to apply for music. Simultaneously, those same schools expect students seeking to study popular subjects like engineering or computer science to apply for those fields. Few enable students strong in both to pursue both (and the few that do generally require students to submit two full applications). At many schools, your music options are limited if you’re a STEM student while your STEM options are limited if you’re a music student. Some universities say you can try to add a second major after you enroll, but few provide pre-enrollment guarantees that you’ll be able to pursue a popular second major.

Applying for music schools in itself is exhausting because you must submit recordings of your performances, generally with piano accompaniment. And you must travel to the schools to audition on site (and get your potentially heavy/fragile instrument to the audition and back). This is an extra burden when you’re simultaneously applying for engineering, data science, and physics programs too, as my son did, because you’re unsure what you want to study in college.

My son chose Carnegie Mellon because it will allow him to pursue trombone and STEM at a high level, but he turned down many great universities that could have been wonderful because we feared bureaucratic/departmental barriers might have prevented him from pursuing his musical and academic interests at the highest level. Conversely, he turned down several top liberal arts colleges that offered wonderful curricular flexibility because they each lacked something: an engineering program or a trombone professor. We wanted the curricular flexibility of a liberal arts college with the resources of a university, and CMU was the best we found.

The difficulty of pursuing STEM + music feels like a systemic weakness across most American universities. We’re glad CMU appreciates that some students don’t want to subordinate music to academics or vice versa because they’re passionate about both and willing to work overtime to pursue both.

Closing thoughts

Most of my son’s friends and classmates got into schools where they’ll probably be happy. But the process was extremely time-consuming and stressful. While I’m glad it seems to work out well for most students in the end, I wish the process were more predictable and less angst-ridden, as it seemed to be back in my day.

Perhaps we all can calm down by appreciating that America is full of excellent colleges and universities and that even if you don’t get into your dream school or even any of your top choices you’ll probably land somewhere where you’ll be reasonably happy and can learn a lot.

No one lives a perfect life. And no college is perfect. College is just four years of your life, and what you do once you arrive on campus matters much more than which campus you’re at.

Because admission rates are so much lower today, students should apply to more colleges than their parents did, but if you choose a list of schools you like that includes some less-selective schools, relax because you’ll probably get in somewhere you like. If not, you can take a gap year or transfer.

Our current process is unhealthy and irrational. As a former Dartmouth admissions officer notes:

“According to a recent New York Times article on the teen mental health crisis, there has been a 60 percent increase in adolescents reporting a major depressive episode, and for people ages 10 to 24, suicide rates jumped nearly 60 percent from 2007 to 2018, according to the CDC. Yet top colleges have not done anything to address their role in exacerbating this problem by rejecting 90-plus percent of applicants.”

Michele Hernández, “How to De-Escalate the Arms Race at the Ivies,” Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/04/17/how-de-escalate-arms-race-ivies.

Her article – like several others I’ve seen recently – suggests several logical ways colleges could improve the admissions process to reduce the time and stress. One suggestion is to have applicants rank-order their college preferences, somewhat similarly to how medical residencies are assigned. I hope healthy change arrives soon.


With appreciation to Darya Tryfanava for their photo on Unsplash