Every spring, after admissions decisions are released, I find myself having some version of the same conversation with parents.
“It seems impossible to get into college now.”
Usually the statement is accompanied by a statistic. An acceptance rate that has fallen from 20% to 8%. A university that now receives more than 100,000 applications. Another headline announcing record-breaking selectivity.
The conclusion feels obvious: Elite colleges have become dramatically harder to get into.
After spending more than twenty years in admissions, I’m not sure that’s the most interesting story.
To be clear, admissions at the most selective colleges is extraordinarily competitive. The students applying to these institutions today are remarkable. Every year I meet teenagers conducting sophisticated research, competing at the highest levels of athletics and academics, launching businesses, creating organizations, and pursuing intellectual interests with a level of depth that would have been unusual a generation ago.
Yet when people discuss admissions competitiveness, the focus is almost always on colleges. We talk about acceptance rates, institutional policies, rankings, and application volume. We spend surprisingly little time talking about what may be the more significant development: the evolution of the applicants themselves.
Acceptance rates have become the dominant measure of admissions competitiveness, but they tell us only part of the story. They reveal how many students a college admits. They also reveal how many students apply.
Over the past two decades, the application process has become dramatically more efficient. Students can apply to more colleges with less effort. Colleges market themselves nationally and internationally. Test-optional policies expanded applicant pools. Information that once required months of research is now available instantly. The denominator has grown rapidly, and acceptance rates have fallen accordingly.
That explanation is familiar; the less discussed development is what happened simultaneously on the applicant side of the equation.
Students today understand admissions in ways previous generations simply didn’t. They have access to mentorship, research opportunities, specialized summer programs, enrichment experiences, and an almost endless supply of information about what successful applicants look like. The strongest students are not merely applying to more colleges. They are arriving with more developed academic and extracurricular profiles than applicants twenty years ago.
The popular narrative is that elite colleges became more selective. I sometimes wonder whether the more consequential story is that elite applicants became more selective.
In many admissions conversations, colleges are treated as the primary actors and students as passive participants reacting to institutional decisions. From where I sit, the relationship looks more reciprocal than that. As information became more accessible, students became more intentional. As pathways became clearer, ambitious students learned how to pursue them. As colleges revealed what they valued, applicants responded.
In some respects, the admissions process became a victim of its own transparency.
When families point to a declining acceptance rate as evidence that admissions has become harder, I generally agree with the underlying sentiment. The competition is intense. Yet I sometimes wonder whether we’ve become so focused on the shrinking percentage of students being admitted that we’ve overlooked a more consequential shift.
The biggest story in elite admissions may not be how much selective colleges have changed.
It may be how much selective applicants have changed.
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
