Fifteen years ago, a high school student who had founded a nonprofit would almost certainly have attracted attention in the admissions office of an elite university.
Today, after reading applications for several hours, it would be unusual not to encounter one.
The organizations vary widely. Some provide free tutoring. Others collect books, advocate for mental health, organize environmental cleanups or support local food pantries. Many are sincere. Some continue to grow long after their founders graduate. Most quietly disappear the spring after college decisions are released.
The interesting story isn’t whether these nonprofits are authentic. The more interesting question is why so many students arrived at the same idea at roughly the same moment.
It’s tempting to conclude that today’s teenagers are simply more entrepreneurial or more civic-minded than previous generations. There is probably some truth to that. But after spending two decades watching admissions evolve, I suspect another force has been just as influential.
Institutions shape behavior, whether they intend to or not.
Elite colleges spent years celebrating applicants who demonstrated initiative, measurable impact and social entrepreneurship. Admissions websites featured student founders. Alumni magazines highlighted organizations launched in high school. Counselors repeated those stories. Families absorbed them. Students paid attention.
They behaved exactly as rational people who respond to incentives.
Then something entirely predictable happened. As more applicants optimized for the same signal, the signal gradually lost its ability to distinguish anyone. Admissions officers who once viewed student-founded nonprofits as unusual began encountering them so frequently that many started approaching them with increasing skepticism. Not because they doubted students’ intentions, but because they could no longer assume that founding an organization reflected something inherently uncommon or even authentic.
This pattern isn’t unique to admissions. Investors optimize around quarterly earnings. Researchers optimize around citation counts. Social media creators optimize around engagement metrics. Every institution creates incentives. Eventually enough people optimize for those incentives that the behavior being measured becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the incentive that produced it.
College admissions simply compresses the timeline. Behaviors that might take decades to spread through other institutions can become commonplace within just a few admissions cycles.
Admissions officers often say they are looking for authenticity rather than performance. I believe they mean it. The difficulty is that institutions rarely have complete control over what authenticity comes to resemble. Once a particular kind of initiative is rewarded often enough, it inevitably becomes a strategy as well as an expression of genuine interest.
Perhaps that is the quiet paradox at the heart of modern admissions.
Colleges spend years encouraging certain forms of initiative, only to discover that success eventually makes those very signals harder to trust.
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.
