A few weeks ago, I spoke with a family that had done what many highly engaged families do today. They had listened to the podcasts, watched the YouTube videos, read the Reddit threads, joined the Facebook groups, researched summer programs, compared acceptance rates and consumed enough admissions content to rival a first-year admissions officer.
By the time we spoke, they were remarkably informed. And completely overwhelmed.
For much of the past several decades, one of the most significant advantages a family could possess in the admissions process was access to information. There was a time when understanding the difference between Early Decision and Early Action, knowing which extracurriculars mattered, or recognizing how selective admissions actually worked constituted a meaningful advantage. Much of that information lived behind institutional walls or within relatively small professional circles.
Today, information is abundant.
A student can learn more about college admissions during a weekend on ChatGPT or Claude than most families could have learned in an entire application cycle twenty years ago. Every aspect of the process has been dissected, analyzed, debated, ranked and repackaged countless times. There are podcasts explaining admissions strategy, forums evaluating essays, influencers reviewing college lists, AI tools generating application plans and endless commentary on what admissions officers supposedly want.
In theory, this should make the process easier. I’m not entirely convinced it has.
One of the peculiar consequences of information abundance is that it often creates the illusion of certainty where very little actually exists. Families encounter thousands of examples of what worked for someone else’s child and naturally begin looking for patterns. They start building theories. The student who conducted research was admitted. The student who started a nonprofit was admitted. The student who attended a prestigious summer program was admitted.
Soon enough, correlation begins masquerading as causation.
Admissions offices, meanwhile, are reading applications in an environment that has become dramatically more sophisticated. Students arrive with stronger résumés, more polished narratives and a much clearer understanding of the process than applicants did a decade ago. Yet the underlying challenge facing admissions officers remains largely unchanged: determining who a student actually is beneath all the strategy.
That tension feels increasingly central to modern admissions.
Families have access to more information than ever before. Admissions offices have access to more accomplished applicants than ever before. Yet both sides often seem to be engaged in the same exercise: trying to separate signal from noise.
I’ve occasionally wondered whether the defining challenge of college admissions has shifted over the past twenty years. The problem used to be information scarcity. Today, it may be information excess.
Most families I meet are not struggling because they don’t know enough. They’re struggling because they know a little bit about everything.
And in a process crowded with advice, opinions, rankings, strategies and increasingly confident predictions, deciding what to ignore may have become every bit as important as deciding what to do.
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.
