4 Secrets About College Admission

In slick ads and media marketing pitches, colleges hint at qualifications students need to get accepted. Too often, though, especially at the most selective colleges, the criteria are kept deliberately mysterious, confounding students trying to parse the precise measures they must meet for admission. Those seemingly unsolvable riddles have produced a Hydra-like admissions industrial complex claiming to sell certainty.

Getting into college is not the same as paying for it, as the nation’s $1.5 trillion in student debt attests. Only a few dozen colleges nationwide promise to charge what families can afford—all elite schools, with billion-dollar endowments and generous aid. They also routinely reject 90 percent or more of their applicants, admitting more students with family incomes in the top 1 percent than in the bottom 60 percent.

Money and fear drive admissions at every income level, contributing to the crippling anxiety so many teens feel about getting into college. While rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are highest among affluent teens, the vast majority of high school students grapple with the fear that earning a degree is a dream beyond their grasp. That worry is real. Those born in 1980 to the highest income families were several times more likely to earn degrees than middle- and moderate-income Americans, a 2018 study in the journal Demography reported. More than half who start college drop out within six years, and only 33 percent of Americans ages twenty-five and older hold a bachelor’s degree. Students report unprecedented angst, academic pressure, and rejections from dream colleges, crushing them emotionally and financially. How did it come to this?

The Winning Formula

Given the odds stacked against them, how can families win the Hunger Games of higher ed? By making the rules work in their favor.

First, it’s a numbers game.

Too many students apply only to elite or selective colleges with acceptance rates in the single digits or low teens, without realizing how little chance they have of being accepted. The first obstacle is overcoming the academic index score. Colleges with the highest barriers to entry require applicants to meet certain academic...

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