How to De-Escalate the Arms Race at the Ivies

The crush of applicants to the Ivies and top colleges has overwhelmed admissions offices. This past year, the Ivies plus Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Northeastern University, the University of Chicago and Duke University received over a half million applicants. The acceptance rate at the Ivies in 2022 ranged from 3.2 percent to 6.9 percent, while schools like Colby College (9 percent), Northeastern (7 percent), Chicago (7 percent) and MIT (4 percent) posted record-low acceptance rates.

Several factors have driven this dramatic rise in applications and record-low admit rates, including post-pandemic test-optional admissions policies; aggressive recruiting and pool-building by colleges (which is tied to the pressure to drive down admit rates, drive up yield and improve rankings); and genuine efforts to diversify the applicant pool along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines by broadening opportunities for historically underrepresented students.

The focus on driving up application volume and driving down admit rates is, at this point, more for institutional bragging rights than for the best interests of students.

In these overly inflated applicant pools, top colleges compete for the best and the brightest and end up fighting over many of the same students. While one student may get accepted to 15 colleges, another may not get into any. Needless to say, this is hardly a model of efficiency. There’s no way that a college can thoughtfully review these massive numbers of applicants in the time allotted.

Students agonize over preparing their applications, only to have them dispensed with in record time while admissions offices struggle with 50,000-plus applications. Beyond just hiring outside readers, colleges use increasingly sophisticated enrollment management data and algorithms to sort the pool and decide who gets read, let alone who gets in, who is likely to enroll and (at schools that use merit aid) who needs additional aid to sweeten the deal.

To stay ahead in this admissions arms race, colleges hire marketing firms and have huge budgets to encourage students to apply, only to then deny admission to 95 percent of them. Because they care so much about their yield (the percentage of students who accept their offer of admission), they lean toward students who, based on predictive analytics, are more likely to enroll and try desperately to distinguish between so many straight-A students and high SAT/ACT/AP scorers, many of whom end up looking the same.

The end result of so many rejected top students, plus the academic pressure of achieving in high school, is one of the sources of the crushing teenage stress and anxiety that has been making headlines. Never in America have so many teens been so unhappy. 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. In a half-hearted attempt to “reduce stress” for students, the best a few schools manage is simply not reporting acceptance rates and other critical admissions metrics. Note to Stanford: not publishing your 3 percent admit rate doesn’t make it go away.

My 1997 book, A Is for Admission, exposed the Ivy League admissions process for the first time and shone a light on its many secret practices, like the use of the Academic Index and the predominance of “hooked” students (like recruited athletes, legacies, underrepresented minority students and development cases) who, to this day, comprise between 40 and 50 percent of students at the Ivies. Keep in mind that the five Ivies (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and UPenn) that have a binding early-decision policy fill up nearly 50 percent of their class in the early round, locking out the majority of students who apply in regular decision round—many “hooked” kids get picked up in this early-decision round.

Contributing to this problem is a policy called single choice early action (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) or restricted early action (Stanford), which limits applicants in the early round to applying to only one college (the only exceptions are public universities and international schools). In contrast, you could, for example, apply binding early decision to Columbia and then apply early action to as many colleges as you can find that have early action. This puts an undue burden on early-action universities.

In practice, what happens is that by my calculation, about 40,000 top students who applied early action last year to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, MIT and Caltech (these last two have regular early action rather than SCEA/REA) were rejected or deferred for a rejection rate of roughly 85 to 90 percent over all. Naturally, those students panic and tend to apply to as many as 20 to 30 colleges in the regular round to maximize their odds of getting in somewhere. That’s why schools like Rice, UPenn, Columbia and NYU, to name a few, are deluged with applicants in the regular round when spaces are at a premium (since most colleges with binding early-decision programs try to accept at least 40 to 50 percent of their freshman classes in the early round). The result? Seven to 10 times the number of students apply in the regular round compared to the early round, leaving colleges to play a guessing game of which students would accept their offer of admission.

I have two possible solutions to revamp the admissions process and make it fairer to all. Instead of accepting 3 to 5 percent of students, colleges could accept a much larger percentage if they changed their policies. The Ivies (plus Ivy-type institutions) need to take the lead in de-escalating Ivy/top college admissions and creating a sane and fair process.

Solution No. 1: Rather than eliminating the early round altogether, SCEA/REA programs should be eliminated. A separate admissions rubric for just Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford sets them apart by virtue of admissions policy and creates an aura of desirability based on the idea of not having to commit in the early round (SCEA is a relatively recent policy).

The next step would be for the most selective colleges to do what some universities (Emory, Vanderbilt and Tufts, for example) do already and hold two rounds of binding early decision but limit the percentage of the class to a smaller number than the current 50 percent (this could vary by college but capped at a specific percentage). Round 1, for example, might fill 25 percent of the class, round 2, 15 percent, so that more than half the class could remain open for the regular round, when most students apply. The difference is, if a student really wants Yale, she would apply early decision round 1. If not accepted, that student would have another shot at her second choice before flooding the zone with dozens of regular round applications.

The idea would be to get many more students who aspire to get into a top college accepted in one of the first two rounds. Granted, students who got pushed to ED2 would still have to apply in the regular round, but the difference is, as soon as they were accepted, they would have to immediately withdraw their applications for the regular round to all other colleges (which by the way is no different from what they have to do now in ED2). In order to encourage all qualified students to apply, regardless of financial status, top colleges must follow the lead of the Ivies and allocate funds to meet 100 percent of demonstrated financial need. That way, students do not have to wait until regular round to compare or shop around for a better financial aid package.

Part 2: Eliminate athletic recruiting for Ivy league football. Right now, at the Ivies, 17 to 20 percent of the first-year class is reserved for recruited athletes, and football players take up close to 20 percent of those spots. If all the Ivies stopped recruiting, they could still field football teams—even if the overall level of play dropped, it would drop equally across the board.

Solution No. 2: Now that all the top colleges accept electronic applications, model top college admissions on the medical school residency model of matching. Students aiming for top colleges could list out 15 to 20 colleges in rank order, and the colleges would, in turn, read those applications and make a decision following an agreed-upon timeline to complete the process between the current early deadline of Nov. 1 and April 1. When students are accepted by a college on their list, they are off the table for all other colleges. If not, they continue. The most competitive colleges could band together and follow this model. Rather than receiving 60,000 applications, even the most desirable college would receive a fraction of the number of applications. The system already exists, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel, and students already submit their applications electronically through the Common Application, so the mechanism exists.

Of course these solutions can be tweaked, but the point is that students, not institutional self-interests, would be first and foremost in importance, a win-win situation rather than mutually assured destruction. Rethinking the admissions process would result in healthier, happier students, and institutions could devote more quality time to reading applicant files while reaping the rewards of not having to reject 95 percent of their applicant pool and leaving all that talent on the table.