The Pressure to Chase Prestige in College Admissions

The college admissions process has never offered more options and yet also created more anxiety for families. As acceptance rates fall at the most selective schools and applications surge, many families are zoning in on a small set of elite institutions, driven less by fit than by status.

Jeff Selingo calls this group the “panicking class” — families caught in a cycle of competition and uncertainty. As a journalist who has spent years covering higher education, he’s closely followed how families make decisions when it comes time for their child to go to college. Faced with a sprawling and often confusing landscape, many turn to rankings for clarity. But those rankings can be misleading. “There is not as much difference between number 40 and number 60 or even number 80 and number 90 from 40 than we think there is,” he says. 

Recent admissions changes have only intensified the pressure. Test-optional policies, the Common Application, and early decision programs aimed at expanding access are making outcomes harder to predict. The result, Selingo says, is a system that feels opaque to those navigating it. “There's nothing that has a high fidelity when it comes to the signal of what any of these pieces of the application have, and I think that's what frustrates parents and students, as well. It's the uncertainty of it all,” he says.

Despite many families recognizing that prestige shouldn’t be the main focus of college searches, they often falter to it anyway. This is something that Selingo describes as a fear of putting their on child at a disadvantage if they totally walk away from the prestige driven culture.

In this episode, the EdCast explores what it would take to shift the culture and why finding the right college fit may matter far more than chasing prestige.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Many families today are so caught up in the race for elite colleges that they lose sight of what Jeff Selingo says matters most, finding the right fit for their child. Jeff is a journalist who has spent years reporting on higher education. He calls this the panicking class, families so driven by prestige that despite thousands of colleges to choose from, they limit themselves to just a few elite schools.

Even for those strongest students, getting in isn't guaranteed, because the college admissions landscape has changed so dramatically. I talked with Jeff about what drives this culture and what it might take to change it. First, I asked why even with all the research urging families to focus on fit, so many still haven't shifted their thinking.

JEFF SELINGO: Because the higher education system, to us who are in it, makes a lot of sense. But to those who only will buy, and I'll call this a product for a minute, who buy this product once, or twice, or three times in their life, depending on how many kids they have, it is a group of 3,000-plus institutions. It's an ecosystem that really doesn't make a lot of sense. Even if you're just talking about four-year colleges and universities with over a thousand students, still talking about a universe of 1,200 colleges and universities.

When you say broaden your search, look deeper in the rankings, they don't know what they're looking for, and they don't know what quality looks like when they find it necessarily. So what do they do? They go to the rankings. The rankings, to them, help make sense of that ecosystem of a thousand-plus colleges and universities among the four-year institutions. But in many ways, the rankings are more confusing than they are clarifying to parents and students, because where do you go? You go to the top of the rank. Top of every ranking is essentially the same colleges and universities over and over again. They're hard to get into.

And so once you go deeper in the rankings, again, you get confused. You're like, "Well, how do I tell the difference between number 40 and number 60?" I will tell you, having worked on the rankings very early in my career, there is not as much difference between number 40 and number 60 or even number 80 and number 90 from 40 than we think there is.

JILL ANDERSON: Right, and you should probably be suspicious of the rankings in general. But as you said, it makes sense. When you're embedded in higher ed, that conversation comes up about the rankings and the fuzzy math, sometimes, that's involved in how they get to those rankings.

JEFF SELINGO: Yeah, and we also know the difference between ... It's even basic stuff around liberal arts colleges, and big research universities, and publics and privates, and how they're governed, and what are we looking for in terms of faculty and the student experience? There's all these elements, when you're working in this system, that you understand, but when you're not in it every day, in some ways, I compare it to how I operate in the healthcare system. I find it incredibly complex and confusing. How do I find a good doctor? I call somebody I know, and I say, "Who do you go to?" which is a terrible way, by the way, to find a good doctor.

We do, in some ways, do the same thing with higher education. We look around us. We like, "Well, those people are successful. Where did they go?" or, "My neighborhood, I see all these stickers or flags for this college or university. It must be good." That's how we kind of look for a college, which is a terrible way to look for a college.

JILL ANDERSON: Right, and of course, the college admissions process itself hasn't really done us any favors in making this easier. I think one of the unique things is this idea that stuff that was meant to make things better or lower barriers, like these test optional policies, early decisions, the Common App, all that drama with the raising of application rates and messing with the acceptance rates, all of these shifts have just made the system, it seems, more complex, more competitive, and families are really struggling. How do you see those changes in the current admissions landscape and just the idea of how it's leaving families to feel overwhelmed and powerless?

JEFF SELINGO: Well, I feel like they have more power than they think they do. It's uncertainty, and they really want certainty. You're not going to get it in a holistic system that is not built like other countries' systems, which might be around grades, or test scores, or hitting certain marks. To be honest with you, that's why some people in the US are looking overseas as a result, because they think those systems are more transparent. Our admission system in the US is kind of a black box that you can't really kind of figure out once you're in it.

We talk about this holistic system, and people think, "Oh. That sounds fair." Right? Because it's based on a mix of factors. Somebody could be strong with good test scores, and then, somebody else could be strong in grades. Somebody else could be strong in how they write, and they all have kind of an equal chance. But then, you kind of realize, but we don't really know how they assess all those different things.

I think the other question that is up for debate right now is what I call the fidelity of those signals that are coming from those things. Right? So we have grade inflation. We have test prep, which, again, we've always had. We have essays that are overly curated, and now, we have AI with the essays. We have signup clubs where students are just trying to fill in the gaps in their resume. So there's nothing that has a high fidelity when it comes to the signal of what any of these pieces of the application have, and I think that's what frustrates parents and students, as well. It's the uncertainty of it all.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. Is this sort of striving something you're seeing just with top-performing students, or is it playing out the same way for average students?

JEFF SELINGO: I think it has an impact on the more average students. For the most part, if I go to most cities and towns in the US, there is not going to be this high anxiety over college admissions. Before we got on the air, you were talking about my travel schedule, and I will tell you that most of my travel is in major metropolitan areas with high achieving public and private high schools. I refer to this group as the panicking class. Right? These are the parents who, in many ways, went to highly selective colleges themselves, or they went to colleges now that they think have become too selective for even their own kids.

They see it in their workplace. There's a lot of worry around AI coming for white collar jobs. There's just this high anxiety that then transfers to their kids. Among the, quote-unquote, "average students," that just riles them up in a way that it really shouldn't, because as I remind people, the average acceptance rate of an American college or university, 65%. Most colleges accept most students. You're going to have plenty of choices, and, quote-unquote, "if you're an average student," you're going to have a ton of choices if you're not trying to aim for those top, top schools.

The fact of the matter is at the top schools, however we define them, and let's define them by selectivity for a second, is that their applications have just grown tremendously over the last 25 years, threefold over the last 25 years. The number of seats have stayed essentially the same. They've grown a little bit here and there. But for the most part, their freshman class is the same as it always has been, and they have three times as many applications. And so it's a headcount measure at the end of the day about how selective they become.

JILL ANDERSON: I was just fascinated in your work that you did some surveys that looked at parents and this idea of prestige-obsessed culture around college, and they recognize it. They see it. They know it's there, and they kind of almost think, "I'm not going to participate in it." But when push comes to shove-

JEFF SELINGO: They do.

JILL ANDERSON: ... they do. Is this really a parenting culture issue that we have?

JEFF SELINGO: There's no doubt about it. It's a parenting culture issue, and it's a collective action problem as a result, and so just talking about these high-achieving high schools where the top students are going to apply to the top schools. Then, that just filters down to everybody else at the school and then creates this anxiety that really shouldn't exist as a result about getting into college. Because as I said earlier, it's easier to get into college. But then, if you're a parent of any of the students in any of these schools, you're thinking, "Well, I don't want to get off this treadmill, because I don't want to put my kid at a disadvantage. I don't want to look like a bad parent because I didn't try for the hardest schools to get into for my kid," even though, by the way, they may not be a good fit for your kid.

That's the other thing. We just blindly follow the leader in college admissions and think, "Well, oh. Harvard must be perfect for everybody, including my kid," when it really isn't perfect for everybody, believe it or not. That is the crux of the issue, Jill, that I'm dealing with right now as I think about, how do we change this culture? Because it's a collective action problem. You can't just say, as an individual parent, "I'm going to stop." You have to get everybody to stop.

In many ways, I compare it to what's happening with cell phones and social media right now, cell phones particularly in schools. Because if I, a couple of years ago, said, "Well, I'm just not going to send my kid to school with a cell phone," then they would say, "But everyone else has one. I have to have one, too." But when the schools or the states, in some cases, and, I mean, I know there's a huge debate about whether we should ban these devices. So let's put that aside for a second

But somebody just says, "We're going to ban them," whether it's the school or the state, and then everybody says, "Okay," arms down, all at the same time. In some ways, we have to do that about college, but it's not as easy as flipping a switch and putting a phone in phone jail, essentially. What do you do? You say maybe nobody could apply to more than two top-ranked schools out of high school? I don't even know where you start to really try to change that conversation, but that, in some ways, is what we have to do. Because if we do it as individual parents, A, it may never take off, or it's going to take a hundred years to go anywhere.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. You're out meeting with parents, and in many ways, you are offering an alternative. You have a guide, essentially, on how they can do this better.

JEFF SELINGO: Well, I think part of it is, what do they really want out of this process or don't want out of this process? I feel like we often start the college search midstream, where we start just putting names on a list, like, "We want to go here and there, because these are schools we're familiar with," rather than stepping back a moment, going further upstream, and saying, "What do we want out of this process? Do we like being in a big high school? Would we rather have been in a smaller high school? Do we like being in small classes? Do we like interaction with faculty members? What do we really want out of this process, or what don't we like?"

Sometimes, I think it's easier for 18 year olds to say what they don't like rather than what they like. That, to me, is where you really start the process about fit, because in my work, there's a student I talked to, William, who ended up at Columbia. He only ended up there because it was the most selective college he could get into. He got there, and he realized all these things he didn't like about it. He wanted to do undergraduate research. He couldn't do undergraduate research. He wanted to take a specific class. He couldn't take a specific class, and he had all these complaints about it, ended up transferring.

When he transferred, I said to him, I said, "William," I said, "all those things you ended up discovering your freshman year that you didn't like, you could have actually discovered most of them during the college search, and you would have had a better fit as a result." He said, "Yes," but he was only defined by one thing, and that was selectivity. Right? It was only prestige. He was blinded by prestige. He wanted to go to the most prestigious college he could get into, and to me, that is not fit.

JILL ANDERSON: So you said fit begins with kind of asking about what you don't want.

JEFF SELINGO: Yep.

JILL ANDERSON: Then, can you help navigate a little bit of the thinking around even good schools, because what does that mean? It's not prescriptive.

JEFF SELINGO: It isn't, and this goes back to fit, is that there's no such thing as a perfect fit. Because I also think we're trying to say, "Well, this school has this, and this school has that." You're never going to find anything that is everything you want. So I think at some point, you have to also prioritize what's most important, "I want to have good, close faculty-student interaction." Well, then you should go to a place that focuses more on undergraduate education than graduate education, where maybe you have more full-time faculty members than you have adjuncts, nothing against adjuncts, but maybe that you would have more time with the faculty members where classes are smaller, where you're going to get to know those professors in an easier way. Right?

So there's all these questions I think you need to ask yourself depending on what you want. If you want to have more of a pre-professional outlook on life, is it a place where they're going to have guaranteed internships or co-ops? It's those questions like that. "How do I like to learn? Do I like to learn by lectures? Do I want to be in small group settings, in seminars? Do I like hands-on learning so there's a lot of project-based learning?" All these things, I think you need to ask yourself very early on, at least to help guide you. Again, you're never going to find a place that offers you everything that you want, but you could at least find a place that fulfills many of those needs.

JILL ANDERSON: So just to sort of pivot back to these kind of panic-laden parents, you said that you've been going out and talking to these audiences. I'm curious whether they're receptive to the messaging that you have.

JEFF SELINGO: I get a lot of polite nods. I think the message gets through to some parents who are more receptive to it, and I think the combination of what I'm providing in my work between data and anecdote really helps, data and storytelling. Right? So every data point, the quants in the audience tend to get that, and then the emotional people in the audience, a story of a student really resonates with them. I think there's also a little bit of a zero-sum game going on here. You kind of hope that your neighbor sitting next to you at one of my talks will listen to me, because maybe then, they think, "Oh. Well, that will open up a spot for me at Harvard, because now, that kid won't apply to Harvard."

My work is not a screed against the highly elite, highly selective colleges. I'm also not telling people not to apply to those places. They're incredible institutions. There is just way too many applications for too few seats, and yes, should you put in an application? Sure. But I think so many families put all of their eggs in that basket and then are really disappointed when the results do not show up the way they had hoped.

JILL ANDERSON: We're talking in March. I feel like this is a really interesting time, because many seniors are finding out where they've been accepted. Financial aid picture might be coming a little bit clearer. Families are starting to realize that maybe this process hasn't gone the way they had hoped, or imagined, or planned, and they have to make some decisions, when we're coming down to the wire, and they have to make a decision, and they maybe didn't get into those top elite schools they were hoping for. How do you suggest they navigate that moment and make really good decisions without just falling back on this dream of a prestigious school?

JEFF SELINGO: Yeah. I mean, at some point, you're just going to have to make a decision. So I think that's part of it. It's kind of the stages of grief in some way. You'll eventually get through the grief of not getting in where you wanted to and pick a school. You'll never really know until you're there. I always encourage students and families to take as many notes as you can throughout the process, not only when you go visit campuses, but how you're feeling about things, like keeping a journal, or an audio journal, or some other sort of picture journal about how you're feeling about things. Because the teenage brain, as we know, is transforming itself throughout high school.

And so then, you could go back when you're trying to make the final decision, "Did I think of this school?" or, "How did I feel at that moment?" and really leave yourself open to changing your mind. Because that's the other thing that I think is really hard for families when they are so set on going to an Ivy, for example, let's just use that as an example, and then they don't get in. Then, they don't really open themselves up to these other possibilities as a result, because they're still so hung up on that.

And so the ability to change your mind during this process, and this is where I think you, by the way, you have a lot more agency than I think people realize they do. I always tell people, I think it's really easy to say you've applied to an Ivy League school. I think real agency in this process is, "I have decided I'm going to major in music," and I'm going to use my undergraduate alma mater, Ithaca College, "and I'm going to go and apply to Ithaca College. Because it started as a music conservatory, and this is why I think it's the strongest place for me."

I think that requires, on the part of teenagers, especially, but even families who live in these communities where there's so much pressure to go to these highly selective colleges, I think, to me, that is real agency, that you are able to break away from that pack. And so that, to me, is really where you have a lot more choice in this process than many people think they do.

JILL ANDERSON: Jeff, you've already talked a little bit about your hopes and aspirations to try to shift the parent culture, which I think you're working on. I wanted to ask you, just looking ahead, what changes do you hope to see in the college admissions landscape that might help around shifting this culture, if any?

JEFF SELINGO: I really wish that, and unfortunately, we're going in the opposite direction. I'm not a huge fan of the push towards earlier and earlier decisions and applications. So the whole early application, whether that's early action or early decision, pushes the whole college process much further and deeper into the junior year. That actually pushes it back into the sophomore year, pushes it back into the freshman year. I'm not saying that it's not appropriate to talk about college earlier in high school, but we've already turned high school into a tryout for college. Now, we just keep pushing the college process deeper into the high school experience.

I mentioned earlier about the teenage brain developing so rapidly and quickly in high school that people change their mind, and they should be able to change their mind. If colleges would just say, "You know what? We're going to go back to one calendar. We're going to give people time to figure this out," I think that would be incredibly helpful. The second thing is that I wish that we would give students some grace in the college admissions process. We make it seem to them, and in some ways it's true, that they can't fail at all in high school, that they have to have perfect grades. They have to take every AP class, every class that's available to them. They have to be perfect on the SAT. They have to do all these activities.

I really wish that somebody out there would say, "You know what? We really want students to experiment, and try, and fail." The teenage years in high school is all about trying things on, figuring out what fits, what doesn't fit, also, by the way, having some fun. I look back on my high school years with fondness, I mean, not that they weren't difficult. I mean, I don't think anyone has a perfect high school teenage experience, but it was a period of rapid, for me, trying things out. I was never one of these people who was hyper-focused, hyper-specialized.
Now, I have two teenage daughters at home. I'm just amazed at the people who have to be all in on something. You're an athlete. You have to be all in on that sport. You're a theater kid. You have to be all in on theater. My God. Could we just give them time to try these things out? We know, by the way, from the research, that hyper-specialization at an early age is a terrible thing. Right? But all of this is a tryout for college. It's all about finding that hook. It's all about finding that way in.

JILL ANDERSON: You'd mentioned a few things that you hope you see change, and I'm wondering if we're going to see a little bit more shifts back. Because it feels like we kind of went, as a result of COVID, leaned a lot in one direction with some of these things. The boost in applications, the test optional stuff has really jiggered some of these things, and I'm wondering if maybe we'll go a little bit back.

JEFF SELINGO: It's an interesting question, and Jill, I don't know what generation you are. But I'm a Gen Xer.

JILL ANDERSON: I'm a Gen Xer, too.

JEFF SELINGO: whose parents are early millennials, kind of on the leading edge of the millennial generation. Stu Schmill, who's the dean of admissions at MIT, has this theory that he has told me that there is generational change among how parents parent and how they think about these things. His theory was they went to a wider range of institutions, because by the time they started college, I don't think it's the early 2000s, I think it's a little bit later. But by the time the mid-2000s, the later 2000s came along, those were the kids that weren't getting into the Ivys the way kids back in our day and age, like in the early '90s were.

That's when the acceptance rates really started to tighten up. They, then, went to a wider range of colleges, and they had success. Because they had success, his theory is they will now take that down to their own kids, and they'll say, "You know what? I didn't go to Harvard. I went to the University of Wisconsin, and I'm fine." Right? And so maybe, will that broaden out our view? I don't know, because the opposite has always happened, where people have gone to less selective places, and then they still wanted their kids to go to more selective places. So I'm not quite sure of that theory, but he could be onto something. Because we are about to go through a bigger generational shift among parents.

JILL ANDERSON: All right. So maybe we'll have you back in 10 years, and we can talk about it then.

JEFF SELINGO: Well, or have Stu on, because it's his theory, not my theory. So we'll just blame him if we're wrong.

JILL ANDERSON: All right. Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF SELINGO: Thank you.

JILL ANDERSON: Jeff Selingo is a journalist and special advisor to the president of Arizona State University. He's the author of Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.