3.4, 4.6, 3.6—these are the acceptance rates for Harvard, Yale, and Columbia from the 2020-2021 college admissions cycle. These acceptance rates are astoundingly low, even in comparison to previous years (Harvard, for example, had its acceptance rate drop from 5.6 to 3.4, a 31 percent decrease). To internalize the difficulty of a three percent acceptance rate, try flipping a coin five times in a row; the chance of getting five consecutive heads is around three percent.
To make matters worse, applicants to top schools are often a self-selecting pool of qualified students. In other words, most students applying to top schools would probably fit in if accepted. The problem, though, is that there are limited spaces for a surfeit of qualified students. Consequently, admissions rates have become milk percentages. While admissions to prestigious institutions has always been difficult, it has never been more difficult than it is today.
In the 2020-2021 admissions year, the number of applications to prestigious universities increased dramatically. For instance, according to the Wall Street Journal, the restrictive early action round at Harvard and Yale received 57 and 38 percent more applications than last year, respectively. This change is similarly mirrored at other top institutions—every university in the Ivy League reported a higher number of applicants during each application cycle this year.
Amidst this drastic increase in applications, the number of individual applicants applying to college this year barely increased—by just under two percent. What turned the system on its head was an 11 percent increase in individual applications sent to universities, meaning that roughly the same number of students applied to significantly more colleges. This created an overflow of applications at each individual university, yet with much higher uncertainty over whether these students were determined to attend a given university, or whether they were just shotgunning—the practice of applying to a large number of reach schools in the hope of getting in somewhere.
This stark increase in applications can be partially attributed to the test-optional policies most renowned universities adopted for the 2020-21 admissions cycle to accomodate for the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing students to submit an application without SAT or ACT scores, colleges opened the door to those unable to take the tests due to the pandemic and those without test preparation resources to apply to universities that previously would have been deemed out of reach. However, the path towards test-optional had been started long before the pandemic. As they recognized that standardized test scores are as much of a reflection of a student’s family income as it is their academic aptitude, colleges nearly universally dropped the requirement for the writing supplements that accompany the SAT and ACT, and valued students’ test scores less.
By going test-optional, prestigious colleges have fully embraced a holistic admissions process, in which they seek to evaluate people, not numerical scores. While the change to test-optional is novel, the trend toward a holistic evaluation is certainly not; elite universities have overlooked test scores in favor of extracurricular passions, life experiences, and other unique talents for decades.
The test-optional policy, more holistic admissions, and the drastic increase in applicants created an admissions cycle in which thousands of similarly qualified applicants in the forms of transcripts and essays fought for only a few hundred spots on the desks of overwhelmed admissions officers. In the end, an all-time high majority of applicants received rejection letters, while waitlists were also larger than ever before, leaving students feeling cheated—asking themselves if their years of hard work and carefully crafted applications were worth it—and even more convinced of the random nature of the whole process.
Admission into a prestigious university is difficult—the milk-percentage-esque admissions rates confirm that. As a result, it’s certainly an incredible accomplishment to get into a prestigious school. But behind every application (regardless of whether it turns out to be an acceptance or a rejection), there is an incredible student—someone who displayed devout diligence in their academic accomplishments, fervent curiosity in their extracurricular passions, and heartwarming compassion in their service to the community. While there may not be enough space in the Ivy League for each outstanding student, there is certainly enough space in the world—and their value cannot be compared to mere pixelated confetti on an admissions portal.