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The whole process of getting a child into college and paying for it is a source of huge anxiety for students and parents alike—and no more so than for those trying to get into “elite” schools, the private schools with the best reputations and the big brand names that will open doors for their graduates (or so students and parents hope).
To get an idea of how far this anxiety will drive some people, recall a few years back when there was a massive scandal [ [link removed] ] in which well-off parents were paying huge sums of money to create fake credentials and bribe college officials to get their kids into top schools. And of course, there are the never-ending debates and lawsuits over college admissions policies, pitting racial preferences against legacy admissions and fretting over which minority groups are helped or hurt by these preferences.
Even though very few students actually attend elite schools, the swirling anxiety around them gets disproportionate attention in our politics and media, perhaps because the people who write and publish articles in mainstream newspapers are the kind of people who went to, or hoped to go to or now hope to get their children into, these schools.
But what if it is all unnecessary? What if the brutal exclusivity of top schools, and the elite anxiety it creates, is the product of an artificial scarcity?
Supply and Demand
In early June, I had a conversation with a parent at my kids’ high school whose daughter had just graduated. She was a star student, but the admissions process had still been a nightmare, in which she was placed on multiple waitlists and didn’t know where she was going in the fall until literally days before graduation. The toughest part was that she had wanted to go to the same Ivy League school her father attended but was rejected. Then again, he observed, when he went there, they accepted 20% of applicants—but now the acceptance rate is below 5%.
This is true across the board. Schools that used to be hard to get into—you had to have good test scores, great grades and a couple of prominent extracurricular activities—have become almost impossible to get accepted to, and decisions about who gets in and who doesn’t seem increasingly arbitrary.
Let’s pause a moment to recognize that there is an overblown emphasis on the importance of attending an elite college. While it is natural for 18-year-olds to think that where they go to college will determine the whole course of their lives, it doesn’t. Half of Fortune 100 CEOs went to state schools [ [link removed] ], while only 10% went to elite universities. My own experience is that by the time you’re a few years out of school, people stop asking or caring where you went and are more likely to care what you did most recently.
Yet there is a real premium to be gained by going to these schools. It’s hard to measure, because there is also a selection effect. A school that only accepts the top 5% of applicants is taking kids who have already done so much by age 18—or at least figured out how to work the meritocratic system—that they are likely to be economically successful in later life no matter where they go. If attending an elite college is likely to make you part of the 1% [ [link removed] ], it’s because you are already part of the fewer than 1% of students who are admitted into these schools—and because you are likely to have already grown up in the 1%.
But if attendance at an elite school is a valuable opportunity, it is an opportunity that has been artificially restricted. A 2021 report [ [link removed] ] from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) quantifies this effect:
In 1979, the incoming class of Yale College freshmen stood at 1,346 students. In 2015, the size of the incoming class of Yale College freshmen stood at 1,360 students, an increase of just 14 students. Over the same period, the number of applications to Yale College increased by over 300 percent, from 9,331 students in 1979 to 30,932 in 2015. Across elite colleges, the story is the same—increasing demand for spaces but with only a small increase in supply. In contrast, less elite colleges have largely expanded supply in response to increasing demand ... .
For colleges in the Bottom 25% of SAT selectivity, enrollment increased by 61 percent between 1990 and 2015. However, four colleges that regularly rotate as the nation’s top ranked college in the widely-cited US News annual survey—Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale (herein “HPSY”) increased their enrollment by only 7 percent ... . [T]he sorting of enrollment by selectivity appears to extend back to 1970.
America is a larger and more educated nation than before. In the past 30 years, the population of the United States has grown by about 70 million, the number of kids graduating from high school each year has increased [ [link removed] ] from less than 2.5 million to more than 3.7 million, and the percentage going to college has risen. While that number has dropped off slightly in recent years, this decrease can be attributed mostly to those for whom a skilled blue-collar job is an attractive alternative to college—not the kids trying to get into Harvard. Hence the paradox of a shortage of students [ [link removed] ] at nonelite schools, even as elite colleges exclude more applicants.
The Chase for Prestige
The NBER report attributes elite colleges’ decision not to grow for the past 50 years to a chase for prestige, the idea that the colleges that admit the fewest applicants must therefore be the best. As former Harvard President Larry Summers put it [ [link removed] ], “What except exclusivity is the rationale for not significantly expanding freshman classes as applicant pools explode?”
Furthermore, Tyler Cowen speculates [ [link removed] ] that it’s not just administrators chasing after prestige, but faculty as well. If you admit more Harvard students, you need more Harvard professors, and they each would lose a little of the exclusivity of their own status.
What does not seem to be in doubt is that students aren’t being turned away because of their abilities. As the NBER report puts it, “if colleges only value the absolute skill level of their students, admit rates always increase in response to rising demand.” As it is, these schools are “often rejecting students that are essentially indistinguishable from admits.”
In the Washington Post, Jeffrey Selingo seconds this [ [link removed] ]:
Application readers at top colleges told me that they could fill multiple freshman classes with deserving students and that, as a result, selection decisions are now often arbitrary. Each year, these colleges turn away thousands of academic superstars based solely on the idea [ [link removed] ] that “more exclusive” means “better.”
The reductio ad absurdum of this trend is a satire quoted in the NBER report about Stanford achieving the ultimate in prestige by admitting no students at all. Inside Higher Ed takes that idea more seriously by projecting [ [link removed] ] the trend toward increasing exclusivity into the future, when some universities could accept fewer than 1% of applicants. It also notes that the cost of elite colleges no longer serves as the primary constraint. Despite shocking nominal tuition rates—up to $75,000 per year—most students don’t pay full freight [ [link removed] ]. As Inside Higher Ed concludes, “In a world of 2050, where the US’s already-wealthy schools are unimaginably more affluent, it is entirely imaginable that most students at elite schools will be attending for free.”
Trends may not continue at their current rate, but the projection serves to make a point. Admission to elite schools is effectively becoming a lottery in which a very small number of lucky 18-year-olds get a free ticket to become part of the 1%. You can see how this creates a spiraling sense of anxiety for students and parents—and a zero-sum game that’s not healthy for the country as a whole.
Scarcity and Conflict
This mentality of artificial scarcity is already becoming ingrained in the students themselves. Last year, The Atlantic published a fascinating report [ [link removed] ] from a Yale student about the absurdly competitive process for gaining membership to student clubs. The exclusivity, it turns out, is imposed entirely by the students themselves, as a recapitulation of the exclusive process by which they got into Yale in the first place. It is as if they are continually reenacting their own trauma—and, for all the fashionable posturing about “progressive” values, enforcing an even higher level of privilege and exclusivity.
What is the result? When resources are scarce, we fight over them.
Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling [ [link removed] ] finding that racial preferences in college admissions are unconstitutional. The case was brought against elite universities, not on behalf of white students, but on behalf of Asian American and Indian American students, who were able to demonstrate that preferences in favor of Black and Hispanic students were exercised mostly by making it more difficult for the Asian kids to get into school.
Others have responded that if we really want to stamp out “privilege” in admissions, elite schools should get rid of “legacy” admissions, which favor the children of previous graduates. A long, good examination of the issue [ [link removed] ] in the Harvard Crimson points out that all of this misses the underlying problem:
The discussion about who is advantaged or disadvantaged by the admissions process—be it Black students, white students or legacy students—seems to take this regime of selectivity for granted, as though elite admissions had to remain a zero-sum game.
But what if it didn’t have to? What if Harvard could think bigger?
Contests over how to divide a fixed pie are always zero-sum. If one person wins, another loses. The only way to escape that is to bake a bigger pie.
The Year of Stasis
So what are the solutions? The NBER report proposes “allowing elite colleges to coordinate their admissions”—for example, if “the top 200 colleges commit to a minimum admit rate.” But it also points out that this kind of “collusion” “is currently illegal on antitrust grounds under the Sherman Act.”
Perhaps the solution is simply to expand the number of elite colleges—a little more plus to the “Ivy Plus [ [link removed] ]”—with second-tier schools absorbing more of the star students and top faculty who can’t find places at the walled-off elite institutions and thereby increasing their own reputations.
But there are wider constraints that also need to be addressed. The Harvard Crimson article is mostly about an abandoned program to expand Harvard championed by Larry Summers during his tenure as the university’s president 20 years ago. But this plan faced resistance from locals, who protested against building more campus facilities and dorms for new students.
If this sounds like familiar NIMBYism, there is a definite parallel. The NBER report considers this as one factor in the failure of colleges to expand:
Before the modern college ratings era begin in earnest in the 1970’s, Stanford increased its enrollment—by over 250 percent between 1920 and 1970—similar to many Ivy League colleges at the time. Nonetheless, one could argue that many small college “officials” (or their faculty) settled upon the absolute size of their campus, consistent with some “look and feel” that they want to preserve, at a point in time that coincided with the start of the modern ratings era.
The year 1970 keeps popping up in this kind of context. For all the clamor of that era’s counterculture about “change” and “revolution,” there are an awful lot of things that began to stagnate at about 1970. It is America’s Year of Stasis: the year our per capita energy usage peaked [ [link removed] ], the year many towns erected zoning barriers against growth, and apparently the year elite colleges decided they had grown as much as they ever needed to and would stay that way forever.
What we need to confront is the wider cultural malaise of a country that in significant ways gave up on growth as a goal—for universities, for towns, for energy, for everything—50 years ago.
Less Scarcity, More Opportunity
Reducing the artificial scarcity of elite educational opportunities is a solution—not just for the anxiety of students and their parents, but for the cultural, ideological and socioeconomic narrowness of elite institutions. More students would mean a more diverse student body in all respects.
More deeply, it would return the universities to their stated mission, which is not to serve as super-exclusive private clubs, but to provide high-quality education to the people who will take on prominent roles in the nation and in their communities.
But that is going to require these schools to value education over a narrow quest for prestige and to value growth and dynamism over stasis.

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