MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
What if I told you that elite doesn't mean best. That the dream school you have in mind for you or your child's college education doesn't exist. In other words, that there is not a single perfect, ideally prestigious match for you or your kid that will put you in a trajectory for lifetime success. And, oh, by the way, if you think the whole college admissions process is crazy, you're not crazy. It really is. All that is according to journalist and author Jeffrey Selingo, who has spent many years reporting on the inner workings of higher ed admissions. He writes about all this in his latest book "Dream School: Finding The College That's Right For You," and he's with us now. Jeffrey Selingo, thanks so much for joining us.
JEFFREY SELINGO: It's great to be here. Thank you.
MARTIN: So first, let's talk about just how crazy college admissions has gotten. Without giving my age, I applied to four schools. Those were the schools my college adviser told me to apply to. I did. You did the same. What, four?
SELINGO: Four colleges, yeah. Yeah.
MARTIN: Four schools. So why is it now people are applying to 30?
SELINGO: Well, I've worked in and around higher ed for nearly 30 years, and I could say this with certainty that we kind of lost our way. We don't think about purpose anymore in higher ed. We think about prestige. And so what's happened just in the last 20 years is that the number of applications filed to the most selective colleges and universities have gone from about 600,000 applications to nearly 2 million applications.
MARTIN: You're saying the size of their freshman classes has stayed flat at around 100,000 in total, but also, the number of high school seniors in the United States has not grown by that much. So the number of these applications cannot be attributed to the fact that there are more humans in the world.
SELINGO: Exactly. And we've gone over. Just the Common App this year went over 10 million applications overall, where, again, the number of seniors has remained consistent. Everybody just keeps applying to more colleges. And they're kind of forgetting, by the way, that the average acceptance rate in the United States of a U.S. college is 65%. Most colleges accept most students, but we keep coming back to this idea that prestige matters. And we know that success is not exclusive to just the Ivy League.
MARTIN: Well, the other thing you point out in the book, though, it isn't just that the most selective colleges are getting this huge increase in applications.
SELINGO: Yes, everyone's getting them, but they mostly want the most selective. So then what happens is who says yes to a acceptance offer. And so yield - that's the percentage of students that actually say yes to a college when they get accepted - those numbers have been falling except at the most prestigious colleges.
MARTIN: Forgive me for putting it in such crass terms, but whose fault is this? I guess, it feels like it should be somebody's fault. Is it these rankings that famously seem to exist only to rank colleges, and they rank them according to selectivity, or is it something else? Is it just this is actually an affluent country, and when you have more money, you tend to go to college?
SELINGO: Well, I'm not trying to get out of the question, but everyone's to blame, right? So we have the Common App, which makes it now easier to apply to college with essentially a press of button. Rankings are to blame because everyone is trying to move up in the rankings. Colleges are to blame because they keep adding different rounds to admissions. So now we have early action and early decision, and they're trying to make students commit earlier than ever before, if they get in. And then finally, at the end of the day, it's really the families. At some point, somebody has to say, stop. And this is what I'm trying to do with this book, is I'm trying to give parents permission to say it's OK to think more broadly about what signals a good college. Student engagement is actually higher at some less-selective colleges than it's at higher-selective colleges.
MARTIN: Let me just ask one more question about the sort of upward pressure on applications. Some parts of the world have gotten a lot more affluent...
SELINGO: Yep.
MARTIN: ...Than they were, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago. And it's a sensitive subject right now because international students are under such a spotlight - some of it quite negative from the current administration. But does an influx of applications from international students - many of whom pay full price - is that also a factor on this sort of upward pressure on applications?
SELINGO: Oh, there's no doubt about it that international students over the last 20 or 30 years have taken spots from domestic students, which is why people worry about the number of international students at American universities. But the problem is, is that, again, we keep thinking that the only place to get a good education is at these elite schools, and that's just not true.
MARTIN: There has been tremendous legal and political energy around affirmative action in recent years. There's this attitude that these unqualified Black and Latino kids are taking up all the spots. Is that...
SELINGO: So, no. I mean, my last book, I was embedded in three selective colleges. And I will tell you, and this is what really frustrated me during the oral arguments in the Supreme Court a couple of years ago in the affirmative action case, is it just doesn't happen. Do they talk about race and income and ethnicity? Yes, they do, but they do it at the very end when they're trying to balance a class. And that's when you have highly qualified students from all different kinds of backgrounds and you're saying as an institution - as is your right, by the way, with institutional autonomy - that we think diversity is important.
MARTIN: I notice that in your book, you didn't identify...
SELINGO: No.
MARTIN: ...Anybody by race. I mean, you gave some sort of markers about, like, where people live and what kind of community or what kind of high school they came from. So I'm just asking, like, is this primarily an upper middle-class issue here?
SELINGO: Well, focus on prestigious colleges, yes. Race and class definitely play a role here. Most students are in high schools where they get very little advice about college. There might be one or two counselors for hundreds of students. They're dealing with just, you know, getting the right classes in high school to even get into college. There's all these things people don't know.
MARTIN: What do you hope parents, students and counselors should look at?
SELINGO: So I want to give them the tools to look beyond kind of the top 25 rankings. And first, what are the colleges and universities that give you a supportive start? One in 4 kids are not going to make it to their sophomore year, and only 50% of students even graduate in four years. So you want to go to a place that has built-in support structures. Many of these best colleges have orientation throughout the year. So you want to look for something with that first year experience. They build that scaffolding around you, and then they slowly take it down as you become a sophomore, junior and senior.
MARTIN: And this is not just kids who are first-gen college students.
SELINGO: No, this is everybody.
MARTIN: This is everybody. You think...
SELINGO: Everybody needs this now.
MARTIN: ...Everybody needs this.
SELINGO: Especially, by the way, post-COVID, a lot of students are coming to college and they're just not ready. So everybody needs that. Second, were connections are easy. We know that belonging in college matters. Again, it matters to completion. So you want to ask other students about, did they find a mentor in that first year of college? We know that finding a mentor is incredibly important to graduating from college for, again, students at all income levels.
MARTIN: Jeffrey Selingo is the author of "Dream School: Finding The College That's Right For You." Jeffrey Selingo, thanks so much for talking to us.
SELINGO: It was great to be here. Thank you.
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