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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. Hey, thanks for spending part of this rainy Wednesday with us. I hope you're staying dry, and as always, I'm so glad you're here. On today's show, we've got a live in-studio performance with the band and some cast members from the Off-Broadway musical Dead Outlaw. Country legend Alice Randall joins us to discuss her new memoir and her new album. Were You Raised By Wolves? podcast host Nick Leighton will be here to talk about wedding etiquette and take your calls about your dilemmas and experiences. That's the plan. Let's get this all started with why this year's college admissions process has been so harrowing.

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Kousha Navidar: Over the past few weeks, high school seniors across the country have probably been compulsively refreshing their email boxes waiting to find out if their college application decision has been posted. I got to tell you, the anxiety is real. I remember it very well personally. Applying to colleges is a stressful, sometimes traumatizing experience. Over the years, applying to college has become much more competitive, opaque, and unequal. This past season was one of the craziest, that's according to Jeffrey Selingo, an author and journalist who covers higher education.

A lot of schools dropped testing requirements since the COVID-19 pandemic, which generated a surge of applicants for each school. In recent months, calculation issues with the FAFSA, that's the Federal Student Aid application system, it caused major processing delays for students who needed financial support. Plus, to add on top of it, the Supreme Court just struck down affirmative action last June, so applying to college now feels like a game of chess, but like you're playing it in the dark.

Students and families are navigating this new set of rules, but Selingo argues that there's only one real winner, and it's the small group of elite colleges who effectively run the entire admissions game. These schools, in Selingo's eyes, are more fixated on protecting its "prestige" to meet its enrollment and revenue goals than they are making the process accessible and fair for applicants. With us to talk about this year's college admissions cycle is Jeff Selingo. Hey, Jeff, thanks for joining us.

Jeffrey Selingo: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Listeners, we want you to help us report this story. Did you or a loved one recently apply to college? What was that experience like? Were you confused or did you figure out a specific strategy that worked out for you? Or maybe you have a child who's prepping for college applications in the next few years, is there a specific part of that that feels overwhelming and you have your mind on it? Give us a call. The number is 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. You can call us, text us, you can hit us up on social. We're @allofitwnyc. Jeff, you've been covering higher Ed for decades now. It's always been competitive, confusing, very difficult, but what was different about this year?

Jeffrey Selingo: I think there are a couple of big things going on. First of all, we have the continuation of test-optional admissions, which really took off during the first year of the pandemic when students couldn't sit for the test. What ends up happening is that, especially at the more selective schools, more students are applying every year because they're not requiring a test score. You've just seen this incredible increase, 30-plus percent at the most selective schools in terms of applications over the last four years. They're up another 7% this year.

You had, obviously, the other thing you mentioned, end of affirmative action in admissions, which really affected the most selective schools where seats are scarce, but there's a lot of applications. That's where race-conscious admissions really did matter in the past. Then the third piece, again, all coming together this year, is the FAFSA debacle, which last fall didn't really seem like much of a problem because the FAFSA was going to be delayed, but the education department said, "No problem. We'll just start it a little bit later than we normally would, open it up a little bit later."

Now what you're finding are these huge delays and a lot of mistakes. It seems like there's a mistake every week that the education department is reporting. You have all three of these things coming together this particular year. At the same time, you have large senior classes. We're about to enter a demographic cliff in the next couple of years in terms of senior classes, but you still have a pretty sizable high school senior class this year.

Kousha Navidar: A perfect storm of both, I guess, to summarize it, both trends that are obstacles and trends that grow the number of applicants. We want to get into all of those. Let's start with those growing number of applications that you had mentioned in this article that you wrote for New York Magazine titled Inside the Craziest College Admission Season Ever. You start your article by following the dean of undergraduate admissions at Duke. Duke got 48,000 applications just for the regular decision cycle. When you were looking and observing at their process, what was it like watching the officers of that university or at least hearing about it? What was it like learning how they sift through all those applications?

Jeffrey Selingo: Yes. I didn't get to observe Duke this year. A couple of years ago, I got to observe three colleges and universities, Emory, Davidson, and the University of Washington for my book Who Gets In and Why. I actually wanted to get back into the process this year where I could actually sit in with them. I approached a dozen schools in the last couple of months and they all said no to me.

Most of them were afraid of having somebody observe their system during the first year where they couldn't use affirmative action and couldn't use race in admissions. I actually just had to hear about it from triangulating conversations with admissions officers. What's clear to me is that, at all of these schools, they're getting inundated with applications. We're talking tens and tens of thousands, 48,000 just in regular decision to Duke and add another couple thousand for early decision.

Most of these colleges are doing regular decision between January and March. There's only so much time that you have, which is why you see most of these colleges really leaning into early action or early decision. They're trying to get more applications earlier in the process, which just, by the way, creates even more anxiety among applicants who now have to submit applications essentially in October of their senior year. They're a month or two into school and they're already applying to college.

Kousha Navidar: One of the elements that you just touched on was, so I'm hearing right, early action, early decision, right? For folks who might not be familiar, it's a non-binding application process where students can find out their results much earlier than the regular deadline. It falls into that portfolio of different application paths that certain students might take at these elite colleges. Who benefits from the early action process, Jeff?

Jeffrey Selingo: The early action process, which is different than the early decision process, so early decision is binding. You learn in December if you get in early decision and then it's binding, you're basically done with your process. Early action, you just find out earlier. What's actually happening is because more schools are doing early action because they want to get applications in the process earlier so they can read them earlier, it also is an indication of student interest. If you apply to a school early, it shows that you're more interested in potentially going there if they accept you.

Part of the problem is because more schools are doing this and more students are applying earlier-- In fact, this year with the common app, there were almost as many applications filed for early action and early decision as there were for regular decision. That's a big change. Most students usually have applied regular decision. What's happened is they're getting so many applications for early action that they're deferring most of the students because they don't even have enough time to get to all those applications. Even though they're coming in earlier, they don't have enough time in the fall to get to all of them.

Plus they know that students are applying to 10, 15, 20 schools. You could get into multiple schools, but you could only go to one. The yield of who actually ends up going is so important to colleges. If they defer you in early and you continue to show interest, they know you're interested in going there, and then maybe in regular, they'll take you. In other words, you have all these students applying early and all they do is get deferred, which is stringing them along even more. This is why I love your analogy of you're playing chess in the dark. That's essentially what this is.

Kousha Navidar: When we talk about yield rates, that seems to be an even more important metric for these schools than how many students apply. Can you talk us through why admissions officers are fixated on yield specifically?

Jeffrey Selingo: Yes. Remember, at the end of the day, they have to fill a class. As I said, you could apply to 10 or 15 schools and many students are applying. One of the reasons why we have so many more applications is you have almost the same number of students, but they're just filing more and more applications, which creates even more uncertainty with colleges about who's really going to come if we accept them. To get your yield rate, you don't want to accept too many students because then that makes you look less selective. There's this balance where you want to accept just enough students to yield just enough students.

The highly selective colleges are still yielding incredible amounts. Duke, for example, their yield rate is 60%. That means 60% of students they accept come to Duke, so it still means 40% are saying no to an acceptance to Duke. As I point out in the story, Brandeis, George Washington, Syracuse, 20 years ago, they had a similar yield rate to Duke. Now their yield rate is like 25% at Brandeis. George Washington's like 19%. Syracuse is 16%. At Syracuse, that means 16% of the students they accept say yes to them. That's a pretty low rate, and so you have to just keep accepting more and more students to get and yield as many students as you have in the class.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking to Jeff Selingo who's a higher education reporter, and just wrote an article for New York Magazine about this admission cycle, which has shaped up to be the most competitive and escalating all of the ways that students might feel nervous or traumatized even by this application process. Listeners, we want to talk to you. Do you have personal experience with this? Do you have questions about why the system is the way that it is? Give us a call, 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. We have a caller. Heather in Brooklyn. Hi, Heather. Welcome to the show.

Heather: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. We're in a year behind this year's traumatized class, but in some ways, it's like trying not to reverb the trauma onto our junior and high school. I think things like early decision are just terrible. As you mentioned, I think, and the guest did as well, it's like it puts so much pressure on families and students and it's independent of your financial aid decision. There's just so many factors that I think are against students or anti-student in some ironic ways. That was my comment and I'll listen off the air. Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: Heather, thank you so much for that call. Speaking of the financial aspect of it, we also got a tweet that just came in. It reads, "My son applied this year. The system is ridiculous. Everything in the USA is being slanted to favor the rich and powerful. This is no different and it's getting worse." Jeff, all of these comments make me think of FAFSA, which is an important element of what's being difficult and what's changing.

The recent financial news is that this year, FAFSA's enrollment process suffered from a calculation error and it delayed a lot of the responses and ability for students to get the information and the outcomes that they needed to get financial support. Seems like a huge deal. Can you share how this impacts applicants and both students that are applying and students who are already enrolled?

Jeff: Yes. It's a huge debacle from the education department. It was supposed to do the opposite. It was supposed to simplify the process. The new FAFSA had a lot fewer questions. It was supposed to be so much better. It will get better. Unfortunately for this year's seniors, it's not, but I would hope by next year they're going to have this all figured out. What's happening now is colleges, because the information they're getting from the federal government has been so delayed-- Students fill out this FAFSA, the education department then sends out the data to colleges and universities.

All that has been not only delayed but there have been a million mistakes, it seems, over the last couple of weeks. Until colleges get that information and get the right information, they can't send out a financial aid package to students that includes any sort of federal aid, a federal student loan, a Pell Grant, all these things that students depend on to go to college, to pay for college. Because of that, if you're a senior and you're waiting on those packages to make a decision, do I want to go to school A or B or C because it depends on how much money I have to go there, you're just sitting now, just wait.

The problem is that May 1st most colleges say they want to know if you're coming. May 1st is only a couple of weeks away. Some colleges have extended their deadline further into May or even into June already. Other colleges have not. If you're sitting at home right now waiting for these financial aid packages, the anxiety just keeps going up because you're not quite sure where you're going to go because you don't know how much money you're going to get.

Kousha Navidar: We just got another text about the FAFSA debacle. This is from Stacy in Irvington, New York. She writes, "My daughter is a high school senior who had applied to a wide range of colleges from an Ivy League to a CUNY and everything in between for a total of 10 schools. She was accepted into all but two, but because of the late FAFSA, we still haven't received financial packages from all schools." Jeff, what you were referring to. "It was nice that some schools pushed their deadline for commitment, but not all. She's stuck in a place where she has to decide by May 1st without knowing how much school is going to cost. It's a big financial risk."

Jeff, it sounds like a lot of this is about, and for so many people, if finances is a driving factor of where you go to school, there are so many obstacles that are popping up now, new hoops that you have to go through, difficult to choose. We're talking to Jeff Selingo, higher education reporter and writer of the article Inside The Craziest College-Admission Season Ever from New York Magazine. Listeners, we want to hear your experience with the college admissions process. Give us a call, 212-433-9692. We have more calls ready to go. We're going to dive into some of those other aspects that you were discussing, Jeff, at the top. We'll be right back after this. Stay with us.

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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. We're talking to Jeff Selingo, higher ed reporter and writer of the article Inside The Craziest College-Admission Season Ever for New York Magazine. Listeners, we're talking about the latest college admission cycle. It is bewildering for a lot of students, a lot of families. The financial pressure is enormous and there are more applicants than ever to these, especially selective schools. We want to hear your story. Give us a call, shoot us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. Jeff, we have another caller who I understand is a current student. We've got Maxine from Putnam, New York. Hi, Maxine. Welcome to the show.

Maxine: Hi there. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm a really big fan.

Kousha Navidar: Thanks. What's your story?

Maxine: I'm 17. I'm a senior this year. I just got my last decision back last Thursday. I'm just about officially committed to University of Pittsburgh, which is really exciting.

Kousha Navidar: Congratulations.

Maxine: Thank you. It's been a very weird admission cycle, especially for me and some of my friends, because we've been told our entire school lives that if you get a 4.0 and if you take three AP classes and if you know you're good at clubs and whatnot, then you know you have a chance and you have a shot at getting into these bigger universities. What I've seen that's happening like another point of this turnover is colleges are now just expecting the impossible from students, especially these more elite colleges.

I see videos of people all over Instagram and all over TikTok of people saying the way to get into these colleges now is the "hack", is to start a nonprofit or to start a shelter or something like that. I think it's another level of colleges expecting the impossible and it's not great.

Kousha Navidar: Maxine, can I ask, for the test optional requirements, did that affect you in any way? What was your calculus about taking SATs or ACTs?

Maxine: Yes, it did. The SAT does not work out in my favor. I'm a 4.0 student. I have five APs. I'm president of three clubs. I have all that stuff, but the SAT map section really did not go in my favor. I went to SAT optional for most of my schools except for a few. I had to go in with Georgetown because they did not go SAT optional. Then some other schools, like state schools for New York, I went in with my SAT.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. Maxine, thank you so much for sharing that, and congratulations again. Jeff, we heard from a student right there who talked about having to navigate this test optional aspect and just building this-- Sounded almost like a brand of what you wanted the school to know about you as a product. Can you talk about what the intent was behind this decision of making tests optional, especially at some of these more elite schools?

Jeff: Yes. They started it during the pandemic because it was hard to take a test during the pandemic. Then they kept it because they liked the flexibility of choosing the students they want to choose whether they have a test score or not. Back in the day when I reported my book, for example, and I was at Emory or any of the schools I was at, and if there's a student they really wanted but they scored a 1,200 on the SAT, they could take a few of those. When they announced that class when I was there, average SAT score was 1,500. The more 1,200 you accept, that lowers your average score.

When you have test-optional, you're only going to report the test scores you get. Normally, the only students who send in a test score are those that have a really high score. The caller also brought up something else that I think is critically important. At the end of the day, what do these schools want? They are setting in many ways an impossible bar. There was a fascinating part of the story in New York Magazine that just floored me. It was the dean of admissions at Duke talking about-- They used to talk about a wall of fives at Duke, and five is the highest score you could get on an AP exam.

You used to get 8, 10, 12 fives on AP tests, an applicant would, and that would move the needle 10 years ago at Duke. As he said, it doesn't move the needle anymore. 8, 10, or 12 fives. I looked up the stats as I put in the story. Only about 15% of all AP tests administered last year were even scored a five. Only half of American public high schools even offer more than five AP scores. We have this huge, really high bar that we're asking students to get over. By the way, even when they do that, it's still not enough.

Kousha Navidar: Your 2020 book, Who Gets In and Why, followed the college application review process of three universities. You're just talking about the enormous bar that these colleges are now setting. Four years down the road since you published that book, do you see the process changing from the perspective of students as they strategize appealing to these colleges?

Jeff Selingo: I'm actually working on a follow-up book now to try to get this. Part of the problem is that we have so many applicants applying to the same set of 20, 25 schools out there, all of which are pretty small by international standards in terms of their undergraduate class, and they haven't increased the size of their freshman class. You take the Ivy League, for example, Yale's added maybe a couple of hundred students over the years, Princeton has added some students, but most of these schools have remained the same size, but they're getting 30%, 40%, 50% more applicants than they did 10, 20 years ago. You're getting all these students trying to get into a smaller number of schools.

What I think students need to do is there are thousands of colleges out there in the US alone, there are hundreds of great colleges in the US alone, I think we need to increase the aperture of the lens that we're looking at higher education and start to apply to schools that actually you can get into and that would want you, and by the way, that I think you're going to have a pretty good experience at.

Kousha Navidar: Can you go a little bit more in-depth about why these applications are rising, so the volume of applicants going? Is it just that maybe the test requirements have been eliminated from some places so incentivizes new students? What's going on there?

Jeff Selingo: I think that's some of it. We're also seeing college admissions, especially at these selective schools, has really been internationalized. Everybody around the world, the most talented students around the world want to go to the same colleges or universities that are highly ranked because we believe that the ranking really leads to success in life, which I think we should question. If you think about the most successful people in your life, by the way, you might not even know where they went to college. I don't know how often people ask you where you went to college, right?

Kousha Navidar: Right.

Jeffrey Selingo: Maybe years later, nobody really cares that much, they care that you can actually do the work. We have this belief that your life is going to be changed if you go to one of these top 10, top 20 colleges and because of that, everybody wants to go there.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking to Jeff Selingo who's a higher ed reporter, and we're talking about the difficult and enormously more competitive admission cycle this year for colleges. There's one piece that I would love to hear about from callers, and that's about affirmative action that just changed last June from the Supreme Court. Has that Supreme Court decision affected you either as an applicant or as a currently enrolled-in student? Give us a call, 212-433-9692. Let's go to some other calls, Jeff. We've got Jill in Westchester. Hi, Jill. Welcome to the show.

Jill: Hi, thanks so much for having me on. I'm so glad that you're talking about this topic. I just spent the last two spring breaks doing college tours with my junior who's in high school. I've been through this before because I have twins who graduated from college in the class of 2022, and I noticed some big changes that I find really concerning. First of all, there's a huge shift towards computer science, and the computer science programs are small in a lot of these schools because they can't get the faculty, which makes them increasingly hard to get into and also ups the competition.

The other thing I noticed is-- I went on a couple of Reddit threads to ask about colleges and I see what kids were feeling. These kids are so stressed from trying to build these brands, as you said. I also wonder, with the elimination of the test scores, do they take these rejections a lot more personally because they're working four years to what they think is to create a persona and then they get rejected or they get waitlisted?

I just don't know what we're doing in this race for these small number of schools that are increasingly impossible to get into. If you see what these kids have done, it's incredible, and yet they're still not getting into what they think are the schools that are the key to success, which, as you said, is not true.

Kousha Navidar: Jill, thank you so much.

Jill: I can get my answer off the air

Kousha Navidar: Jill, thank you. We just actually got a text that dovetails with this question that you're asking with building up that brand. Jeff, this is for you as well. You write pretty bluntly that college presidents are "responsible for policies that are making the application process more stressful and confusing than ever." Have you been in rooms with them? Are they cognizant of this responsibility? We hear Jill talking about how much more personally are students taking these rejections. Any insights on both of those parallel tracks?

Jeff Selingo: Yes. As I pointed out in my book a couple of years ago, and it's even more so now, college admissions is not about the applicant, it is about the college and their needs and their priorities. At the end of the day, these colleges are businesses and the students are their customers, and they want to get in the right students to fill their needs. They want a mix of students from different states. They want a mix of gender and race and ethnicity. They want a mix of majors. I think the caller brings up a really good point about majors. There's a huge decline in the number of students applying and enrolling in the humanities, for example. A lot of college presidents are worried about that.

They have to fill every sports team they have on campus. They have to fill the orchestra, and they love full payers on top of that. There's all these needs they have, and that's how they use admissions. They don't really care about the applicant and their needs. It's hard to say because I think we have this love affair with higher education. I think many of us who went to college 20, 30, 40 years ago, many of us still love our alma mater because it changed our lives in a certain way. At the end of the day, these are just businesses and they treat families like that. It's unfortunate.

The only way I think it's going to change is if families start to become smarter about this and start to say, "You know what? We're not going to apply to Harvard. We're not going to apply to these Ivy Leagues. We're going to go elsewhere where it's a better fit, where we're actually going to get a decent amount of aid, where we can get in, where we're going to get a good experience." That's the only way that these elite schools are going to change is if people stop applying to them. Unfortunately, the evidence shows they're not.

Kousha Navidar: I want to thank all of the callers. We had so many more than we had time to hear from, but thank you so much to everyone who's sharing these stories. Jeff, as we listened to them, I could hear that element you were talking about, about I want to set myself up for the best way in life that I can and so that might mean the most prestigious school that I can get into. You just talked about what you hope would change that culture. In the time we have remaining, just one more question for you, what do you think it would take to actually see that culture change?

Jeff Selingo: I think that the more data that we have on outcomes-- We're getting better at this, the US Department of Education publishes this thing called the College Scorecard where you can look up salary outcomes of college graduates by college, by program, actually. What you'll find out, for example, is that in many programs, the outcomes are pretty similar across the board at different colleges.

Again, we perceive that a degree from Harvard or Yale or Princeton or you name the top school is worth more than these others. Yes, you're buying a network. I get that. I totally get that, but for the most part, the outcomes at less selective schools are just as good in terms of getting you a job and getting you a good job just as much as those top schools.

Kousha Navidar: Jeff Selingo is a higher education reporter and writer of the article Inside the Crazy College-Admissions Season Ever for New York Magazine. Students, if you're listening to this, congratulations on whatever path you are choosing to go down. We wish you the best of luck. For those of you that just went through the college applications process, we also wish you the best and some well-earned rest. Jeff, thank you so much.

Jeff Selingo: It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.

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