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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. By now, most college-bound high school seniors have received their 2023 admissions decisions. We're learning that elite colleges just keep getting more competitive. Harvard admitted just 3.4% of its applicants to its class of 2027, Stanford, 3.7%, Yale, a little over 4%.

Bowdoin College is a small, prestigious liberal arts college in Maine, and its alums include people currently in the news and sympathetically like Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter unjustly jailed in Russia, and Justin J. Pearson, the Tennessee Lawmaker, who was reinstated to the Tennessee House of Representatives just yesterday after what many have deemed a politically and racially motivated expulsion. Yes, Justin Pearson went to Bowdoin. Evan Gershkovich went to Bowdoin. Zohran Mamdani, New York State assemblyman becoming increasingly prominent, he was just on the show recently representing parts of Queens.

Bowdoin's admit rate for the class of 2027 just 7.7%, almost up there or down there, should I say, with the Harvards, the Yales, and the Stanfords. The pressure-laden experience of applying to these schools and eagerly awaiting their decisions, has met the age of social media engagement, of course.

New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang, another Bowdoin alum of course, alum, says he doesn't quite know why the TikTok algorithm has been sending videos of college applicants opening up their decision letters and emails, but he is struck by what he sees in this content by the degrees of their unhappiness. College admissions is a numbers game. It's opaque. With little in the way of explanation to accompany a rejection or waitlisting, kids are simply left to cope.

Let's speak with Jay about his article in the New Yorker called The Particular Misery of College-Admissions TikTok, and dig deeper into that content. We'll also touch on a couple of his other recent pieces. Jay Caspian Kang is always so interesting in The New Yorker. Maybe you saw his The Case for Banning Children from Social Media or What's the Point of Reading Writing by Humans?, his article for the AI era.

In addition to being a staff writer at The New Yorker, Jay Caspian Kang is a documentary film director and author of the book The Loneliest Americans from 2021. Hi, Jay. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jay Caspian Kang: Hey, how's it going?

Brian Lehrer: Good. To start with just an aside, how do you think the algorithm came to send college-admissions TikTok videos to your feed?

Jay Caspian Kang: [laughs] I don't know if there's a good answer to that question that makes me look good, but my sense of it is that I use TikTok for a bit of reporting research. Generally, I do write quite a bit about Asian American things, and I have some interest in what youth are doing. This just became a thing among Asian American youth. I think they're very over-represented in these college-admission TikToks and I think that's why they started coming. I actually don't know. I've never solved the mysteries of the TikTok algorithm.

It's not as simple as Instagram where, I don't know, I look for a tennis racket, and then they start sending me tennis gear. It's a little bit more mysterious than that.

Brian Lehrer: All right. You say this content reminds you of the people who claim to take a data-driven approach to house hunting in the Bay Area, where a tiny inventory of homes tends to get bid up with large cash offers. Explain the analogy there.

Jay Caspian Kang: Oh, yes. I live in the Bay Area and there's all these articles that come out and they say, "Hey, this person has figured out how to buy a house in the Bay Area. The person is invariably somebody who works in the tech industry." They say, "Oh, I made this algorithm now--" This is nonsense basically since there are so few homes here and everything goes so over asking price. All that matters is that some rich person comes by and offers way more than you can offer, then they're going to get the house. It's random luck. You just have to pray that that person doesn't come along.

There's this thing where you just compile numbers together, you make a whole bunch of spreadsheets, and then you hope that you can find some sort of path through that, that makes sense, that will give you some hope or some map. Generally, with these types of things where there's such short supply and such high demand, that just isn't really true. You just have to get lucky or you have to have some sort of divine interference or something like that.

For these kids, I think what they're doing when they're applying these colleges, they feel that. They've seen kids older than them. They've seen their brothers and sisters. They all go on these websites where kids discuss these types of things. They see scores like, "Oh, I had a 1560 SAT and a perfect GPA. I was valedictorian. I was a captain of the debate club and I was four-year Letterman playing basketball or something, and I got rejected from seven Ivys, but I got into one. Here's how I did it."

They're trying to cobble together some sort of coherence or even some sort of vocabulary or mental vocabulary where all of this starts to make sense. For me, I feel bad for them watching it because if you take one step back or even a half-step back, you can just see that this is all just them coping with the stress of the situation.

Brian Lehrer: That's what you're seeing in a lot of these TikTok videos, is a visual display of coping. Do you think it's, at least, cathartic and helpful, or does TikTok, as social media does in various realms of our lives, make things worse for those involved?

Jay Caspian Kang: I think that the ones where the kids are getting rejected from every college-- Now, there's one that went viral and it's this kid. It's very hard to verify whether these things are true, but it seems to be true where he says he got a 1550 SAT and he was valedictorian of his school. It's just a series of videos of him with his friends opening up Ivy League decisions and getting rejected and they just start laughing. I think for something like that, maybe that's cathartic and helpful because maybe people see it and they say, "We shouldn't take it that seriously."

I think the ones that cause people stress honestly, are the ones where people get accepted to colleges. There's two variations of this; the first one is the celebratory, "Oh, my God, I got in my dream school. I can't believe it." They, at some point, invariably turn to the camera and they say, "There's nothing special about me. You can do it too." [chuckles]

I think those ones are probably infuriating. I myself find myself getting a little bit mad at those. I think that if I was in the position of an 18-year-old who had just gotten rejected from a school or was nervous about getting into school in a year or two, I would find those to be particularly misery-inducing.

I don't know about whether or not the ones in which kids say, "Oh, I got rejected from all these schools and now I'm sad." Maybe those ones are a little bit less stress-inducing, but they also probably heighten the anxiety of kids being like, "If this kid couldn't get in, then what chances do I have?" Maybe they're both bad.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, the narrowest version of how you can participate in this segment is to call and tell us your experience of college admission, TikTok in particular. Does anybody listening right now happen to have any such experience either for yourself or maybe for your high school senior child? 212-433-WNYC. Did you find it helpful as you navigated the stressful process of applying to college, again, either for yourself or for your child?

If there are parents listening out there, did you get any helpful advice or insight from what purport to be advice-sharing TikTok videos as Jay Caspian Kang from the The New Yorker was just describing? Or what else do you want to say about the hyper-selectivity of the already selective colleges this year or anything else about the college application experience 2023? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

Again, my guest is Jay Caspian Kang, staff writer for The New Yorker, documentary film director and author of The Loneliest Americans book that came out in 2021 for which he did a book interview here. His recent stories in The New Yorker include The Particular Misery of College-Admissions TikTok, The Case for Banning Children from Social Media, which we'll touch on, and What's the Point of Reading Writing by Humans? which I know he doesn't really mean.

Jay, can you talk about the racial dynamics visible in this TikTok content and beyond? You write, "One can feel however one wants about the misery of college-admissions TikTok, but it reflects a real sense of helplessness, of feeling that no matter what your resume says, the only actual determining factor for getting into college is what race you check on your application."

Why did you boil it down to that.

Jay Caspian Kang: That seems to be the subtext to all of this if you read the comments on these TikToks or if you even hear what the people who did not get into colleges are saying. When they're despairing and when they're saying stuff like, "I don't know what else I have to do. I did everything perfectly. What can I do?" there is this idea that basically nothing matters as long as you're above a certain threshold.

Now, that threshold is almost impossible for 99.9% of students to achieve, but within these very high-achieving kids, there's this thought that "Everything is random, we have no chance. The reason why we have no chance- "and this is especially true, I think amongst the Asian American kids who are recording these things, "-is because colleges don't want us. Their main idea or their main objective is to try and have a diverse type of student body, and that they're going to do that at our expense."

Now, this grievance is not new. Obviously, people have been saying this about affirmative action programs for 30 years. I think it's interesting online because the kids are afraid of being canceled in some sort of way, I think because they have grown up with that type of sensitivity, it's all buried in subtext. I think that when you watch enough of these, you can really feel it.

There are these other people who explain, "Here's how you can get into these colleges, or here's how you can do X, Y, and Z. Here are these truths about these colleges," that are these informal college counselors that have spread it up on these platforms. The one thing they talk about all the time is race. They say, "Oh, here's a 1540 SAT person," and then they'll say, "This is white middle class," or something like that. Then when you read the comments, all of the comments are really about how the person's race factored into whether they got into that college or not.

What it showed me is that kids are really obsessed with this question, and that even though they don't outright say it in the way that some politicians or pundits might, that it is definitely front of their mind when they're thinking about whether or not they're going to get into these selective colleges.

Brian Lehrer: This, of course, is a big political question in the United States with the Republicans trying to make as much hay out of it as they can. One of the creators you introduce us to in your article is Daniel Lim, a sophomore at Duke, whose handle is limmytalks. One of his videos you write is about the racial makeup of students admitted to Harvard and Yale, "When one looks at the chart, Lim explains, what becomes clear is that you can be a Black student in the bottom 40% of applicants and have the same chance as an Asian-American student in the top 10%." Is his assessment fair or accurate as far as you know, or irrelevant?

Jay Caspian Kang: Those are the statistics that came out in the trial, the affirmative action trial, Harvard and Students for Fair Admission, that has been going on for the past three years now at the Supreme Court. I think that's also just part of this, trying to find some sort of path through this opaque process is that they are very good at finding information just like any kids these days. You have the entire internet and you can cobble together any number of little different threads, and then you can make a narrative out of it.

I do think that for a lot of these kids that, when they find these types of statistics, there's two things that happen. The first is that, if they are raised in places that are more liberal, if they grow up in blue cities or something like that, they feel like this is almost illicit information, and it becomes more powerful to them in a way. They say, "Oh, here's the real truth." A lot of them will discuss it in that type of way. They won't say, "Here's an interesting and real conversation about how Harvard looks at race." They'll say, "Here's what Harvard doesn't want you to know."

That type of framing is a little bit different. I just think that the way in which they enter this conversation is always- like I said, it's never quite straight on. It's always through a little bit of a remove. It is always really at the forefront of their minds. You can see even the engagement for the types of posts that they do. If they just do normal posts about college admissions or whatever, it will get a certain amount, but anything about race will have huge numbers behind it.

Brian Lehrer: The proportional racial makeup of admitted students, as we were just discussing, is one thing, but I think we should also say the racial makeup of the student pool is another. Of course, these schools are still mostly white. Do you find in the discourse of college-admissions on TikTok and in our broader culture in society that TikTok is an implement to pit racial groups against each other?

Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, I do. I think it goes beyond that. I think social media is really terrible in that sort of way in which I think that it does allow people to create better and faster narratives out of more disparate pieces of information, which I think lead to very alluring type of stories that can be told. Also, a lot of those stories lack any type of context. A lot of them are flat-out dumb. [chuckles] They sound good.

You see this chart, for example, and stripped of any context, it looks unfair. You can hand-wave that, "Oh, well, here's why they do it," or whatever. The point is that you're seeing some numbers and the numbers don't really add up, but you're not really thinking about what the context behind all of it is.

I think more than that, it just suggests that there's just something deeply anxious about being a kid who is trying to apply to these types of colleges these days, and the amount of pressure that's placed upon them, and the extent to which they're willing to not think about the larger context of the society that they're in, and also not really think about anything except, whether they're going to get into these colleges or not.

The monomania of that, this is not the kids' fault. It is because of the admissions rates that you pointed out at the beginning of the show. I went to Bowdoin College. You said it was a 7% acceptance rate right now. When I went, it was 35% or something like that. It was still relatively selective. I felt like I could get in, I got in. I absolutely could not get in right now. I applied, I think, to eight colleges, which seemed like a lot when I was a high school senior. These kids are applying to 30 schools now. They're paying 30 different admission fees, they're writing 30 different essays.

I just think that the piling on of stress is leading to really hardened and odd opinions amongst them. Because it's so much of their world between, from when they're in 5th grade on, it is actually the thing that really informs a lot of their politics and the way that they think about the world. I find that to be really unfortunate. Young people should not be focusing entirely on how the world impacts their college admissions chances over anything else.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Jay Caspian Kang. We have some interesting looking calls coming in. Heads up, we're going to take first one after the break from a fellow Bowdoin alum. Eric and Ramsey, New Jersey, you'll be first. Dominique in Bohemia, Long Island, you'll be second with Jay Caspian Kang from The New Yorker. Stay with us. 

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking with Jay Caspian Kang from The New Yorker mostly about his recent article 'The Particular Misery of College-Admissions TikTok'. Eric in Ramsey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eric.
Eric: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. It's great to be listening to your show. I just want to shout out to my fellow Polar Bear, Jay. Jay, I'm approaching my 50th reunion, so you know I'm not a spring chicken.
Brian Lehrer: Wow. Wait, the team at Bowdoin is called the Polar Bears?
Jay Caspian Kang: Yes.
Brian Lehrer: I guess, when you're in Maine, [crosstalk].
Jay Caspian Kang: Yes, we have a polar bear on campus. Not a live one, but a stuffed one.
Eric: Yes, well, it's the Arctic tradition, the [unintelligible 00:19:50]. Anyway. Here's my question, and you kind of answered already, Jay. Is selectivity really getting worse or much worse? My personal experience from nearly 50 years ago was 80% of the colleges I applied to rejected me and 20% accepted me. Among the 20% was Bowdoin, it was an early, early acceptance. It was a really weird situation. Then I became part of Bowdoin Basic. You might know what that was. It was a Bowdoin alumni student interviewing committee, a number of alumni that were-- We were asked to help out with the admissions process. Your 35% was not consistent with what we were told over a two- or three-decade period.
My last comment is, we were also counseled in our interviews to tell the prospective student, "You're in a stressful situation. You know you want to get into your dream school, but wherever you go, you're going to make the best of it, you're going to have a great experience." That's something they have a hard time dealing with, but it tends to be true. With that, I'll take my comments offline, and Go U Bears.
Brian Lehrer: Eric, thank you. Jay?
Jay Caspian Kang: Well, to address the last part, I think that that is the thing that people should tell kids, that it doesn't really matter if you go to Stanford or if you go to Harvard, but I think that kids are pretty smart these days and that, if they are that ambitious and they are young and they have their entire lives in front of them, they look at the world, and they can see certain patterns, and I think that it is wrong to deny them the truth of those patterns.
For example, I live here in the Bay Area, and it certainly does seem that, if you go to Stanford and you want to work in the tech industry, that a lot of these very wealthy people who run the tech industry, whether on the VC side or on the creator side, a lot of them did go to Stanford, and very few of them went to, for example, I don't know, Cal State East Bay, or any of the state schools that are in the area, other than UC Berkeley, obviously. I don't know if that's true. Within my own industry, in media, I work at The New Yorker. Before that, I worked at The New York Times. The majority of people that I interact with went to an Ivy League school. Actually, most of them just went to Harvard. I think that that is a reality.
I think that kids see that. They can research things, and they can see that. I think to say, "Oh, you'll be totally fine, and there's no truth to the fact that these types of very elite places tend to select from these very elite schools," I do think that that's wrong to tell kids because what I think that does is that I think it takes a lot of the pressure off of the general exclusive selective system from having any type of change because then you're basically telling kids to be complacent, and I think you're, in a way, almost lying to them about it, that, "The entire world is still open to you." It's not. We live in a country that has these exclusive networks, and those determine a lot of these elite jobs, and those are really run through a lot of these colleges. I think we should just be honest about that for kids.
Brian Lehrer: Let's see if I can get two more callers on in our remaining time, so I'm going to ask you both to keep it brief. We're going to a Bohemian next. It's Dominique in Bohemia in Suffolk County. Dominique, you're on WNYC. Hi.
Dominique: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for taking my call. I'm coming at this as an educator and somebody who has a company called Crimson Coaching, and yes, that is because I also graduated from Harvard, so I know the value of that kind of network. I'm really concerned about teen mental health and the epidemic of mental health crises. I really just hope that-- and would really encourage parents to mitigate all of this pressure that society is putting on kids by really putting a cap on the number of schools that their child can apply to. Your guest mentioned 30, I recently heard 40 as the max of one student. Not my own student, but others are doing that. Then counselors can really help students by encouraging them to build balance lists. I recently had a family come to me, and the kid had all eight Ivies on her list. That shows me that that child has put no effort into discriminating between them. I would encourage--
Brian Lehrer: Have a couple of good safe schools, right?
Dominique: Yes, even the best students should have colleges, I think, that have between 70% and 80% admit rates. A lot of those schools have rolling admissions. They can get into one or two colleges in the summer before the senior fall even begins.
Brian Lehrer: Oh, that's so interesting. Dominique, that's great advice for a lot of parents, I think. Thank you. I'm going to leave it there so I can also get Tasha in Harlem in here before we run out of time. Tasha, thank you for calling. We've got about a minute for you.
Tasha: Hi, yes, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I am not currently in the college admissions process, but I have nieces and nephews who are going through it. They haven't received their letters yet, but I'm calling because I'd like to put a comment out there for reflection with your guest and yourself. This could be a critical thinking teaching moment for the students because it seems to me, especially with regards to the idea that race may play a factor, that they're thinking about the wrong question.
The question should not necessarily be, "Okay, well, I'm Asian or whatever race, and if I don't get in, other races are taking my place." The question for reflection should be, "Why is it that there are only so many places for students who are not light, and what are the structural programs that perpetuate that?" If you think about legacy admissions, for instance, legacy admissions, according to The New York Times, was 14% a couple years ago, and yet, the percentage of Black students at-- I'm sorry, legacy admissions at Yale, but when you look at the percentage of Black students that [unintelligible 00:26:21] Harvard, it's still a fraction of that.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I hear all those stats. Tasha, forgive me, we're running out of time in the show. Jay, say anything you want in our last 30 seconds for you.
Jay Caspian Kang: I think that really using this moment to think about who all this is for and whether anyone likes it is the most important thing. I don't know a single person who thinks that the college admissions process is good right now or that it's fair, that it's interesting, or that it produces the best types of students. Everybody's miserable with this. At that point, there needs to be some really-
Brian Lehrer: True.
Jay Caspian Kang: -deep thinking and real change about how it takes place. If everyone-
Brian Lehrer: Jay--
Jay Caspian Kang: -hates it, why do it?
Brian Lehrer: More discussion needed, obviously. Jay Caspian King, staff writer for The New Yorker, as we've talked about, his recent article, 'The Particular Misery of College-Admissions TikTok'. Thanks for making people think.
Jay Caspian Kang: Thank you.

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