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College Admissions is now a high stakes game. As the admissions rates to the top American colleges gets even more stiffer, more and more students are being rejected from the top colleges, ostensibly the Uber private colleges such as Williams and Middlebury, flagship state universities such as UTexas Austin, Michigan and UC Berkeley, and Ivy league and peer Institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Stanford. That’s why the college counselling market is booming and parents are spending up to $150,000 on college admission counselors to ensure their kids have a better chance of upward social economic mobility. It used to be that you could succeed by going to any college in America, heck, you even didn’t need to go to college at all, you could enroll for a three to six month craft course and you would just be as fine. The fact that President Biden is the first President in 40 years to have attended a public college speaks of just the limited opportunities for upward social economic mobility in America.

The admissions rates in the nation’s mose elite colleges such as Harvard is now about 3 percent and will continue to be lower even amidst the perception that the shine of these colleges is waning off, owing to a growing antisemitism in the colleges amid the ongoing campus protests against the Israel Hamas war. A degree from a top tier college is almost a guarantee of a high quality job post graduation, while a degree from a second or third tier college could mean joining of the ranks in the middle cadre bureaucracy as the essayist William Deresiewiscz argues in his widely acclaimed essay “Disadvantages of Elite Education”. This is why America must do more to improve the quality of tier two and three colleges whether be it improvement in government funding or increase in endowment from more wealthy donors.

The fact is we don’t do justice when we confine millions of high school students to low quality colleges. In fact, the high school experience is now more about faking it in the kind of extra curriculars you are involved in, rather than genuinely enjoying the academic rigor of such schools. One celebrity kid says the reason she is joining so many clubs such as Students Campaign Against Drugs, SCAD, drama, music, St. John’s is all because she wants her extra curricular CV to look thick so she can go to Yale, her dream college. So merely, a student is not joining clubs because she has a genuine interest and passions and talents in those fields, it’s so that the admissions office can be like “wow”, we like this kid. And then when she gets to Yale, the real genuine passionate scholar doesn’t get in because she is deemed as boring. Such a rigged admissions system. Why don’t we just become like Oxford and Cambridge for instance where then it will just be about a certain cut off point in the grades and the test scores, or even have a common entrance exam like the UK, China, India or Kenya for instance?