Stop the college-application frenzy

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Now that the new year and the college admissions season are upon us, perhaps it's time to make a resolution for the former to do something about the latter.

For years, the growing competition to get into an elite college - especially on Long Island, where brilliant students abound - has been driving parents crazy and ruining childhoods. It puts needless pressure on the kids who are already most likely to achieve. It promotes cheating. And it fosters cynicism by encouraging mindless resume-building.

In short, it's time to call a halt. But before we talk about how, let's examine what got us into this mess.

As is so often the case, the central problem is that we're victims of our own success. In fact, the elite-college madness perfectly encapsulates a great deal about our culture: the hazards of meritocracy, the power of the Internet, and the unintended consequences of competition - played out in the churning stomachs of our kids.

On the bright side, it's worth remembering that things used to be worse. Once upon a time, after all, the nation's elite universities admitted mostly well-to-do white kids from the Northeast. Minorities were excluded or, as with the Jews, strictly limited in number.

That was a terrible system, and so we replaced an arrangement essentially based on membership with another based on merit. We also demanded that elite schools admit more women and minorities.

Today, well-to-do kids still have advantages, but the improvement in fairness is dramatic. On the other hand, the new arrangement has proved maddening in its own way.

First, elite institutions are growing more slowly than the number of qualified kids, who aren't just scrambling for status. As more Americans get run-of-the-mill degrees, sheepskins from elite schools are commanding an ever-larger pay differential.

And meritocracy, it turns out, inspires anxiety in middle-class parents, who fear their children won't measure up. Getting them into a top school is a sign of salvation, and so the latter-day openness of elite colleges has launched a stampede for admission - leading desperate kids to churn out applications.

The Internet has enabled such behavior. The Common Application, filed electronically, has radically cut the effort required for applying to additional colleges. A recent study for the National Association for College Admission Counseling concluded that, when it comes to elite college admissions, "an ever-increasing number of students are applying to more institutions."

So there are more applicants, which is great. But each is submitting more applications, which makes the acceptance rate go down every year.

Perversely, even fine colleges already buried in applications are out drumming up more - so they can reject more students and look more selective in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Much of the competition, in other words, is illusory.

What is to be done? It would help for all parties to recognize that the course of a life isn't determined by the brand of college you attend, though there's no point pretending it doesn't matter. It would also help to cut down the ridiculous number of applications.

Raising admission fees will only benefit the rich by excluding more of the poor, so why not rationing? Every student might be given 10 "points" for use in applying to college, and every application would cost at least one. Early-admission might take three or four. Schools could even give an edge to applications with more points attached.

Rationing won't stop the frenzy. But it's a start.