Applying to college today is incredibly public and incredibly isolating

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Thousands of teenagers across the country are extra nervous this week.

That’s because many of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities will be releasing early-decision offers, letting seniors know whether they’ll have a spot in next year’s incoming class. Those who get in will be celebrating with friends and family, and possibly crafting their acceptance posts for their school’s Instagram accounts. Those who didn’t will be treated to a parade of high school seniors across their social media feeds, sharing the “stats,” such as GPA and extracurriculars, that got them accepted.

“Social media about college can be really relatable, but at the same time I feel like it can be very toxic,” Jayden, now a freshman at Stanford University, told me.

It’s just one of the ways that college admissions have become more complex, stressful, and high-pressure in recent decades, as skyrocketing numbers of applications, dwindling acceptance rates, and economic precarity have combined to make a degree from a selective college seem both more necessary and more difficult to obtain than ever before.

Applying to college today is “drastically different” from the experience that millennial and older Americans remember, said Sara Harberson, a former dean of admissions at Franklin & Marshall College and the founder of Application Nation, an online college counseling community.

The number of students applying to college has risen in recent years, jumping by 21.3 percent between 2019–2020 and 2021–2022 alone. Individual students are also applying to more colleges — an average of 6.22 in 2021–2022 compared with 4.63 in 2013–2014. The share of students applying to more than 10 colleges also jumped from 8 percent to 17 percent over the same decade.

As the number of applicants has gone up, the most selective colleges have gotten much harder to get into. The University of Pennsylvania’s acceptance rate in the 1990s was nearly 50 percent, Harberson told me. Last year, it was about 6 percent.

The beginning of application season has also inched earlier and earlier, with about 58 percent of would-be college students applying either “early decision,” in which students commit to attend if admitted, or “early action,” in which students simply apply early without making a commitment to attend. Early-decision and early-action applications typically have deadlines in November, but some schools offer rolling admissions starting as soon as August 1.

For many millennials and Gen X-ers, college application season was a limited period of time, with deadlines in the fall and acceptances in the spring. Now, students are continuously applying and hearing back over the course of nearly 12 months, all while watching their peers around the world do the same. “The college process is like a marathon,” Jayden said.

For some, it can be as isolating as it is long, as students struggle to get reliable information about topics, like financial aid, that remain shrouded in confusion. Some young people say even their families don’t fully understand what they’re going through because applying to college is unrecognizable from what their parents experienced decades ago.

“I am very thankful for my parents, but they just don’t have a lot of the experience that I feel like I need in my day and age,” Brin, a high school senior in Wisconsin, told me. “I don’t know what I’m doing, where I’m going, and what if I’m doing the wrong thing, and I can’t have an answer about any of that, and that’s very scary.”

Teens today are applying to college early and often

The choice of a college is increasingly painted as a kind of identity formation for young people. Stella, a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, called college “the biggest life decision ever.”

Meanwhile, many young people, especially first-generation or low-income applicants, urgently need the economic leg up that a degree from a selective college can provide. Students have told Cindy Zarzuela, a college adviser with the New York-based nonprofit Yonkers Partners in Education, that “their families are really depending on them to have more opportunities, to earn more income, to have a better job,” Zarzuela told me. “It’s a lot of weight on their shoulders.”

Applying early can increase students’ odds of getting admitted — early decision, in particular, can make them as much as four times as likely to get in, Harberson said. But the rush to apply can also be distracting and stressful. “It takes a lot of time out of school,” Abigail, a high school senior in Yonkers, New York, told me. “Even though we’re applying to college, we still have classes to do.”

The push to apply early also results in a months-long march of deadlines and decision days, from late summer into the following spring. “It felt like forever,” Ummul, a sophomore at Baruch College, told me.

For better and for worse, young people across the country and around the world are chronicling their every acceptance and rejection on social media. Many high schools, teens told me, have dedicated Instagram accounts where seniors can submit their college decisions.

For Stella, who was recruited by Sarah Lawrence as an athlete, deciding when to post her college decision added another layer of complexity to the process because doing so too early was considered rude. “There was definitely some moral compass in terms of, when are you going to post,” she said.

Meanwhile, TikToks of students’ college admissions alongside their grades and other bona fides can lead to anxiety and false expectations, since having the same GPA as someone who got in is no guarantee of admission. “Even though a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, this is how I got in,’ it’s not the same for everyone,” Abigail told me.

Some of the most important parts of the process — like money — are the most confusing

Even as students are faced with a glut of information about where other teens are going to school, they often struggle to get basic guidance on something equally or more important: financial aid. “Nobody talks about anything related to financial aid at my school, and I feel very lost related to it,” Brin said.

College tuition has spiked in the last 20 years, and while an increasing number of top-flight universities have begun offering free tuition to students from low-income or even middle-class families, a lack of transparency and confusing financial aid application processes often leave students unsure how much financial help, if any, they can expect.

Early decision can complicate the picture further. Though many top-flight schools pledge to meet the full financial need of any student admitted through early decision, many lower-income students still avoid the process because of an unease about committing to a single school without being able to compare aid offers, students and experts say. That means the admissions advantages that come with early decision disproportionately go to teens from wealthier families.

Students at private or well-resourced public schools can rely on college counselors to help them navigate the application process, while affluent families are increasingly turning to private admissions coaches and consultants. But lower-income students — those most in need of financial aid — often must manage the process largely on their own.

Nonprofits like Yonkers Partners in Education, which offers college counseling and academic support at 11 high schools, can help. But young people are also calling for larger-scale changes, like more open conversation around money and college, starting earlier in high school. “I feel like financial literacy is so important and would have helped me so much,” Brin said.

For now, a lot of young people are getting information and emotional support from one another.

A lot of Ummul’s friends are also first-generation students, and “there was a sense of community,” she said. “Like, if anyone has a question, we’re here to help you.” Brin, Ummul, Stella, and Jayden are all part of This Teenage Life, a podcast for and by teens that they also credit with helping guide them through the process.

“You get the most support from your peers,” Stella told me, “from the people who are kind of going through it alongside you.”

Social media, meanwhile, can be a space for commiseration, not just a source of envy. “Sometimes you’ll be like, ‘Man, I thought I was going to get into this school,’ and then you’ll hear about someone else who didn’t,” Jayden said. “It’s almost like, okay, we can all connect in this moment.”

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