I just solved college admissions

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In my family, we like to stick to a theme. Right now, we’re all on a road trip through a chunk of the Midwest, visiting several colleges we think our 16-year-old daughter, Sasha, might like to apply to. So, naturally, we’re listening to the audiobook of The Price You Pay for College, an excellent breakdown of why higher education costs so much these days. Written by New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber, the book goes deep on the messy complications of a system that is as expensive as it is stressful as it is impenetrable. Here we all are, parents of, we hope, college-bound kids, and we’re preparing to drop probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on… what? Four-ish years of toil and joy? For what? The ability to read and an arbitrary qualification and a network of helpful alumni pals? The only guarantee is that misery will ensue, in one form or another.

But in listening to ten or so chapters of this, I was struck with an idea that I think could change the whole system. And since you, my dear reader, have the misfortune to subscribe to this newsletter, you’re about to be tortured treated to a preview. Buckle up, buttercups! I’m about to solve the whole college admissions process!

More after the highly clickable ad…

Paying for college is weird. Once your child has applied to a school and miraculously gotten in, you then have to figure out how to pay for it. You do this in part by filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the College Scholarship Service profile, which detail all the assets you (the parents) have or don’t have, and the school or schools use this information to decide what you can and should pay for tuition. In some cases, the discounts they offer—which they call grants or merit aid—are enormous: A $65,000-per-year bill could get cut down to $20,000. That’s still a hell of a lot of money, but it’s a potentially manageable sum for many, whereas the full price is ridiculously far beyond most families’ budgets.

What’s more, these discounts are not rare. At many schools, every admitted student gets merit aid at some level, with only the richest families paying at or near full list price.

This is crazy, but there are reasons! For one, high prices suggest high quality, even if almost no one actually pays them. For another, the colleges need students to actually enroll and pay something. If they offered a more modest but immovable list price, or offered fewer discounts, perhaps enough students would enroll elsewhere that a school would not have enough incoming students to cover its costs the following year. That would be bad! And apparently there’s a billion-dollar industry of consultants dedicated to helping U.S. universities figure out who to admit and how much to charge them.

This is the part I want to change. Think of it this way: The first stage in college admissions is the student’s appeal to schools. Look at me! Don’t you want me? Then, once a certain number of schools decides they want the student, they then compete to offer the student an appealing price.

But students (and their families) are at an inherent disadvantage at this point. That is, they’ve already announced they want to go to Yale or Michigan or Swarthmore or wherever. Those schools could then offer them discounts that are significant (but not necessarily maximized) in an attempt to woo them. Students and their families have to weigh desire against means: Can they afford what they want?

My solution is to take desire out of the equation: We end college applications.

Sounds dramatic, right? What I really mean is, we end applications to specific colleges. Here’s how the process would run instead:

1. High school seniors would do most of the things they already do: fill out the Common App, write essays, upload transcripts and test scores, get letters of recommendation, and so on.

2. But they would not choose specific schools to apply to. Instead, they would indicate their areas of interest (architecture, business, biomedical engineering), the types of schools they’d consider (public, private, 4-year, Jesuit, Jewish, big, small, urban, rural), and their geographic preferences (region, state, distance from home).

3. That’s it for the students! They’re done: They’ve shown off who they are and what they want.

4. Now it’s the schools’ turn: Each one has an idea of the types of students they want, so, using sophisticated search algorithms, they assemble a pool of potential students who meet those criteria. They can then vet those students—read their essays, delve into their extracurriculars—and figure out who they want and what those students can/should pay.

5. Then the schools make their offers—in the first of two or three rounds of drafts, separated by, say, three weeks. A student might receive a few or a lot, with tuition offers/discounts attached, and the rare student who receives none in the first round might receive several in the second. Students could accept or reject offers, or ask for more aid, or simply wait for the next round, when schools, having received some acceptances but not enough, adjust who they want and what they can offer. By the end of three rounds, I’m betting, everyone has been accepted somewhere acceptable.

To me, this system makes a lot of sense. It allows students to say, “Hey! Here I am! Look at me! Make me an offer!” without requiring them to invest energy and emotion into specific schools—and to risk the pain of rejection. It allows for surprise and discovery: They might get offers from schools in places they’d never considered (University of Hawaii, eh?), or at levels they thought impossible (Yale wants me?!?). It doesn’t require them to make a bet until the final stage, when they actually, finally choose where they want to go. That’s always going to be a crapshoot.

It’s good for the schools, too. It widens their prospective pools of applicants to literally everyone in the country, increasing the potential opportunities for minorities and first-generation college students. You don’t need them to apply when you can instead seek them out! Selective schools, meanwhile, can maintain that status by comparing their acceptance numbers against that total pool of around 4 million students. In this system, a 5% admissions rate will come to seem enormous.

And it could make college more affordable. Instead of leveraging a student’s desire to go to a particular school, schools would have to compete for the privilege of enrolling that student, by offering not just the discounted rates they would have offered anyway but better ones, since who knows what their rival institutions are pitching? This kind of jockeying for students happens anyway already, so this system simply recognizes it and expands it into the realm of true competition.

Surely, there are complications that would arise. Any system can be gamed, and there will certainly be students with 4.0 GPAs who indicate they’re hoping for colleges in and around New Haven, Connecticut. But those students may also recognize that in doing so they’re cutting themselves off from other, more interesting opportunities—and possibly more affordable ones, too.

OK, we did it! Another major American problem solved by Trying! Now we just need to get the Common App, the College Board, and pretty much every institution of higher education in this country onboard. How hard could that be? 🪨🪨🪨

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