In recent years, college acceptance rates have seen a sharp decline, while tuition has gone through the roof.
From 2015 to 2024, the acceptance rate for the eight Ivy League schools dropped considerably, with Harvard and Brown’s acceptance rates dropping 50 percent from 6 percent to 3 percent.
USC admissions officers said the private school had its lowest acceptance rate ever this year with only 9 percent of students who applied getting in. Stanford’s acceptance rate dropped to 4.3 percent.
And, to a degree (get it?), this trend is understandable. Total applications through the Common Application have jumped by 12 percent from last year, according to collegematchpoint.com, a college counseling business. The problem is more and more students are applying to top colleges every year, but the number of available spots stays the same. It’s no wonder acceptance rates dip year after year.
Combine the increase in applications with other factors such as holistic admissions and American’s institutions of higher learning have created a recipe for thousands of broken-hearted seniors being rejected from their dream schools.
Holistic admissions shift the focus of an application away from academics and more toward the applicant as a whole. Colleges with holistic admissions often consider extracurriculars, essays, and teacher recommendations on par with GPA and class rank.
This leads to students having to excel at everything to be admitted, rather than being able to focus specifically on their academics.
So, maybe the low admission rates nowadays are understandable. What isn’t understandable, on the other hand, is the cost of attending college for those fortunate students who are admitted somewhere. Most top private colleges charge well over $60,000 in tuition alone to attend their school.
Adding in room and board, textbooks, hidden fees, and more brings the final cost of attending a top school to the $80,000 to $90,000 range per year. That’s almost $400,000 for four years of undergrad.
The annual cost alone is enough money to buy six 2014 Toyota Camrys, 18,000 $5 footlongs at Subway, 90 iPhone 15s, or 15,000 Crunchwrap Supremes at Taco Bell.
With these prices, even acceptances can feel like burdens. Sure, students get into their dream school, but now they have to cough up half a million dollars for it. Or, take on crippling student debt and spend the next 60 years slaving away to pay it off.
And this isn’t even factoring in if students decide to attend grad school.
The UC system isn’t safe from this “acceptance-rates-down-tuition-up” pattern, either.
Despite the fact that California residents quite literally fund every single UC school with their tax dollars, that doesn’t stop the UC system from crushing the dreams of Cal High students every application cycle.
Cal really does get the short end of the stick, too. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, the acceptance rate for Cal students at schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA were well below the state average in 2023. The same pattern emerges with UC San Diego, Santa Barbara, Irvine, and Davis.
Not to mention, both the UC and CSU systems are seeing constant increases in tuition, with the CSU system undergoing a 6 percent hike from last year. This increase will continue for the next five years. One would think that after the $70 application fee per school, the CSU system could afford to cut back on cost of attendance.
This all brings up an important question for seniors going to college: is it worth it? Applicants pour so much time and money (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) into their applications.
Perhaps the solution is aiming for less competitive or less prestigious schools. Less prestigious colleges have just about as much payoff as more selective ones, according to The Hill, a Washington, D.C., newspaper that focuses on politics.
Applicants put everything they have into their applications, and for what? For the UCs to turn up their noses and shoo them away? For the Ivies to tell them the applicant pool is “extremely competitive”?
All that effort for a 3 percent chance to get accepted at some schools, and students still fall for it every year. Students still lay awake at night, hoping and praying that some admissions officer will like them enough to let us in.
At this point, do the students ever win?
