College Admissions are Nonsense
How to fix a system that is sending students all the wrong signals | Charting the Course
College admissions are nonsense.
Not because colleges are malicious or because admissions officers are stupid, but because the process itself pretends to have a level of precision and moral seriousness it simply does not possess.
There is a study I would love to run someday if I ever get a PhD (I probably won’t).
Take a set of elite colleges and ask their admissions offices to re-evaluate last year’s applicants completely blind: no names, no legacy markers, no institutional memory of who actually enrolled. Then compare the newly admitted class to the one they actually chose. My guess is the overlap would be far closer to 50 percent than 100 percent.
If that’s anywhere close to correct, it tells us something important. The problem isn’t that admissions officers make occasional mistakes. It’s that “holistic review” cannot reliably distinguish among thousands of highly qualified applicants, even when applied by the same institution to the same pool. The differences between who gets in and who doesn’t are not fine judgments of merit.
Yet, colleges refuse to acknowledge this arbitrariness. Instead, they force students to behave as if every essay sentence, extracurricular choice, and leadership title might be decisive. This fuels an escalating arms race — one that rewards those with time, money, and inside knowledge. It also warps the lives of teenagers, who use their free time to build resumes rather than explore their interests, and become risk-averse learners.
There is a simpler and more honest alternative: set a clear academic threshold for readiness and then admit students by lottery.1
How Holistic Admissions Processes Reward Wealth, Not Merit
One of the most comprehensive pieces of research on the negative impacts of holistic admission on high-achieving, low-income students comes from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s True Merit report.
Their findings reveal that the system of preferences and discretionary criteria used by admissions officers at selective colleges unfairly puts HALO students at a disadvantage against applicants with social and economic advantage.
Example #1: Donor and Legacy Preferences
Donor and legacy preferences are among the most straightforward ways wealth is converted into admissions advantage, and they illustrate the central flaw of holistic admissions more clearly than almost any other practice. In theory, these preferences are justified as tools for institutional stability or alumni engagement. In practice, they disproportionately benefit students from affluent families who already enjoy advantages across every other dimension of the application process.
Example #2: Advanced Coursework and GPAs
Federal education data shows that low-income students are less likely to have access to AP/IB classes - a key factor in “academic index” scores selective colleges use to screen large applicant pools. Because students enrolled in these classes are often able to have GPAs greater than a 4.0, it gives an edge to students from affluent schools.
Example #3: Standardized Test Advantages
Wealthier students are much more likely to enroll in test preparation courses and take the SAT/ACT multiple times, inflating their scores. While research on the benefits of test preparation courses is mixed, recent research from Harvard University shows that retaking the SAT substantially improves scores and increases four-year college enrollment rates. Often, only wealthy students are able to take advantage of these opportunities.2
Example #4: Demonstrated Interest
Selective colleges reward students who visit campus or engage in recruitment events. One reason for this is that it increases the institution’s yield rate, i.e. the percentage of applicants granted admission that actually enroll. These activities are often inaccessible to low-income students due to travel costs or work obligations.
Example #5: Early Decision/Action
Applicants that submit early decision or early action applications have significantly higher admission rates. However, low-income students are much less likely to apply early because they must compare financial aid packages before committing. This disadvantages them for admissions through no fault of their own.
Example #6: Student Essays
A 2021 study from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis found that application essays were more strongly correlated with household income than SAT scores, meaning essays encode socioeconomic status through vocabulary, themes, and narrative style. This matters because essays are treated as signals of depth, curiosity, and fit, when, in reality, they often signal access to coaching and cultural knowledge about what admissions officers want to hear.
Example #7: Letters of Recommendation
In theory, letters of recommendation provide admissions officers with a character assessment of the applicant. In practice, however, they reward students who attend schools with low guidance counselor caseloads, experienced college-savvy teachers, and institutional familiarity with selective admissions norms. In contrast, high-achieving low-income students often attend schools where counselors manage hundreds of students, teachers are stretched thin, and recommendation letters are brief, generic, or procedural due to sheer caseload.
Example #8: Extra-Curricular Activities
Extracurricular activities are often treated as evidence of passion, leadership, and initiative, but in holistic admissions, they function largely as proxies for time and money. Many of the activities admissions offices reward — sport travel teams, research internships, unpaid summer programs, or sustained leadership in clubs — require flexible schedules, transportation, and resources.
The Holistic Admissions Rat Race
Holistic admissions changes how teenagers spend their lives.
When colleges insist that every element of an application might matter, they create a system in which marginal effort always seems potentially decisive. This is the core mechanism of the admissions rat race.
If there is no clear bar and no honest admission that many applicants are indistinguishable from each other, students are rational to assume that one more activity or one more line on a resume could be the difference between acceptance and rejection.
This mindset reshapes how students learn, think, and spend their time.
Teenagers become risk-averse learners, avoiding challenging questions or courses, where an A is not guaranteed. During my limited time as a teacher early in my career at a private school in the suburbs of Chicago, I routinely witnessed bright students choose assignments that were easier-to-answer even when I rewarded more potential points for more difficult questions. Why risk the hit to a GPA to scratch the itch of curiosity?
This mindset also limits teenagers’ time for creative exploration. Instead, they participate in activities they do not enjoy, but are beneficial in building a competitive application.
All of this can take a significant toll. Research suggests that when students are overloaded with academic and extracurricular commitments, the marginal cognitive benefit of extra effort flattens out while the negative outcomes (i.e. anxiety, sleep deprivation, etc.) rise. In other words, students are not just “working hard”: they are over-optimizing for an opaque and hyper-competitive signals game, at the cost of rest, curiosity, and mental health.
When admissions decisions hinge on subtle, subjective differences, students internalize scarcity and anxiety as foundational truths about education, rather than as byproducts of a flawed selection process.
Why a Lottery is Fairer and Healthier
A lottery admissions system would be fairer for HALO students because it dampens the advantage of wealth. By setting a clear academic threshold, such as a minimum ACT/SAT score, colleges would identify a pool of students who can succeed. Once that bar is met, selection by lottery acknowledges an uncomfortable, but honest truth: beyond readiness, differences among applicants are often too small, too subjective, or too context-dependent to rank meaningfully. For HALO students, this matters enormously.
A lottery would also change how many teenagers live their lives. When students know that meeting a clear academic bar is sufficient, the incentive to endlessly optimize disappears. Free time no longer has to be admissions-relevant; learning no longer has to be risk-free. Students can take harder classes without fearing that a single low-grade will sink them, explore interests without worrying whether they count, and spend time working, resting, or helping family without feeling they are losing an invisible race.
More importantly, a lottery tells students that they didn’t personally fail if they don’t get into their first-choice school. In a lottery system, rejection reflects scarcity, not deficiency. Students who meet a clear academic bar can understand that they were qualified, but not selected — and not secretly judged and found wanting. Making luck explicit strips rejection of its moral weight and weakens the idea that every outcome is a referendum on one’s self-worth.
From Here to There
I’ve worked in public policy long enough to know that this post will not suddenly convince selective colleges to abandon admissions criteria they’ve relied on for decades. But, I also actually want to change how the college admissions process works — and I have a track record of doing so when systems become indefensible.3 If we care about fairness rather than rhetoric, there are concrete steps we can take through public policy and sustained advocacy to make the admissions process more like a lottery.
Example #1 - Prohibit Legacy and Donor Preferences in College Admissions
A growing number of states have passed laws prohibiting admissions officers at public universities from considering legacy or donor status when assembling an incoming class. California has gone further, enacting a law in 2025 that extends this prohibition to private, nonprofit colleges and universities operating in the state. That matters. Legacy and donor preferences are among the most explicit ways wealth is converted into admissions advantage, and banning them is one of the rare reforms that improves equity without introducing new distortions. Expanding these laws to more states is a clear step in the right direction.
Example #2 - Repeal Test-Optional/No-Test Policies
This is an area where California has gotten things exactly wrong. In an effort to address equity concerns surrounding standardized tests, the state has instead entrenched an admissions system that disadvantages HALO students. Eliminating the SAT and ACT does not eliminate wealth advantage; it amplifies it by shifting weight onto essays, recommendations, and extracurriculars — all of which are more strongly correlated with family income than test scores. Worse, research shows that high-achieving, low-income students are less likely to submit test scores even when they perform well, meaning test-optional policies systematically suppress one of the few signals that can help them compete.
Example #3 - Participate in the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program
Most advocates supported the federal tax credit scholarship program because it allows scholarships to be used for private school tuition. But an under-reported feature is that the program also allows scholarships to cover non-tuition educational expenses, including tutoring, SAT/ACT preparation, and exam fees. For HALO students competing against peers who can take standardized tests multiple times with tailored instruction, these supports are equalizers. Access to high-quality test prep and the ability to sit for exams without financial stress affects outcomes, and this program directly addresses that imbalance.
Example #4 - Pass State-Based Education Expense Scholarships or Credits
If governors or legislatures are uncomfortable participating in the federal program, states can pursue similar goals on their own. State-based education expense tax credits or scholarships — particularly those targeted to low- and middle-income families — can be used to offset the costs of tutoring, test preparation, and other enrichment activities. These policies need not include private school tuition to be effective. Several states, including Illinois, already operate programs along these lines. Properly designed, they reduce the role of wealth at the margins of competition rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Example #5 - Pressure Campaigns by Alumni and Donors
Not every problem has a legislative solution. Admissions offices are acutely sensitive to alumni and donor sentiment, and that reality can be leveraged for reform. Coordinated pressure campaigns can push institutions to drop legacy and donor preferences, adopt clearer admissions thresholds, or pilot lottery-based selection among qualified applicants. Colleges often justify inequitable practices as “institutional necessities,” but those arguments weaken quickly when a sufficient number of alumni and donors demand change.
None of these reforms will single-handedly fix college admissions. But, taken together, they would reduce the degree to which wealth masquerades as merit, lower the stakes of resume optimization, and make the process more honest about uncertainty and scarcity. That is not radical. It is what fairness looks like in a system that has spent far too long pretending it can finely rank students when, in reality, it cannot.
Selective college admissions has become an exercise in false precision. Faced with thousands of academically capable applicants, institutions insist on ranking the unrankable, leaning on criteria that quietly reward wealth and inside knowledge while pretending to measure merit. The result is a system that is neither fair nor honest. It is one that disadvantages HALO students, fuels an exhausting rat race, and teaches teenagers that college admissions outcome is a referendum on their worth.
A lottery system offers a better alternative. By setting a clear academic standard for readiness and then using a lottery to allocate scarce seats, selective colleges would acknowledge what they already know, but rarely say out loud: beyond a certain point, many applicants are equally qualified. This approach is fairer because it limits the returns to wealth at the margins. It is healthier because it changes incentives, allowing teenagers to learn deeply, take intellectual risks, and spend their time on pursuits that matter to them. And, it is more humane, because it makes room for luck as an unavoidable feature of life.
If I was in charge, I’d make it a minimum SAT/ACT score.
How can you say that selective colleges should only use SAT/ACT scores to select students and then argue that these tests advantage the wealthy? Read until the end to find out.
I wrote and passed Illinois’ Accelerated Placement Act, a statewide policy that allows students to enter early, take above grade level coursework, skip grades, and graduate early, after meeting and talking with families who desperately wanted to send their students to public schools, but felt like they couldn’t because the refused the schools refused to meet their child’s educational needs.
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> There is a simpler and more honest alternative: set a clear academic threshold for readiness and then admit students by lottery.
What minimum SAT score are you imagining here? There aren't that many students in the country who score 1550+ (though you could argue that would change as admissions criteria changed of course). I'm confident that fewer than 100k students would score a 1550+ on the SAT and a 5 on three AP exams, for example—and this is assuming they know those to be the only admissions criteria for eligibility in the lottery. I made some estimates here: https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/college-admissions-doesnt-need-to
In general, I don't understand the fascination with lottery systems, which prioritize a confused notion of fairness—unless the goal is merely to reduce the amount of effort and other resources students spend on the admissions contest, in which case you should make that explicit as the goal and try to quantify the costs and benefits that you're trading off.
> Once that bar is met, selection by lottery acknowledges an uncomfortable, but honest truth: beyond readiness, differences among applicants are often too small, too subjective, or too context-dependent to rank meaningfully ... Faced with thousands of academically capable applicants, institutions insist on ranking the unrankable
Your implied argument is that it's literally impossible to distinguish the top e.g. 10k students (out of a graduating class of 4 million) from the top 100k students. But you don't defend this assumption at all.
Are you going to allow departments to do their own admissions? Outside of the most selective institutions, some departments require far more capable students than the general student admission bar - and institutions want those most capable students. I did my degrees in Physics and Engineering. I did my BS at an open admissions state university, but the Physics for Physicists class started with ~ 200 students the freshman year - and was down to about 5 by the end of the sophomore year. The math department similarly filtered the math students who chose to major in math. Such filtering is probably still universal in the STEM areas.