This year's college admissions cycle is the most competitive it has ever been. Due to the 2007 baby boom, NPR estimates that around 6.7 million students from around the world are competing for spots at top American universities, with over 1.2 million first-year students. In addition, applicants from lower income students and minorities are the highest they have ever been. There are a variety of factors that have contributed to this upward trend.
In the past few years, choosing a college has become a much more important decision in a student’s life. Students are now expected to be all-around superstars, with an impressive range of extracurriculars, leadership roles, and internships. The belief that which college a student attends determines their future has surged in the past few years.
Many experts have traced this upward trend back to social media. Students feel as though they need to match the “perfection” seen on mainstream media, balancing seemingly impossible tasks. Burnout is common in high school juniors and seniors due to these standards set by social media influencers, who convince students that they have to be “perfect” in order to get into a good college and achieve their life goals. Students also see others online as “competition,” and feel a need to do better or belittle accomplishments of others, leading to cyberbullying among students in the college admissions process.
“Both on social media and in real life, I’ve seen a larger and larger amount of people obsessing over elite colleges and universities,” NHS senior Charles Dunn said. “It seems like everyone dreams of being the perfect Ivy League student, so much so that they discredit the rest of the great schools in the country. They believe that the school you attend dictates success later on in life, which isn’t true.”
Another reason that applications have been growing in previous years has been the rise of the Common Application (CommonApp). The CommonApp makes it easy for students to fill out a single form and apply to over 900 partner colleges, with each student being able to apply to a maximum of 20 colleges. Thus, students feel pressured to apply to as many colleges as they can to increase their chances of being accepted somewhere. This leads to an increase in applications at universities around the country.
The students are not the only ones suffering from this increase in applications, though. Colleges also are having trouble figuring out how to handle this rise in applicants. The cost for these colleges to expand their student bodies or build new infrastructure to account for more students has made it difficult for many colleges to keep up. Some colleges have sought to address this by increasing their reliance on technology, offering more online classes or creating satellite campuses. However, many students believe that these options do not allow for them to experience the “true college experience.”
But not all colleges have the funds or ability to expand their campuses. This has led to an increase in colleges over enrolling students for their upcoming classes, leading to housing struggles.
For example, the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) announced significant over-enrollment for their Class of 2028. The university was forced to rent out a nearby Holiday Inn for students to live and sleep. Colleges around the country are in similar situations due to the increased applicants across the past few years.
Not even graduate students are safe from increasing competition. Due to NIH and research funding cuts, graduate colleges are sharply decreasing the amount of acceptances. The University of Pittsburgh even completely stopped accepting graduate students in 2025.
"After the announcement that NIH indirect costs would be capped at 15%, the University’s Office of the Provost temporarily paused additional Ph.D. offers of admission until the impacts of that cap were better understood,” a Pitt spokesperson said in a statement to WESA. The University of Pittsburgh is not alone in this movement. Other elite R1 universities have also stopped accepting graduate students, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington, and the University of Southern California.
In fact, many acceptances had already been sent out from these colleges for graduate admissions. However, the colleges have said that they will be forced to rescind the decisions due to “fiscal constraints.”
The increase in competition has placed immense pressure on both students and universities, leading to significant changes that will affect students in the far future. As application numbers continue to rise, schools will be forced to implement new policies in order to keep all parties happy.
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