Duke’s Horrible Early Admissions Reaction Video

Publicizing the reactions of over-stressed young people and their families to early admission represents everything that is wrong with elite university admissions systems

I love the university where I teach, but when I scrolled through Twitter this morning, I was disgusted to see this video documenting the reactions of students and families to the notification of early admission to Duke. It represents virtually everything that is wrong with the system for admitting students to elite universities. 

Where to begin?

For starters, how about the fact that for every admission celebration (you might say “scenes of joy” but look more carefully) in the video, there were five other scenes of vast disappointment, with parents having to console their deeply distraught children. It is a cruelty for a school that only admitted 16% of its early applicants to be so oblivious to the feelings of the 84% of the students that it did not admit.  That is especially true when for the 4,000 students who weren’t admitted, Duke was their absolute number one choice and Duke strongly encouraged them to apply. Sure, some got deferred and will still have a slim chance in regular admissions, but for most their dream of attending Duke is, for all extents and purposes, over. Having to see the happiness of those admitted and their families on social media makes the experience even worse. 

I was also struck by how many of the students reacted not with expressions of glee, but rather by bursting into tears of relief. Perhaps universities should take a close look at these tears and consider what the admissions system that they have created is doing to the mental health of the students that will eventually be coming to their campuses. There are many causes of the worsening college mental health crisis, but when 60-75 percent of the students who arrive on  campuses are experiencing some form of moderate or severe psychological distress, schools might start thinking about whether the system they have put in place to gain admission might be contributing to this syndrome. 

As a teacher and mentor to these students, I am 100% certain that the system is causing harm. Many students do not arrive on our campus each fall basking in their achievement and primed for four years of intellectual inquiry and growth. Rather, they are bundles of stress and anxiety, pre-programmed by their college admissions experience to believe that they should spend the next four years of their lives compiling a dossier of achievements to achieve their next big goal, whether it be admission to an elite professional school, a prestigious scholarship or high-paying job.

I saw this first-hand in August during a lunch with first year students that had just unpacked their bags the prior day. I started the lunch conversation asking the students what they were most looking forward to about college and, I kid you not, one of them asked me what activities they should do to maximize their chances for admission to law school. When I answered that the best approach was to find something they loved doing and doing it well and that Duke didn’t have a pre-law program, the student’s response was “why not?”

I have also seen the impact of this mind-set as students proceed with their college careers. Many students try to recreate what they did in high school by maximizing the number of difficult courses on their schedules, loading their lives with a range of extra-curricular activities, and applying for impressive summer jobs. Peer pressure from living among other high-performing, over-achieving students leads to them believe that they must ramp up the intensity of their pursuits to compete with their colleagues. What we end up with after a year or two of this is far too many students who are physically and mentally exhausted, over-stressed, and often waiting for a counseling appointment at our over-booked student mental health system.

Of course, there is no good way to dole out prized slots in elite schools that so many students want and so many parents want for their children. But the stage of the process that is glorified in Duke’s video – early admissions – is by far the worst aspect of a rotten system.

Do not think for a second that a chance to gain admission in December instead of March has anything to do with benefitting students. That isn’t how it works at all.  Rather, it is a way to enable schools to pick their students rather than students picking their schools. 

You would think it should be the other way around when it is the students and their families that need to plunk down (or apply for grants or borrow) about $350,000 to pay for a four-year  undergraduate experience at Duke. In a fair, student-centered system, the students would get to apply to whatever schools they want, see where they are admitted, and pick their top choice school, armed with full information about the financial aid packages and scholarships that might be available to them. 

But early admission distorts the entire system.

In “early decision” schools, like Duke, students are committed to attend if admitted. Under this system, students are forced to make a strategic decision on the single school to apply to early. Some students forego a chance to apply to their true first choice since they think they have a better chance of getting into Duke. Some students take a swing at the 1 out of 6 odds of early admission to Duke when it might have made more sense to apply to a “safer” school.  Most students can’t afford to bind themselves to going to Duke without knowing what kind of financial aid they might obtain so they don’t apply early at all.  That is probably the biggest reason why last year only 4,111 of the total 50,002 applicants participated in the early process.

There is a lot of pressure to participate in the early system and make the right strategic choice because failing to gain early admission has its consequences. Duke admits a total of about 3000 students – but allots over a quarter of these prized slots during early admissions. Most elite schools do the same. So, if you don’t participate in the early process or don’t gain early admission – you have lost the chance at virtually every school to compete for a big chunk of the available spaces. At Duke, the admit rate drops from around 16% in December to less than 5% in March.

Early admission stinks.

It deprives students the chance to compete for all the spots at all the schools to which they want to apply. It discriminates against students that are reliant on financial aid. And it creates a double-whammy process that forces students to endure the stress of admissions decisions twice instead of just once. Worse yet, the early system creates a “yes-no” dichotomy in which the vast majority of students feel personally devalued by failure to gain admission to their favorite school. At least in the regular admissions process, rejections at some schools are tempered by admissions somewhere else.   

Getting rid of early admissions wouldn’t solve every problem with college admissions, but it would help. Scholar Michael Sandel has some even more radical ideas about admissions reform, that he believes would relieve some of the divisiveness in America. I hope to consider them in a future post.

The problem for now is schools are making a bad system even worse by fetishizing their own hyper-selectivity without considering the substantial harms of the system they have created.

It is time for this to stop.