Selective college admissions have been a vortex of anxiety and stress for what seems like forever, inducing panic in more top high school seniors each year.
But the 2023-2024 admissions season was not just an incremental increase in the frantic posturing and high-pressure guesswork that make this annual ritual seem like academic Hunger Games.
The so-called Ivy-Plus schools — the eight members of the Ivy League plus M.I.T., Duke, Chicago and Stanford — collectively received about 175,000 applications in 2002.
In 2022, the most recent year for which totals are available, they got more than 590,000, with only a few thousand more available spots.
A legal challenge swept the rules away, freeing the most powerful schools to do pretty much whatever they wanted.
Persons:
—, clamoring, Stanford —
Organizations:
Hunger, Ivy League, Stanford
Locations:
Duke, Chicago, United States