The headlines last week weren’t pretty. As colleges and universities nationwide revealed their admissions decisions, news broke of a dramatic decline in acceptance rates — and not just at Ivy League schools. The shift means that for the legions of high school students who sunk all their hopes and plans into a dream school find themselves grappling with some serious disappointment this week.
Why were admissions so low? It’s a numbers game. This year’s graduating class is one of the largest on record. As a result, colleges saw the number of applicants soar to record-high levels, but budgetary constraints kept most of them from upping the number of spots they could offer. Harvard, the school with the lowest admission rate in the country, offered enrollment to just 6.2% of applicants, or a total of 2,158 students of the record 34,950 who applied. But it isn’t just the Ivy League schools; both state schools and private liberal-arts colleges saw their acceptance rates decline as well. The University of California, San Diego, is poised to accept 34.3% of the 53,455 students who applied , while Amherst College in Massachusetts projects it will accept 12.6% of its 8,432 applicants.
It’s not that most students won’t get into college at all — there are more than enough spots nationwide for every qualified student to find a place to study — but for many, the school they end up enrolling in may not have been their first, or even third, choice. The initial sting of rejection can take a toll on a student’s psyche. These are kids who are used to being the best of the best, says Julia V. Taylor, a school counselor at Apex High School in Raleigh, N.C.
But some of that letdown is self-inflicted, says Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and author of You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10-25. He says our nation’s obsession with rankings and prestige means that high school students — and their parents — form intense emotional commitments to schools long before admissions decisions have been made. “When they’re rejected it’s like being rejected by a boyfriend or girlfriend,” Steinberg tells TIME. “They internalize it: What’s the matter with me? What could I have done differently? Why did they choose that person and not me?”
That emotional attachment is often only about what decal students will paste on their parents’ minivan, Steinberg says, but it may lead to families overlooking what may actually be the better school for the students. Taylor agrees. In her state, students most often clamor for admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “They don’t know a thing about the university. They just know they want to wear a Tar Heels sweatshirt,” she says of the university’s mascot.
But the good news is, as painful as rejection is, in terms of long-term success, getting into a prestigious college doesn’t matter much. A study released in March by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Stacy Dale of Mathematica Policy Research shows students who are rejected by highly selective schools go on to bank the same average earnings as Ivy League graduates. Krueger tells TIME his study shows too much attention is paid to the schools and not enough to the students. “Students can get a good education at many places,” he says. “What matters most is what students put into their education — how seriously they take their studies and how much work they put in.” It’s what he calls the “Spielberg effect.”
