With UCLA at 8.6% and Michigan at 8%, the College Essay Is Now the Last Variable That Decides

Step by step

1. The brand-name schools now admit only a small share ▶23:20

   Rastello starts with the numbers. He says Michigan has an 8% acceptance rate, UCLA has 8.6%, USC is under 10%, and Stanford has stayed under 5% for a while. When students cannot get into an Ivy, they turn to the next group of top schools. Those schools then get harder to enter too. Rastello says the same students end up applying to the same small set of schools, which all use a nearly identical process. He states his view plainly: a public school with an 8.6 acceptance rate is not, in his words, a good thing for society.

2. Most applicants are qualified, so the choice gets subjective ▶9:50

   Rastello says these colleges get 80,000 applications and could easily admit 75,000 of them. Instead they admit about 10%. Students are coached well, and their teachers write supportive letters, so many files look strong. That leaves the school asking what makes one student more valuable than the next. Nick puts it as a ratio, not a rate. He says that in his talks with people who work in selective admissions, the real issue is having at least a 10 to one ratio of qualified students to open spots. In that setting, the essay becomes the last thing that sets one student apart.

3. The essay already favored families with money ▶7:30

   Nick says that, from his reading in the admissions literature, the quality of essays as judged by admissions officers lines up with family income more closely than grades or test scores do. He did not name a specific study on tape. He calls the essay a hidden class filter. He also points out that no one can prove they spot ghostwritten essays, because the ones that slipped past are never seen. Rastello agrees that the problem is not new. He says some adults are very good at sounding like a bright 17 year old, and families hire them to write essays.

4. AI may force the system to rebuild ▶6:10

   Rastello expects admissions offices will not have AI detectors in place at first, given how many applications they get, at least not in year one or year two. He predicts detection will become a routine safeguard later, the way it already is for English teachers. Still, he sees an upside. As an illustration of where things are heading, he says UCLA cannot keep going from 150,000 to 160,000 to 175,000 applications while its admit rate slides from 8.6% to 7.5% to 5.7%. At some point, he says, the 4.7 GPA, the black belt, and the Eagle Scout stop meaning anything. That is why he thinks the system needs to be blown up and rebuilt.

5. The pressure starts at 13 or 14 ▶15:30

   Nick shares a story from a counselor at an elite private high school. A parent wanted Stanford for a student near the top of a hard class. The only blemish was a couple of B-pluses and A-minuses from freshman year. The counselor did not care about those grades. But if Stanford has another student with no A-minuses at all, the fair-seeming choice is the straight-A student. Nick says the knock-on effect is that a student must perform at their very best at 13 or 14, before they know who they are, and should not carry that kind of pressure.

6. A lottery above a floor ▶16:50

   Nick describes the one fix he has heard that could work in practice, from Malcolm Gladwell. Students would need to clear a reasonable floor, such as a 3.5 GPA and a test score. Nick says he is pulling the score out of the air, using 1,300 on the SAT as an example. Above that line, admission would be a lottery. A higher GPA or more activities would add nothing. Rastello calls it a great suggestion. Nick adds that a lottery could change school incentives, since he says donations and research grants rise as admit rates fall, which is why colleges spend so much on marketing.

7. The cost Rastello saw in his own seniors ▶18:40

   Rastello says the clearest cost was with his current senior class. This year, more than any year before, admissions decisions hurt how students saw themselves. Within three weeks they were fine. But for two to three weeks, he says, it was scary as an educator. He did not know what they would do with the sadness of not getting what they wanted. He says students need resilience skills and a better grasp of how subjective the process is, and he sees part of that as the counselor's job to teach.

8. Why common fixes fall short ▶20:40

   Rastello notes there is no real cap on applications. The Common App allows 20, but with the UC, Cal State and coalition apps a student can still apply to 50. He recalls an article, which he thinks was in the LA Times, about a student who applied to something like 127 schools. He also rejects two popular reforms. He says going test blind is not the solution, and neither is removing race from the application. He calls those band-aids. The deeper problem, he says, is children taught they must be perfect, chasing a shrinking number of brand-name seats.

9. Look at your actual kid ▶29:30

   Asked for one piece of advice for parents, Rastello turned the question back on Nick: what does he want for his own daughter? Nick said he wants her to know who she is and avoid the arms race, which he calls a race to nowhere. Rastello says that question is the advice. Look honestly at your child and check your ego. A Harvard trophy means little if a student cannot handle a bad grade without calling home every other day. He adds that getting into eight out of 10 schools is not an 80% success rate, because you only attend one.