The Power of No
On Dec. 14, Ivy got an answer from Duke: She was rejected.
She was in extremely good company. It’s been a while since top students could assume they’d get into top schools, but today, they get rejected more often than not. It even happens at places like Northeastern, a school now ranked 53rd in the nation by U.S. News& World Report — and not long ago, more than 100 slots lower than that — and which spends less per student on instruction than the Boston public schools.
“There’s no target school any more and no safety school,” says Stef Mauler, a private admissions coach in Texas. “You have to have a strategy for every school you apply to.”
Northeastern was one of the 18 other schools Ivy applied to, carefully sifting through various deadlines and conditions, mapping out her strategy. With Duke out of the way, her thoughts kept returning to one of them in particular: Dartmouth, her father’s alma mater. “My mom said, ‘Ivy, you love New Hampshire. Look at Dartmouth.’ She was right.” She had wanted to go someplace warm, but the idea of cold weather seemed to be bothering her less and less.
Meanwhile Rania watched as early decision day came and went, and thousands of high school seniors across the country got the best news of their lives. For Rania, it was just another Friday.
A Free Market in Financial Aid
In 2003, a consortium of about 20 elite colleges agreed to follow a shared formula for financial aid, to ensure that they were competing for students on the merits, not on mere dollars and cents. It sounds civilized, but pricing agreements are generally illegal for commercial ventures. (Imagine if car companies agreed not to underbid each other.) The colleges believed they were exempt from that prohibition, however, because they practiced “need-blind” admissions, meaning they don’t discriminate based on a student’s ability to pay.
In 2022, nine current and former students from an array of prestigious colleges filed a class action antitrust lawsuit — later backed by the Justice Department — arguing that the consortium’s gentlemanly agreement was depriving applicants of the benefits of a free market. And to defang the defense, they produced a brilliant argument: No, these wealthy colleges didn’t discriminate against students who were poor, but they sure did discriminate in favor of students who were rich. They favored the children of alumni and devoted whole development offices to luring the kinds of ultra-rich families that affix their names to shiny new buildings. It worked: early this year, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Emory and Yale joined the University of Chicago in conceding, and paying out a nine-figure settlement. (They deny any wrongdoing.) Several other schools are playing on, but the consortium and its rules have evaporated.
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