This piece was published in The Phoenix‘s Winter 2026 print issue. Read the full issue at uchicagophoenix.com/magazine.

College prices have risen dramatically over the past two decades. While scholarships and financial aid bring the daunting sticker prices down for many students, parents still stress over data points like “median salary after graduation,” hoping the bill they have to foot for four years will be refunded in excess by their kids’ future careers. Among high-achieving students, this has created a “prestige bust” mindset, where the only colleges deemed worth the investment are “T20 schools”—elite, highly-selective (or highly-rejective) institutions. The fallback is public state universities, which have considerably lower sticker prices, so students are more likely to get their money’s worth. 

With these being the only two options presented to high-achieving students, their college process is shaped by how high on the list the colleges they’re applying to are, rather than those colleges’ identity and resources. The best school for many students might be ranked 30th, 50th, or 150th—but those schools don’t have the prestige and potential for high future earnings that T20s do. As a result, many kids are encouraged, both explicitly and implicitly, to grit their teeth for four years at a top-ranked school instead of thriving at a “less prestigious” institution. 

Take UChicago. We’re freezing for half the school year and have a culture whose glum humor is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of how depressed and overworked we all are. These traits aren’t easily captured by glossy postcards or college rankings, and would have proved surprising to many arriving students. But the process rewarded them, so they have to take their lumps and live for the future. 

This phenomenon, in tandem with the declining number of students matriculating, threatens to radically reshape the higher education system. For decades, graduating high schoolers have had a buffet of options available to them, from state schools to liberal arts colleges to Ivy Leagues, and everything in between. No matter what kind of student you were, both in terms of your grades and the learning/social environment you wanted, you could find a four-year home. Now, issues such as grade inflation and test-optional admissions have put many kids at the threshold for highly selective colleges (on paper). And with private colleges all carrying a similar price tag, it’s harder for families to justify paying for one that lacks the prestige and generationally reinforced value of an Ivy or Ivy-plus institution. As a result, many of these “less-prestigious” private colleges will likely face enrollment crises that push them to a financial brink (I think about Brandeis, my former college, which is currently facing this very crisis). 

This mindset is also responsible for the “shotgun method” of college applications, where students will apply to 10 or more highly selective colleges with the hopes of getting into one. “You have kids who work so hard and just want to get into the best school they can get into, so they look at the rankings, apply to the top schools, and will just go to whichever one they get into,” Ashley, a private admissions consultant and former admissions reader at Dartmouth and Stanford, told me. 

Many kids are encouraged to grit their teeth for four years at a top-ranked school instead of thriving at a “less prestigious” institution

The transformation of the college application process into a form of gambling means that, in many cases, rather than researching a slate of potential options and diving deep into the ones that truly reflect their goals, prospective students pump out essay templates they can fit to college after college with just a few changed words. Ashley suggested the rationale was that “these kids are 17 to 18 years old; they’re still figuring themselves and their interests out. What they care most about at that moment is ranking and prestige. They can’t figure out [the differences between highly-selective universities] because their marketing is all the same.” 

In some ways, the college process is built to handle “shotgunning.” With its emphasis on “fit,” or alignment between students and schools, it’s usually able to see through students who care more about a university’s prestige than what comprises that institution. “A lot of times the process works itself out and kids don’t get in because they try to manufacture fit for a bunch of different schools,” Ashley remarked. Sometimes it works the other way; the core values reflected in a student’s application could put them in alignment with one of the colleges on their list, and their scattershot approach actually results in them finding their best college environment. However, when these students arrive at these schools, a pressure to succeed still weighs on them: to “get their money’s worth,” to earn a good job, and to “give their parents’ investment a return.” Details that they overlooked during their college process have put them in an environment that isn’t for them, where it is significantly more challenging for them to achieve that success. 

Ashley works for a firm that provides students with strategies on how to best craft their college applications and maximize their chances of acceptance. Many families pay immense sums of money to these firms to “guarantee” that their kid gets into an elite university. Their bill can reach into six figures if they’re paying for a service that structures their kid’s life from ninth-grade through graduation. While it is almost exclusively highly wealthy households that use these more extensive services, many middle-class families may be tempted to spend five or ten thousand dollars on a consultant for their highly accomplished child if it means they’re more likely to get into a prestigious college, due to the potential return on investment.

Not every consultant is built the same; some, like Ashley, are former admissions readers who know what colleges look for, while others are either students or alumni at elite colleges who post TikToks and Reels about their college process, believing their own admission provides the credentials they need to sell guarantees of acceptance. While Ashley emphasized that she made her clients conduct thorough research into the schools they were applying to and that she strove for applicant authenticity, she admitted that many other consultants have heavy hands in crafting students’ applications to maintain their track record of elite placement. This can also leave students feeling stranded at what should’ve been their dream college, as the perceived fit that matched them with that school wasn’t authentic to them.

“These kids are 17 to 18 years old; they’re still figuring themselves and their interests out… They can’t figure out [the differences between highly- selective universities] because their marketing is all the same”

Almost every day at UChicago, you’re liable to hear someone complaining that we’ve gotten too pre-professional, that we’ve strayed away from the quirky spirit that once defined us. The opposite is also true: any visit to Sidechat will have you encounter posters wishing they’d gone to a school that was “easier,” but similarly prestigious. From an admissions perspective, it feels like we want to have it both ways. We submitted to the homogenization of the college application process when we joined the Common App, but in our supplement, we kept the unique essay prompts that defined our “Uncommon Application.” It seems that as long as there’s a divide between students who long for more quirkiness and students who would rather we just funnel them into quant and IB, the college will be unable to fully serve either, leaving us in limbo. 

How do these concerns weigh on students today? Colleges have historically been viewed as tools that enable social mobility: an extension of the American dream. However, even that notion has been narrowed to highly-exclusive universities, as their student populations contain a disproportionate percentage of kids from the top 1 percent. Breaking through is seen as a victory for low-income and middle-class families. In fact, it’s largely the middle class that suffers this anxiety around college admissions, as wealthier families pay out-of-pocket and low-income students have greater access to need-based aid, scholarships, and application pathways such as Questbridge. 

But for families that won’t get a big discount on the sticker price and simultaneously can’t afford the bill, the only private colleges that are worth it are the ones labeled with prestige. What’s lost in all this worrying is the reality of what college is, ostensibly: a place where students learn. It can be easy to think of it as the end goal after four years of stress and countless nights of lost sleep, but it’s just another step in a long journey. If you enter into it with a shallow understanding of what you’re signing up for, you’re likely going to graduate with a shallow experience behind you.