There Is No Formula for Getting In: The Anti-Anxiety Truth About U.S. College Admissions
Low admit rates are a story about roughly 80 selective schools nationally; for most families there is no formula, and the most useful thing a parent can do is hold a standing meeting and control what is controllable.
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No one else's path into college can be copied
Rick says admissions has used the word ‘process’ for so long that it makes people believe there is an optimal formula, some x+y=z. But take Georgia Tech's roughly 4,000 first-year students: one stood out for being extraordinarily focused on a single area, another stood out for doing too many things at once, another stood out for being from North Dakota and wanting to study public policy. The conclusion: there is no repeatable path in, and someone else's route to a yes will not necessarily work for you.
— Rick Clark‘Impossible to get into’ is an illusion manufactured by 80 schools
Rick first uses Georgia Tech to show the change: 20 years ago it took fewer than 10,000 applications and admitted about two-thirds of them; in the most recent year it took 60,000 applications and the admit rate fell to 15%. But he insists the Stanford-style low admit rates the media fixates on are not the whole picture — only about 80 colleges in the country admit fewer than 25% of applicants. With births declining after the pandemic, schools are shorter on students than they used to be, and the average admit rate at four-year colleges nationally has in fact been climbing from 65%. So ‘impossible to get into’ is a cognitive distortion produced by a handful of famous names.
— Rick ClarkEssays are won on new information, not on prose style
Rick argues the essay creates anxiety because grades, activities and course selection are essentially locked in before application season, leaving the essay as the one thing a student can still control. But what actually has value is not the writing or the topic — it is new information. Do not use the prose to repeat clues the application already contains; write the ‘next chapter’ the admissions officer did not see coming, so that the picture of you already forming in their head gets color and a frame. He points to the essay Lisa's daughter wrote about difficult customers at a retail store — the kind of thing a transcript can never show.
— Rick ClarkParents should coach perspective rather than make themselves invisible
Rick pushes back on the line that the student should completely own the process and the parent should ideally disappear. He thinks that is unrealistic, and that it wastes a chance for the parent-child relationship to level up. His method: hold one application meeting at a fixed time every week, and fence the essays, the deadlines and the rest inside that block — so nobody brings up the Notre Dame essay late at night, right after practice, or over a snack. The parent's core job is ‘perspective coach’: making sure your kid knows there are many roads to happiness and success, and that this will not become the only subject in your relationship.
— Rick ClarkLast year's middle 50% no longer tells you where you stand
Test-optional has made students who could submit scores or not submit them more anxious, not less. Rick says the most common advice is ‘send them if you fall inside the school's middle 50% from past years’, but that math is now distorted: because some lower-scoring students choose not to send scores, the average score of admitted students is artificially lifted, and a prior year's middle 50% range cannot be applied directly. He calls on colleges to publish admit rates and middle 50% ranges separately for the score-submitting and non-submitting groups — otherwise nobody can say what ‘optional’ actually means for any given person.
— Rick ClarkThe athletic scholarship funnel keeps getting narrower
Rick says only about 7% of high school varsity athletes go on to play a college varsity sport. Even at the D1 level, the overwhelming majority of scholarships are not full rides — full scholarships are common only in revenue sports like football and basketball, while many of the so-called Olympic or non-revenue sports offer partial awards. Add the transfer portal, which pushes colleges to pull more of their players from college athletes who have already proven themselves, and the funnel from high school graduation straight onto a college roster is narrowing further. Parents sometimes get swept along by the commercial incentives behind showcases and camps; better to start by asking parents who have already been through it, whose kids are already in college.
— Rick ClarkA consultant can buy you process, but never an admission
Rick's stance on college consultants is ‘it depends what you want them for’: if a family needs someone standing in the middle to watch deadlines and keep the parent-child relationship healthy, there is value in that. But no claim of ‘guaranteed admission’ should be believed, because predictability is declining at many schools. Whether SAT/ACT prep is worth it works the same way: some public universities tie scholarship dollars directly to test scores and GPA, and he gives the example of putting in $2,000 on test prep and potentially getting back an advantage of $8,000 a year, $30,000 in total. But a disciplined kid can get there just fine on free resources like Khan Academy.
— Rick ClarkNever apply to a school you would not actually attend
Rick says the most common thing students do is ‘smart people doing dumb things’: applying to a school they would never actually attend. The right posture in building a list is to name a set of schools you would genuinely be glad to go to — there are 4,000 colleges in the country and you are applying to 10, which makes you already more selective than any one of them. Change ‘I have to write this essay, I have to do this interview’ into ‘I get to write it, I get to go’ and the whole experience changes. This is also the way of thinking college itself teaches: form a hypothesis first, then stay open and curious about different outcomes.
— Rick ClarkIn their own words · checked verbatim
sometimes in a holistic review that is just a highly Uber focused student in one particular area and in other times what stood out was how in the heck did this kid possibly do all of these different things
Rick Clark7:36
really if you look at schools that admit,Less than 25% there's only about 80 of them in the country it's just that that's what we focus on right
Rick Clark11:09
I think that parents role as I've come to understand it is we are coaches in perspective
Rick Clark18:50
controlling the conversation by setting up a weekly meeting where instead of letting it bleed into life and all conversations it's 10 o'clock just got back from tennis practice trying to get a snack and all of a sudden we're talking about like the Notre Dame essay
Rick Clark20:00
it also needs to be understood that the math isn't really math so much on this right now, because if you have a percentage of your students who are electing not to send scores, the averages are actually escalating
Rick Clark25:00
the money available is usually lower than what people think
Rick Clark32:26
don't apply to a school you wouldn't actually attend
Rick Clark44:55
Figures
| Average admit rate, four-year colleges nationally | about two-thirds | 10:00 |
| Georgia Tech applications 20 years ago | fewer than 10,000 | 10:00 |
| Georgia Tech applications in the most recent year | 60,000 | 10:00 |
| Change in Georgia Tech's admit rate | from about 65% down to 15% | 10:00 |
| U.S. colleges admitting fewer than 25% | about 80 | 11:09 |
| Share of high school varsity athletes who play college varsity | about 7% | 32:26 |
| Test prep vs. scholarship return (Rick's example) | $2,000 on prep → $8,000 a year, $30,000 total advantage | 41:13 |
Glossary
- holistic review
- Admissions officers evaluate grades, activities, essays and background together, rather than lining applicants up by score.
- test-optional
- The student decides whether to submit SAT/ACT scores; not submitting does not make the application incomplete.
- Common App
- A shared platform that lets one set of application materials go to many U.S. colleges at once.
- FAFSA
- The U.S. federal government's Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which determines most federal aid amounts.
- net price calculator
- A tool on a school's website that estimates what a family will actually pay after you enter its financial information.
How to listen
Parents and counselors with a kid in grades 9-11 who are starting to plan U.S. undergraduate applications and are afraid the anxiety will swallow the whole family.
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