The Myth of Too Many Great Students

In the course of a witty and poignant reflection on his daughter's college search, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes:

The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there's a glut of good kids -- excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We've all read the stories of the despairing admissions officers wading through applications from one overachiever after another, cursing the gods -- "No, not another valedictorian!"

It's true, we've all read those stories, because newspapers like the Post love to publish them. But the idea there's this new or problematic oversupply of super-qualified high school students--it's nonsense, really. The dirty not-so-secret of the American educational system is that a quarter of the kids don't graduate from high school on time, and for black and Latino students it's closer to half. Of those who do finish, many aren't even minimally prepared for college-level work--national remediation rates for college freshmen are, depending on the estimate, 25 to to 40 percent. In 1978, seven percent of all 17-year olds scored over 350 on the NAEP long-term trends math exam. Last year, it was six percent. Achenbach says that kids these days "routinely" apply to "12 or 15" colleges. Last I checked with the folks at the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute who study these things, about two percent of students apply to 12 colleges or more. 

In truth, the frenzied college admissions rate race is a niche phenomenon concentrated in the wealthy sections of a relatively small number of metropolitan areas located disproportionately on the coasts. Of course, those are also the places where agenda-setting national newspapers are published, and where the people who write for them live. But let's not pretend that their lives are in any way representative of most American college students, people who tend to be focused on more mundane problems like getting a decent high school education, finding enough money to get through the local public two- or four-year college, and earning a degree.