In 2013, the admissions department of New York University offered acceptance to 35 percent of its applicants. Eleven years later, the school’s acceptance rate had dropped to 8 percent. Yale’s acceptance rate has hovered on both sides of 4 percent in recent years. Stanford’s acceptance rate has dipped below 4 percent. Harvard’s is right at about 3 percent. Other elite schools boast acceptance rates far down in the single digits. Duke, for example, has offered acceptance to about 5 percent of its most recent batch of applicants.
These numbers signify something not just stressful but ironic, if not absurd, for those applicants and their families. Students applying to these top schools have likely been inside the college admissions process for years. Maybe, on top of summers of math camp and language tutoring, their parents have paid tuition to demanding prep schools. Or maybe, knowing the top schools try not to accept too many prep school kids these days, they’ve strategically sent their child to the public school in their urban neighborhood, even though they’re kind of rich, and their public school’s kind of a mess. Maybe they’ve hired a private college consultant to tell them what extracurriculars the colleges like. At the very least, they’ve brainstormed about the best, most dramatic topics for their admissions essays, and then written and edited and rewritten those essays until they sounded just right — perhaps, again, with the help of a paid consultant.
And then, after all this strategic scheming, all the academic effort and careful curating of a personal profile that will impress admissions departments, they confront odds of admissions success at their preferred school that resemble pure randomness. For families this is both hard to grasp and a little cruel. They’ve worked so hard and rationally to master the elements of a successful life, only to find that the key moment in this process, the crucible everyone’s focused on, is governed by what looks from the outside like college functionaries flipping coins.
This isn’t the only irony, or the deepest one. That colleges, especially elite colleges, govern the fates of American families so arbitrarily, inspire and direct such frantic striving, is a signal and measure of their immense power. The deeper and perhaps darker irony, for today’s ambitious parents, is that this power has been given to these institutions by yesterday’s ambitious parents. In striving to control the future for their children, America’s eager, anxious, self-empowered families have given certain gate-keeping institutions the power to control them.
This happens at several points during the parenting years. In more affluent ZIP codes, for example, families compete over the scarce openings in prestigious preschools. I document this partly grim, partly comical preschool competition in my book “Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age.” In Manhattan, ambitious, often wealthy and powerful parents find themselves bossed and belittled by the heads of fancy preschools, who — these anxious parents wrongly believe — hold the key to a better life for the few lucky toddlers granted admission to these elite day care centers.
Media accounts of such competition tend to blame individual families. We’re accustomed to rolling our eyes at overscheduled kids and, especially, their overcompetitive parents, but the real story is more complicated than this. Over the last 35 years, as parents have become more intentional and vigorous in arming their children to succeed, the institutions they interact with — sensing their own importance to those desperate and pliable parents — have grown more demanding. After all, like families, those institutions are competing with each other. They’re angling for a leg up in their own struggles. Indeed, competition among families fuels the competition among institutions, and vice versa. It’s a fierce dynamic, parallel arms races making each other more costly and exhausting.
America’s families have given certain gate-keeping institutions the power to control them.
Perhaps the best area of family striving with which to illustrate this dilemma is the stressful system of youth sports, especially sports played through private, competitive clubs. As with other areas of family competition, reporters and analysts resort to lazy tropes and stock villains to diagnose the larger problems. When youth sports appear in your Facebook feed or on the evening news, it’s usually because a bunch of parents started fighting on the sidelines, or a coach has punched a referee. Scholars and writers who set out to explain the excesses in American youth sports — the expense, the exhausting schedules, the injuries — in broader terms typically settle on a familiar culprit: capitalism. Magazine articles often use the phrase “youth sports industrial complex” to refer to those who run and profit from and supposedly control this system. Sociologist Rick Eckstein, author of “How College Athletics are Hurting Girls’ Sports,” recurs to the broad Marxist assumptions familiar in his discipline. For him, parents “who place too much emphasis on youth sports” are working within the ideological blinders of capitalist society. They’re lost in false consciousness thanks to the beguiling forces of “corporatization, commercialization, and commodification.”
Capitalism probably aggravates things, but it simply doesn’t explain why America’s youth sports are distinctly hard on families, compared to sports in other capitalist countries. In fact, high-level youth sports in Europe are more capitalist, more closely linked to much more powerful forces of “corporatization, commercialization, and commodification” than are American youth sports. The European system is dominated by giant, profit-driven businesses — the clubs that run professional sports teams, such as famous soccer clubs like FC Barcelona and Manchester United FC, which essentially own the sporting futures of the young kids they recruit and sign.
And the central money-making figures in American youth sports do not form, or even resemble, any kind of “industrial complex.” Instead, the main figures are a decidedly humble lot — towns that build tournament complexes to bring in customers for their struggling businesses, ex-college players who run skill clinics, and the thousands of clubs themselves, which are generally small, independent, nonprofit bodies. The money that families spend on the pricey wares of Nike and Adidas (the main “industrial” actors in this system) is a tiny fraction of what they spend on club fees, tournament travel, and ad hoc skill training through private clinics.
Parents aren’t going overboard with sports involvement because of corporatization or commercialization or whatever. They’re going overboard because of other parents. As a group, sports parents are caught in what political scientists call a “collective action problem.” A family’s involvement in the entangling system of youth sports typically starts with a common, indeed wholesome challenge. Your son is a good athlete who likes soccer, and so he probably wants to play the sport in a serious way. He wants to test himself against real competition. This is entirely natural. It’s an elemental aspect of sports. But once you agree to put him into “competitive” rather than “recreational” soccer, say, you’ll find yourself operating in a sort of arms race. If he really wants to compete, you’ll have to consider not just the several practices a week and those weekend games and distant tournaments, but the extra skill training on nights when he doesn’t have practice. The alternative is him losing playing time, being demoted to a lower team, perhaps being cut altogether. Why choose the “competitive” route only to watch your son go backwards? So, to keep up, you do what you imagine other parents are doing, who are doing what they imagine you’re doing.
You might want to blame the competitive clubs at this point, since they’re the ones who set that exhausting pace of practice and travel. But the clubs are in a parallel situation to parents. They’re in an arms race too, competing with each other not just for success on the pitch or court but for players and their paying families. If a competitive club decides to make things a little mellower and less demanding for families, with fewer practices and less travel, they risk losing their most committed players to clubs that are keeping things intense. As with players and their parents, then, the clubs are caught in an arms race, a more-is-more dynamic they can’t opt out of without paying a steep, perhaps fatal price. Sports have always been competitive, of course, but something has changed this competition, so that it matters for larger things, the very life prospects of those who play the games.
That something is college. The valuable sport-related benefits that colleges offer change the meaning and functioning of club sports for both families and the clubs themselves. With scholarships and admissions preferences for their “recruited athletes,” colleges dangle a shiny object for the main figures to compete over — club against club and, especially, family against family. This is not to say that every sports parent is grinding to win a scholarship for their child, or angling to get her into a prestigious college as a recruited athlete. Most parents just want to watch their athletic kids play a sport they’re good at. But it takes only a few high-strung, college-focused parents to set a frantic tempo that everyone else has to dance to, if they want to dance at all.
Parents aren’t going overboard with sports involvement because of corporatization or commercialization. They’re going overboard because of other parents
Indeed, the idea of college drives most forms of over-competitive parenting. Even those Manhattan preschool parents are scheming to get their toddlers into the fanciest day care because they think it means a better shot of admissions to a top college 15 years down the road. But it hasn’t always been this way. It’s only in the last few decades that the idea of college has fueled this exhausting culture of overwrought parenting. In an often-cited 2010 article titled “The Rug Rat Race,” economists Garey and Valerie Ramey document an increase in the intensity of parenting methods starting in the early 1990s. They argue, persuasively, that this increase owes largely to concerns about college. The Rameys cite time-use surveys showing that the time American parents (especially college-educated parents) spend actively involved with their children began a steady increase in the early 1990s. This increase coincided with a heightened emphasis on college education in the burgeoning “knowledge economy” (and with collapsing industrial employment), and an increased competition for admissions slots in American colleges and universities.
But the economic factor on its own does not explain the increase. Canadian parents were subject to the same economic forces, and the same worries about their children’s futures, as their American counterparts, but their parenting time did not increase. This, the Rameys argue, is because American parents grew focused on and worried about college in ways that Canadian parents did not. They point out that much of the increased parenting time was devoted to helping teenage kids with college-related activities. College had, with apparent suddenness, become an intense and widespread fixation among American parents.
One reason this happened is that, beginning in the 1980s when U.S. News & World Report published its first edition of America’s Best Colleges and the college guide industry took off, knowledge about attractive colleges throughout the nation began to circulate more widely. Status competition over entry to the “best” colleges escaped its traditional habitats, tony prep schools and the public high schools of old-money suburbs, and the competitive market for college placement went national. An increasing number of middle-class, middle-American kids began looking beyond their good-enough state universities and started aiming for the best school they could get into, anywhere in the country. This is borne out by college application numbers, which began their steep ascent in the early ’90s, as more kids, much better informed about America’s many lovely and storied colleges than were earlier generations, began submitting more applications to more schools in more states than ever before.
But still, why America and not Canada? One reason is that, in Canada, students generally don’t compete to get into the “best college.” They compete to get into the most desirable programs within individual colleges and universities. So the most direct competition among Canadian students happens in college. In the U.S., it happens in high school, if not earlier, when anxious parents can devote their greater resources and wherewithal to making their children’s chances better, and, inadvertently, to making the culture of American parenting worse.
Another reason is that the highest-profile universities in Canada are simply much larger than America’s most prestigious schools. Where America’s iconic Harvard and Yale each have fewer than 7,000 undergraduates, the University of Toronto had nearly 80,000 and the University of British Columbia nearly 60,000. America’s elite liberal arts colleges are even tinier. Swarthmore, for example, is fairly typical with its 1,600 students. The perception of exclusivity, arising from both their small size and their extremely low acceptance rates, gives these American colleges inflated meaning as status signifiers. There’s not so much to brag about in having your kid join the army of 15,000 freshmen marching into the University of British Columbia, but if he’s one of the 400 kids who slipped through the magic keyhole that leads to Swarthmore, that new college bumper sticker that just went on your Tesla is going to win some wonderful double-takes from your jealous neighbors.
America’s abundance of college choices (we have about 2,800 four-year colleges in this country) might seem to offer some relief, a nice menu of distinctive choices to ease the competitive stress. But the public rankings, and the competitive focus of decades of teenagers, have turned this array of colleges into a single hierarchy that everyone recognizes. For teenagers seeking the best college placement, it functions as one big sorting mechanism. America’s sheer number of precisely ranked colleges makes the ones at the top seem that much more desirable, and so, ironically, this numerical abundance actually intensifies the competition.
As with club sports, commentators tend to see problems in the college admissions process as if they simply result from parents and kids going crazy on their own. Almost no one turns a suspicious look to the people who actually design the process: the admissions deans of prestigious schools. In their specific behaviors, those overcompetitive parents and kids are largely responding to incentives generated by this process. Indeed, with their exacting and personalized requirements, admissions people actually encourage overwrought college admissions behavior. And when parental scheming gets so bad it hits the evening news, such as the episode of celebrity cheating known as the Varsity Blues scandal, this actually benefits the better schools, because it makes them look even more desirable.
Colleges encourage this pathological competition in other ways. They make a yearly pageant of publicizing their low admissions rates, which sends fresh waves of anxiety through upcoming classes of applicants, driving those applicants to apply to even more schools. And, through a practice known as “Recruit to Deny,” they encourage applications from kids they know they’re going to reject, to pump up their application numbers and drive down their acceptance rates even further.
One crucial aspect of this overheated process that commentators reliably ignore is how much personal, intimate power it gives to those admissions departments. A good way to grasp this power is to look at the evolution of their selection procedures in recent decades, especially on the “character” parts of the application, the essays and extracurriculars. Until the 1990s, colleges typically sought out “well-rounded” applicants, which allowed those colleges to claim their admissions procedures have a moral dimension. “Well-rounded” applicants were the kids who played some sports or did some admirable volunteering, in addition to having high grades and test scores. Along with the propaganda boost the “character” side of the application gave colleges, it also helped solve an administrative problem. Extracurriculars gave them a way to see their applicants better, to distinguish between otherwise similar kids. That is, they could break a tie between applicants with the same grades and test scores. In other words, by competing to distinguish themselves from each other on things like extracurriculars, applicants were doing the work of admissions departments for them.
But, starting in the early 1990s, admissions competition turned into a sort of self-aware system, with savvy kids knowing what the other savvy kids were doing, and trying to outcompete those other kids by having more extracurriculars, being more well-rounded. This exacerbated the administrative problem it originally solved, because all those grinding kids with their redundant extracurriculars began to look too much alike. At the same time, the obvious résumé-padding started making the moral pretensions of admissions departments look hollow and ridiculous.
Admissions people are under the curious impression that they earned this leverage, that they are some sort of anointed clerisy who deserve their moral influence and are righteous in using it on the malleable selves of their teenage applicants. In fact, it merely accrued to them over time, as college competition among teenagers and their families grew according to its own inner logic of fear and worry.
As parents have become more intentional in arming their children to succeed, the institutions they interact withhave grown more demanding.
This is the hidden price of family competition in America, the power over families it cedes to gate-keeping organizations and institutions that administer this contest. New parents begin the delightful, rewarding process of raising a family and, not long after, aware of what other parents are doing, they start asking themselves what they’ll have to do to keep up. They’ll learn that, if they really want to compete with their most determined peers, they’ll have to conform to the demands of surprisingly bossy coaches, college bureaucrats, and other functionaries who sit at the margins of the parental arms race and profit from it.
This dynamic is frustrating to observe because it’s the very people whose lives it distorts — parents and families — who keep it going. This is how arms races work. They are hard to stop as systems because they’re hard to escape for individuals. No one caught up in them thinks they can opt out unless everyone else agrees to opt out.
But there are a few ways in which parents can stop thinking in arms race terms and feel OK about it. The main one is to realize that they may be overestimating the importance of college placement. In a famous pair of studies, economists Stacy Dale and the late Alan Krueger showed that the link between college placement and future income is much smaller than is commonly thought. For example, the difference in income between someone who graduates from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, and someone who got into UPenn but attended Penn State, is negligible. I like to put the lesson of these studies in this way: Who your child is matters more to her future income than where she goes. So raise a good kid who’s willing to work and likes to learn, because those are good qualities in themselves, and stop stressing about the different rungs on the ladder of college prestige. And once parents put the matter of college in a mellower light, they might take a more relaxed view of all the earlier moments in their children’s lives that supposedly have grave future importance for college placement.
The institutions are probably a harder case, because, in many cases, their very purposes have been transformed by competition among families for the benefits they dispense. College admissions departments, for example, have so wrapped themselves in their vain moral projects that it’s hard to imagine them becoming less presumptuous and demanding on their own. But there are other things colleges might do to reduce their long unhealthy influence on family life. The most important would be to stop offering scholarships and admissions benefits to their recruited athletes. It is surely too much to ask Ohio State to shut down its highly profitable football “program,” but what about “nonrevenue” sports? Colleges might be persuaded to drop scholarships and admissions benefits for sports like soccer, volleyball, lacrosse and fencing. After all, these programs don’t make money for the schools. Severing them from the admissions process would depressurize the competitive club system for kids and families. And it would have the added benefit of deprofessionalizing the majority of intercollegiate sports, turning them into real student activities rather than staged competitions between squads of paid ringers.
Other changes are already happening. I’ve begun hearing about sports clubs that, in an effort to win over weary parents, are cutting back on the most perverse and burdensome aspect of participation in competitive sports: tournaments. Everyone complains about how they and their kids have to drive or fly hundreds of miles for weekend tournaments, all the time. So some clubs, at least, are getting the message. This might be a sign something’s changing, that enough parents are finally fed up, that we’re ready to exit the arms race of family competition out of sheer exhaustion, and from a simple desire to have our families back.
Matt Feeney is a writer and the author of “Little Platoons: A defense of family in a competitive age,” from which this essay was adapted.
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.