LIKE other parents with teenagers starting their final year in high school, Babbage is learning how fraught the whole process is these days of applying for a place at one or other university his daughter hopes to attend upon matriculation. Given The Economist’s demographics, many readers are likely to fall into a similar category. Babbage would welcome the chance to learn from their own experiences.



The process, as far as Babbage is concerned, started six months ago, with college tours and chats with breezy admissions officers and more pragmatic school councillors. From now on, the timetable gets tense and tight. Decisions have to be taken on what discipline to read (ie, major in), where to do so, and when exactly to apply. Numerous deadlines are fast approaching.



In the remaining weeks and months, standardised aptitude test (SAT and ACT) scores may need to be boosted, essays polished, common application forms sweated over. All this is without even beginning to research scholarships, grants, aid packages and loans that might be available. By all accounts, filling in the federal government’s form for financial aid—with its 116 questions—is as daunting and time-consuming as preparing a tax return. At least, there is software to do the latter, not to mention an army of certified public accountants ready to complete the chore for a fee.



A lot is at stake. With fees plus accommodation for four-year colleges in America running at $45,000 a year and up, few families can afford to meet the total cost out of their own pocket. Local state universities are cheaper, but can be even more choosy about who they admit. Given similar grades and accomplishments, the selection process favours out-of-state and foreign students—for the simple reason they are required to pay much more.



Even with grants, tax relief and scholarships, the average debt students face after completing a four-year degree is around $30,000. But that is just the average. Many have loans in excess of $100,000, and can be out-of-pocket (in terms of depleted savings, family contributions and forgone earnings) for as much again or more. And that is for only an undergraduate degree. Attending graduate school, where tertiary education in the United States begins in earnest, is a whole different ball game—and one that can leave a student with a lifetime of debt. In America, student debt now exceeds $1.2 trillion—about 7% of the country’s GDP.



With this in mind, Babbage wonders seriously whether getting a university degree, even merely a baccalaureate, is worth it nowadays. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the median annual wage of Americans with a bachelor degree, and lucky enough to have found (not easy) full employment, was $48,000 last year, compared with a little over $25,000 for those with only a high-school diploma. But college graduates in the lower quartile made no more than $27,000.



Meanwhile, the cost of getting a college education continues to increase. Over the past decade, university fees have risen three times faster than inflation. Like the recent housing bubble, this has been fuelled largely by the ballooning supply of easy credit—especially, student loans and federal grants. There has been a 50-fold increase in federal assistance for students since 1970, says Richard Vedder, director of the Centre for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, DC.



Practically all 2,900 or so four-year universities and colleges in America have been guilty of ramping up fees. With credit widely available during the halcyon years before the Great Recession, institutions splurged on recreational facilities—in a bid to attract ever more students and keep tuition revenues rolling in. Most invested heavily in luxury accommodation, fancy dining halls and Olympic-class sports arenas, notes Dr Vedder. They also hired all manner of well-paid administrators, sustainability co-ordinators, diversity specialists, communications officers and assistant deans of everything. Little wonder academic fees have soared.



In their latest book “Aspiring Adults Adrift”, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, of New York University and the University of Virginia respectively, fear that universities focus too much these days on students’ social lives at the expense of academic rigor. The pandering has resulted in a decline in general competencies, such as critical thinking, complex reasoning and logical communication. Meanwhile, tenured professors have gained greater freedom to pursue their own research interests—in the vain hope that Nobel Prizes may be won, prestigious research grants awarded and endowments bolstered. As a result, lectures and tutorials are given, even in elite universities, by graduate students or hired adjuncts.



Too many universities, it seems, are behaving more like commercial enterprises than academic institutions, with students treated as commodities needing to be processed with the minimum of effort, instead of being given a thorough education to help them navigate life's choices as thoughtful and compassionate adults. Given the circumstances, there is a strong incentive on both sides—faculty and student body—not to challenge this secular decline in standards. “The whole enterprise is treated as a system to be gamed, in which plagiarism and cheating abound,” wrote Geoffrey Collier, a psychology professor at South Carolina State University, in the Wall Street Journal last December. “We pretend to teach, they pretend to learn” was the title of Dr Collier’s op-ed article.



And gamed the academic system most assuredly is. Indeed, the gaming begins even before the students arrive on campus. The single, most important task for high-school pupils, parents and councillors alike is to devise a game plan, to ensure acceptance by at least one (preferably more) of the universities of choice. While lesser establishments may be willing to accept anyone with the minimum of requirements, the competition for places in the more prestigious universities has become cut-throat. This year, Stanford University in California admitted just 5% of its 38,800 applicants, the lowest percentage for any institution ever. Getting into Harvard, Yale, Columbia or Princeton is only marginally easier.



Beyond the Ivy League schools, admission rates at the next 40 most-respected state and private institutions range from 10% to around 30%. With space for no more than 16,000 freshmen, the University of California, Los Angeles, had over 80,000 applicants in 2013—twice as many as in 2005—giving it an admission rate of 20%. Though vastly smaller, the top two dozen liberal arts colleges in the country had percentages equally low. The frustration, as admissions officers readily attest, is that many of those who are turned away are just as competent as those admitted.



Sensing that the whole process is a crap-shoot, high-school pupils adopt the tactics of an arms race. Bruce Poch, a former dean of admissions at Pomona College in California, was reported recently by the New York Times as saying, “As kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, they send more applications, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more applications.” Where it will all end is anyone’s guess. Richard Shaw, dean of undergraduate admission at Stanford, professes to being shocked at how low his institution’s admission rate has sunk.



With so competitive an environment, the need for a game plan is essential. The first question, then, is whether to attend a university offering a full range of disciplines, but with probably greater emphasis on research than teaching, or to opt instead for a liberal arts and sciences college that focuses exclusively on undergraduate education? Universities usually offer greater prestige and an easier path to postgraduate studies. Parents spending $200,000 or more for an undergraduate degree may feel the “brand value” of a prestigious university makes the investment worthwhile. But four-year liberal arts colleges generally provide a better all-round education—and one that future employers often view more favourably.



After that, the pupil must decide on location and size of campus, ranking in the subject of choice, and the probability of being accepted (given his or her expected grades). With all the boxes checked, the task then is to optimise the likelihood of being offered a place by at least one of the chosen institutions.



To do so, the pupil should select one or two so-called “reach” colleges—ie, those worth having a shot at, but probably long shots at best. The main selection should be a handful of “likely” institutions that meet most of the pupil’s requirements and offer a reasonable chance of being accepted. Finally, a couple of “safety” schools should be included in case all else fails.

Then comes the tricky bit of deciding just how much commitment to make upfront to one particular institution of choice. Applying with a binding “early-decision” or even a somewhat less-binding “early-action” can raise the likelihood of acceptance, and even bolster the chance of getting up to 100% funding. But both forms of early application come with serious restrictions on the candidate’s freedom to choose back-ups. In the case of an early-decision, an offer must be accepted and any application elsewhere immediately abandoned.



Fortunately, the deadlines for these more committed applications come a month or so earlier in the academic calendar, allowing pupils not offered early places (three-quarters or more are not) time to make regular applications to other universities later in the autumn. In the arcane world of college application, all manner of restricted, single-choice and rolling admissions complement the early-decision and early-action options to help pupils game the system still further.



One piece of advice Babbage was given early on was to back off: parents should let their preferences be known, but then leave the selection proces to their daughter or son, hopefully guided by a school councillor rather than merely friends. Another piece of advice was to visit as many campuses as possible beforehand. The backward-walking campus tour guide will have the biggest influence of all, positive or negative, on a pupil’s final choice. In the end, a young person’s own gut-feeling will be the deciding factor.



Parents should not be unduly concerned. The one university ranking system that relies exclusively on high-school seniors’ actual preferences rather than feedback from academic professionals—the Parchment Student Choice College Rankings—shows that teenagers have not only a ready grasp of the virtues and idiosyncrasies of various institutions, but also recognise the value of alternatives often overlooked by more conventional ranking systems. This year’s Parchment study, for instance, placed the United States Air Force Academy seventh, above such Ivies as Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth. The United States Military Academy was placed 16th, ahead of powerhouses like the Berkeley or Los Angeles campuses of the University of California.



The final word of advice Babbage was given was not to worry too much if his teenager has trouble selecting a discipline to major in. Two out of three students at American universities and colleges change their major at least once during their four years on campus; one in five does so two or three times. Babbage welcomes advice from other parents dealing with these stressful times.