The absurdity of it all has become hard to ignore, and there’s growing consensus that the culture of college admissions is seriously in need of reform. “What had once been a fairly brief and straightforward process, in which the children of the middle and upper classes found a suitable college, filled out an application, got in, and then went happily away ... has evolved into a multiyear rite of passage, often beginning before puberty,” wrote the journalist Andrew Ferguson in his 2011 book Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College. The filmmaker and education advocate Vicki Abeles in her book called the process “the college admissions race.” The Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has described it as a “lottery” that’s “stacked in favor of the Adonises of our world, the children of the wealthy.” (And in preserving legacy preferences and espousing a complex application system, as Guinier and others point out, it still has the vestiges of the system developed in the early 20th century at Harvard and other Ivies in an attempt to reduce the number of Jews on campus.)

Things have gotten so bad that a slew of educators and administrators recently pledged to “rethink” the admissions process at selective colleges on the grounds that it is so competitive—and so obsessed with enrolling near-perfect, well-rounded students—that it tempts teens into a dark, dangerous spiral that sucks the learning out of education and favors those with means. As The New York Times’s columnist Frank Bruni bluntly put it, “many kids admitted into top schools are emotional wrecks or slavish adherents to soulless scripts that forbid the exploration of genuine passions.” The new campaign to rethink admissions is largely based on a survey of 10,000 middle- and high-school students in 2014 by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project, which found that only 22 percent of respondents identified caring for others as their top priority; the rest prioritized their own achievement (48 percent) or happiness (30 percent). According to those spearheading the reform campaign, the modern-day admissions process is in part why today’s teens are so self-absorbed.

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The new admissions-reform campaign is called “Turning the Tide,” and it currently has the backing of nearly 100 admissions professionals and other higher-education officials. Enshrined in a recent report by Harvard’s Making Caring Common project, it highlights the “emotional toll” caused by the “pervasive pressure” on students to outshine their peers. “This [admissions] process, instead of being a wonderful exploration of the future and something that's exciting and dynamic and happy, is a burden, a thing to be feared, a thing to be endured,” said Rod Skinner, the director of college counseling at Milton Academy, an elite New England prep school, who was closely involved in the report.