On March 31st, I opened my last college decision letter from Duke University. Possessing an admissions rate hovering around six percent, Duke is a powerhouse in the field of economics and forms a third of the elusive Research Triangle in the Raleigh-Durham- Chapel Hill area of North Carolina. My mouse wandered over to the admissions button, my eyes sauntering across the home page. The rejection letter stared back at me, unblinking, stoic.

I closed the tab silently and shut off my computer.

From 2007 to 2021, admissions rates in many popular, private, non-profit, four-year universities and colleges tanked. It is evident in Williams College’s 17.4 percent plunge to 8 percent, in UChicago’s 34.9 percent falling to 6.2 percent, in Tulane’s 44 percent spiraling to 9.73 percent. To the average adult, these figures may be surprising, but to so many American high schoolers heedlessly stacking Advanced Placement classes, studying until three in the morning for the dreaded SAT, and spending thousands on a private college counselor, these figures are a fact of life.

Despite this, according to Forbes, college enrollment has been decreasing for years and hit a record low of a 4.9 percent drop in undergraduate students nationwide in 2021. Post-pandemic work shortages have made the job market increasingly accessible to those without a college degree, and the bad aftertaste of financial insecurity convinced many poorer would-be college students to put off further schooling for at least a few years.

These two conflicting findings point to one cause: the disparity between private, non-profit universities — like Harvard University, California Institute of Technology, University of Notre Dame — and, well, everyone else who is not as popular. Frankly, students nationwide yearn for the sweet, sweet stamp of success only a famous, acclaimed college or university can give them. For those colleges, admission rates are increasing. For others, it is plummeting, causing a frenzied rush of layoffs, cuts to academic and extracurricular programs,
and even the merging of colleges to consolidate financial resources.

Why even worry about these less-competitive colleges if they themselves aren’t competitive enough to endure the lack of applicants? The largest reason is that this divide between elite and non-elite colleges draws a parallel between the poor and the wealthy, the in-touch and the out-of-touch. As a New York Times article states, “By and large, urban state universities like Rutgers University’s Newark campus have done a
much better job integrating with their environments than elite private universities,” which opens the doorway for many toward actual, effective student activism and a more down-to-earth mindset and awareness of the society they live in.

In a broader sense, these colleges serve the underrepresented and disadvantaged within their community, offering them a hopeful ticket to a better life. But this tradeoff works both ways — these colleges, and only these colleges, will suffer enrollment issues because it is the underrepresented and disadvantaged who now have to make the decision between short-term versus long-term financial security. In working towards themes such as togetherness and connectivity — themes fervently debated and questioned post-pandemic, post-BLM, post-#MeToo — it is essential to look at our schools, at our places of education, to see where this gap occurs.