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Back then the rankings were still a novelty — as was basic data about colleges and universities. Only a few years earlier, in 1990, after an effort by two former college basketball stars who ended up in Congress — Sen. Bill Bradley and Rep. Tom McMillen, both Democrats — legislation passed requiring colleges to report graduation rates. In 1992, Congress made the completion of the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, mandatory in order for an institution to be eligible for federal financial aid. In 1997, a group of publishers and colleges banded together to create the Common Data Set to collect and standardize information for guidebooks. The following year, in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, lawmakers required that information on college prices and financial aid be made available to parents and students — an effort that gave rise to a precursor to College Navigator.
Small changes can ripple through a complex system, triggering larger shifts that we don’t fully appreciate until much later. Few of those who were instrumental in pushing for greater transparency could have imagined that the next decade would be defined by the growth of the internet. Over the past 25 years, these two trends — government-mandated disclosure and easily accessible information online — merged, feeding a national panic attack about who gets into college and providing families with a new source of decision-making power.
As time passed, this emphasis on analytics fed an obsession with data that only grew as people found new ways to slice, dice, and analyze it. Armed with stats they had long lacked, families began to apply a data-first mindset to their college searches, organizing their lives and futures around menus of facts and figures, all in the hunt for the perfect fit.
The problem is not simply a failure of communications, as college leaders often think. It is a structural failure in how higher education presents itself to the public.
“The intent was not to regulate the behavior of colleges,” Terry W. Hartle, a former chief lobbyist for the American Council on Education and senior aide to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat, recalled to me. “We wanted to make this information public and ultimately let students vote with their feet.” If students were going to vote with their feet, however, they needed a map to know where to step. Neither Congress nor colleges provided that map. Instead, the congressional mandates unintentionally laid the groundwork for an “information marketplace” that reshaped how American families search for colleges, and altered how admissions and enrollment management functions at most colleges.
This sprawling information marketplace has reoriented the admissions ecosystem in three significant ways.
First, the record-breaking number of applications sent by high-school seniors. More than 13 million applications were filed in 2023, up from 4.4 million in 2001. To put those numbers in context, the number of high-school graduates in the United States has remained relatively constant over that time, rising by just 800,000 since 2001. Application inflation is most pronounced at super-selective colleges. Institutions that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants received 1.9 million applications in 2023. That’s up from 600,000 in 2001. Meanwhile, the number of available spots at these colleges hasn’t budged much since the late 1970s.
Second, students can apply to multiple colleges, but they can only enroll in one. And every college wants to be that one. Yield — the percentages of accepted applicants who actually enroll — has plummeted at all but the most-selective colleges. Whereas 25 years ago colleges had similar yield rates of around 40 percent, now the rates for all but the top-ranked institutions have fallen below 30 percent (and in many cases below 20 percent). The result is an incredibly inefficient admissions system for both colleges and students. More time and money are spent to lure more prospective students into the top of the admissions funnel — all to yield a class of the same size.
Finally, the abundance of data and chatter about admissions has had an unintended effect: It has pushed families toward rankings in their effort to find a signal about what makes a good college. To see the real impact of the information marketplace on students’ choices, I asked Niche to run an analysis of how a teenager’s college list changes over the course of high school. Roughly half of college-bound students in the United States create accounts on Niche by the time they’re seniors in high school, so the company has a lot of data.
Niche found that most students don’t finalize their college lists until right before senior year. Freshmen cast the widest net, exploring colleges across the rankings spectrum. That spread gradually narrows through sophomore and junior years. But something striking happens in July before senior year: Rather than continue narrowing steadily, the range of colleges plummets in the months before October, when early applications are due. Seniors aren’t just cutting institutions from their lists — they’re clustering around colleges with similar rankings. At high-achieving high schools, those colleges bunch near the top.
The college search lacks context, translation, and alignment with the factors that genuinely shape students’ experiences: effective teaching, strong advising, a sense of belonging, and a clear pathway into the job market. The problem is not simply a failure of communications, as college leaders often think (“if only we could tell our story better”). It is a structural failure in how higher education presents itself to the public.
I realized this while compiling research for my book. I found myself acting exactly like the families I write about: building spreadsheets of data about colleges and adding variables as I created a list of institutions to highlight. We’re all constructing what the statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes as a “haystack” of data, making it harder to find the needle buried deep inside. Taleb warned years ago that the age of big data has “brought cherry-picking to an industrial level,” and he was right. Institutions cherry-pick the metrics that cast them in the most favorable light. And families cherry-pick when they gravitate toward anecdotes or rankings that confirm their hopes or fears.
What the current information marketplace rewards is not clarity, but volume. It encourages institutions to compete on the numbers that are easiest to compare, such as acceptance and placement rates, not those measures most relevant to developing students: the first-year experience, quality teaching, and access to mentors and experiential learning.
A more responsible information marketplace would surface both quantitative and qualitative evidence that illuminates the student experience that institutions say they value but rarely make legible to applicants and their families. It would paint existing metrics in a broader picture and explain why graduation rates vary across student demographics and majors, how net price changes by socioeconomic status, or what median earnings obscure about majors and regional labor markets.
We also need a shift in the role of admissions officers. As AI begins to absorb routine recruitment and communications tasks, colleges have the opportunity to redeploy admissions staff as interpreters —professionals who help families understand the meaning of institutional data rather than simply marketing it. Hospitals long ago recognized the value of patient navigators to translate complexity; higher education needs its own version of that role.
This moment echoes the 1990s, when federal reporting requirements and the early internet gave rise to today’s chaotic admissions-information marketplace. Colleges largely stood on the sidelines then, assuming that a little more transparency wouldn’t fundamentally alter how students searched or how campuses recruited. It did. Three decades later, institutions are still wrestling with the downstream effects — application inflation, volatile yields, and escalating recruitment costs that deliver diminishing returns. Reasserting control means designing an information environment where the most meaningful signals are also the most visible.
This article is adapted from Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You (Scribner, 2025).
