Starting about a year ago, my school's college counselors gravely informed us that because of demographics, this year would be the hardest ever to get into college.   According to the Times, however, the number of high schools seniors is going to peak in about two years, making about 99% of colleges less selective:

Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.

Although it's certainly true that good schools have gotten more selective, there's a bit more to this trend then simply admittance percentages going down.  The first oddity is that while the elite schools have gone from incredibly selective to total crapshoot (Harvard, Yale and Princeton admit less than 10% of their applicants, despite 85% being perfectly qualified to go), the number of good, selective schools has skyrocketed.  Schools like Emory and USC, which only a decade or two ago were considered mediocre rich kid schools, have, because of their bulging endowments, been able to snatch up the best professors and students.  USC, for example, will not only offer scholarships to good students, but will just straight up hand out cash.   Also, due to the increasing financial returns to a college education, the number of objectively highly qualified students, with good SAT scores and what, has also increased due to the incentives.  This means that, from the other end, the number of good schools has to go up because there's been a downward flow in where the good students are going to school.  Add on the fact that because of applications being predominately online and most schools accepting the Common Application, it's become much, much easier to apply to a bunch of good schools, and consequently, acceptance rates have to go down. 

But while the stress and amount of work associated with trying to get into a competitive school has certainly gone up - as I can attest - the actual quality of American higher education, at the highest level, has probably gone up more.   

“I do not want to become another African American/Black stereotype. Most of us men are labeled as thugs, because of our long hair, dreads, dark clothing and the music we listen to. If we are driving a luxurious car most people assume that we either bought it with illegal money or we stole. … I don’t want to be added to someone’s death statistic.”

This is the opening of an essay written by Antoine Tate, 16, who is going into his senior year at a large, predominantly black and low-income high school just outside D.C. in Prince George’s County, Md. This summer Tate participated in the College Summit program, a four-day workshop at Howard University about applying to college.

According to a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton, more than a quarter--and at some schools as many as half--of black college students are first or second generation immigrants, not African American descendents of slaves. Which schools' black populations are most heavily composed of immigrants? You guessed it--the Ivies. As the Brown Daily Herald reports:

The study's authors noted that once immigrant black students are enrolled in college, their performances do not differ from those whose families have a longer history in the United States. They did, however, find that immigrant blacks have distinct advantages over non-immigrants in gaining acceptance to selective colleges and universities, including statistically higher SAT scores, higher attendance of private schools and a better likelihood that one or both parents graduated from college.

Elite universities like to brag about their diversity. What this study compels, I think, is the realization (if you ever doubted it) that universities need to be doing much more to reach out to African American communities that aren't as upwardly mobile as recent immigrant families tend to be. Immigrants and children of immigrants bring important perspectives to campuses, and should also be beneficiaries of affirmative action policies. But the color of their skin doesn't let schools off the hook from aggressively recruiting students whose families are victims of generations of American racism. Of course, this is a huge challenge, especially considering the sub-par public schools so many low-income kids attend--schools that do little to prepare students for college academics. But by instituting tutoring and mentoring programs in public schools, some universities are doing their best to foster relationships that bring low-income and minority students to elite colleges.

What more can be done? Should college applications ask students to identify themselves not just by race, but by immigration status as well? Should forms distinguish between the categories of "black," "African American," "African," and the like?