A single college rejection letter can sting. Admissions teams will say no thousands of times in the coming weeks.
This rationing of knowledge is unnecessary. Higher education can be scalable, borderless and affordable without sacrificing quality. Many institutions prove it, yet gatekeepers continue to block capable applicants from proving themselves in the classroom.
Princeton Review treats admissions season like a sport. Elite business schools that turn away the highest percentage of learners earn a place on the Toughest to Get Into leaderboard.
North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School falls somewhere outside the top 10 but taunted potential applicants anyway with a brash slogan in banner ads from 2012 to 2014: “The online MBA you probably can’t get into.”
Ranking reports from third-party organizations historically encouraged this exclusionary mindset. Until 2019, U.S. News & World Report used a point system that rewarded low acceptance rates, creating a perverse incentive to string along hopeful high school graduates with little chance of acceptance.
Disappointed students who seek explanations receive none. Peter Parker chases down a college admissions official on the freeway and pleads for reconsideration in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (2021), but regular people must live without answers.
Instead of providing clear guidance, admissions officials give themselves wiggle room to weigh each piece of information differently from one application to the next. They call this process “holistic review.” The result is a well-documented black box.
The Supreme Court cleared up one aspect of holistic review in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a 2023 decision that prohibits race-based affirmative action. Yet dozens of factors remain, leaving the admissions process largely unclear.
Higher education officials defend their policies of exclusion by pointing to practical concerns on brick-and-mortar campuses. Any physical space, from an airplane to an elevator, has occupancy limits, and lecture halls are no different. Anybody who gets in must push someone else out, like a high-stakes game of musical chairs.
Colleges and universities worry that demand might outpace supply if they opened their doors to anyone, triggering a systemwide collapse. China responded with an imperial examination system that excluded more than 99 percent of applicants over 1,300 years.
This tradition of restricting access to education has continued in modern times, yet admissions officials no longer have to function like guardhouse attendants at a country club. New opportunities exist to deliver high-quality content at scale.
WorldQuant University shows one approach. We do not need a holistic review because we accept anyone who passes our entrance exam. The process is transparent and inclusive, eliminating the risk of lawsuits like the one against Harvard.
Put simply, no one takes a seat from anyone else because we do not ration access. Rather than focusing on black-box categories, we prioritize academic rigor and allow students to demonstrate their competence through their work.
Those who drop out incur no financial loss because our academic offerings are free to learners. Tuition-based models also work.
Arizona State University has emphasized inclusivity and scalability for more than 20 years. Since 2000, ASU enrollment has climbed from 49,000 to more than 170,000 degree-seeking students. Along the way, ASU has taken steps to unlock the admissions black box by setting clear aptitude and competency requirements.
Hidden formulas matter less when your goal is to say yes rather than no. First-year retention rates, graduation rates and other key metrics suggest ASU has expanded without sacrificing quality.
Another example comes from Western Governors University, which started in 1997 as an online institution with no brick-and-mortar campus. WGU combines technology with personalized support to ensure quality, resulting in more than 50,000 degrees during the 2024 academic year.
Admissions officials at many colleges and universities will spend their days saying no in the coming weeks, but the time has come to flip the script. Instead of creating barriers, academic institutions must make room for everyone.
