Good morning, and welcome to Friday, July 5. Dan Berrett, Amanda Friedman, and Andrew Mytelka wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
Explaining the opaque landscape of admissions
Meet Daniel Lim. He’s one of the most noteworthy players in the fraught world of college-admissions social-media influencers, who offer guidance to anxious applicants who want to get into highly selective institutions. But the line between helping and harming applicants is, at best, unclear, our Erin Gretzinger reports.
College-admissions influencers today capture a fair amount of attention. TikTok aggregates over 86,500 videos on the topic, and more than 430,500 Instagram posts are tagged with #collegeadmissions. On both platforms, using the handle @limmytalks, Lim has racked up nearly a half-million followers and earned over $100,000 in brand deals.
Lim seeks to give insight into a process that’s frustratingly hazy at many colleges. He says he’s read over 5,000 college applications that students have sent him. He shares the highlights with his followers and predicts where the applicants got in, setting off spirited debate in the comments. Lim acknowledges that his predictions have “very little functional purpose.” In fact, he estimates they aren’t much more accurate than a coin flip.
Social-media influencers are the latest example of what the market seeks. Decades ago, the virtual forums of College Confidential sought to shed insight into the admissions process. More recently, the ApplyingToCollege subreddit has become popular. Lim’s prediction strategy also isn’t novel: A ChanceMe subreddit does something similar.
- Quotable: “If the admissions process was crystal clear” he told Erin, “then maybe I would not be a content creator.”
Remember, Lim and his audience are exceptions. For all the outsize attention that highly selective colleges generate, most students attend an institution close to home: 69 percent of undergraduates attend college within 50 miles of home, according to a recent analysis. But for those who shop around and sometimes travel farther, slots can be hard to come by. A new report, for example, found that nearly a third of all selective four-year institutions considered legacy status during the 2021-22 academic year.
Authenticity + relatability = authority. Lim connects with his audience because he was recently in their shoes. An ambitious first-generation college student, Lim immigrated to the United States from South Korea when he was 4 and was named valedictorian at what he described as a “middle of the road” public high school in New Jersey. The pressure to attend a highly selective college didn’t come from his parents as much as it was all around him.
Notions of selectivity and prestige can shape the ambitions of certain students, for whom an admissions decision feels like a verdict. Lim started recording videos about college admissions, in part, to make sense of his own journey. In one of his videos, Lim described sobbing for two hours after he learned that he’d been deferred by his top choice, the University of Pennsylvania, which accepts just 6 percent of applicants, according to federal data. He ended up at Duke University, where the acceptance rate is 7 percent.
The bigger question: Colleges haven’t been bystanders in this process, which in many ways is designed to serve them more than students. And if, as education researchers have long noted, there are more significant differences within institutions than between them, then what does the stoking of competition really accomplish? What would happen if institutions put more energy into helping students think about what matters to them, and how to create a meaningful life for themselves once they’re actually there?
For more, read: The College Admissions TikToker Who Tried to Crack the Code
