By breakfast my inbox is already clogged with come-ons: a calculus-prep program, tips to increase my SAT score by 200 points, a blast of “leadership opportunities that will get you into the Ivy League.” The message is clear: Distinguish yourself. Yet the tools to demonstrate distinctiveness and nonacademic achievement are the same for most high school students. We have built a college admissions marketplace where uniqueness comes in units that can be quantified and compared. The irony is brutal: The harder we try to stand out, the more we converge.
In a system of titles and stackable credentials, individuality gets measured by how neatly it fits a template. “Founder of . . . ,” “captain of . . . ,” and “10 AP courses” become boxes we try to check in the competition to stand out. In recent decades, colleges have broadened their definition of “merit” beyond grade point averages and test scores. But this move toward holistic evaluation, though laudable, has had unintended consequences, generating a rash of identical extracurricular yardsticks. When the yardsticks become the point, it should come as no surprise that students’ résumés start to look the same.
Economists and sociologists have language that helps explain how we got here. In situations with scarce rewards—admission to selective colleges or the competition for a few choice jobs—status becomes a “positional good.” Its value depends on where we stand relative to others, not on an absolute level of qualification or excellence. Fred Hirsch’s classic account from 1976, Social Limits to Growth, shows why competition for positional goods escalates without increasing total welfare: Elite credentials, by definition, cannot be expanded to accommodate everyone who “qualifies,” so effort becomes a race to look better than the next person. In the context of elite colleges, that means applicants tend to cluster around the same markers of achievement, ones that decisionmakers can quickly recognize. It is not that students have an identical passion for student government or for “founding” things; it is that these are reliable “units of difference” in a race for positional resources.
A close look at the records students present to colleges illustrates this rush to conformity. A 2023 analysis of nearly 860,000 applicants, conducted by the Common App and other researchers, indicates that students disproportionately report a small set of marketable roles, especially “leadership” and top-level titles, and that reporting patterns concentrate around a narrow band of categories and distinctions.
Under time pressure, admissions officers must rely on words that serve as proxies for desired personal qualities such as “initiative” and “impact”—labels like founder, president, award winner, or participant in a named selective program. The Common App’s short-form questions impose character limits on responses, compressing narratives into headline verbs, so “founded” or “launched” carries outsized weight, while steady, unglamorous stewardship is hard to convey. Students tend to rely on signals that look unique in a quick scan: micro-clubs, pop-up ventures, and summer experiences designed to read as singular regardless of their depth.
What’s more, the scales are tipped by how the system weights nonacademic credentials. A 2023 Opportunity Insights study of “Ivy-Plus” admissions shows that students from top-income families enjoy significantly higher admit rates than their middle- and lower-income peers with similar academic credentials, in part because of advantages in nonacademic ratings (extracurriculars, recommendations, perceived leadership), legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and attendance at elite private high schools. Private school environments, by design, are optimized to produce those nonacademic markers. When high-stakes systems reward a specific kind of difference, the affluent respond by mass-producing it. What looks like uniqueness on a résumé is, in practice, an industrial product.
The psychological costs of the sameness race are increasingly visible in the very settings we label “high-achieving.” Studies led by Suniya Luthar and colleagues identify students in high-achieving schools as an “at-risk” group, with elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use. Analyses by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill find that perfectionism, especially socially prescribed perfectionism—the sense that others demand perfection from one—has risen notably among young people over recent decades. Indeed, achievement is no longer just about personal growth or success but about meeting an increasingly narrow, idealized standard that leaves little room for failure or imperfection. As the behavioral health therapist Josh McKivigan has observed, high-achieving students often appear to be “well put together,” but “behind the scenes, they’re barely holding it together. The only type of school they feel is acceptable is an Ivy League.” More and more, students are gauging how they stack up against others and judging themselves more harshly.
Social scientists have a word for the way organizations in a given sphere trend toward sameness: isomorphism. That is, institutions, and the people within them, grow more alike as they respond to the same evaluative pressures. “Once a set of organizations emerges as a field,” wrote sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell in 1983, “a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them.”
When organizations all chase the same rankings, their strategies converge. When students all chase the same admissions ratings, our lives do, too. We do not copy each other because we lack imagination; we do it because only a limited range of achievement indicators “count” to those who do the counting.
A booby trap is also hiding in the metrics themselves. Campbell’s Law predicts that the more any criterion is used for decisionmaking, the more it will be gamed—and the more it will distort the very process it is meant to monitor. In regard to education, Donald Campbell said that “achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.” Establish a leaderboard for “originality” and you will get students who become excellent at leaderboard-friendly behaviors.
I see this happening at my own school. When a community service club announces elections, people who never attended meetings suddenly show up to vie for leadership positions. New “initiatives” pop up in the fall with glossy names and thin plans. Peers test out entrepreneurial titles in their college-application bios, like “CEO of a two-person startup,” because such terms sound more impressive than “volunteer” or “member.” We laugh about it privately and perform it publicly. This is not to say that my fellow students are phony. On the contrary, they are responding rationally to a system that confers real benefits for visible, sortable nonacademic credentials.
