Inside the r/ApplyingToCollege Bubble
Here's what you need to know about the self-described “premier forum for college admissions.”
Avantika Singh
As I scroll through r/ApplyingToCollege, the self-described “premier forum for college admissions questions, advice, and discussions”, I am in an alternate reality. I leave the real world, where the average American high schooler has a 3.0 GPA and an ACT score of around 20 (if they opt for standardized testing at all, that is), and enter the A2C (as its users call it) universe, where having a GPA lower than 3.75 and an ACT score below 34 is a personal failing so bad you actually deserve less in this world. I see someone say that having a 32 ACT is like being 5’10’’ because it’s above average but not enough to stand out. I want to reply with a please log off and go touch some grass, but I don’t have it in me to be that mean.
In 2017, the first year that an unofficial A2C census was conducted, over 80% percent of the respondents applied to at least one Ivy League school. It’s 2023 now, and with a cursory scroll of A2C, Harvard is mentioned at least six times and Columbia mentioned in three posts in a row. Other schools that seem to be talked about a lot include UChicago, MIT, and Stanford. It doesn’t escape my attention that the posts are ordered based on how “hot” they are, so the posts that mention these top schools have been pushed to the top of the subreddit page by the Reddit algorithm because they’re popular. Some of the top keywords mentioned on A2C are “1520”, “1540”, and “1580”, all 98th percentile or above SAT scores.
“The name r/ApplyingToCollege implies that you are applying to any college, it’s not called r/ApplyingToIvyLeagues, but there’s very little talk about community college, transfers, or public colleges that aren’t as good,” says Shreyasi, a high school junior who’s been a lurker on A2C for a few months now. “It’s all just like I’m a junior, I take 11 APs, will I get into Harvard?. It’s just a circle jerk of like-minded people who are very competitive and from very affluent areas. Very little of it is the large population of people who apply to college.” According to A2C’s most recent moderator-run census, they’re not wrong
The A2C census is not a random sample, nor does it represent the majority of the almost one million A2C users. It can, however, begin to sketch a rough picture of daily active A2C users. This year’s census collected over 2,000 responses over a period of 30 days. It reveals that two-thirds of respondents have a household income of at least $100,000 and over a quarter of respondents have a household income above $250,000. Conversely, according to data from the Census Bureau, real median household income in the US is $70,784, and only 5% of the country is in the $250,000 or more income bracket. According to the census, the top five schools by A2C matriculation are UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale, all institutions with less than 20% acceptance rates. 21.8% of A2Cers hail from California and another 15.9% reside in either New York or New Jersey. The average of the respondents’ best SAT scores is 1507, but the national average SAT score is 1050. The A2C alternate reality stops being a joke and starts looking like fact.
Tesfa, a high school senior who used A2C over the summer, agrees with Shreyasi in that he mostly saw talk about Ivy Leagues and other highly selective colleges on the subreddit, but he also admits that he was biased towards looking at posts about those schools because they were the ones he was applying to. I ask him if he thinks it’s possible to make A2C less skewed towards elite institutions. “I honestly don’t think so,” he says. “Everyone on A2C is applying to Ivy Leagues and these highly selective colleges, and people who aren’t don’t seem invested enough to go on Reddit and ask for other people’s opinions.”
Dana, a current college freshman, found A2C as a high school sophomore when she was looking for other people attending Stanford’s Summer Humanities Institute, a high school summer enrichment course that upper-middle class students often take to improve their applications. When her junior year started, she began paying more attention to discussion of specific colleges, applicant statistics, and application results, and by the time senior year rolled around, she was actively posting and commenting. “I liked being able to connect with other seniors who were applying to the same colleges [as me] and were just as stressed about it,” she tells me, “but that connection coexisted with competition, with fostered toxicity.”
A2C introduced her to extracurricular opportunities and students with similar applicant profiles to her, which she appreciated because she struggled to find people with the same academic and career interests as her in her high school. When she began the actual application process, the essay writing tips and lists of similar colleges on A2C proved to be useful, and other students sharing her stress and excitement comforted her. “That being said,” she is quick to add, “I saw many posts where students would tell other applicants that they weren't nearly good enough for certain colleges, that their intended majors were useless.” She doesn’t blame the people who succumbed to that toxicity, admitting that “the application process is intentionally stressful and nerve-wracking, and the scarcity of spots at most colleges is very true”, but some of the rhetoric she saw on A2C definitely kept her on edge.
Is there anything that can be done to reduce the level of toxicity on A2C or is the subreddit destined to fall prey to harmful rhetoric? “I think it’s destined to be toxic by nature, unfortunately,” Dana says. “The college admissions process is inherently a competition because there’s always going to be a limited amount of space available at universities, and there’s always going to be tons of eager, hardworking applicants. Add in familial pressure and academic stress and you end up with a lot of overworked kids who rely on A2C as a space for support but inevitably also a space to release their stress.”
Shreyasi has had a similar experience. Like Dana, there aren’t that many people at their high school with similar interests as them, as they are a prospective humanities/social sciences major in a STEM-obsessed school, so A2C has given them valuable resources that they otherwise wouldn’t have found. But, they also think that there needs to be a massive revitalization of what A2C’s priorities are in order to make the subreddit more reflective of the wide range of college applicants that exists in the real world. “There is definitely a specific type of emotional support you find [on A2C],” they say. “Just scrolling through right now, you can see posts that are like, Hey guys, it’s okay if you didn’t get into Harvard, I promise you’re only gonna die like a little bit. I’m exaggerating but even though there are some genuinely supportive posts on A2C, they’re always centered around these top schools. So, even within these ‘emotionally supportive areas,’ these posts just reaffirm those schools.”
u/thifting, an A2C moderator and a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, attended a magnet high school in New York City and is a first-generation college student, something that shaped both her time as a high schooler using A2C and how she operates as a moderator now. Growing up in the city with the most segregated schooling system in the nation sparked her interest in education as “both a field and a political topic”. “I took a course on U.S. educational history and politics in high school that solidified my infatuation with educational equity,” she tells me. “A2C, being a free, easily accessible community, appealed to me as a vehicle to close the education gap. The wealth of knowledge I learned through A2C and the resources it directed me to is the only reason I'm at UPenn. Had I not encountered A2C, I would probably have never learned about Ivies or prestigious institutions, in general, let alone considered applying to them.” That is what led her to apply to be a moderator in the first place. “Being able to directly influence and participate in the moderation of such a powerful group was really appealing,” she says. “I could impact some underserved, unaware student the same way the community and the moderators before me impacted me.”
She acknowledges that much of the criticism leveled at A2C is valid, but she also points out that a lot of the problems associated with the subreddit are unavoidable. A2C demographics are generally Reddit demographics, and the most popular state subreddits overlap with the states that the majority of A2C users hail from. The states that A2C users tend to be heavily concentrated in are also home to affluent pockets, like the Bay Area in California and the New York City metropolitan area, which spans New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Add in the fact that kids from underserved backgrounds are likely to have less time on their hands to browse Reddit (if you’re helping your parents with housework and working at an afterschool job, you don’t have as much free time as a wealthier peer who has a cleaning lady and a monthly allowance), and you have the perfect recipe for an A2C bubble.
I ask her if there’s anything the moderators are doing to make A2C more accessible to people from different backgrounds, and she admits that because the subreddit doesn’t advertise itself, the moderators can’t exactly compel people from less affluent backgrounds to join. “I think what can be done, something we currently are doing, is making the subreddit a safer and more positive space for conversations regarding privilege. The rules have changed over the years to reflect that. For instance, discussion of the highly contentious topic of affirmative action is now prohibited as it almost always devolved into bigotry.”
While it’s true that affirmative action discussion is technically banned on A2C, Shreyasi feels that it’s not always moderated. They checked the subreddit a lot when Early Decision results and recall seeing a lot of posts that didn’t directly reference affirmative action but still managed to complain about it in a roundabout sort of way. “I think there was one that was just straight-up like I hate being Asian, and the person was just ranting about how applying to college made them hate being Asian.” u/thifting herself acknowledges that moderation comes with a lot of gray areas. “We remove posts with misinformation, unconfirmed information, speculation/portal astrology, and/or just plain rudeness, and redirect users to our Wiki and FAQ to dispel misconceptions,” she says. “For controversial topics, it can be hard to navigate. Typically, for gray area posts, we carefully watch them to ensure comments don't veer off into definitely-against-the-rules territory and lock or remove them if the comments begin breaking the rules frequently or if the user clearly breaks a rule in their comments section.”
u/thrifting responds to the criticism about lack of community with the point that Reddit itself isn’t very conducive to community building. She recommends the A2C Discord server for people who are looking for more than a place to simply ask a question every now and then. “The way Reddit works is very anonymous and disconnected while Discord is almost like a huge group chat, and it’s easier to remember active users and make friends”.
She agrees that the A2C Reddit tends to be home to a lot of toxicity and harmful rhetoric, from people discouraging fellow applicants by telling them that their 1490 SAT isn’t good enough, to normalizing applying to dozens of schools, a method called ‘shotgunning’. “This isn’t necessarily done with malicious intent,” she says. “Some kids perpetuating these ideas genuinely believe them.”
The college admissions process is insanely competitive on its own, and the mystery surrounding highly selective colleges causes desperate students (and parents) to come up with far-fetched theories and spread misinformation. Because A2C is such a large online community, it unwittingly becomes a vehicle to spread incorrect and potentially damaging rhetoric. “We see every post and comment, including ones users never see because of our moderation,” u/thifting says. “Our moderation team has been vigilant about quashing misinformation.” Sometimes, though, even the highest level of vigilance isn’t enough, and she says that the moderation team welcomes feedback.
I ask Shreyasi and Tefsa if either of them would ever recommend A2C to anyone.
Shreyasi chuckles. “Honestly? No, I wouldn’t. The thing about internet spaces, in general, is that they have this way of encapsulating certain trends and certain mindsets within certain groups of people, and I think A2C encapsulates that mindset of very privileged, affluent, often cishet men who have steeped a lot of their identity in what college they get into. I don’t know if I would ever encourage anyone to actively buy into that mindset. I think people who are in that mindset will find A2C naturally, you know, it’s fate, but for me, recommending A2C is not just recommending a subreddit, it’s recommending a whole mindset that A2C encapsulates, and I think that mindset is very toxic.”
Tefsa says that if you’re a highly competitive college applicant who is looking for affirmation, A2C is the place to go. “Most of the people posting, they have really high stats, 1550+ SAT scores and stuff like that, so if you think you’re underqualified compared to everyone else, it’s not the best place for a confidence boost. But if you’re ‘overqualified’ and need the confidence, maybe you should post or comment here”.
They’re right. No matter what momentary solace or surface-level support you can find on A2C, it is, at the end of the day, kept alive by a tiny population of high school students who don’t represent the world outside of elite American institutions. There are other free and accessible online spaces out there, such as College Vine and College Essay Guy, where you can find resources and advice without the tagalong toxic pseudo-community.
The toxicity on A2C is the result of primarily underage children acting out of what they’ve been taught, and the abuse of resources and the suppression of peers who have less than you that we see on the subreddit is inherent to the competitive, hyper-individualistic landscape of the admissions process at elite schools. The socio-economic opportunities these schools promise and the limited number of spaces they have turn ambitious high school students into the worst versions of themselves. That, plus the anonymity and lack of material consequences that accompany having an online presence, make A2C, by nature of its scope, inherently limiting and, one could argue, self-defeating.
Avantika Singh (she/her) is a culture and lifestyle writer and co-founder of WHITEWASHED! Magazine.
