In January, 2017, in the middle of a rare snowstorm in Memphis, I presented to the students and parents at three private high schools. Part of my talk focused on the paradox of complexity in college admission: Everyone says we hate it, but the institutions that introduce more of it tend to be rewarded with greater and greater demand. I used this slide to show a student who had eight colleges on their list, and who was debating if they would apply Early to one or more of them. (This was from 2017, so don’t use these guidelines with your own children.)

My point was that we loved complexity, despite our protestations. It is, of course, a function of independent evolution, where each college’s processes evolve independently, never guided by any commonality, and resulting in unpredictable outcomes. I tried to explain why I thought we secretly loved complexity:

• Complexity reinforces importance and special-ness, as opposed to the routine and mundane. Think of weddings, and how extraordinarily ridiculous they’ve become; think of corporate purchase orders in the bureaucracy, which are designed to ensure you don’t spend money foolishly; and think of the auto manufacturer Saturn, which tried to de-mystify the auto buying experience, and how horribly that experiment failed.
• Complexity invigorates, even if the goal is the opposite: Think of family vacations, and how stressful they can be because you’re out of your routine, and suddenly coordinating among five people seems like Differential Equations.
• Complexity is associated with big wins: The state sells a lot more Lotto tickets when the payoff is enormous, even though your odds on the scratch off are frequently higher, and easier to understand.  If I asked you to name someone who’s climbed the second-highest mountain in the world, would you be able to do so?
• Finally (you probably knew it was coming to this): Complexity favors the insiders, and the people with a Sherpa who can help them navigate. Imagine being 17 and faced with figuring out where to start, no matter how intelligent you are.  The process is like Pac-Man; an average video game player who has watched it before trying it will probably do much better than an expert gamer who goes in cold.  And, unfortunately, college admissions is mostly something people do once, at least in the high stakes realm.

But more and more, I’m wondering: Suppose the perfect college exists: It’s responsive, it’s high quality by any measure, it’s fully transparent about pricing, admissions decisions are predictable, and it puts the interest of students above its own. In three years, do you think this college will a) have so many applications it can’t possibly be like that any more, or b) get so few applications that it will no longer be viewed as a high quality college?

Is this a window of opportunity, or a quick exit to the ground floor?

Whether you take this bet depends on the risk of doing something vs. the risk of doing nothing.

Which will you choose?