Update

It’s easy to make fun of 1968. I mean, just look at the hair. And paisley shirts? How were paisley shirts ever a thing? Of Nehru Jackets, bell bottom pants, and tie-dye shirts, not much remains. I don’t get out much—hard to read a book in a nightclub—but were I to leave the house, I’m betting I wouldn’t see too many folks wearing go-go boots.

Some of 1968 remains relevant, even visionary: Star Trek has some worthwhile lessons, Gilligan’s Island less so. Although I might not have a good answer for how I can suspend verisimilitude to accept faster than light travel and teleportation but not seven people living happily together without bug spray. And I will leave to the interested reader to consider the perennial question: how could The Professor build a radio out of sticks and mud but not be able to fix a hole in a boat? I guess 1968 does have a lot to answer for.

How about college admissions advice from the year before Neil Armstrong took one small step for man? The fact is that there is no real difficulty in getting into a college… it is obvious that the talk of difficulty is mainly talk suggested Frank H. Bowles et al in the fourth edition on How to Get into College published that year. Those numbers have changed in ways that were hard to predict 57 years ago. Must be much more competitive now what with so many more kids applying to more colleges. Indeed in 2025, there are now 17 schools that admit fewer than 10% of their applicants.

Wait a minute. Seventeen? Seventeen schools admit fewer than one student in ten? Seventeen schools isn’t very many at all. Seventeen hyper-selective colleges out of thousands of institutions. That’s hardly any, way fewer than one percent.

How many schools admit over 50 percent of applicants? Most all of them. Seventy-eight percent of public colleges admit over half of their applicants. Seventy percent of private colleges do.

What do these numbers mean for you and your family? It’s incredibly good news. You won the lottery, and you don’t even know it. If your kid can get through four years of math and English in high school and avoid getting any C grades, your kid is pretty much guaranteed to be admitted to college, lots of colleges. Maybe not one of the seventeen, but tons of awesome choices.

What has changed since 1968? Lots. Space travel undreamed of on Star Trek, TV shows, fashion, this author’s ability to stay awake past 10:00 pm. What hasn’t changed? That your child—absent being kidnapped by aliens—is beyond likely to go to college.

Hence the slogan I’ve been using ever since the first cohort of young people whom I advised in 1984: It’s never too late to relax about being admitted to college.

And your kids don’t even have to wear paisley shirts on campus.