The figures are out: This year Northwestern sent out acceptance letters to only 12.9 percent of applicants. Since the 2006 round, the NU administration has slashed the rate by a yearly average of two percentage points.

A very ugly misconception is thinking lower rates imply incoming freshmen will be much smarter or more dedicated than those from years back. Median test scores have not risen dramatically over the years, nor have already high graduation rates. The trend is terrifying, less because of what little it has to do with academic success and more because it has to do with NU’s entry into the “admissions arms race.” I am exploiting scare quotes for a reason, because the outcome of this arms race will only be for the worse.

That is not to say an arms race is not a good description of what is happening among the nation’s elite colleges. On one hand, there are fewer American teenagers now than there were in the past. Consistent with earlier peaks in elementary and high school enrollment, the level of college enrollment peaked in 2012. Even then, the rise of online applications lets the college bound try their luck with dozens of schools, “reach” to “safety.”

The demand for higher education, from the individual school’s perspective, is uncertain. One way to cope with this is to strictly dominate all competition. The arms race is one of data mining and self-promotion. Elite schools buy student data from high schools, spam anyone above a certain test score with brochures and boast about bigger and better investments. The more hope they sow, the better; more applications give them greater choice in composing the class, mitigating uncertainty.

Among the top colleges, Northwestern employs a particularly shrewd strategy. A near doubling of applications over ten years is due to mass interest from the East and West Coasts, as well as abroad, whose growing enrollment substitutes for the decline in the number of Midwestern applicants. To ensure against admitting students not devoted to the school, early decision applicants now make up 45 percent of the admitted body, compared to just a quarter of it eight years ago. NU now admits students from two worlds: those who can afford to apply early decision and are willing to accept whatever bill the school throws at them and a disparate bunch who can boast major accomplishments during high school, picked up after they ended up still not good enough for the most elite schools.

Even those fighting the admissions arms race admit it is not a good thing. Former admissions directors confess too many are suckered into applying to a school when they have no chance. The more colleges try to outperform competitors when it comes to prestige, the more they must remain credible to current customers and become incessantly pre-professional — a trend current admissions directors believe to be true. For all the rhetoric about reaching out to underrepresented groups, the recruitment strategies have shown to have little effect on convincing high-performing, low-income students to apply.

What makes the NU case even worse is that its students, split among six undergraduate schools and many other clusters, do not have much of a shared identity in the first place. It is hard enough for the administration to build that identity, but I claim its admissions strategy creates more problems every year than those it fixes. The basic question is about empathy; the two worlds have difficulty communicating with each other. The early decision world is intoxicated by the school’s traditions. The regular decision world fragments into distinct majors and professions, with each person too focused on the path they plodded along to hear outside voices.

Can the high school seniors with acceptance letters on their monitors understand the stress they will go through if they come here, enveloped in degrees of self-doubt, guilt and hopelessness and the feeling when no one can really spare the time to listen? The thought terrifies me, at least. Yet the arms race goes on, unless decision makers consider a divorce from the madness. Maybe we need a drastic policy change, like an admissions system where acceptances are chosen by lottery. What matters more than selectivity is a desire to band together.

Tom Cui is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].