While applying to colleges last fall, Jack Anderson slept soundly, ran 50 miles a week, and practiced the saxophone. He also found the time to hang out with friends. Sometimes, his mother says, he even smiled.
Mr. Anderson is no slacker. In fact, he earns A's and B's at Madison High School, in New Jersey, where he is president of the student government. But he was not the stereotypical college applicant, racked with worry.

"Whatever happens, happens," says Mr. Anderson. "That was my attitude."

High schools throughout the nation are full of Jack Andersons, though they are not as famous as their angst-ridden peers, usually those who seek spots at the most-selective colleges. Each April those students dominate front-page articles, which focus almost exclusively on Ivy League colleges and other highly competitive institutions that reject the vast majority of their applicants.

This spring, tales of admissions woe could bloom like never before. After all, applications to Harvard University and some other supercompetitive colleges have increased by double-digit percentages over last year.

In a January letter to The New York Times, John W. Etchemendy, Stanford University's provost, warned that the recent demise of early-admission programs at three prominent institutions would bring a flood of applications, escalating the admissions "frenzy." A high-school counselor used the same word in a recent Times article to describe unprecedented panic among his students.

"Frenzy," as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, means "mental derangement, temporary insanity; the uncontrollable excitement of a paroxysm of mania." Is that what most teenagers experience during the admissions process?

No, several high-school counselors and admissions deans insist. "There are those kids who really stress over it," says Brett Levine, director of guidance at Madison, "but a big majority approach it in a rational way."

Admissions Odds: Still Good

National statistics say students are wise to remain calm. In 2007, for instance, 80 percent of current first-year students were admitted to their top-choice college, according to an annual survey of more than 270,000 freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Furthermore, all but the most selective colleges continue to admit a large proportion of students who apply. Nationally, the average acceptance rate for applicants is close to 70 percent, a number that has changed little since the mid-1980s, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as Nacac.

Recently, the association compiled admissions data from more than 1,000 four-year institutions. In 2006 about 3 percent of those colleges accepted fewer than 25 percent of their applicants, while 82 percent accepted more than half.

"What our members have found difficult is getting the word out about that silent majority," says David A. Hawkins, Nacac's director of public policy and research.

One reason: Some students and parents do not want to hear about any college outside U.S. News & World Report's Top 25 list. Like a Ferrari or a Rolls-Royce, an education from Harvard or Stanford is expensive, prestigious, and something that most people do not have. In turn, the quest to attain it is inherently more dramatic than the quest for relatively sure bets.

"Anytime something's in high demand and low supply," Mr. Hawkins says, "people are going to make noise about it."

Especially if it appears that the supply is shrinking. Last spring several highly selective colleges announced the lowest admission rates in their histories. And after receiving significantly more applications than last year, some colleges will surely see those rates decline further in 2008.

'Statistical Mirage'

Another record-setting wave of rejection letters this spring would seem to support the popular notion that getting into a top-tier college is becoming more difficult each year. But Kevin Carey calls that a "statistical mirage."

Last year, Mr. Carey, research and policy manager at Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, wrote in The American Prospect that "the growing number of applications per student only makes the admissions environment seem more crowded."

The odds of getting into a particular college, Mr. Carey tells The Chronicle, depend on the overall ratio of admission offers to qualified applicants—not the ratio of admission offers to applications.

It is true that the number of prospective college students has been growing for a decade. Approximately 3.2 million students graduated from high school in 2007, up from 2.9 million in 2002, for an increase of 9 percent. But Mr. Carey calculated that the total number of spots at about 60 of the most competitive colleges has increased at a similar rate—8 percent—during that time.

Meanwhile, as more students have applied to more colleges, the number of applications at highly competitive institutions has risen by double-digit rates. "But that doesn't mean there are more qualified people throwing their hats into the ring," Mr. Carey says.

Nonetheless, he understands why tales of long odds and dashed hopes appear every spring. "People love the drama," he says. "What these stories do is tell them their anxieties are important."

'I Won't Get In Anywhere'

The problem is that so-called admissions scare stories further the perception that it has become nearly impossible to get into any college, not just an elite one.

So says Marty O'Connell, executive director of Colleges That Change Lives, a nonprofit group that represents 41 liberal-arts colleges and helps families with the college-search process.

Each year Ms. O'Connell, a former dean of admissions at McDaniel College, in Maryland, gives between 35 and 40 presentations, during which she urges parents to stay calm despite the "scary headlines" they have seen in newspapers.

Ms. O'Connell often tries to reassure students by telling them that if they have conducted a thoughtful search, they need apply to only four or five colleges.

Sometimes that's a tough sell. "You don't see people nodding," she says. "They'll say, 'No, I've got to apply to 12 schools, or else I won't get in anywhere.'"

Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University, encounters the same perception. He has spent a lot of time, he says, talking to reporters who want to know why applying to college is so "awful for everyone," or how "nobody can afford it."

"I feel like I'm sort of a buzzkill," he says, "because after I finish talking to them, I've told them they don't have a story."

Despite the depictions of the so-called admissions frenzy, Monica C. Inzer, dean of admission and financial aid at Hamilton College, in New York, believes most students come through the application process unscathed.
"They realize that they might not get in everywhere they apply," says Ms. Inzer in an e-mail message. "They get over rejection much faster than anyone gives them credit for."

Mr. Anderson, the high-school senior from New Jersey, says students who experience the most stress about admissions are the ones who have their heart set on just one college. He did not.

With his parents' help, Mr. Anderson did research on colleges that were likely to admit him, based on his grades and test scores. He visited several campuses and filed six applications.

He received a handful of acceptances and decided to attend the College of Wooster, in Ohio.

Mr. Anderson had liked Wooster's out-of-the-way campus and had been impressed when he saw football players there mingling with other students.

Still, he says, "I knew I would have been happy anywhere. Really."

That's hardly the kind of story that makes for dramatic reading.