BY B. M. RYAN

In Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, Frank Bruni’s intervention into the admissions debate was built around a stabilizing claim: Where you go is not who you’ll be. It was an argument against status anxiety, against the idea that elite college admission determined life outcomes, and against the growing obsession with institutional brand names.

It worked because it described a world in which the relationship between education and work still felt relatively legible, but college admissions no longer behave like a status market, or even an admissions arms race.

In what might be named the first “phase” of admissions, from roughly the postwar period through the 1990s, the wealthy bought prestige, and the college name itself was the asset. Parents wanted the Harvard sticker, the Notre Dame ring, the Duke sweatshirt, the Stanford network: Elite institutions were scarce, and access itself created value. College signaled class membership, social mobility, and institutional affiliation in a labor market where degrees reliably sorted into income and status. The uncertainty was limited. The signal was strong.

In the second “phase,” the so-called admissions arms race (2000–23), the game became optimization. SAT tutors, travel sports, admissions consultants, essay coaching, research internships—parents were no longer simply buying a degree, they were buying admission itself, entry into increasingly selective institutions that functioned as bottlenecks to perceived opportunity. But the underlying assumption still held: College placement, while competitive, mapped onto a relatively stable labor market. The goal was to win the sorting mechanism.

Now, in the third “phase,” the question is no longer Can my kid get in? It is, What future am I buying? This is where college stops behaving like a status contest and starts behaving like a long-duration bet on uncertain economic outcomes.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas and later in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard reshaped how institutions can structure admissions decisions. Whatever one’s view of those rulings, their practical effect has been to push universities away from explicit categorical sorting and toward more diffuse, individualized, and less transparent evaluation criteria. In economic terms, the pricing mechanism has become less legible.

The college decision should be seen less a contest for status than an exercise in forecasting under uncertainty: Will artificial intelligence reduce demand for entry-level white-collar work? Will health care occupations continue to expand as populations age? Will elite credentials retain their signaling value? Will traditional degrees remain aligned with occupational outcomes? Will universities themselves remain financially stable?

These are not educational questions. They are forecasts about the future.

Uncertainty has always been part of the college experience. A substantial share of students changes majors at least once during their undergraduate careers, often in pursuit of purpose, identity, or a better understanding of their interests and talents. In that sense, educational uncertainty can be productive; it reflects exploration rather than failure.

The question, however, is whether such exploration remains economically viable. When the cost of attendance can exceed $200,000 and labor market outcomes are increasingly difficult to predict, the freedom to discover one’s passions collides with the pressure to make financially consequential decisions. What once appeared to be a developmental journey increasingly resembles an investment choice, forcing students and families to weigh personal fulfillment against uncertain economic returns.

Meanwhile, labor markets themselves are changing. Artificial intelligence now performs tasks once associated with entry-level cognitive work: writing, coding, research, summarization, and analysis. At the same time, demographic aging is creating sustained demand for nurses, health-care professionals, and eldercare services. Some occupations appear positioned for growth. Others face uncertainty regarding technological substitution.

Every major increasingly reflects an implicit forecast, yet the comparison to financial markets reveals a critical difference. In actual prediction markets, disagreement generates information. Participants buy and sell contracts tied to future events, and market prices aggregate dispersed beliefs into forecasts. The market itself becomes a tool for discovering what people collectively expect.

College admissions offer no such mechanism. There is no market price for the future value of a nursing degree. No tradable contract tied to the earnings of political science majors. No efficient mechanism for aggregating beliefs about the future demand for software engineers or accountants.

One can imagine such markets existing—contracts linked to future earnings by major, employment outcomes, or debt-to-income ratios could potentially provide useful signals about expected educational returns—but that is not the world students inhabit. Instead, they are asked to make enormous, irreversible investments under conditions of profound uncertainty.

The eighteen-year-old applicant is not the twenty-two-year-old graduate, and certainly not the forty-year-old worker. Human beings develop, adapt, mature, and change. Yet educational decisions are frequently priced as though future identities and future labor markets can be forecast with confidence.

This is where Bruni’s argument remains correct but incomplete. Where you go is not who you’ll be, but today’s anxiety is not fundamentally about status. It is about uncertainty.

Families are not merely competing for prestige. They are attempting to navigate a future that has become increasingly difficult to predict. The tragedy is not that these bets are irrational; the tragedy is that they are unavoidable.

In a world where educational value depends on labor markets, technologies, institutions, and personal development that cannot be reliably forecast, every choice involves exposure to uncertainty. Even opting out is itself a wager.

College admissions no longer simply sort students. It allocates risk. And that may be the most important economic function it now serves.