The Age of Rejection

David Brooks:

In 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected.

The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected. I recently spoke with one college student who applied to 40 summer internships and was rejected by 39. I ran into some students who told me they felt they had to fill out 150 to 250 internship applications each year to be confident there would be a few that wouldn’t reject them.

Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market. They enter what I’ve come to think of as the seventh circle of Indeed hell. Applying for jobs online is easy, so you have millions of people sending hundreds of applications each into the great miasma of the internet, and God knows which impersonal algorithm is reading them. I keep hearing and reading stories about young people who applied to 400 jobs and got rejected by all of them.

Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about the vast waste of time and resources produced by our meritocracy. In particular, I wonder about the millions of hours people collectively spend applying for things they don't get. It is true that online applications are much simpler, but the process is still far from painless, and there are lots of niche positions with their own unique grinds. Imagine what you could do with all the hours smart young people put into applying for Rhodes Scholarships. Not to mention the other side, all the time smart older people put into reviewing their applications. 

Then come interviews, another vast waste of human energy, with some companies imposing as many as seven separate interviews on applicants, despite the data showing that interviews are a terrible way of identifying good employees.

On top of that there is the simple fact of rejection. It sucks to be rejected, even if you applied to fifty colleges on the assumption that most would reject you.

Wondering about how to solve this problem, I come up with only one thing: AI. Set up a universal system for college applications, another for internship applications, etc., have people send in one application, and let the AI sort it out. It might be awful, but then the system we have isn't so great either. 

But then again by the time AI can do that it may be able to do just about everything, so there won't be many "knowledge worker" jobs left to apply for.