After we finished our tour of the college campus, the admissions officer asked if there were any questions.

“How long do you spend evaluating each application?” one parent asked.

He paused for a second and you could tell he was hesitating because he knew it wouldn’t sound good. He decided to plow ahead anyway.

“About three to five minutes,” he said.

That put the whole process into stark relief. 

A decade of studying, taking tests and accumulating extracurriculars are compressed into a five-minute window.

It didn’t seem like a lot of time.

You could see the parents in the room doing the calculation: five minutes divided by all the money and time spent on trips and tours and consultants and essays and letters.

In defense of admissions officers, the volumes are huge, so they have to move fast. Each school also has a pretty clear idea of what they want. 

(For perspective, venture capitalists take on average just over two minutes to review the pitch decks submitted by startups.)

The admissions officer we were meeting with said his team evaluates more than 16,000 applications for about 1,200 spots each year. They read every submission.

He joked that the only real way to improve your chances was to move to North Dakota since those applications are rare and schools want every state represented.

It’s hard not to feel like your future rides on being selected to the school of your choice.

Of course, it’s impossible to predict how things will turn out.

During the drive up to visit schools, my son and I listened to one of David Senra’s excellent Founders podcasts about the life of Warren Buffett. 

Senra tells the story about how Buffett was crushed to be rejected by Harvard Business School. 

Looking around for other options, he realized that two of his mentors, professors Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, were teaching at Columbia University.

The deadline to apply for Columbia had already passed, but Buffett wrote a letter to Dodd in mid-August of 1951 entreating him to consider his application. 

He was accepted.

Buffett learned from Graham and Dodd the investment skills that would make him a fortune.

He later said getting rejected from Harvard was the best thing that happened to him.