Miami ? All over the country, a game is going on. It’s called applying to college.

High school seniors are playing it, applying to more universities in search of the best deal, then turning down all but one, making the rest look bad by lowering their acceptance rates.

Colleges are playing it, too, luring as many applicants as possible, turning down most of them in a quest for higher rankings in all-important college guide books.

The very process of applying to college is like a game, part of which is guessing what the rules really are. The best players, or at least those with the best coaching, succeed. The rest settle for what’s left.

The game is getting tougher, as children of the baby boom generation reach college age and flood universities with applications — they’re up by one-third since 1979, when the boomers themselves were flocking to college — while the number of slots for entering freshmen fails to keep up.

“It’s not necessarily fair, it’s not necessarily meritocratic,” says a former Duke University admissions officer, Rachel Toor, “and even if applicants do everything right, they still can’t be assured they will get what they think they want.”

But flawed or not, it is the process — and it can be tough on a 17-year-old.

The root of today’s stiffer competition is the all-American belief, at least since GIs returned from World War II, that everybody should have a shot at college. Today the grandchildren of those GIs have swollen college enrollments by 31 percent since 1979, while far too few classrooms have been built to accommodate them, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“When I came here about 10 years ago, we got about 7,000 applications for 1,960 entering freshman slots,” said Ed Gillis, admissions director for University of Miami. “Today we get 16,000 for about the same number of slots.”

America’s college freshman class, which grew only from 2.3 million to 2.4 million between 1990 and 2000, will swell to 2.7 million by 2010, the Education Department says.

Unable to take many more students, colleges are responding by raising entrance standards:

• A survey by The College Board found that half or more of America’s four-year colleges raised their admission standards for high school GPA and class rank between 1995 and 2000.
• The average SAT of college applicants in 2002 is 1020, which is 19 points higher than a decade ago.

In a survey by the College Board, 1,600 college admissions officers ranked the following as carrying the most weight:1. High school GPA or class rank.2. Test scores such as SAT and ACT.3. Degree of difficulty of high school courses. Advanced placement (AP) and honors classes are the key here.4. Student essays and teacher letters of recommendation.

• At Miami, the average entering freshman has a 4.0 GPA today, compared with about a 3.4 a decade ago; and an SAT score of 1220, about 80 points higher than 10 years ago, Gillis said.
• Yale in 1991 had 10,705 applicants and admitted 23 percent of them. In 2001 it had 15,466 applicants and admitted 13 percent of them.

“If you can’t get bigger, you get more choosy,” said Brad Quin, admissions specialist for the College Board. “What you trim off is students at the bottom with less-strong academic profiles.”

So what do colleges and universities really look for?

Such importance is given to the above factors that Toor, the former Duke admissions officer, said staffers there were instructed to rate student applicants on a 1-to-5 basis, with 5 the highest, in each of the above categories. So in admissions parlance, a given applicant might be referred to as a “5, 4, 3, 5.”

As important as grades are, they aren’t the only factor. College admissions officers say GPAs are the most important consideration for the top 20 percent of applicants (often winning them automatic acceptance) and the bottom 20 percent (often subjecting them to automatic rejection). But they say admission decisions about the vast, middle 60 percent of applicants still rely heavily on student essays.

In the end, as confusing and frustrating as the college application process is, as flawed as it can seem — most high school counselors say it works in at least an adequate fashion.

“For the most part, I think the admissions process is pretty fair,” says Graf, head of the Broward Advisor for Continuing Education (BRACE) program of college counselors at Plantation High School in Miami. “We get our feelings hurt when we have a wonderful student who isn’t accepted to his number one choice. But getting rejected from everywhere is pretty rare.”