While the college years can be “the best years of your life,” not the same can be said about applying to college these days. Baby boomers have produced a booming crop of college bound students and they are carrying the enormous expectations of their parents to get into top schools. More applicants to top schools has led to more rejections, and that only has made schools more selective and thus, more desirable.

“It’s now 20 percent harder to get into any college than it was just a decade ago,” says the Atlantic Monthly’s National Correspondent Jim Fallows. In the lead story of the magazine’s first-ever college survey, he describes parents, their private college consultants, and the colleges themselves going to new heights and lows in working the admissions process.

Click the “Listen” link to hear about the new college admissions mayhem and how parents, kids and schools are working the system.

Guests:

James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly magazine, wrote lead piece in the November Issue “The Atlantic College Admissions Survey”

Marilee Jones, Dean of Admissions at MIT

Jonathan Reider, director of college admissions at University High School in San Francisco