Giving Compass' Take: 

• Anti-trust laws prevent changes to the college admissions process that would decrease stress on students, families, and schools. 

• should colleges be granted an exemption from anti-trust laws? How can philanthropy most effectively support changes to the college admissions system? 

• Learn how educators are seeking emerging assessments of high school students for college admissions.

Year after year, the admissions process at selective colleges seems to make high-schoolers and their parents only more anxious.

Plenty of ideas to fix the system—to make it more bearable for students, parents, and even colleges themselves—have been floated in recent years, including restructuring the whole process to be a somewhat randomized lottery, or implementing a matching system akin to how medical-school graduates are placed in residencies. They are promising, but they have something problematic in common: In all likelihood, they’d be illegal.

That’s because, like nearly every other American company and organization, colleges and universities are subject to antitrust law, meaning they are bound to compete with one another in a way the government deems fair. Such antitrust provisions are vital—they are what stop, say, automakers from raising the price of cars in unison—but in the case of higher education, it might turn out that antitrust law stands in the way of making college admissions, as well as the linked and similarly fraught process for divvying out financial aid, fairer and less harrowing for all involved.

Read the full article about ways to fix college admissions by Jeffrey Selingo at The Atlantic.