We recently had the opportunity to participate in a conference at the Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice at the University of Southern California devoted to the question of how to improve the college-admissions process. The focus was on selective college admissions. People are rightly concerned about both the extent to which the admissions process is skewed in favor of students from privileged backgrounds and the negative effects on the competition among institutions and the competition among top students for the limited number of spaces in the most prestigious institutions.

Ultimately, the intense scramble among students and colleges at the top of the pecking order matters far less than the “big sort” that determines who gets to go to a college at all, and particularly to a college that offers the prospect of a good outcome and a start on a successful career. But we do put a lot of resources into highly selective institutions, and they educate a lot of people who make major contributions to society. We should improve the process and, in doing so, reduce the maniacal pressures on the pre-college lives of elite students.

One of the hard truths here is that it seems virtually impossible to imagine a move to ease the pressure that will not reduce the large relative advantage enjoyed by the top players in the competitive game as currently played. A basic problem is that the number of institutions in the top 20 has not and will not increase (by definition of “20”). The number of student places at these institutions has also been essentially fixed for years. But the number of students qualified for and interested in attending these colleges has grown dramatically. The number of 18-year-olds has grown and mobility has increased. Top students are much more willing to travel from all parts of the country to the top institutions than they were a generation ago.

Fixed supply and increasing demand inevitably lead either to rising prices and/or a shortage. College tuition has certainly risen, but the most prestigious colleges are no more expensive than those a little farther down the food chain. And because they have so much endowment wealth, they are able to offer much more generous financial aid. The net prices students actually pay to attend these institutions are lower than at many other colleges. (These top schools tend to give only need-based aid, so they are much less expensive for the price-sensitive middle- and lower-income students than less wealthy institutions.) So there is a long waiting list of students who are qualified to enroll in these colleges and able and willing to pay the prices they would be charged.

It’s not hard to see why admissions are increasingly competitive, and affluent suburban high-school students are taking more and more AP classes and building more houses in Guatemala every summer. And every time admissions officers cut the onion a little finer in an effort to find some way to distinguish among an abundance of superbly qualified applicants, they send elite high-school students scrambling to meet the still higher expectations.

In light of all this, we invited the assembled admissions leaders to consider one simple and obvious step toward relieving the pressure: expand your enrollment. Our friends and colleagues at the meeting found it easy to contain their enthusiasm for our idea. But consider:

Most of these institutions have endowments per student that far exceed those at other very high-quality institutions. If they were to increase the size of their undergraduate student bodies by some percentage (say half), virtually all of them would still be at the top of the list of institutions ranked by wealth per student, and their admissions queues would still be out the door.

Increasing the number of undergraduate places in these institutions seems like an obvious step. Twenty of the wealthiest, most selective private colleges enroll a total of about 20,000 first-year students each year. If they enrolled 30,000, there would be a significant reduction in the number of rejection letters sent to highly qualified students.

There would of course be ripple effects. The added students at the top places would almost all come from places a little further down the food chain. So those places would also have to reach further. And that in turn would lower the admissions pressure a little further down the line.

There would not be a whole new set of top 20 institutions. But the current top 20 would have to use some of their resources to accommodate more students. They could easily hire more faculty and expand their facilities a bit (or use the existing plant more efficiently) without unacceptably reducing the quality of the educational opportunities they offer. Admittedly, with a lower endowment per student, the impressive level of amenities at these places might decline somewhat; more substantively classes would be a little larger, perhaps, and the experience moderately less intimate. But these institutions are currently supplying their mostly privileged students with levels of resources that far exceed those experienced by most students. And a modest reduction in their relative spending would not change that truth one bit.

We suspect that the main obstacle to getting a hearing for an idea like this is that a step in this direction is clearly not in the narrow self-interest of elite institutions — a reminder that ultimately the current system, for all its travails, serves these institutions very well indeed. We are far from claiming that our idea is the best one to pursue or try. But if leaders at top places are waiting for a solution that will not require any sacrifice on their part, they are going to be waiting a long time.