Arrow Zhang came to Yale last fall eager to try new things. In high school, she had spent most of her free time writing and practicing piano, but at Yale, she envisioned dividing her time between activities as disparate as finance and international relations. Zhang did not anticipate how competitive Yale’s clubs would be.

She quickly learned that, not unlike the admissions process to the university itself, entrance to student clubs often requires written applications and interviews. She filled her Google Calendar with hours of info sessions and application tasks. After more than a month of nonstop auditions, applications, interviews, and even tests, Zhang found herself rejected from multiple clubs, including ones that had no obvious reason to be selective. Most of the clubs she was able to join—The Yale Herald, a dance group, the clock-tower bell-ringers —involved skills she’d already honed in high school.

“Everyone would say, You don’t need any experience to apply,” she said. “But then everyone who gets in are already pros.”

Yale’s competitive-admission clubs include many that are notoriously exclusive but also more surprising entries, such as the community-service club. One of Zhang’s rejections came from the Existential Threats Initiative, which meets to discuss issues such as climate change and AI. Zhang was turned away for not having enough experience dealing with existential threats. Her rejection email encouraged her to listen to more podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours (tagline: “In-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems”) or otherwise gain expertise in the field.

[Derek Thompson: The religion of workism is making Americans miserable]

Ben Snyder, a recent Yale grad who co-founded Existential Threats in 2022, told me the club is simply not for beginners.

“We wanted to be more selective so we could have more advanced conversations,” said Snyder, whose expertise in this subject includes having researched the risk potential of pandemics at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation last summer.

High barriers to entry are no longer just for historically elite groups on campus like secret societies and the acapella group the Whiffenpoofs, or even for club sports teams, which can field only so many players. The investing club turned away 236 people last year. The “teach kids to code” club turned away 20. The musical-improv group turned away several dozen, leaving its rejectees to find more loosely organized ways to burst into song. Half of the applicants to the magic club saw their hopes vanish into thin air.

Yale’s hyper-competitive club culture is not unique. At UCLA, application packages for coveted clubs routinely exceed 10 pages and are only the first step in multi-round processes that include formal interviews and informal coffee talks. The Voyager Consulting business club at UC Berkeley receives about 800 to 1,000 applications a cycle, and typically accepts six or seven. “It’s way harder to get into Voyager Consulting than to get into Berkeley,” Ethan Chien, a member, told me. Similar stories about the club scene abound at other highly selective universities, including Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell. At other schools, the rush process for sororities and fraternities can be just as competitive, with multiple rounds of interviews and mandatory events.

“There’s some kind of frenetic quality about it that goes way beyond rational competition, that is insanely over the top,” says David F. Labaree, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who has observed a competitive mania overtake higher education in recent years. “Anything that students come in second in, they think is a sign that they’re doomed: Oh my God. Maybe I’m a loser here.”

I just started my junior year at Yale, so I’ve experienced this frenzy myself. I fretted through applications and interviews, worried about getting rejected and having to tell my friends and parents that I wasn’t good enough. Things ended up well for me: I was admitted to the environmental-education club and landed a volunteer grant-writing position I applied for, and I started writing for student publications that have almost no barriers to entry. Still, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that this system is exhausting, absurd, and above all unnecessary. So many of these clubs are competitive for no good reason.

As I reported this story, one thing became clear: This culture is not wholly imposed by Yale as an institution. The faculty members I interviewed were perplexed that clubs are so competitive. Pericles Lewis, the dean of the college, told me he’d talked with club leaders about making the application process more humane, and they’d declined to implement significant changes. The students are doing this to themselves.

[Jerusalem Demsas: No one deserves to go to Harvard]

Yale is a place where everyone is a winner. Less than 5 percent of people who apply are offered a spot. You might think that this selectivity would make students feel confident and secure—if we had to beat out 95 percent of our peers to get in, we must be really special. But the opposite seems to be true: Students, fueled by insecurity, feel the need to over-justify their worthiness. And so they impose endless hierarchies on one another.

Many clubs on campus are open-entry, including the pizza society, the bridge club, the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, the Pokémon GO club, Yale Outdoors, the anime society, and most student publications. To take part in the Dungeons & Dragons or Minecraft clubs, one need only log on to the respective Discord servers. But though welcoming enclaves exist, rejection is ubiquitous.

“College clubs are so unserious like why are you the same age as me and trying to gatekeep me from joining a social impact volunteer group,” one Yale student complained on the anonymous social-media app Fizz. The post received 1,600 upvotes.

Parents have feelings about all of this as well. A frustrated Yale mother posted on Facebook: “Most of the things my daughter wanted to do in college required a try-out … What was frustrating to us was that if you weren’t already good at something then you don’t get the opportunity to learn … She did cast that net wide. She tried out for evvvvvverything. Auditioned for Rent, MUN [Model United Nations], Mock trial, glee club, singing groups … and many more. Got rejected from all. Even volunteer groups. It was a huge hit to her self-esteem.”

[Read: The absurdity of college admissions]

Perhaps unaware that publicly discussing their children’s college activities may not be just a symptom but also a contributor to the culture they are maligning, other parents flocked to echo her comments: “My daughter had the same experience.” “My daughter tried out for the comedy groups and was told that she wasn’t funny enough.” “My first year has gotten turned down from everything—even simple volunteer opportunities that you wouldn’t think would be competitive!”

After getting into these clubs, many students are unable to fully participate. Han Choi, a senior majoring in political science who has thought about a career in law, was admitted to the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association (YULAA) but then found the club too competitive to allow him to truly contribute to advocacy and aid work.

“You have to apply to be a member of the club, and then you have to apply again to actually be on a service project,” Choi told me. “Even when I joined the club, I couldn’t do anything, because there’s a whole other super-competitive application process where you have to write about your experiences.”

YULAA was not always so selective. Yasmin Eriksson, who founded the club as an undergrad in 2016, told me the club had an application to gauge passion and commitment, but if someone was admitted, they were guaranteed placement on a service project.

“When the opportunity to volunteer is made super competitive, that sends a message to students that being interested and passionate about various issues isn’t enough. And then the question is: What is enough?” Eriksson said.

She thinks that the logical response to high group demand is to expand the opportunities available, not to turn more people away. YULAA’s leadership board has nearly doubled the number of projects offered in the past year, from about 10 to more than 20. Still, many volunteers remain who want to serve but cannot be accommodated.

Most clubs have the capacity to accept far larger cohorts or do away with entrance requirements altogether, but choose to maintain rigid admissions frameworks. The Asian American Students Alliance, for instance—the primary Asian American affiliation group, for which one would think the main requirement would be affiliation—currently requires an application.

“It’s strange to me how many student organizations decide to be selective when it’s students who completely control the system,” Mira Debs, the executive director of Yale’s education-studies program, told me. “I have often found it to be a puzzle. What force drives Yale students to be so competitive, and to construct all of these different categories that they’re applying for?”

Despite the pervasiveness of exclusivity and rejection on Yale’s campus, most of the students I spoke with didn’t feel that they were living in an end-stage meritocracy hellscape. “I am very glad I tried for as many clubs as I did,” Arrow Zhang said, “because of the incredible people I met along the way.”

Many of my peers accept the applications and interviews for clubs as the rules of the game they fought so hard to play. They embrace a million micro-meritocracies, and believe that if they aren’t willing to prove their worth at every turn, they don’t deserve full participation in campus life.

Labaree, the Stanford professor, sees the competitiveness as a result of being in an era when college is “becoming generic,” in that many American high-schoolers are expected to attend.

“If the issue is not just what education I get but how exclusive my education is, then every time access grows to that exclusive level, it’s watering down my advantage,” Labaree said, channeling the viewpoint of the educated class. “I have to find another way of establishing advantage. And I do it by stratifying.”

These dynamics are hardest on first-generation and low-income students, and students from underfunded public schools who have less specialized résumés. Vanesa Carrillo, a first-generation graduate, told me that she has never felt more stressed than during her first year at Georgetown, in part because of the pressures of club applications. She hears her undergraduate mentees describe similar feelings.

“They feel like they want to break down all the time, and I think it’s because freshman-year club culture is so insane—coming in as a 17- or 18-year-old and not knowing where to join, but knowing you have limited time,” Carrillo said.

Even some of the student leaders who enforce these norms feel queasy about it. Matthew Meyers, a senior, was the president of Yale Undergraduate Moot Court, a law club. The club’s travel expenses limit its size, which results in high selectivity. Meyers called the process of rejecting applicants “gut-wrenching.” Moot Court’s rejection email, he said, is not just a stock “We regret to inform you ...” message. It is long and delicate. Tony Ruan, a leader of the Asian American Students Alliance, is planning to make the group more accessible. “It’s strange to select based on merit, especially when the whole point of this organization is to give people an avenue to explore their interests and identity,” he told me.

Lewis, the dean, said he has spoken with student groups several times about holding tryouts later in the semester so that first-year students don’t experience so much competitive pressure in their first weeks on campus. (In Lewis’s words, this is “not a very fun way to start Yale.”) The student leaders declined, Lewis said, because they didn’t want to push back the entire semester’s events calendar. He added that Yale’s culture has a tendency to encourage an overflowing slate of activities, which he thinks stems from both university tradition and student psychology.

[From the April 2001 issue: The organization kid]

“Students have competed a lot to get into Yale. They’ve been president of their club in school. They’ve done very well in grades and sometimes in national competitions,” Lewis said. “So then they reproduce that when they get here.”

This fall, as a sophomore, Arrow Zhang will see the other side of club admissions. She will help supervise the five-week audition process for the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs, the bell-ringing club, which accepted eight of 31 applicants last year. She feels uncomfortable about becoming one of the gatekeepers she had to face just a year ago. “Now I have a say in the outcome of someone else’s audition,” she said. “I wish we could accept more people.”