Twin American obsessions that trump politics in spring

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Forget the e-mail scandal that has dogged Hillary Clinton; it won't linger. You can ignore the early wrangling among Republican presidential candidates; there are two dozen of them and the process won't get serious for several more months. And the budget fight on Capitol Hill? It may be great sport to watch the Republicans battle each other but do not forget that American budget resolutions are non-binding and are not even subject to presidential vetoes.

So what is the real preoccupation of Americans now that spring has arrived? In a word: College.

You can search for the 21st-century American character in Washington, where the partisan divide has produced paralysis; or on the Internet and radio stations, where popular culture runs riot; or even in the grocery stores and restaurants of the United States, where the surge of quinoa and kale suggests dramatic changes in the American diet. (Goodbye, club sandwich! Hello quinoa tabbouleh!)

But the real American character is revealed in twin competitions being played out in the next fortnight: The rush for admission to elite colleges. The obsession with college basketball.

Both of these competitions have been around since the first half of the last century; Harvard began testing applicants for admission as early as 1905 and Oregon won the first national basketball championship of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1939. But today the college admissions game and the games of March Madness are American obsessions. Note that variations on the word "game" appear twice in the last sentence.

Right now the pressure is on in both games. In the tucked-away admissions suites of the Ivy League, in the selective Eastern liberal-arts colleges, in the small campuses of the Midwest and in the research powerhouses at Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the final decisions are being made, and though there is ample evidence to the contrary, tens of thousands of American high-school students believe their destinies are being determined.

At the same time, on the hard-court surfaces of athletic palaces around the United States, a field of more than five dozen elite college basketball teams is being whittled down as the countdown begins to the annoyingly alliteration-afflicted Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four. The national championship game will be in Indianapolis, Ind., on April 6.

So consumed are Americans with these two competitions that ordinary life has been altered. One example will suffice: A prominent Washington couple made two reservations for dinner on April 4 – one at 5:30 in case Duke, which is likely to advance to the Final Four, plays the late game that night, and one at 8:30 in case the Blue Devils, as the team is known, plays the early game. (Duke's admissions rate last year was under 11 per cent. Harvard, which had an admissions rate last year of just under 6 per cent, was admitted to the college basketball tournament for the fourth straight year but everyone acknowledged that its chances of advancing to the Final Four was well under 6 per cent.)

These two games match Americans' obsession with both elitism and numbers – and are examples of how the one bolsters the other.

Six of the eight Ivy League colleges had admissions rates of under 10 per cent last year. I'm not the only Ivy graduate (Dartmouth College Class of 1976) who walks the earth with the devout but humbling conviction that my chances of admission to my alma mater's Class of 2019 would be, well, nil. (Dartmouth has not been selected to the NCAA basketball tournament for 56 years, though its Big Green teams lost the championship games in 1942 and 1944, the latter in a tough overtime game against Utah.)

No one really believes that the college admissions game is particularly honest (alumni children get a big advantage) or healthy (loads of terrific kids are about to have their hearts broken), and the revolt against it is almost an annual ritual.

This year's rebellion is being led by New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who has just come out with a book whose title (Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be) deftly explains its contents. Mr. Bruni is a graduate of the University of North Carolina. (Here I must add that North Carolina barely defeated Harvard, 67-65, in the first round of this month's basketball tournament. UNC had an admissions rate of 29 per cent last year, which puts it in elite company among state universities.)

Mr. Bruni's critique has been embraced in every corner and will likely be ignored in every high-school guidance office. It is almost impossible to avoid his finding – it has been cited in scores of publications and blogs – that only one of the chiefs of the top 10 American businesses is a graduate of an Ivy League college. But it is also almost impossible to stem the flood of applications to these institutions and their college cousins. Last year, Stanford received 42,167 applications. It rejected 95 per cent of them.

One of the reasons the acceptance  rates are so low: Increasing numbers of colleges accept the Common Application, a one-stop form that allows students to apply simultaneously to multiple colleges, even those where they don't have a prayer of prevailing. (Hey friends! I applied to Cornell! I might be the next Ken Dryden!) That is skewing the admissions process, as is the outsized attention given to college rankings, particularly those of USNews and World Report, which publishes an annual edition that rates the colleges and universities.

For two more weeks, the college basketball tournament will provide something of a distraction. It also reduces work productivity and warps the usual patterns of behaviour.

Just last week, I asked a friend to join me at the Notre Dame-Northeastern game being played a few blocks from our office. He turned down the $88 ticket (online auction value: many times that amount) in an instant. The reason: He'd rather sit at his desk and watch multiple games on television – switching channels furiously during time-out breaks – than be confined to watching only one game in person. (By the way, his team, Oklahoma, won its first two games.)