Back to the original topic of the thread. College is a competition in some, but not all cases, and it is also a very different type of competition than, say, a race. There are open admissions, schools with very high admissions rates, etc, which are definitely not competitions of any type.
Even highly competitive places, like Harvard, aren’t a competition in the full sense of the term. They are competitions in that many are trying to get in, but only a few can, so every acceptance is at the expense of other people. However, unlike a “regular” competition, there is no set measure for “winning”. In a race, it is about speed, in a game, it’s about scoring. Even in, say, a writing competition, there is a rubric with different levels. Some schools do try and set up a “rubric”, but even there, the scoring very subjective beyond the initial culling. So there is a strong element of selection as well. So many students are chosen, not because they scored high an any particular elemental in the school’s rubric, but because they fulfilled a specific need, , checked a particular box, or simply made an admissions person say “wow, that’s cool”.
Even the competition part is more like figure skating than like a marathon or a soccer game.