An observation (which could be totally off base- I’ve only been to Lakewood once and basically everything I know about it is from people who live there):
I think that this situation and the shidduch crisis can be compared in one aspect, which actually comes from Lakewood- everyone’s looking for the same thing.
Lakewood has been growing more and more diverse over time. But it’s still seen both in its eyes and the public eye as an Ir HaTorah, with a social system based on that, even as people move in from other places, change personally, etc.
Somewhere like Brooklyn, or Monsey (where I live), when parents are looking for a school, they look for one that matches their child, one that matches their hashkafa on an individual level. In fact, for many it’s the other way around- schools will accept them, but parents will choose other schools if they don’t feel that it’s the right fit. I would not have been happy in many of the stricter BYs where I live, and I therefore didn’t apply to them and didn’t go to them and felt no stigma because of it.
In Lakewood, everyone’s expected to be a similar type. There is much much much less of a spectrum, and what spectrum there is isn’t so much on hashkafa or values but on prestige, for whatever reason. Every school is expected to have basically similar values. The families too are meant to have similar values, whether they do or they don’t, and either way it’s a bad situation- if they do fit in the mold, then there has to be some kind of groping for a TINY difference to set people apart, because you really CAN’T fit every kid in the same school, and if they don’t, then they have to make it into the “right” schools so that people think that they do. Because it is a community ideally based on a certain ideology, there is precious little room for variance. And, therefore, there is much more at stake when it comes to getting into “the right” school because there is some kind of an ideal which must be worked up to, while in other communities, the ideal is more what works for you. (No, it’s not that simple entirely, there’s peer pressure everywhere, but not like THIS.)
Of course, the same thing happens in the shidduch system, as every girl runs herself ragged looking for the same kind of guy, as every guy fits into the same mold and spends nights looking through practically identical looking resumes of girls who also are squeezing themselves into that box, and the distinctions are like a chut hase’arah.