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A Primer for College Admissions Decisions

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We’re about three weeks away from the height of the release of college admissions decisions, the time of year when students pull their hair out either waiting to hear or musing over what they’ve heard.  Along with trying to ease student angst, college admissions veterans know they can expect an inbox full of articles featuring the following content:

  • Record High Applications at Highly Selective Schools
  • Highly Selective Schools Report New Lows in Admit Rates (yes, these two are related, but most Americans don’t understand this, thanks to the way we teach math in this country, so…)
  • Calls for Equity in Admissions Follow Record Application Year

We can expect these articles because they are written every year, partly to make an official record of what actually has happened, partly to supply some kind of solace to students who didn’t get the admissions news they had hoped (“See Son?  It was harder than ever to get in”) or to fatten the praise of those who did (“Wow!  I beat the odds in the Most. Competitive. Year. Ever!”)

To balance these “the sky is falling” articles, I write one that tries to keep everyone on an even keel, so they can provide some stability to the students and parents who are new at this, or who are doing it again, and forgot what it felt like the first time.  Hardly anyone notices the piece I write—it’s apparently more fun to be out there on rocky seas than to be safe in the harbor—but in the interest of trying to offer some support, here we go:

  • Not all applications are created equal. A college that reports a 5 percent admission rate doesn’t mean a particular student’s odds of getting in are 5 percent; it means the college admits 5 out of every 100 applications it receives.  Put another way, a student with a C average applying to Swarthmore doesn’t have the same “chance” of being admitted as a student with a 3.9.  Juniors should keep this in mind.
  • Much of the college experience depends far more on what the student puts into the experience than where they experience it. A former student was admitted to a Seven Sisters college, which then proceeded to gap her in financial aid.  She ended up at a public university, where she basically ran the Global Studies program where she earned a degree.  This included fulfilling her desire to do a semester abroad in South Africa, even though her college didn’t offer study abroad there.  She simply registered as a guest student at another college that did.  Tell me she would have had any of those opportunities at the Seven Sisters school.  Go ahead.
  • Notions of the need for change in the college admission process are overblown. It takes about 20 minutes to apply to most colleges, since they require neither essays nor teacher letters.  Since that’s about the same amount of time it takes to get to another level in Mario Brothers 812, it’s pretty safe to say most students can complete this task without life-altering stress.
  • Notions of change in the college admission process are simplistic, Part I. Admissions observers had a field day when COVID drove many competitive colleges to go test optional, a change that was gaining steam even before 2019.  Two years later, we now find a rise in “test optional strategies” from test prep advisors who will advise students on which tests to take, and which scores to send—all for a fee.  Similarly, we see some competitive colleges admitting fewer—far fewer—test optional students than those who submit scores, but deciding not to report that to the major public, since the “test optional” moniker is so highly valued.  The result?  A change that was supposed to make applying to college easier has made it harder in many cases, except at colleges where the admit rates were generous to begin with—and those are the schools where applying takes 20 minutes, and application reform wasn’t necessary.
  • Notions of change in the college admissions process are simplistic, Part II. Undeterred by the lack of real parity brought by many test optional policies, many reform advocates are now turning to essays and teacher letters of recommendation as the next parts to go in the current process.  This leads to two questions:
    • If you take out all parts of the current application process (some are even saying grades shouldn’t have to be reported), what do you replace them with?
    • Do you honestly think whatever you answered in the last question can’t also be gamed to favor the rich? Interviews?  Community Service?  Cake Baking?  Put any life experience or skill in the mix of college applications, and in a year, a horde of tutors will crop up that will give an edge to students who can afford their services.  That will be very hard to beat.
  • My annual plea for more counselor training in college counseling. If it’s safe to conclude that any admissions process will favor students who understand it, it’s reasonable to conclude it will favor any student who works with a counselor who understands it.  So, instead of changing the admissions process, how about leveling the playing field by making sure all counselors receive deep training in college counseling?  Less than 5 percent of all school counselor training programs devote any time to instruction in college counseling, and that sometimes only consists of how to register for the SAT.  Private school college counselors have greater access to professional development that keeps their already keen college counseling skills sharp.  Most public school counselors got their counselor training in a program that gave them no college counseling skills at all.  Which group needs to be better trained in the first place?

That should be all you need to make it through the media madness of the next month.  Release the hounds.

 

15 Liberal Arts Colleges Join Forces for Virtual Fair on the 15th

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Fifteen American liberal arts colleges are getting together for another year of what they are calling 15 on the 15th — a monthly virtual college fair.

Designed for international prospective students and counselors, the goal of 15 on the 15th is to provide the opportunity for students to get to know the fifteen participating institutions in-depth and at their own pace.

On the fifteenth day of each month, from March through December 2022, these fifteen colleges – including Bates College, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna College, Colorado College, Davidson College, Haverford College, Middlebury College, Oberlin College, Sewanee: The University of the South, Skidmore College, Smith College, Union College, Wellesley College, Wesleyan University, and Whitman College – will come together to offer “15 minutes of Tips” for the college application process followed by an hour-long virtual college fair. Each institution will have its own Zoom room for students to meet with an international admission officer and a current student or alum. The format will be the same every month yet there will be different opening topics and tips. This represents a great education and networking opportunity for students.

Those interested in participating should register here.

15 on the 15th: Liberal Arts College Across the U.S.
Virtual College Fair
9:45 a.m. – 11 a.m. Eastern Time
15th each month, March through December, 2022

Those interested only need to register once. Before each college fair registrants will receive a reminder email with the Zoom links to access the main webinar and each college’s room.

The 15 on the 15th website also includes each institution’s international admission officer’s contact information and links to school-specific virtual program offerings.

It’s about to pay a little more to be poor at Colby

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Colby College has announced the creation of the Weiland Welcome Grant through which incoming first-year students in the Class of 2026 and later with an expected parent or guardian contribution of $0 will receive $1,250 in free money in addition to financial aid to address unexpected expenses such as technology needs, course materials, or travel home.

Colby’s generosity to those of relatively modest financial means is being made possible by a three million dollar gift from Trustee Emerita Nancy Weiland ’65 and Andrew Weiland ’64.  The newly created endowed fund is an extension of the Colby Commitment, which ensures the most talented students from all backgrounds have access to the best possible education.

Recent changes at Colby have opened doors for more students from all backgrounds to attend the Waterville, Maine liberal arts college, none more so than an increase in the financial aid from twenty-eight million dollars in 2014 to fifty-two million dollars in 2021. Colby is also among a small group of colleges that meets 100 percent of demonstrated need without student loans. Among first-year students in the Class of 2025, eleven percent are projected to be the first in their families to graduate from college, and more than 100 are Pell Grant recipients, triple the number of students receiving Pell Grants from only several of years ago, said Randi L. Arsenault ’09, Colby’s dean of admissions and assistant vice president of admissions and financial aid.

In unrelated, but somewhat ironic news, Colby has also recently announced that it has acquired two private islands in the Gulf of Maine where renowned American artist Andrew Wyeth painted some of his greatest works.

Ten Unique and Memorable College Acceptance Gifts for All Personality Types

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The hard part – the sweating over grades, exams, and essays and the agonizing wait for decisions – is over. The big moment has arrived – and it is a triumph! It is time to celebrate. Champagne corks are popped; yet, now the question is, what gift should be purchased for the college-bound student? Sadly, gift giving has increasingly become a lost art, so we’ve selected ten neat gifts organized by student personality that will make recently-accepted college students’ hearts swell with pride.

1. Preppy

If the lucky student was admitted to an old-line traditional school with lots of ivy decorating the buildings and he or she has a good sense of humor, then the student will need to brush up on the essentials of proper etiquette outlined in the classic Preppy Handbook:

2. Old Fashioned

Anyone can buy a t-shirt or hoodie in the college bookstore, but a me-too gift is boring. Want to be distinctive? How about throw-back designs on T-shirts featuring vintage school images like the one below, which is a 1960 version of Georgetown. Available for many schools.

3. Hipster

If the student is hip, how about a cool banner to hang in his or her dorm room?

4. Discerning

Maybe something a little more elegant. How about a Halcyon Days box?

5. Gamer

Maybe the incoming student is a STEM major and a gamer. In that case, a version of Monopoly customized to their school is on point so he or she can learn the names of buildings and streets on campus.

6. Artistic

These whimsically illustrated items would be the perfect gift for the artiste. Offered by the California-based catstudio, they make bags, glasses, pillows, towels, art prints and more for hundreds of schools.

7. Fashionista

If the rising freshman has a great sense of fashion and style and you have a big budget, then an elegant watch with the school’s logo on it might fit the bill for her.

8. Sporty

If the student is going to a big football school, then they will need lots of apparel to wear to the games. How about a customized jersey with the student’s name on it? Available for scores of schools.

9. The Type A

Is the grad a natural worrier or type A personality who likes to have anything thought through beforehand? Then, The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College by Harlan Cohen is the perfect gift, and a New York Times bestseller.

10. All Types

A customized gift box from Etsy tailored to your recipient puts the perfect finishing touch on your gift(s).

 

The above post was sponsored by Collectable Ivy, specialists in collegiate memorabilia. For a fuller selection of unique, vintage, and special gift items, check out the thousands of items at CollectableIvy.com.

Notre Dame Accepts Only 17% Early Action As Record Number Apply

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University of Notre Dame saw the number of students who applied via its Restrictive Early Action (REA) plan skyrocket this fall. A record 9,683 students applied to Notre Dame Restrictive Early Action in 2021. In 2020 7,744 students applied to Notre Dame Restrictive Early Action. That represents an over 25% increase in just one year.  Those applying to Notre Dame Restrictive Early Action have until May 1 to deposit and were able to apply to other colleges with Early Action programs but they were not allowed to apply concurrently via other colleges’ binding Early Decisions plans.

Yet, despite far larger numbers of REA applications to review, Notre Dame only accepted two more students REA in 2021 than it did in 2020; Notre Dame accepted 1,673 REA applicants in 2020 versus 1,675 REA applicants in 2021. This means that Notre Dame’s Restrictive Early Action acceptance rate dropped from roughly 22% to 17% in just one year, which helps bolster Notre Dame’s place in the realm of hyper-selective U.S. universities.

Meanwhile, a full 30% of REA applicants were accepted without submitting scores from the ACT or SAT. This is a huge change from just two years ago when scores from either the ACT or SAT were required of all admitted applicants. A full 46% of REA applicants to Notre Dame in 2021 applied without submitting test scores.

Unusual among many other selective U.S. universities, Notre Dame also shared that of those students accepted Restrictive Early Action in 2021 there are roughly even numbers of Asians/Pacific Islanders (12%), International students (12%), and Black students (10%).

Notre Dame released REA admissions decisions on Thursday, December 16, 2021, at 6:42 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, in a nod to the university’s founding year of 1842. Of the admitted student pool, 1,204 high schools are represented, including 43% public, 40% Catholic, and 18% private. A full 26% of accepted students indicated intended majors in the College of Arts and Letters, 22% in the College of Engineering and School of Architecture, 24% in the Mendoza College of Business, and 28% in the College of Science.

Typically, Notre Dame admits between 1,600 and 1,800 in its REA pool and a larger number in its Regular Decision pool, which this year has an application deadline of January 1, 2022. Last year, 1,768 students who were deferred during the REA round eventually earned admission during the Regular Decisions admissions cycle. This year, 1,599 REA applicants were deferred.

 

Yale’s Early Action Acceptance Rate Rises As Fewer Apply

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What goes up must come down. Yale, which saw its largest ever Single-Choice Early Action applicant pool in 2020, experienced a noteworthy decline in Early Action apps this fall.

The New Haven, Connecticut Ivy received 7,288 Single-Choice Early Action applications during the Fall 2021 admissions cycle, which is down nine percent compared to last year when Yale had 7,939 apply using the university’s Single-Choice Early Action plan. The 651 fewer applications this year indicates that the fanfare surrounding Yale’s decision to go test-optional may be wearing off.

As a result, Yale’s EA acceptance rate increased slightly from 10.5% in 2020 to 11% in 2021.

Meanwhile, this year (2021) 31% of students who applied through early action were deferred for reconsideration in the spring, 57% were denied admission, and 1% of applications were withdrawn or incomplete. Last year (2020) 50% of students who applied through early action were deferred for reconsideration in the spring, 38% were denied admission, and 1% of applications were withdrawn or incomplete.

Newly minted accepted Yale students have until May 2, 2022 to reply to their offer of admission. Traditionally, the vast majority of those accepted go on to matriculate.

Tulane Early Action Admit Rate Plummets to 10%

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Jeff Schiffman, Tulane’s former director of undergraduate admission, may be gone, but elements of his transparent approach live on as Tulane has recently shared some interesting data points relating to its Early Decision and Early Action admits for its undergraduate Class of 2026.

Decisions for Tulane Early Decision applicants were released on November 22 and decisions for Early Action applicants will be released on Monday, December 20 at 5:00 p.m. EST. According to Owen Knight, Tulane’s Director of Admission Engagement, the university expects between fifty-five and fifty-eight percent of next year’s freshman class to be comprised of Early Decision students. Due to the fact that Tulane over-enrolled last year and saw a twenty-five percent increase in the percentage of students accepting the offer of admission over the previous year, Tulane will be admitting a jaw-dropping 1,650 fewer Early Action (EA) applicants this year. This will speed up a trend of EA at Tulane becoming hyper-selective, especially relative to how the admissions plan used to be at Tulane prior to Tulane bringing back ED a few years ago.

As a result, Tulane anticipates marginally more offers of admission for deferred students and Regular Decision applicants than in the past. The overall admission rate for Early Action applicants is just ten percent, which is half the EA admission rate in 2017.

Overall, Tulane is planning for its Class of 2026 freshman class to be roughly 1,750 students.

Forty-six percent of Tulane’s Early Action admitted students for the Class of 2026 identify as BIPOC, which is a 70% increase, over twenty-seven percent of students who identified as such in 2017.

Knight also notes that Early Decision II is currently available through January 12 for students who are starting a new application for admission or for students who have already applied Early Action. Students who have already applied may switch to EDII via their Green Wave portals.

 

 

 

How to Avoid Bad Pre-College Programs

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Not all summer opportunities for high school students are created equal! Learn how to select pre-college programs or other summer activities that will help your chances of college admission.

January Application Deadlines Are Just a Bad Idea

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The story is worth hearing, and even listening to again.  You came home from college for the holidays, and Mom or Dad was preparing the traditional roast.  You’d somehow eaten this dish a thousand times without ever seeing it prepared, so you were horrified and fascinated to watch them lop off a half pound or so from the back of the roast and toss it in the trash—perfectly good food.  You composed yourself enough to make asking why they did this sound downright casual.  “My mother made it this way” was the response—and it was just too convenient that the mother in question was also in the room.  “That’s right” she added, “and my mother made it the same way.”

The resolution of the issue had to wait until Sunday, when great grandmother joined the family for dinner.  Seated at the table with the roast right in front of everyone, the sensory elements were perfectly aligned to ask the question- why cut the roast?  “I learned to do that from my mother.  The pan we had was too small for a full roast, so we always had to trim it to size.”

And there is the fascination.  No other generation had the same limitation of pan or oven, but the roast trimming continued without questioning or consideration for three generations.

It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to consider just how many implications this tale of roast trimming exist in college admissions, and nowhere is that more clearly the case than with application and notification deadlines.  Long before any kind of Internet presence, January 1 was an application deadline for hundreds of colleges.  Remarkably enough, this pre-high tech deadline didn’t make much sense even back then, since the deadline was a postmark deadline, but post offices were never open on New Year’s Day—in fact, depending on how small your town was back then, post offices across smalltown America were hard to find open after noon on the 31st.

Postmark deadlines are now a thing of the past, but there are other issues to consider with January 1.  A clear number of high schools close for the holidays around December 23 if not sooner.  This leaves most students largely on their own to put the finishing touches on the first major, multi-component task they’ve had to negotiate in their young lives—that, or it compels counseling offices everywhere to assemble some makeshift effort to offer support here and there at a time when counselors most need a break of their own. (Although there was one high school who was floating a “guarantee” that every counselor would check their email every day of the December break, thus denying everyone a chance to rest and recover.  Talk about a happy new year…)

Even the efforts to offer some kind of support over vacation can miss the mark, especially for students who are the first in their family to apply to college.  I am not a disciple of the “applying to college is rocket science” school, nor do I believe young people learn much about deadlines by treating them like they are amorphous, when they are not.  Still, given that this is the first major multi-tasking activity most young people have that has a fairly big consequence attached to it, it isn’t unreasonable to hope the deadline would permit them the chance to have counsel—and even more important, face-to-face support—to complete the task, something a finger-wagging “just plan ahead” overlooks in a brazen, cold way.  If we then add on the fact that nearly every admissions office is empty and unavailable for student support on January 1st, it’s easy to see every director of admission with carving knife in hand, ready to lay waste to a couple of pounds of perfectly good applications, all in the name of “we’ve always done it this way.”

At the risk of sounding like someone who has never run or even worked in an admissions office, the answer seems simple—this is a practice that needs to stop.  The easiest alternative would be requiring all materials to be submitted by the second Tuesday in January, a time when even the most luxurious of December vacations is over, where students have had time to seek the help they need, and everyone has had time to refresh their energies in a meaningful way.  Doing something challenging doesn’t mean it has to be inhumane, and the family man in me suggests that, for as much as I value the lessons learned in applying to college, there are more important things to consider over the holidays, like developing a strategy for a successful entry in the annual family gingerbread building contest.  This is the final holiday of youth, and it deserves recognition, and space, as such.  It’s possible to do that and develop a strong college portfolio, given the right deadline.

This isn’t the only deadline that could use some attention.  November 1, November 15, and May 1 all landed on a Sunday last school year, leaving students with a couple of days to do the best they could with what little they knew.  Again, this is especially true for students whose family has no experience applying to college.  Since these students tend to come from urban and rural schools where counseling ratios are typically astronomical, it’s easy to hope colleges would want to nurture applications from these populations, rather than throw more barriers in the way of these talented, but raw, applicants.

There are many other facets of the college application process where roast trimming can apply, especially when considering every facet of the application is easier for students who come from a background of wealth.  This aspect seems easy enough to start with, since its effects are easy enough to understand.  Let’s put the January 1 deadline and its impact back in its sheath.

College Admissions Interview: Dress for Success

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There is something special about meeting someone at for an interview – especially later in the day or in the evening. If you find yourself scheduled for an interview with a college on your list, you’ve got to rise to the occasion style-wise.