Admissions Blog

Making a Calm College Decision

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Patrick O'Connor

This is typically the week many high school seniors are a little tense about their college plans. The last few colleges are sending out decisions this week, and they tend to be the colleges where the admit rates are a little less than getting struck by lightning, so the hopes are high, while the odds remain low.

Now that the big week is finally here, here’s a quick list of things you should focus on to make a quality decision for life after high school:

What you do with the college experience matters more than where you go. Most counselors save this advice for the end of articles like this, but these are unusual times. Chances are, if you’ve applied to a highly selective school, you have what it takes to do well there—it’s just that the college runs out of room before they run out of great applicants. This means that the talents, habits, interests, and way you look at the world has prepared you to do great things wherever you go. The college you attend won’t automatically make you a success; that will still be up to you. So your future will still be in your hands, no matter what the colleges have to say this week.

It looks like another record breaking year. There are fewer students graduating from high school this year, but that isn’t keeping many colleges from seeing new highs in applications—and some that are seeing declines are still admitting less than 20 percent of their applicants. Combined with an increase in the number of students many colleges took through early action and early decision plans, that leaves precious few seats to give out this week.

Yes, No, or Maybe, read the entire letter. A student I am close to—OK, it’s my son—was so happy to read he was admitted to his first choice school he didn’t bother to read page 2 of the acceptance letter. I did, and it’s a good thing, since it included information on the merit scholarship that made his attendance their possible. Other yes letters have information about when deposits are due, and those are important as well.

Letters that waitlist you are even more important to read, since staying on the list may require you to do something—email, send back a card, update your application—by a specific date. Even the letters of denial could give you information about transfer options that may now come into play. So read the letter from start to finish, and have a parent do the same.

Read, and update, your financial aid information. There’s a good chance all your colleges are going to be sending financial aid packages this week. These are based on the financial aid information you gave them two months ago, when the world was a quiet place, before the stock market lost 30 percent of its value—and possibly before you or your parents lost their job.

The only way a college will know your financial picture has changed is if you tell them, and this is college—so it’s not time to be shy. Pick up the phone, call financial aid, tell them your new story, and be ready to send supporting documents. You’re this close to making the dream real. Keep working.

File financial aid for the first time. It’s certainly true most colleges have given all their aid away to students who applied for it in February, but many of those students turn down packages, or go to a different school. If you now need help paying for college, get the forms in yesterday—check the college’s website to find out all the forms they need, and where you should send them. Calling to ask is an even better idea.

Ask for an extension to the May 1 deposit. Many colleges understand that this spring isn’t exactly normal, which is why they are moving their deposit deadlines to June 1 or later. If your college isn’t doing that, you can still call and request an extension for personal reasons. They might say no, but the only way they say yes is because you ask—kind of like the only way they admitted you is because you applied. Make. The. Call.

Apply to more colleges. Except for the Top 50, every college in this country is still taking applications for fall admission—and, as mentioned before, some will still have financial aid to offer you. If you’re looking at changing your college plans due to all the changes in the world, lots of colleges are eager to hear from you for the first time…

Consider transferring …and thanks to some pretty strong transfer options, you could still end up graduating from your dream school, even if you can’t start there. The best way to plan a transfer is to call the college where you want to finish, and ask about transfer options. Building the plan from the end means you know where to start, and what classes are best to take to minimize the credits you’ll lose when you make the shift. Ask for transfer admissions when you call.

Talk to your counselor. One upside of all of this is that counselors now have more time than ever to talk college with you, since they don’t have to do lunch duty. I know, I know—they have 8,000 students on their caseload, and they might not know you well. They will once you tell them who you are, and what you need—and that window is now more wide open than ever before. Most schools have sent students direction on how to reach out to counselors. As is the case with most things in life, what you do with that information is now up to you.

Remembering Tom Weede, and Calling on the Next Tom Weedes

Posted on July 16, 2019 by Patrick O'Connor

I could tell this was not going to be a typical meeting with a college representative. He walked into my office with absolutely no hurry, as if this was all he had to do all day, and talked about his school from the heart, not from a memory-committed checklist of things someone else told him to say. When I asked questions, he left a space between when I stopped talking, and when he started his answer, never once referring me to the school’s website, or the college catalog. This was clearly a guy who knew his school as well as he knew his middle name.

It was also notable that he didn’t talk about his school in some theoretical abstract. We do that a lot in college admissions, where we talk about a college in the third person, like it’s some kind of god. He mostly talked about the students at his school, what they were doing, what they liked about being there. He knew that’s what makes the college experience work for a student—who you go to school with. He wasn’t going to waste my time reciting scores and rankings, because Rugg’s could tell me about scores, and rankings were, well, pretty pointless. If you have time to talk with someone face-to-face, the conversation should be a giving of self, not of data, and that meant talking about things that mattered. What matters most in college is the students.

After he said everything he thought I should know, he got up and gave me his card. As I recall, he said something about how he’d like to hear from me, but the university had made it kind of hard to get hold of him, with a student aide and a secretary standing between him and every incoming call, but he urged me to persist. After he’d left, I read his card, and realized I’d just spent forty-five minutes talking to a Director of Admissions who had made a cold call to my high school.

That was my introduction to Tom Weede, who passed on earlier this month, leaving this world and our profession all the poorer. The outpouring of loss has come from all circles of our field, and it all contains one common message; Tom was the rare person who not only felt you mattered; he made sure you knew you mattered. He trusted you with his opinion, and trusted that you would step up and let him know how you felt in turn, even if you saw things differently. His advocacy in the profession was focused on students, and when he engaged you in conversation, you felt, as George Bailey once said, that he knew you all the way to your back collar button.

Tom’s come to mind quite a bit this summer, and not just because of his passing. I’ve been besieged by a number of students and parents flooding my office with requests to make college plans, and they’re all ninth and tenth graders. One father called and insisted he had to meet with me right away, since his son was a junior, and had no college plans at all. The student’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up. Turns out he was a sophomore, but since his father called the day after school was over, calling his son a junior made things sound more important, I guess.

That’s the kind of month it’s been. One parent wants to meet to talk about “college strategy,” another one is convinced his ninth grader’s chances at graduate school are already shot because the student has no plans for this summer. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the mania the media is peddling as college readiness, but it’s never hit the ninth and tenth graders like this before. Worse, it seems to be hitting their parents, and too many of them are succumbing to the herd mentality of college angst, abandoning their post as sentinels of their children’s youth.

If there’s any remedy to this, I’d like to think it’s the calm, listening voice of the Tom Weedes that are still with us. Tom did most of his preaching to admissions officers, and none of us were smart enough to ever ask him if he’d thought about saying this to kids and families. Since similar voices are doing the same thing, it’s time to ask them to broaden their scope, before SAT flash cards become the in gift for bar mitzvahs.

Voices like Ken Anselment, Heath Einstein, and Tamara Siler do a very nice job of reminding colleagues that that the college selection process is all about the kids. What’s needed now is for them to share their insights with a larger audience, giving kids permission to be kids. It would be a great way to honor Tom’s memory. Better still, it would be the right thing to do for our world.

U.S. News Reveals its Top 10 Undergraduate Business Programs of 2019

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Craig

U.S. News is teasing its popular Top Colleges edition with the release of the names of its 2019 top 10 Best Undergraduate Business programs. All of the programs included in the list are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Due to some ties, thirteen business programs appear on the list. See below for our thoughts.

2019 US News Top 10 Business Programs (Including Ties and Listed Alphabetically)
Carnegie Mellon University
Cornell University
Indiana University—Bloomington
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New York University
University of California—Berkeley
University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of Texas—Austin
University of Virginia

First Thought: Kelley at IU is by far the best back-door into America’s top business programs. It’s curriculum and graduates are highly respected by the on-campus recruiting community, which is where the action really is if you want to get a good job once you graduate. The admissions standards at Kelley, while they are far higher than they were ten years ago, are still far less onerous than those at any of the other undergraduate business programs on the list.

Second Thought: Cornell got what it wanted by reorganizing its business/hospitality programs in recent years. They are now regularly mentioned as one of only two Ivy League colleges in the big leagues in terms undergraduate business. Penn no longer has a monopoly on this designation, which is exactly what Cornell was aiming for with the revamp.

Third Thought: There is no excuse for a high-flying aspiring undergraduate business student not to have heard from at least a third of colleges on his or her list by February 1 if he or she is developing his or her college list correctly. Six colleges on the list below offer some form of Early Action (Michigan, UVA, UNC, Notre Dame, MIT) or Rolling Decision (IU). Meanwhile, UT offers Priority (11/1), and Penn, Cornell, NYU, and Carnegie Mellon offer Early Decision. Just as in the world of business, in the world of undergraduate admission, the early bird gets the worm! Get your act together early if you want to give yourself the best shot of admission into colleges deemed to offer the best business programs in the USA.

Final Thought: The list is definitely larger than last year when only ten colleges made this list because of a tie for seventh place. While more colleges are included, we are certainly happy to see the likes of USC and IU added over Boston College, Emory, Penn State and the like. From our experience there is a definite difference between both the quality of the student and the quality of the student experience at colleges included on the above list and colleges not making the list. U.S. should try to not include any more colleges than thirteen on this list in future years unless a current pretender dramatically alters its undergraduate programming and/or its admissions processes.