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Undergraduate Admissions Uncensored

The Birthrate Crisis, and How Colleges Should Respond

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The biggest stumbling block in education research is its lack of replicability.  In science, the same amount of vinegar plus the same amount of baking soda gives you the same result—and the same-sized result—no matter who does the experiment.  But take someone else’s methods and teaching materials, implement them the exact same way the first experimenter did, and you will likely get nothing even close to the same result.

A happy exception to this “it’s never the same” rule occurred in the 90s, when a number of studies showed, time after time, there was a way to significantly improve student learning—and it had nothing to do with changing curriculum, retraining teachers, or extending the school day.  This swath of studies showed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the best way to improve student learning—especially in grades K-3—is to follow the magic recipe of 15 students or less with one teacher in one classroom.  Do that, and great things happen.

What has happened to this rare pillar of education reform?  Well, not much.  Once the magic recipe was discovered, administrators scoffed at the idea of dropping class size that low.  For that matter, so did taxpayers, who didn’t take long to realize that lower class size meant more classrooms and more teachers—and both cost more money.  As a result, education has largely turned its back on this piece of magic, except for some not-so-clever administrators who believe they can keep 30 kids in one classroom with a teacher and an aide and still maintain the ratio.

Since all three parts must be honored, this would be like doubling the baking soda and eggs in a cookie recipe without increasing the amount of flour.  You get something different, but you don’t get better cookies.  The magic recipe failed on its promise to deliver because the people in charge of schools—administrators and taxpayers—decided the change wasn’t worth the cost, offering instead some sleight of hand with ratios that satisfied most everyone, largely because Americans really don’t understand mathematics.

The leaders of our higher education systems are on the verge of making a similar error, with far more serious consequences.  It’s no secret that the birthrate in the US declined about 20 years ago, and is headed for a serious nose dive of the number of high school graduates in about 2025.  Since this isn’t exactly new news, one would think colleges would be looking at these numbers and saying something like “Fewer high school graduates means fewer college freshmen.  What should we do about it?”

Like the K-12 class size issue, the answer here is pretty easy.  No every high school senior goes to college right after high school, so there’s plenty of room to increase the number of college-bound seniors, and still maintain strong college enrollments.  The trick here lies in talking to students who don’t see college as part of their futures, and getting them to change their minds. If every high school student already went straight to college, this couldn’t be done; but that just isn’t the case.

As is often the case with answers that appear easy, this one has at least one major snag.  A very close read of most college recruiting literature shows it’s based on one big assumption; the student or family reading the literature is already convinced a four-year college is the answer for them, and they now simply need to sort out which ones they’ll consider.  They know about testing and application essays and degree requirements and different application deadlines, so it isn’t a question of “If College”.  It’s a question of “What College”.

Any student unsure about the benefits of four-year colleges would look at this admissions information and feel like they’ve walked into the middle of a three-hour movie; they know they have some catching up to do, but no one seems to want to help them, since they’re too busy watching the movie themselves. Given that mindset, you’d think most colleges—especially those that experienced freshman enrollment declines of up to 40 percent during COVID—would move heaven and earth to make sure they don’t end up as losers in the birthrate lottery.  A few new pamphlets, a different kind of open house, a new video or two, and a little admissions training, and you’re all set.

To date, that has not been the response of the higher education community.  Senior admissions officials tell me the general overall response has been to double down on an admissions strategy that includes making their institution the best choice, a strategy that turns what could be a bona fide effort at expanding college access into a zero-sum game.  This approach seems to glean support from the national papers who have always covered college admissions like there are only 25 colleges in the country.  The more “Ivies Report Record Application” stories they print, the more they feed the attitude that asks the question “Enrollment problem?  What enrollment problem?”

The real irony here is that the creation of a “Why College?” campaign for students new to the idea is fairly affordable and relatively easy.  Colleges that have like-minded missions and student bodies tend to be in the same athletic league.  Imagine what could happen if all colleges in one league pitched in a couple of admissions officers and a modest amount of cash to create, for example, The Big Ten Guide to the Benefits of College.  Since the goal of the campaign is informational, this wouldn’t constitute monopoly-building, and could even be overseen by the US Department of Education, which has a vested interest in making sure the college market doesn’t shrink.

The magic recipe of 15 students didn’t generate the results it was capable of for one reason—in the end, most people didn’t really care about fixing the problem.  The difference with the birthrate decline is that a lack of students means more than a few colleges will wither, or even die.  That would be a shame, but the only way to get something different is to do something different.  Are colleges wise enough to realize this, and innovate?

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.

 

What Needs to Change in College Admissions

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The ups and downs of the quarantine gave college admissions officers and school counselors a taste of application life to come, as the birth rate for high school graduates continues to slide, and the need to develop new approaches to recruit students increases.  As the profession continues to try and improve college access, and knowing that small differences can make a big difference, here are some considerations for both sides of the desk to ponder this summer over a well-deserved glass of lemonade:

Colleges—move your deadline dates.  November 1 (early applications), January 1 (regular applications), and May 1 (many deposits) are all big dates in the college application world—and they all fell on a Sunday or a holiday this year.  I don’t understand this, since the admissions offices weren’t open, and the vast majority of high school seniors had no access to counselors or other application helpers the day of and before the deadlines.

This needs to change.  Yes, students need to be responsible, and should learn to plan ahead—but perhaps that lesson is better applied to deadlines for things they’ve done before (like papers), not with things they are doing for the first time (like applying to college).  The first Tuesday in November, the second Tuesday in January, and the first Tuesday in May would solve this problem nicely, increasing the quality and quantity of applications to boot. Georgia Tech made the move, and they get kaboodles of applications.  It’s an easy, but important, change.

High Schools—stop working holidays.  Moving the January 1 deadline to a date when high schools are in session is also overdue for school counselors, who have taken a serious shellacking this year with all the student mental health issues arising from COVID.  School counselors have always been overworked, but never able to use the December holidays to recover, since they were expected to help their students make January 1 college deadlines.

It’s time to take a stand.  Assuming the colleges move their deadlines, counselors need to learn to let go.  Send a note to all senior families early in November, letting them know your vacation is—well, a vacation.  If you really can’t let go of your students for that long—or if the colleges unwisely cling to January 1– set two days of vacation for online office hours, and take a breath all the other days.  You have mastered online office hours this year.  Let them be your friend.

Colleges—keep innovating.  One (and perhaps the only) upside of the quarantine was the ability of college admissions offices to adapt major chunks of their traditional approach to recruitment. Test optional, drive-thru tours, and online high school visits suggested it might be OK for everyone to get their hopes up, that some real college admissions reform was in the air.

Yes.  Well.

In a post-vaccine world, we see more signs of returning to “normal” than creating new normal.  Reinventing the entire admissions process is no easy feat, to be sure, but how hard might it be for admissions offices to spend half a day this summer doing “What ifs” to one part of the application process?  Do that for five years, and you have a new admissions paradigm, and a more accessible one—the thing you say you keep wanting.

High schools— mental health and college access aren’t either/or.  I will legitimately blow my top if I read one more post from a high school counselor insisting that the increase in COVID-related mental health needs makes it impossible to do any effective college counseling.

School counseling as a profession has long been showing a mental health bias at the expense of quality college counseling, and this year just seems to have widened the gap.   Counselor training programs plant the seeds of this bias— training programs devote about 7 classes to mental health training, and none to college counseling—and all of this must stop, if only because the dichotomy is a false one.

Discouraged, depressed high school students light up like a hilltop church on Christmas Eve when I tell them college gives them a fresh start to life and learning, proof enough that college counseling affects mental health.  That, plus the American School Counselor Association says college counseling is part of the job.  Counselors truly are overworked, so they can’t do everything they want in any part of counseling.  That said, college can still be part of a key to a better self.  More counselors need to see that, and act on it.

Everyone—stop beating up on the Ivies.  The Ivies and their equally tough-to-get-into institutions largely decided to go test optional this year.  For some reason, this gave a lot of students with B averages the hope that they too could pahk the cah in the yahd, now that they didn’t have to reveal their test scores.

So—more students applied to the Ivies this year than last year.  The Ivies didn’t admit more students this year than last year.  That means their admit rate had to go down, and more students were denied.

That isn’t news—it’s math.  And if you want to blame the Ivies for encouraging students to apply who didn’t really stand a chance of getting in, you’re going to need to make a thousand more jackets for that club.  If you think the Ivies take too few Pell-eligible students, say that.  If you think they admit too many legacies, stay that.  But don’t beat them up for proving the laws of basic ratios.  Any other college in their shoes would have to do the same thing. (Besides, it’s the national media who has left our society with the impression that there are only 25 colleges in America.)

Everyone—about Kiddos.  It’s no secret that college is largely a time of youth, especially with the expansion of adolescence into the early twenties and beyond. But college is also a time to help young people embrace the opportunities of adulthood, skills and attitudes that sometimes require setting the desires of self to one side.

This goal would be more easily achieved if we saw students—and if they saw themselves– as capable of embracing a larger sense of self by referring to them as students, not Kiddos.  They don’t need to grow up in a hurry or, with the right kind of help, succumb to the media images of college choice as a high stakes pressure cooker.  But they also need something more than just a pat on the head and a verbal affirmation that’s the equivalent of a lollipop. Let’s try calling them students.

COVID Changed Admissions a Little.  Let’s Change it More.

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This isn’t the week to be a high school student.  Statewide assessment is going on  across the country, and thanks to social distancing policies, at least some students are taking the ACT on gym bleachers, six feet apart, straddling a wooden plank across their legs and using it as a desk.  Among other things, the results of this ACT will be used in some states to decide which  students get merit scholarship money.

Students in Michigan are about a month away from likely doing the same thing.  State officials reached out to the US Department of Education and asked for a waiver from the required testing in this year of  COVID mayhem.  Apparently the request got there when Betsy Devos was still in charge, because it was denied.

School counselors really thought we had won the day when over 1350 colleges decided to continue their test-optional admission policies for this year’s juniors—in fact, many colleges have extended this policy for an additional two years.  This kind of extension takes a little bit of courage, since it was made before colleges finished the current admissions cycle.  Either they’re hoping for the best, or they’re seeing what so many colleges have long known—testing doesn’t mean all that much, and once you no longer have it,

In our delirium, it seems we forgot to talk to government officials, who are asking for test results that are sure to disappoint.  Early test results in the last year show student achievement is down.  That may be for all kinds of reasons, but when you make a student take the ACT on their lap, it’s pretty likely that’s not going to show their best effort—so we can expect to see more of the same.

School counselors aren’t a greedy bunch by nature, but there are more than a few that look at the adoption of test optional policies and sigh.  It was just a year ago when more than a few college admissions wonks—deans and directors included—were truly excited at the prospect of creating a brand new admissions system that was cleaner, fairer, and easier.  Ample articles are out there showing how wealth skews every single tool used in the current system, from grades to test scores to essays to letters of recommendation to extra curriculars.  When the COVID quarantine came along, veteran admission watchers thought “At last!  Here’s the big thing that’s going to require us to rethink the whole process.”

That didn’t exactly happen. Since many of the changes affecting admissions also affected campus life and methods of instruction, college administrators were too concerned with keeping beds full and classrooms open to consider changing most admissions policies.  Figuring out how to build a class without test scores proved to be challenging enough; changing anything else was perceived to be a dice roll no one could take right now, unless they were willing to risk the college’s entire future on it.

There’s still a lot to do to bring in this fall’s class, but it isn’t too early for colleges to hunker down now and think about The Big Move they didn’t have time for this year.  Understanding that most admission changes are glacial, admission offices can use the lessons they learned from the quick change to test optional and build on them with a more strategic approach for other changes.  This could lead to a new model of admission for this year’s high school sophomores.  It’s already clear most colleges that went test-optional aren’t going to go back.  Top that decision off with some strategic planning, and careful study of some schools who did make huge strides this year (I’m looking at you, UCLA), and there’s still a chance to either even the playing field of admission, or openly admit it isn’t even, and develop the protocols needed to create the exceptions that will make it more fair.

Meanwhile, if someone could just tell government policy makers why they went test optional, and why it makes sense for states to do so as well?  They might as well make the students complete the tests with quill pens.

College Counseling: The Year in Review

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There are many years in the college counseling world that come and go without a lot of fanfare, but this certainly wasn’t one of them.  Thanks to America’s ever-growing fascination with the college application process, counseling received more than its share of the limelight in 2019.  Here are the highlights:

The Scandal Known as Varsity Blues  Leave it to a small group of parents with way more dollars than sense, and a con man feigning to be an independent college counselor, to create even more angst over selective college selection than ever before.  Since this story involved Hollywood, money, and some of the three schools the New York Times considers representative of the world of college admissions, way too much time and energy was devoted to understanding what this kerfuffle meant to college admissions as a whole. The average high school senior takes the SAT once and goes to college within 150 miles of home.  Varsity Blues meant nothing to them.  The same should have been true for the rest of us; instead, this issue is now running neck and neck with Popeye’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich for the year’s Story That Wasn’t Award.

Change to NACAC Ethics Code It made fewer headlines, but the Justice Department’s investigation into NACAC’s Code of Ethics could prove to have far more implications to the college plans of seniors than Varsity Blues could hope to.  With colleges now allowed to offer incentives for students to apply early, and with colleges able to continue to pursue students who have committed to another college, the May 1 deposit date is still in effect, but may prove to have significantly less effect.

 College Testing and the University of California  The value of the SAT and ACT popped up in the headlines all year, as even more colleges decided test scores no longer had to be part of their application process.  At year’s end, the test optional movement got a big media splash, as the University of California announced it was reviewing its testing policy.  Combined with a lawsuit filed against the UCs claiming the tests are discriminatory, it’s clear that business as usual in the college application process is on its way out.  Will more changes ensue?

The Harvard Case and Race  Affirmative action advocates celebrated a legal victory this fall when a court ruled Harvard’s admissions procedures do, and may, use race as a factor in reviewing college applications.  The case drew national attention in part because it was initiated by a group claiming Harvard didn’t admit enough students of Asian descent.  It’s likely to stay in the headlines when the decision is ultimately appealed to the US Supreme Court, a group that, as it currently stands, has been known to be highly skeptical of race-based programs—meaning this year’s lower court victory could be pyrrhic at best.

Improved Research on College Counseling  Academic research has never gotten its due in the world of school counseling, and that’s certainly true in the more specific field of college counseling.  That trend may be changing, as a report from Harvard lays the groundwork for a more data-based approach to measure the difference counselors make in their work.  The findings include an indication that counselors tend to be more effective in college counseling if the counselor was raised in the same area where they work, and, as a rule, are more helpful providing information to the student about the college the counselor attended.  The report suggests this may be due to undertraining in college admissions as part of counselor education programs– to which most of the counseling world replied, no kidding. Look for more to come here.

Billions More for More Counselors, But Who Cares  It’s hard to remember the need for more counselors was one of the favorite topics of the media just two years ago.  A sign of American’s true indifference—or short attention span—rests with a congressional bill that provides up to $5 billion for new school counselor positions, a bill that is currently languishing in committee.  Is this bill a victim of an absence of school shootings, impeachment, or both?  Given what it can do, is there really any reason this bill can’t be a focus of action in 2020? That’s really up to us.

 

 

Remembering Tom Weede, and Calling on the Next Tom Weedes

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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.

How and When to Thank Your Recommendation Writers

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While you should thank your teacher and counselor recommenders early and often during the college admissions process, make sure you go the extra mile with a December thank you gift.