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College Application Completion Playlist: Top 20+ Tracks to Get Inspiration to Get Into College

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Picture it. You are all alone in your bedroom at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday night.

By day you are an overloaded high school senior year who feels dominated by IB or AP course assignments, juggling the responsibilities that come with leading four time-sucking extracurricular activities, and cramming to get an 800 on your fourth SAT Subject Test.

Unlike your classmates who could best be described as one or more of the following —

  • Ivy League legacies
  • Recruitable athletes
  • Paying unscrupulous New York, LA, or Palm Beach consultants to write their applications for them
  • Paying dastardly ‘doctors’ to write faux concussion, migraine, or Crohn’s Disease sick notes for them in order to secure very real SAT or ACT extended time testing accommodations
  • Underrepresented minorities who, ironically, also happen to be children of doctors, lawyers, bankers, bureaucrats, or other assorted white collar professionals
  • Full-pay international students
  • Completely disinterested in college (and, as a result, probably far smarter than you give them credit for)

— you are going to have to actually earn your way into an Ivy on your own! So, you find yourself staring at your computer screen at nearly midnight and into the abyss that is the Common Application filled with various application supplements that you have yet to complete.

By night, you must shift into truly high gear. You need inspiration. You are tapped out from doing summersaults throughout high school but you can’t afford to get tired now when there are so few spots at America’s ‘top’ colleges for students who actually have to earn their way into them on their own – with their own wits and moxie. Your fate will depend on your wisdom and your will – and whether or not a lot of legacies et al. are applying to your first choice college this year.

You have to work for at least two more hours to draft essays if your final essay drafts will ever be of the quality that they need to be to get you in. You turn to YouTube for a song or a soundtrack to pump you up; yet, most of the tracks that pop up aren’t capable of taking you to the level that you need to be at in order to pump out what you need to pump out tonight – and every night – between now and November 1, the date when you aim to submit all of your college applications to your one Early Decision, five Early Action, two Priority, and two Rolling admission colleges.

You turn to Google to find inspiration and you type in, “College Application Completion Playlists” or “Motivational Songs” or “EDM Motivation” or some other search query that gets you to this blessed page where you find yourself right now.

Lucky you.

Without further ado, here they are – the top 20+ tracks to have playing in the background as you complete your college applications, especially the essays, if you are serious about doing all that you can do to get in by virtue of your work ethic alone:

21. T-Pain – Best Love Song ft. Chris Brown

You really do need to consider your college application supplemental essays as individualized ‘love songs’ to each college on your list. If you write a generic love note or song to a potential love interest, he or she is not going to take your seriously, and the same goes with colleges getting a generic supplement from you. This track underscores the point that you are in the love song writing business until you are finished each and every app that has supplemental writing.

20. Johnny Nash – I Can See Clearly Now

That feeling you get either when your writer’s block clears or you realize the sun is rising and school starts in two hours.

19. Alex Gaudino feat. Crystal Waters – Destination Calabria

Because, let’s face it, even if you put in 200% effort over the coming nights, the “destination [is] unknown” and you very well may end up at Michigan or Wisconsin.

18. Ida Corr vs Fedde Le Grand Let Me Think About It (Extended)

What the heck is your favorite word and why? Come on UVA! “Let me think about it.”

17. Better Off Alone

No. You won’t be better off alone. The very thought of a gap year “alone” scares/inspires you to complete a better application during the dead of night. Plus, you can’t afford a gap year to find yourself like Malia or your lax-playing buddies.

16. Gina G Ooh Aah Just A Little Bit

This one’s good because it reminds you that one day this will all be over. You can do it! “Just a little bit” more.

15. Viola Wills – If You Could Read My Mind

Why can’t the admissions officers “just read my mind” instead of forcing me to communicate well in 650 words or fewer? After all, you’ve likely endured an extremely poor education in English throughout your K-12 career due to too many English teachers being focused on serving up critical theory rather than traditional literary analysis, strong writing instruction, or any sort of celebration of the best works of Western Civilization. By the way, there are a lot of versions of this song, but we chose this one because Viola Wills put her soul into it – just like you will need to put your soul into your apps.

14. Lighthouse Family – High

“When you are close to tears remember, someday it will all be over, one day we’re going to get so high!” Enough said, but don’t do drugs, even if it’s legal.

13. Don’t Stop Believin’

Don’t stop believin’ that you will get in…unless you are honest and of Asian heritage, in which case, just stop believing because the Ivies value ‘diversity,’ which is code for ‘they have more Asians than they currently wish to accept.’ Your only hope is the Supreme Court.

12. The Jacksons – Can You Feel It [Audio HQ] HD

Can you feel the acceptance notifications coming your way?

11. Cass Elliot – Make Your Own Kind of Music (HQ)

Because, really, you do need to be true to who you are and utterly unique if you are going to have any chance of getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale without any of the characteristics mentioned in that bulleted list above.

10. One Day More! – Les Misérables – 10th Anniversary Concert

Only play this one on October 31 – or the day before you know you will be finished your dastardly applications once and for all.

9. Michael Ball, Alfie Boe – He Lives In You (From “The Lion King” / Lyric Video)

Indeed, you must, “have faith” and “he does live in you!” You need to draw on generations of your ancestors to find strength. After all, if they could get through famines, wars, living without an iPhone, you can complete a few college applications.

8. Avicii – Levels

You need a good feeling or two right about now.

7. Jason Derulo – “Want To Want Me” (Official Video)

“It’s too hard to sleep…” Please, Columbia and Brown, I just “want you to want me”…despite you preferring well-connected social justice activists and loaded legacies…or better yet, those who check both of those boxes. :-/

6. Deorro x Chris Brown – Five More Hours (Official Video)

Whether you are up against the deadline on November 1 with just five more hours to go or “you are just getting started,” this one works.

5. P!nk – So What (Official Music Video)

“So, what?” Even if I have to go to Emory, “I’m still a rockstar!”

4. Bob Seger – Hollywood Nights (Lyrics)

At least you can comfort yourself knowing that you are not Aunt Becky or a Desperate Housewife out in “Hollywood” bribing the powers that be at USC for the honor of living in Compton for four years.

3. Let It Be (Remastered 2009)

Try your best and all, but maybe it’s time to just “let it be” and settle for Barrett Honors College at ASU?

2. Eric Prydz – Call On Me (Official Music Video) [HD]

You can always “call on me,” Craig Meister, the CollegeMeister, the best and most refreshingly honest college admissions consultant on the planet. Cue this EDM classic.

1. Kygo & Whitney Houston – Higher Love (Official Video)

Okay, it’s a complete visual knockoff of Eric Prydz’s song above, but the vocals are pure – early Whitney Houston – and the accompaniment is rock solid and by Kygo. And it’s 2019, so it’s current combined with classic. Not to mention the lyrics are perfect for ascending to the ‘higher’ level that you to need to reach in order to at least get into Cornell or Dartmouth.

P.S.: As you wait for your admissions decisions, or as an alternate to some of the options above, how about playing a one-hour constant loop of “High Hopes” by Panic! At The Disco?

P.P.S.: Do realize that the above list is completely subjective and somewhat satirical – just like the crazy college admissions process at America’s most selective colleges; therefore, I apologize in advance if your favorite songs didn’t make the cut, if you don’t get in where you want, and/or if you are offended. Life’s unfair like that. Just remember that if you don’t get in, you need to sing this one last song out loud whenever your friends – and frienemies – get into their top choices:

You will survive!

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.

Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough in College Admissions Either

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Earlier this month, I was trying to figure out what day it was.  Rather than look at the calendar, I simply looked at the College Admissions Facebook page on my computer screen.  There was one story about the record low admit rates at Ivy League colleges, four stories about how most colleges admit a vast majority of their applicants, and two or three reminders that it’s all about what you do in college, not where you do it.

“So” I said to myself, “it must be April 10th.” And I was right.

There is something equally comforting and disturbing about the college admissions grieving cycle. It begins in late March, when we all bemoan it’s easier to get struck by lightning than to get admitted to a selective school.  Even the recent admissions scandal, replete with movie stars and lots of cash, played right into the timing of the “ain’t it awful” phase.

Early April gives way to requests for help with aid packages and muffled cries for some kind of reform from the madness of the application process.  Mid-April begins the search for schools willing to accept great kids who somehow ended up with “nowhere” to go, and late April finds us back in the trenches, asking about colleges for really bright juniors who want to study Hungarian and elephants.

This is our version of thoughts and prayers.  Like legislators tackling school safety, we look at the misshapen blob college admissions has become long enough to be horrified, only to get swept away by the need to make the broken system work just one more time, if only for the benefit of next year’s hardworking seniors. Major changes are just too far out of reach, and minor changes make no palpable difference, so we sigh and carry on, hoping a thoughtful social media post or two will somehow turn the tide. Real change, it seems, is beyond our grasp.

It isn’t.  Like anything else that’s out of shape, moving in a new direction requires a little bit of time, and a ton of vision.  No one in this profession is short on vision; they’re stymied by how to bring that vision to life. Here are some starter ideas.

College Admission Personnel who want to open up college access have all kinds of small projects that, when regularly tended to, can take on lives of their own.

  • Buy lunch for someone on your student success team, and get an overview of their work.  What students are doing well once they’re on campus, and which ones aren’t? Is there anything your institution can learn from the success of Georgia State, understanding that student success is far more than a cut and copy endeavor? What does any of this mean about who you’re recruiting—and, more important, if they have no idea who’s succeeding and why, why not?
  • If you have two counselor fly-in programs, cut it to one.  Use the new-found money to hold a three-day College Counselor Workshop for any school counselor in your area with less than five years’ experience.  As a rule, counselor graduate programs teach nothing meaningful about college counseling.  You know the counselors who know their stuff, and you have a NACAC affiliate at your disposal.  Bring them in, and let them train your local rookies.
  • As long as you’re at it, have coffee with the director of your graduate counseling program, and ask them if you can have a three-hour class period to talk about college admission.  Most counselor educators will have the humility to admit they’ve been out of the college admissions game too long, so they’ll give you the time.  Bring along two of your favorite counselors, and the grad students will be begging for more.  If you don’t know what you’d do with those three hours, I have a program that’s in the box and ready to present, and you can have it.
  • Call a test-optional college that looks like yours and ask how it’s going. The argument that test optional is a ruse to raise average test scores means nothing to the bright kid heading to University of Chicago this fall who can’t even spell SAT.  If colleges that look like yours have figured out test scores mean nothing in the application of a straight A student– and they have– maybe your school could open things up, too.

High School Counselors  have eight bajillion kids on their caseloads and duties that have nothing to do with counseling.  That said, find a way to get to work twenty minutes early once a week, and pick one of these projects to work on:

  • Shoot an email to the professional development chair of your NACAC affiliate and volunteer to be a mentor.  Less than thirty graduate programs in the country devote a course to college counseling, and it’s showing.  What you know about this profession will be an oasis to a new counselor, and most of the mentoring can occur through email and phone calls.
  • Look at your messaging about college options.  Do you tell students and parents about test optional colleges, community colleges, or state colleges with amazing residential programs?  Use this time to bring yourself up to speed on the paths your students aren’t taking, then put together a plan for spreading the word to parents and students.
  • When’s the last time you talked college with your middle school and elementary mental health partners?  Opening up postsecondary options is as much a matter of changing the mindset of parents as it is presenting options to students—and if that’s starting in ninth grade, forget it.  Ask your NACAC affiliate for grant opportunities to strengthen your K-8 postsecondary curriculum, and build the partnerships needed to make it work.

No one in this business was surprised last month to discover the wealthy have an advantage applying to college. What may come as a surprise is how much we can change that dynamic by throwing our hearts behind that change with twenty minutes a week, giving tangible shape to our thoughts, prayers, and deepest hopes for this profession.

Penn’s Class of 2022 Acceptance Rates

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Eric J. Furda, University of Pennsylvania’s Dean of Admissions, provided high school counselors with a June update today, and in it he shared Penn’s three acceptance rates for the just-concluded admissions cycle.

Penn in the city of Philadelphia, PA.

Penn’s overall acceptance rate for this year’s roughly 44,500 applicants was a hair above 8 percent. Yet, this number tells only a small part of the story. Over fifty percent of Penn’s Class of 2022 was accepted Early Decision, and Penn’s Early Decision Acceptance rate this cycle was 18.5 percent. This meant that Penn’s third and final acceptance rate, it’s Regular Decision acceptance rate, was a paltry 6 percent.

In terms of ratios, this year’s numbers track well with Penn’s proclivity for having an Early Decision acceptance rate that weighs in at roughly three times as size (percentage-wise) as its Regular Decision acceptance rate (18.5:6).

Furda also shared information on the importance Penn places on fit it its applicants while also informing counselors that last year, 46 percent of Penn undergrads received financial aid. The average aid award last year was an impressive $50,348.

Villanova’s Acceptance Rate Falls to 29%

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Villanova University will release its Regular Decision admissions notifications on Thursday, March 22, 2018. Yet, before it does, the suburban Philadelphia university has shared with high school counselors important bits of information about its Class of 2022 applicant pool.

According to Michael M. Gaynor, Villanova’s director of undergraduate admission, Villanova received 22,727 applications for the 1,670 spots the university has allotted for first-year students entering this fall. 22,727 first-year applications represents a 7.65% increase in first-year applications from last year’s previous high.

In addition, Villanova began offering an Early Decision application option to students who applied this past fall. In its inaugural year, 24% of Villanova’s entering class will be admitted through the university’s new Early Decision program.

Villanova also still offers non-binding Early Action, and 12,677 Early Action applications were submitted this past fall.

As a result of its new differentiated admission options, Villanova’s overall acceptance rate has fallen to 28.8%. Last year, when the university only offered Early Action and Regular Decision, Villanova’s overall acceptance rate was 34.9%, and during the previous admission cycle, it was 43.2%. Long story short, Villanova has now joined many other colleges in using Early Decision to reduce its overall acceptance rate.

Of those students accepted, the middle 50% earned weighted high school GPAs on a traditional 4.00 scale between 4.10 and 4.48. Note that such GPAs are not final GPAs, but rather cumulative GPAs students’ earned at the time of their application submissions. Also, of those students accepted, the middle 50% SAT score range fell between 1380 and 1490 and the middle 50% score range on the ACT was between 32 and 34.

Finally, Gaynor notes that some Villanova majors are harder to get into than others. In particular, the most competitive programs were Biology, Business, Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, and Nursing.

Admissions and Financial Aid Statistics to Keep Close at Hand | UPDATED

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Stanford University

Students and parents often find transparency in short supply when navigating the US college admissions process and when trying to determine the methodologies American colleges and universities use award financial aid. Many students and parents will spend hours – if not days – trying to splice and dice statistics gleaned from various college websites and guide books in order to determine their chances of earning admission and/or aid to colleges on their lists.

Sadly, colleges and  universities themselves have done relatively little create user-friendly transparency; however, that hasn’t stopped independent educational consultants Jennie Kent and Jeff Levy from trying to bring a degree of order and transparency to the task of gauging one’s relative likelihood of earning admission to and aid from American colleges. In recent years the two consultants have put out annual lists with the latest statistics in three distinct categories:

  1. Early Decision vs. Regular Decision Acceptance Rates: Excel | PDF
  2. Domestic Undergraduate Need-Based Aid and Merit Aid: Excel | PDF
  3. Financial Aid for Nonresident Alien Undergraduates: Excel | PDF

While entire articles could be written – and one great one by Nancy Griesemer already has – about the valuable nuggets of knowledge found within these lists, of particular note are the three following findings:

– Many of America’s most selective colleges continue to have Early Decision acceptance rates that are triple their Regular Decision acceptance rates. This continues to spur the movement motivating students to apply using binding plans early in their senior years of high school. Some particularly high ED Acceptance Rate to RD Acceptance Rate ratios of note include University of Pennsylvania (3.3 to 1), Middlebury College (3.4 to 1), Claremont McKenna College (4.7 to 1), Carleton College (3 to 1), Amherst College (3.2 to 1), and American University (3.7 to 1).

– Domestic undergraduate applicants should look very carefully at the average need met by colleges and universities on their lists, especially if these colleges are public universities or somewhat selective private colleges, as they appear to have the widest range of disparities concerning how much need they meet. While hyper-selective colleges (Ivies and their immediate peers) meet 100% of domestic applicants’ demonstrated need, public schools meet between 45% to 99% of domestic applicants’ demonstrated need and selective private colleges generally meet between 60% to 100% of domestic applicants’ demonstrated need.

– International students have more need-based aid options than they did years ago, but the majority of aid opportunities for international applicants still derive from merit-based aid and not need-based aid. Public and private colleges awarded no aid to international applicants (Auburn, Clemson, Boston College, and Carnegie Mellon University among others), only merit-based aid to international applicants (Baylor University, Boston University, Cooper Union, Rice University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign among others), only need-based aid to international applicants (all Ivies, Colgate University, Reed College, and Villanova University among others), or both merit-based and need based aid to international applicants (Brandeis University, Bringham Young University, Grinnell College, and Skidmore among others).

AdmissionsIntel.com has included links to all three lists above and on our Resources page.

Strategizing Your Regular Decision College List

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Students applying to highly selective colleges and universities often wonder what their regular decision college lists should look like – especially after learning of an early decision or early action rejection or deferral. On this episode of College Counseling Tonight, we address the concerns of students who want to get into the best colleges regular but who don’t quite know what those colleges are. As you will learn from listening, the answer will depend on the students actions as much as his or her ability.

Relative Importance of Supplemental Essays Depends on Application Submission Date

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College-specific supplemental short answers and essays are either very important or extremely important to your chances of admission. In tonight’s College Counseling Tonight podcast, learn more about the relative importance of college application supplements depending on whether you are completing them for Early Decision, Early Action, or Regular Decision consideration.

Priority Admission vs. Regular Decision

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Comparing Priority Admission and Regular Decision is not that hard to do. What is hard to understand is why anyone would miss applying by a college’s priority deadline and in the process settle for applying regular.

When you apply Regular Decision you are applying by a college’s regular deadline, which is typically in early winter (January or February). Students can apply to more than one college Regular Decision. Decisions tend to be received between March and April.

Priority Admission is when a college sets a date by which applications given the most consideration must be received. This date precedes such colleges’ Regular Decision deadlines. If offered by a college on your list, you would be crazy not to apply by this date.

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