How Did We Get Here? - Part 1
This will be the first blog in a series.
Part 1 - Let’s Celebrate Progress!
It has never been harder to navigate the college admissions process. Since the pandemic hit over three years ago, the number of applications to most highly selective colleges has risen, and admissions rates have dropped dramatically. Why has this happened? How did we get here? This is the first in a series of blogs to try and answer these questions.
Why am I focusing on the admissions rates to highly selective colleges when most students do not attend or even apply to these institutions? I bring them up because what happens at these colleges affects what happens at admissions to most of the colleges our students apply to. When highly selective colleges admit fewer students, it trickles down and puts pressure on selective and less selective colleges as those denied students are looking for places to enroll. Let’s start with what we have seen this year.
The admissions cycle feels longer than it used to be, probably because it is.
Some colleges, like the University of Pittsburgh and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, have rolling decisions, so our students submitted their apps for Fall 2023 admission right at the beginning of August 2022. At the same time, we still have one student awaiting a regular decision from a state flagship with a roughly 80% acceptance rate, and we heard she is not the only one.
Some institutions are more popular than others.
Large schools with rah-rah sports are enjoying record-breaking numbers of applications, while there has been a decline in the popularity of small liberal art colleges, especially those that are less selective.
Colleges in the southeast have really taken off because they had a better life during COVID - An example, Auburn’s popularity has soared. This year they had an all-time high 48,000 applications, up 5% from last year when their admissions rate dropped from 71.1% to 43.7%. However, this might be changing in the future as many students are now unwilling to go to the South for political reasons. According to this article in Inside Higher Ed, 1 in 4 students consider politics in their decision.
Return on Investment is very important to families because colleges are so expensive! Some colleges already cost over $90k a year (hello, NYU, I mean you), and they increase tuition yearly (hello, Stanford, who is increasing their COA by 6.1% next year). As a result, colleges with higher starting salaries, which are typically colleges with strength in STEM/technology/engineering and those with the strongest alum networks, are especially popular right now. Apps were down a little at a lot of places overall, but STEM-heavy colleges, apps were generally up. (MIT would be the exception to this, but that is because they went back to requiring standardized test scores.) The Humanities are suffering. For more on this, please read from The New Yorker, The End of the English Major. This article is long but very much worth your attention.
Colleges go in and out of favor, and this often has little to do with the quality of their education. See above and some other examples:
The University of Tennessee became more selective this year based on last year’s Football success.
After March Madness this year, expect San Diego State University, Furman University, and Florida Atlantic apps to increase next year.
Other forces that are out of your control can also affect colleges. For example, apps are always down at Tulane and Florida colleges after heavy hurricane seasons.
Just by making the Final Four, NCAA basketball teams allow themselves to have $1.2BB in free advertising over the course of those two weeks. Listen to the Tests and the Rest podcast, The Flutie Effect, to learn more.
Then this last one is a big one. Most people are focused on the same, roughly 250 colleges, and the rest are struggling to fill their classes.
This is a quote from Frank Bruni’s article in The NY Times on 3/27/23.
"Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, marveled to me: “Our applications for admission, which hovered around 9,000 for many, many years, suddenly doubled to 17,500. Then they increased to over 21,000. We have to turn away students who want tours and we find ourselves looking at an admit rate of 10 percent. Has this deterred students from applying? No. We find interest growing even further. I am left wondering: Is Colgate more desirable because it is more desired?”
Studies show that if someone wants something, others will also want it. Folks inevitably believe: It must be better. The more selective a college is, the more desirable it becomes. People suddenly attach value to a thing (or a college) that has nothing to do with the actual college itself. People think that if a college is not hard to get into, it must not be good. That is simply untrue.
DON'T LET YOURSELF GET SUCKED INTO THIS!! A college is not better just because it is harder to get into.
This leads me to an important point: Every year, we see kids apply to colleges that, even if they gained admission, they wouldn’t actually like. So we urge students to focus on schools they are genuinely excited about for reasons beyond their popularity. This keeps everyone sane and makes for a much calmer senior year.
Speaking of popularity, Jeff Selingo noted in The NY Times on 3/16/23:
“The number of college applications filed through the Common Application, the single online application now used by more than a thousand institutions, has jumped 30 percent over the past three years. That equates to some 1.56 million additional applications sent by this year’s class compared to their counterparts in the class of 2020 — although the classes are roughly the same size.
This quote from Jeff, while true, is misleading.
Applications to 841 returning institutions (the number of institutions on the Common App in 2020 that are still on the Common App) are indeed up 30% since 2020. The high school classes of 2020 and 2023 might be the same size, but there are 21% more applicants applying to those 841 returning institutions today than there were in 2020. We believe that WAY MORE students than that are applying to the 250 colleges and universities most people focus on.
Why?
Grade inflation has led students to believe they are qualified. In 2020, before COVID inflated grades even further, 68.1% of first-year students at 4-year colleges had an A or A- average in high school. Please see my blog here for more on grade inflation.
Test-Optional (TO)
When the pandemic hit, and the world went test optional, students no longer felt pigeonholed by their test scores to a specific group of colleges.
TO opened the door to a whole host of students who had never considered certain selective colleges, and it also allowed colleges to focus on their institutional priorities in a way they never could before. Please see my blog here for more on institutional priorities.
A quick rundown of most selective colleges’ institutional priorities.
A Diversified class of students
Enrollment Management
Full and Successful athletic teams, bands, choirs, debate teams, and theater productions.
Students in all of their different majors
Relationships with particular high schools
Rankings and making decisions to optimize their place on US News and World Report
What does a diversified class of students mean?
Diversified interests in and out of the classroom
Diversified ethnic groups
Diversified regionally from all 50 states and multiple international locations
Diversified gender and sexual orientation identities
Diversified educational backgrounds and family histories
Diversified religious and personal backgrounds
Diversified socioeconomic backgrounds
Why do colleges want to have a diverse group of students? There have been numerous studies that prove ALL students learn better within a diverse group.
During the last three years, this Institutional Priority to create a diversified class has not just been a factor in who gets in and why; it is responsible for whom colleges solicit and ultimately want to serve.
What does this mean?
The pandemic revolutionized the way that colleges market to students. Virtual life has allowed colleges to reach all kinds of kids they never could before, without those kids and admissions reps ever having left their homes.
The Common App made the process simpler for those students that qualified to get a fee waiver, and they eliminated the disciplinary question because it was proven to turn away certain groups of students.
Many colleges have increased the amount of need-based aid they are giving away.
Many colleges have increased the income thresholds for receiving aid.
Some colleges have added a “no loan” feature for students whose families fall below certain income brackets.
Some colleges have gone to providing need-based aid for international students.
Many colleges have relationships with significantly more CBO organizations that provide college counseling support to under-resourced students.
More colleges are eliminating legacy preference because legacy is largely viewed as benefitting privileged students. An example of this is Amherst College and the State of Colorado.
These efforts are transforming applicant pools. Some data from the Common Application:
“Underrepresented Minority (UMR) applicants increased by 30% over 2019-20, while first-generation applicants increased by 35%, nearly three times the rate of continuing-generation applicants over the same time period. Students reporting eligibility for the Common App fee waiver increased at over four times the rate of students not reporting fee waiver eligibility (47% vs 11%).
“The number of distinct applicants residing outside the United States increased at nearly triple the rate of applicants in the United States since 2019-20 (45% versus 17%). China, India, Nigeria, Ghana, and Canada were the leading countries for international applicants.” Initially, after the pandemic, these international students disappeared, so these numbers now are even more significant.
We are thrilled that selective colleges are attracting and serving more diverse populations today than they did four years ago because, for these students in particular, attending highly selective colleges can be life-changing.
As the article Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges discussed, it has been found that many students with top grades and scores were given an earnings boost not just by attending these colleges but simply by applying. "A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn.” A student with ambitions for Penn exhibits qualities that will make them successful on any campus. "It’s important to note, though, that a few major groups did not fit the pattern: black students, Latino students, low-income students, and students whose parents did not graduate from college. “For them, attending a more selective school increased earnings significantly.””
Most highly selective colleges have way more applicants than four years ago. They still have the same group who have always applied, and now they have a huge increase in students from underserved populations both domestically and internationally. The vast majority of students who apply to these colleges are incredibly qualified. They all have excellent grades, have taken challenging classes, and have positively impacted their communities. Admissions officers have spoken about how difficult it is to decide who is an admit and who is not. In a case study presentation I attended, the director of admissions from Harvey Mudd College discussed two students from a recent admissions cycle. They admitted one and not the other, but when he reviewed their profiles again for the audience, he said he probably would have reversed the decision. Yes, some admissions decisions seem that random, but remember, because, for the most part, all of the applicants are qualified, who gets in and why is often determined by what institutional priority the college needs to address.
Like many colleges, my alma mater, Tufts, has 50% more applicants than it did just three years ago, and today its accepted class reflects its way more diverse applicant pool. Let’s celebrate this progress. All of the students will benefit!
Next in Part 2:
We will discuss how other institutional priorities are making admissions increasingly more unpredictable.