CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR STUDENTS

This year our students were accepted to 163 undergraduate and graduate schools in 33 states and 4 countries. Our Class of 2030 received an all-time Admissions Village High of over $10,700,000 in merit aid.

This list represents our students' hard work and WE ARE SO PROUD. It takes a village, and we want to THANK YOU for being a part of ours.

The above list is where our amazing AV class of 2030 has chosen to enroll.

Trends in Admissions and Higher ED, Part 3 - Students Should Follow One of Two Pathways

Since we just finished with trends in law and medical school admissions, we’ll start with them as we explain what students can do to best prepare themselves for today’s environment.

Timing - When to Apply to Law and Medical School

Time is a big factor in med school and law school admissions, on two fronts. First is the timing of when, in your life, to apply to grad school. For multiple reasons, gap years have become the norm rather than the exception for both law school and medical school. At Harvard Law, 84% of entering students last fall were at least one year out of college, with 69% at least two years out. Law schools are very concerned with their graduates’ employment outcomes, and they know that employers like to hire candidates who already have solid work experience. Recruiting for law firm jobs has now moved up to the first year of law school, which means the resume a student has on their first day of law school is basically the resume they’ll be applying to jobs with. Gap years not only give students time to build resumes that help them get into law school, they help students get jobs after law school as well. 

Likewise, the average age for University of Rochester Medical School's incoming class this past year was 25. Medical schools look very closely at the number of hours each applicant spent on various activities. If you work full time during a gap year, you can get something like 1,500 hours per year of clinical or research experience – a number that would be incredibly difficult to match while still in college.

We advise applicants to start planning for gap years early on so they can pace themselves throughout college, balancing activities and academics and not spreading themselves too thin.

Time is also a big factor in law and medical school admissions. When in the admissions cycle to submit your application is critically important. Both med school and law school use rolling admissions. A common mistake is thinking you just need to submit by the application deadline. But by that time a lot of the acceptances have already gone out. So what we usually advise applicants is to submit as soon in the admissions cycle as they can without sacrificing the quality of the application (including potentially higher scores, better recommendations, or better essays).

So, Back to How Do We Advise Our Students Applying to College in this Current Landscape? 

First take a deep breath and be patient. This starts with being patient with yourself. This is your own process - try not to compare it to what everyone else is doing and stick to your own timeline and agenda. Recently Aly read an article by an anonymous author and they said, “Comparison is the thief of joy, and the algorithm is its accomplice.” And there’s actually research to back this up. Stanford University paid 35,000 students to quit social media for 6 weeks and found that participants’ levels of anxiety and depression decreased while overall happiness increased So what does that mean? Stay off social media! Every year we see students looking at Instagram posts of where students have decided to attend and they accept at a college to be done. That is not what you should be doing. You should only accept your spot once you are in love with where you are going. That hurry to post really stresses everyone out. You will change a lot throughout this process and the school that you always thought you loved in 9th, 10th or even 11th grade might not be the right one for an 18 year old you. You need to play the long game here just like the colleges have been doing. That means careful, slow planning. Please realize this process is a marathon, not a sprint. 

Course selection: What does it mean to be patient with your course selection? Be thoughtful, not reactive. Course selection is not about taking every hard class, it’s about taking the right level of rigor for you and building toward long-term goals. Decisions made early in high school, like math placement, matter because they shape future opportunities. For example, reaching calculus is important, if you want highly selective business or engineering programs. Although keep in mind colleges will always evaluate you in the context of what is offered at your high school and some high schools do not offer calculus while some offer classes past calculus like linear algebra or multivariable calculus. Most importantly do not overwhelm yourself early on. Strong grades in well-chosen courses matter more than overloading and burning out.

Testing strategy:There’s a lot of urgency around testing, but the most successful students take a slower, more intentional approach. Starting prep too early often leads to burnout or plateauing, the goal isn’t to finish quickly, but to do it well. Most students should take SAT and ACT diagnostics at the end of 10th grade to see which suits them best, there’s no admissions advantage to either. In 9th and 10th grade, the focus should be on strong fundamentals, good grades, and the right level of course rigor. When prep begins, it’s about strategy and performance, learning how to take the test and timing it when you’re confident and ready. Some of our students have actually scored higher in early senior fall than in spring junior year. Because they’re more mature, more confident, and better prepared. Colleges don’t care when you take the test. They just see the score.

Activities: Activities will and should evolve over time. They do not need to be fully figured out early. There is no magic formula. You DO NOT need an internship in high school. What really matters is simple: What do you care about, and what have you done about it? The strongest applications come from students who genuinely engage in what they enjoy, not what they think will look impressive. Comparison is the thief of joy, and it’s especially dangerous here. Another thing to consider is that your activities should align with what you want to study. They are the evidence for colleges that proves to them you understand what you want to study and that you will be successful doing it. The goal is not to build a “perfect” activity list, it’s to build one that reflects who you are and positions you to thrive in the right college environment.

College visits: Be intentional and start early. With more students applying early, it is best, if you can afford it, to visit before you apply, not after, and ideally when students are on campus. This is the best way to understand fit. Look beyond big, impressive facilities, these can sometimes mask weak advising or limited support. Smaller schools may feel less exciting at first but could ultimately be a much better fit. Additionally, visits are also one of the strongest ways to demonstrate interest, especially at schools that track it. For example, Elon University has seen 10x higher yield from students who visit in person and 1x higher yield for virtual visits than if they have not visited at all. Even at highly selective schools with the highest yield rates, visits are important because they help you write stronger, more specific essays. A few quick tips: Try to tour in the afternoon to get a better feel for campus life. Campuses are still kind of sleepy in the morning, even during the school week. Be mindful that factors like weather (as noted in recent research from Amherst College) or even doing back-to-back tours can influence your perception. We know visits can be hard to schedule and expensive, but, when possible, they are worth it.

Applications  and essays: These take time, a LOT of time. Strong applications and essays require: reflection, iteration, and multiple rewrites. This is not something you want to rush. Students who give themselves time to think and revise always produce better work.

Be patient with yourself, your parents, your teachers and counselors and others: This is a hard and stressful process. Most people are trying to support you and truly have your best interests in mind but they are also busy and can not always priortize you at any given moment. Try to carefully plan out the work you need to get done in this process and not to leave things until the last minute. This will lead to the best results and also keep you happiest and calm. 

Longer application season: The process is longer now. With deferrals and waitlists being utilized more, your final decision could potentially drag past May 1st and into the summer. Again, this requires patience. Honestly, we often see that those students who are in this process the longest are the happiest in the end. 

So what else can students do?

Maybe students should also have two pathways in admissions. This part is really critical: While applying early can improve outcomes, the right kind of early depends on your goals. If your priority is maximizing your chances at more selective schools, then being decisive and applying ED or REA can be a strong strategy. If your priority is maximizing your financial options then patience becomes even more important. Applying EA or Regular Decision allows you to wait, compare offers, and potentially negotiate for better financial packages. Keep in mind this might take a while and potentially even bring you past May 1st and colleges take a while to work through financial aid appeals. The key is understanding that there isn’t one “best” strategy; there’s the one that aligns with your goals. And that requires patience.

Why did we explain all this to you? 

Our goal is simple: to help you look beyond acceptance rates. Because colleges today are following different pathways that lead to different enrollment strategies. Many are navigating real financial pressures behind the scenes. When you understand how the system actually works, you can make better decisions and feel more certain that they are right ones for you and your family. 

Last, I want to go back to timing.

This is a scary time for kids and their parents- everyone is worried about if their student will get into a college they want, if they will like that college and then the bigger worry will they get a job in this new AI world. Please take a minute and breathe. Every time there is a major new technology jobs shift and change. Old ones do disappear but new ones replace them. Think about this. Why are you going to college? It might be about return on investment to get a job but we like to think of it as a return on investment in yourself. College is the gift of time. The time to learn and grow and figure out who you are and what you want to do in this world.

Trends in Admissions and Higher ED, Part 2 - Admissions is Competitive Not Just For You, But Colleges As Well

If you just read Part 1 of our blog, you’ve learned that most colleges are feeling particularly financially strained at this time.

So How Did All of this Affect Admissions this Year? 

Here are some key findings from the First-Year Application Trends Report, published by the Common App in March. Looking at the data, we see the largest growth in applicants from previously underrepresented groups because colleges are targeting these students with their marketing and financial aid policies. 

Many colleges continued to experience record or near-record application volume while others struggled to fill seats. For highly selective institutions, the enrollment cliff is largely irrelevant to their application volumes and we expect those colleges to stay just as, if not more, selective next year. Yet, we keep hearing about more colleges closing. Many places are really struggling, especially smaller colleges, regional institutions and even some community colleges. In the last ten years, over 120 colleges and universities have closed or merged. Penn State has seen enrollment decline 35% or more over the last ten years at several of its branch campuses while over the same time period its University Park campus is up 5% in enrollment. Penn State is considering closing seven of its regional campuses. Just recently, Hampshire College announced they will close and immediately many colleges swooped in to say they would welcome Hampshire students, a sign that many colleges have unfilled beds. 

We have heard estimates that over 100 colleges will close in the next few years. The Huron Consulting Group estimates that close to 400 colleges could close or merge in the coming decade, possibly displacing around 600,000 students. According to a recent paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment. If it seems like our numbers are confusing it is because they are. Different sources count college closures differently. In a 2024 blog post from Robert Kelchen linked here, he discusses why people count closures differently and which sources are the most accurate. When a college closes or renames branch campuses, should that be considered a closure?  Regardless of how these closures are being counted we are losing a lot of great institutions and particularly regional and local options.  

This affects not just students at those colleges that are closing. It has a ripple effect that goes much further. Many of these colleges are located in small towns and cities where the college is the primary employer for that area and its students are a huge source of revenue for local businesses. Colleges often serve as the cultural heart of the community with performances and art exhibits, which can also attract newcomers and retirees to the community. Closures will lead to the demise of many small towns and cities and fundamentally change the ethos of small town America. These closures also affect admissions at the colleges who are still thriving. For example, Villanova took over the Cabrini campus last year and opened up 900 seats for their students going forward. Despite Villanova receiving a record high number of applications, their acceptance rate rose by about 2% to 29.6% according to College Navigators because they were targeting an additional 230 seats for this year. 

While international applicants were down overall 9% this year, their application numbers were fairly stable at the most selective institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that international applications increased as school’s selectivity increased while applications to the lowest two selectivity bands declined almost 20%. More international students are applying to top institutions since tracking began in 2021, and the selectivity gap is growing. For example, Tufts had its third largest year ever of international students applying for admission. 

We are seeing a slight increase in the number of students who are taking standardized tests. 

• This past cycle, for the first time since the pandemic, more students chose to submit test scores than not. 

• Low-income, underrepresented minority and first-generation students remain less likely to report test scores.

• All the Ivies except Columbia now require test scores. WPI moved from test blind to test optional. Purdue is technically test-optional, but they told us two weeks ago, they are “test expected.” 

• Regional location often impacts testing policies for public institutions. Southern selective colleges are often more likely to require scores. LSU is the latest to add themselves to the list of colleges requiring scores. Each time another college becomes test required it drives test submittal rates up everywhere because more students already have a score. 

• Colleges are increasingly looking for scores because in the world of grade inflation, transcripts are difficult to compare. UC San Diego, a part of the University of California system which is test blind for SAT and ACT exams, is saying their incoming students can’t do math. We would not be surprised to see the UC system become test-optional, instead of test-blind, at some point in the future. 

• Requiring scores or incorporating them into the review process also aligns with the reality that some highly selective universities may have agreed to report admissions data to the federal government or they feel their admissions decisions will need to hold up under scrutiny.

• However, some colleges, like Wake Forest and Bowdoin have been test optional for a long time, while University of Delaware recently announced they are remaining test optional indefinitely. 

Colleges are increasingly looking at AP scores to show mastery of content in a time of grade inflation.

• Emory says they look very closely at AP scores. The UC system is test blind but only for SAT and ACT scores. They review and value AP scores as part of their admissions process. Then there are a group of colleges like Notre Dame that have told us they are test optional, but they are not quantitative evidence optional- meaning they prefer test results of some kind.

• There is also a growth in AP class offerings. The College Board is creating new classes like AP Cybersecurity, AP Networking, and AP Business with Personal Finance, among others. This aligns with colleges wanting independent metrics, but we also need to remember that the College Board, who is responsible for APs, is also a business with tremendous revenue from AP exams. 

• We are seeing some colleges like Caltech require AP scores from students who have taken the courses, instead of letting the reporting of AP scores be optional, and we are seeing some colleges like Yale whose test-flexible policy allows for AP scores instead of ACT or SAT scores. 

In the last approximately 30 years there has been a large increase in the number of high schools offering AP courses. Today roughly 70% of public high schools in the U.S. offer AP courses today compared to about 50% in 1997. 

Why are Tests Coming Back into Importance?

We have spoken before about how grade inflation is rampant in this country. This has become much more widely known and post pandemic there is greater awareness that grade inflation is damaging to students. According to The Hechinger Report, in February of 2026  “A new study delivers an uncomfortable answer. It finds that lenient grading, or grade inflation, is actually harming students, leading not only to worse academic outcomes but also reducing their employment prospects and future earnings.” When kids miss learning material, or how to stick with challenging subjects to gain mastery, they are losing opportunities to learn how to work hard. Knowledge gaps follow them into the workplace, eroding confidence and performance.

Back to Our Theme: Time

As you can see from the above chart, early applications have now surpassed regular decision applications. It is almost as though if you are not early, you are late as many colleges in an effort to yield the class they want, give away the vast majority of their seats and money in their early rounds. (Please see some of our past institutional priorities blogs for some examples of colleges that admit the majority of their students early.) Each year we see more colleges adding early deadlines. Next year WashU and Connecticut College are adding Early Action and University of Southern California is making Early Decision available for all of their majors.

This is a Low Moment in Time for Public Confidence in Higher ED

From the recently released report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education Yale University, “Just a decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction.” 

“Our committee identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust. The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. The second focuses on the college admissions system—specifically, the question of who gets in and why. The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission. The range of topics revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education.” 

Let’s unpack this a little bit - of course people are distrustful. While the cost of many colleges has gone up we continue to see colleges tightening their belts with many cost-cutting measures. 

• Programs and majors are being cut or changed because of politics and low enrollment/lack of interest - For example: Syracuse had a significant restructuring in early 2026, announcing the consolidation, pause, or elimination of nearly 100 academic programs.

• Colleges are also cutting costs in less obvious ways: On our recent tour of midwestern colleges one of our students at UChicago told us the dining hall closes much earlier on Saturdays and has more limited food choices. She said instead of having an adult resident director who lives in every dorm, now there is  only one for every four dorms. At Northwestern, after a $790 million federal funding freeze, they decided to eliminate their annual winter holiday lights on campus trees and buildings. And at one super-selective college, it was plainly obvious they had decided to cut back on their landscaping costs. On the academic side some colleges are getting rid of adjunct professors because of financial pressures or they are adding more adjuncts to cut costs. Students at almost all of the colleges we recently visited spoke about being taught by PhD students. This can be a future concern as PhD programs are being cut and scholarships for grad programs have been limited. 

• According to Forbes, “Tenure is in a long-term decline in the US, with tenured faculty dropping from over 50% in 1975 to roughly 1 in 5 today.” Tenure dying is a cost-cutting measure, a response to political pressure and a fundamental change to the philosophy of higher education. 

• Lastly, the rise in AI has people questioning the value of higher education and further complicates the college admissions process as more admissions offices are starting to use it in some way in their application reviews. We are seeing a lot more AI majors and minors and revamping of curriculums to incorporate AI. We hope we will also see a return to humanities majors as the rise of AI is highlighting the need for soft skills. 

How We Saw This Affecting Our Admissions Village Students This Year 

Overall we saw a lot of these trends affect our own applicants, who had a great year. Many of our students chose less expensive options for college this year over more selective, more expensive options. We even saw students turning down the very most selective colleges that have acceptance rates under 20%. There was a very small reversal of grade inflation. We had 12 students with a C on their transcript last year who outperformed how they would have done with admissions just a few years ago. For a few years post pandemic we did not see any Cs. 

• Despite the demographic cliff, applications are up at highly selective colleges, especially at the large public, southern and apolitical schools. We had more Texas colleges on our college list than ever before. The increase in interest in large state schools, even if it’s not a student’s own state, is impacting other trends we are seeing, like more states moving to auto admit for top 5-10% of instate students, which limits out-of-state spots even further. We also saw the use of pathway programs to ensure a pipeline of students into these schools after the first semester or first year, which also keeps admit rates lower as students who matriculate into a college via these Pathways do not need to be reported in a college’s admissions statistics. 

• We saw more spring admits and more alternative campus admits. For the first time ever, Vanderbilt offered a select group of students a Verto year abroad start and the 120 student cohort filled in less than 24 hours. Not including colleges that have community college pathways, some colleges that offered guaranteed transfers this year are George Washington, University of Georgia, Cornell University, Boston University, Georgia Tech, University of Southern California, Georgetown, and Northeastern University.

• We also saw an increase of colleges deferring students from the early round to the regular round, especially for students who did not have a straight A transcript or who lacked a standardized test score. This could be attributed to more colleges sorting by AI initially. Then there were cases like U Michigan’s ED round this year, where we believe they simply did not get all of their apps read in time so they deferred most of their ED applicants only to admit a group January 5th and then another group in the EA round later that month. 

• We saw the continuation of colleges carrying large wait lists and moving to those waitlists earlier than ever before. University of South Carolina, UChicago and UMiami have already moved to their waitlists. 

• In addition to more early applicants and deadlines we saw colleges come back sooner with decisions. Colleges are trying to lock kids into a decision earlier as the environment is more competitive not just for you, but for colleges as well. 

• We saw colleges adding a sort of quiet ED3 round by quietly offering to switch to ED in March.  

• Colleges added new ways to measure interest - A few weeks after its deadline, Lehigh asked all of the students who had submitted an application to send in a song for their reading playlist. (They coincidentally received a historic high number of apps this year). 

• Colleges gave more and bigger merit scholarships-

  • We saw students choosing to play DIII athletics because they were offered huge academic merit scholarships at those colleges. We believe changes in Parent PLUS loans are partially responsible for this as colleges feel an increased need to compete with each other financially. 

  • We also saw colleges giving merit aid this year that we have never seen this from before, like Holy Cross, Reed and Trinity College. Some colleges independently raised that amount before and after students had made a decision. This has been happening for a few years now, in part because the DOJ issued an antitrust directive that was meant to stimulate competition between colleges after the Varsity Blues scandal in 2019. Our families had more luck appealing for more merit money, with more schools willing to negotiate.

  • Families are being more conscious of what undergrad will cost them and what they can realistically afford, due to upcoming loan limits, especially when grad school is likely to be involved. We saw several top students this year opting for Honors Colleges at State Universities and more affordable or full rides options over more selective names. We have current college students choosing to shorten their time to graduation, which they are able to do because they have taken so many AP and dual enrollment classes in high school. Some other students are forgoing private 4-year colleges to enter community college which is backed up by a national rise in community college students 

  • We have also seen an increased interest in UK and Canadian schools as more affordable options and as students want to avoid more holistic admissions, and American politics. 

• Increasing use of AI both on students' parts and college admissions offices, even among our colleagues and peers. Interestingly we saw more colleges asking for supplemental essays, not less, with the exception of a couple of places like UVA. 

• We saw increased uncertainty about jobs after graduation, in part because of AI, which led to increased grad school apps. 

Trends in Law and Medical School Admissions

This uncertain job market is probably one of the reasons that this past year’s admissions cycle for both law school and med school - which are just now ending - saw an increase in applicants. 

For law school, this continues a trend from last year, so the increase in applications over two years is very significant. Applicants are up almost 32% compared to just two years ago. Not only are there more applicants, but applications are up 38.3% during the same time period, meaning each applicant is submitting more applications than ever before. And for medical school, applications increased this year for the first time in a while, up 5.3%. In a hopeful sign, though, spots in med school are increasing as well because new med schools are opening and existing ones are expanding their classes.

One result of this is that median test scores and GPAs for accepted applicants are rising as well. This past fall, 28 law schools had LSAT medians of 170+ (compared to only 5 schools with such high medians in 2015). 91 law schools had LSAT medians of 160+ (compared to 49 schools with those medians ten years ago). Mean MCAT scores for matriculants climbed in the 2025-26 cycle, reaching 512.1 (compared with 511.8 the previous year). High scores are increasingly important,not only for admission but also for securing merit-based financial aid.

If you think you want to go to law school or medical school, our advice is to (1) focus on getting good grades during college and (2) allot enough time before the application cycle to study for and re-take standardized tests. 

It’s still unclear how the new federal loan caps which were discussed above are going to play out, but there’ve been predictions that over the next couple of months, as schools turn to waitlists to fill their remaining seats, there might be more waitlist movement than usual because some accepted applicants are going to crunch the numbers and realize they simply can’t afford to go. 

Keep reading to learn in Part 3 what prospective undergraduate and graduate students can do to help themselves in the current landscape.

Trends in Admissions and Higher ED, Part 1 - Colleges are Following Two Pathways

I want to start by thanking our Admissions Village team for helping to put together this information and especially Meg Joyce who co-authored this blog series with me.

If last year’s admissions and higher ed theme was uncertainty, this year’s theme is time. Let’s start with colleges. They are at a very precipitous time in history. Colleges have been playing the long game for a very extended period of time, and there are some things that are finally catching up with them, and most relate to money. 

Playing the Long Game - Two Different Pathways

Why have colleges been playing the long game? They have been preparing for the demographic cliff that hit this year. We have fewer future high school students going forward simply because fewer children were born starting around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. So, how have colleges been playing the long game? Over the years, in order to enroll the classes they hope to, colleges have followed one of two enrollment management pathways or both. Highly selective colleges were concerned about remaining desirable and attracting the top students. They followed the first pathway to increase their applicant pool by attracting students who were not traditionally attending college or their colleges, thereby improving the education of all of their students by having a more diverse class. How did they do this? They started heavily marketing themselves to low-income, first-generation, small-town and rural, international students, and different ethnic populations, and they backed that up with generous financial aid packages. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision against race-based affirmative action, they essentially moved to economic affirmative action, but with the original case behind this decision starting in late 2014, they had already set economic affirmative action in motion almost 10 years prior. In fact, they set it in motion way before then, as Princeton announced it would meet full demonstrated need without loans in April 2002. 

Approximately 70–80 elite private colleges and a few public universities now meet 100% of demonstrated financial need, a slight increase from about 60–70 schools two decades ago. Roughly 20–30+ institutions now offer "no-loan" packages—eliminating loans entirely for families with incomes below specific thresholds.

As you can see from the above chart, at our most competitive colleges, over half the students qualify for need-based aid, and they aren’t paying anything, or they’re paying a small amount. In addition, even full-pay students often cost the colleges twice what their tuition brings in. Economic affirmative action is working. Has racial diversity been impacted by the 2023 Supreme Court ruling? A new study by the Progressive Policy Institute finds it has declined much less than was predicted.

So what is the second pathway? Other colleges also wanted to attract students, but they had an even more pressing concern: their ability to fill their classes amid the demographic cliff. They knew they had to increase their competitiveness in order to do so. How did they do that? They started awarding large merit scholarships. About 25 years ago, colleges discovered that merit scholarships could attract higher-achieving students, which helped them rise in the rankings and made people feel their colleges were better. But many colleges began offering merit scholarships at the same time, and things kind of spiraled as each one had to offer more and more money to beat out the next college. With credit to Higher Ed Insights substack, “economists have a name for this: the prisoner’s dilemma. Colleges must keep discounting to stay competitive, and the collective result of so many colleges doing that is that the entire sector is moving towards insolvency together.”

Private colleges discounting tuition by an average of 56.3% is a record high, meaning that for every dollar of tuition a private college could theoretically charge, it collects 44 cents. While it is great that both private and public colleges are accessible to more students, both pathways have led to the same result: most colleges subsidize most of their students.

Colleges and Families Are Feeling Financially Strained

The reality is many students are paying less to go to college today than 20 years ago, especially when adjusted for inflation, but just like in our own lives, everything else is costing more, so families have less money available to pay the college bill. 

As you can see, when adjusted for inflation, aid for students has increased significantly over the last 20 years, while net tuition has not. According to the March 3rd NEXT Newsletter, what students actually pay after financial aid is factored in has been relatively flat at private colleges for lower- and middle-income families earning up to $170,000 a year since 2008, even after adjusting for inflation. 

Marshall Steinbaum, assistant professor of economics at the University of Utah, told the Times Higher Education, “The three-legged stool of higher education finance in the United States is tuition, federal research funding, and state appropriations. All three legs have been cut down in the last year.” This is not new. Colleges have been slowly receiving less tuition for over 20 years now, but here is why this year’s theme is timing: it is catching up to them, and especially this year, because the other two main sources of institutional funding - federal research dollars and state appropriations - are also taking big hits. Add to that new expenses, some of which were predictable and some not, which we will break down in a bit. Both groups of colleges are receiving less tuition in an effort to yield more competitive applicants, and they have worked themselves into a corner. According to an analysis by Robert Kelchen, Professor and Head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, based on IPEDS data, 40% of private colleges and 20% of public colleges are running deficits. Some major institutions facing deficits or significant budget shortfalls include the University of Chicago ($160M-$221M), University of Connecticut ($70M), Temple University ($60M), University of Southern California ($200M+), Harvard (113m), and Columbia University ($40M).

Why, Beyond a Lack of Tuition Revenue, Are Colleges Feeling Financially Strained? This again goes back to timing. There were many major changes this year that did not exist a year ago. 

• The first new expense concerns threats to federal research funding and pressure from the Trump administration over affirmative action. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia all reached settlements that include a mix of fines, policy changes, and payouts to specific organizations, the largest being a $200 million fine for Columbia. Many more colleges and universities have proactively made DEI-related policy changes as a result.
  

• Increased endowment taxes. Private colleges with the largest endowments per student have a new and, in some cases, huge cost. Starting this academic year, private colleges with more than 3,000 tuition-paying students are subject to a sliding-scale tax of up to 8% on endowment income. This tax used to be a flat 1.4%. In August of 2025, Princeton increased its financial aid income threshold to $250,000 for most families to qualify for free tuition. According to The Daily Princetonian, this move, which costs the university $44 million was done in part because it put Princeton’s number of students paying tuition under 3,000 students, thereby allowing them to avoid paying the endowment tax entirely, saving them $180 million. Princeton can only do this because of their smaller size. We expect to see other colleges where the math makes sense start to offer free tuition under certain income thresholds to avoid this endowment tax. For Harvard, the new tax will cost approximately $300 million annually. Yale’s president estimated $280 million in the very first year. This matters because every additional endowment tax dollar directly impacts funds available for research, teaching, and scholarships. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “on average, endowments now fund 15.2 percent of operating expenses across higher education, up from 10.9 percent just two years ago, and at the most endowment-dependent institutions, the reliance is far higher. Princeton funds roughly 65 percent of its operating budget from its endowment, up from around 15 percent in 1985. Grinnell and Swarthmore are near 60 percent. Bowdoin is at 51 percent. Harvard is around 40 percent.” In our opinion, the change to the endowment tax is a very big reason students and families should be reconsidering small colleges, as they’re not only exempt from the increase, but as the President of Swarthmore explained, they’re now exempt from the tax entirely. This means 26 wealthier small institutions are avoiding the increase and saving the 1.4% tax they had been paying.
  
  

• Changes to the federal student loan program are adding pressure on colleges to increase scholarships or offer loans themselves to families. These changes mean that, starting this summer, students and families might no longer be able to afford 4-year colleges which were once within financial reach. Undergrads will still be able to take out federal loans of between $5,500 and $7,500 each year, but parent PLUS loans for their undergraduate children will have annual limits of $20,000 and a lifetime limit of just $65,000 per student, when currently they can cover up to the entire cost of attendance. Additionally, many families with existing Parent PLUS loans and a student starting or continuing college in the fall are not aware that a new disbursement after July 1, 2026, may change their repayment plan options for their entire balance. The Grad PLUS loan program, which had allowed graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, is ending. Students will still be able to take out federal loans for grad school, though they’ll have annual and total limits according to the type of degree, and there are new lifetime borrowing limits for all federal student loans that could make financing multiple advanced degrees challenging. There are more details and there will be grandfathering, but new borrowers will be subject to these restrictions.

  Back to our theme of timing again - keep in mind this is all happening at a time when the Department of Education is being dismantled. Operational responsibility for the $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio is shifting from the Department of Education to the U.S. Treasury, and eventually all federal student loan functions including the processing of FAFSA (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid) will also be the Treasury Department’s responsibility. But as noted in Higher Ed Insights, the Department of Education’s workforce has gone from approximately 4,100 employees to around 2,800, and Federal Student Aid, the office that administers the financial aid system most families interact with, has lost nearly half its staff.
  
  

• Fewer full-pay students at most colleges. Our experience has been that some families are willing to pay full price for certain name-brand schools but not for other similar schools. Jeff Selingo has spoken about a similar phenomenon: “Colleges at all but the very top of the rankings are pushing the limits of what higher-income families will pay. Wealthier families are deciding that—barring an acceptance to the most prestigious institutions—these prices don’t make sense anymore. They’re willing to trade a certain amount of prestige for a discounted price at a college deeper in the rankings. That shift among the richest families has ripple effects further down the income scale, as colleges have fewer full-payers to pay for merit-aid discounts for middle-income families.”

• There are fewer international students because of the difficulties in obtaining visas. This is a huge problem for most institutions, as their international students pay full tuition.
  
  

• Deferred maintenance and ambitious building projects that are no longer needed. According to Inside Higher Ed’s annual survey with Hanover Research, 63% of colleges were planning to fund less than a quarter of their deferred maintenance needs last fiscal year, and 36% of university Chief Business Officers identified infrastructure and deferred maintenance costs as a top financial risk to their institution, just behind state and/or federal policy changes. St Michael’s College in Vermont has dorms built within the last 20 years that now stand empty. Compounding the problem for colleges is the fact that it becomes harder to attract and yield new students when prospective students tour underutilized campuses and buildings in need of repair.
  

• Athletics expenses at many NCAA Division I colleges are on the rise. Starting July 1st last year, DI colleges can directly pay athletes via revenue sharing, up to a total of $20.5 million dollars. Scholarship limits have been replaced with roster limits, meaning schools can now fund as many full or partial athletic scholarships as they want, so long as they stay within the sport’s specific roster caps. Baseball, for example, used to have a scholarship limit of 11.7, but now it has a roster limit of 34. That means DI schools have a potential increase of up to 22.3 new baseball scholarships to fund.
  
  

• And finally, the rise in AI has brought us back full circle and fueled those questioning the value of a college degree.

Although highly selective and well-endowed private and public institutions will adjust more easily to the new environment, Todd Ely who is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado–Denver said in Inside Higher Ed, “‘Uncertainty’ remains the watchword for U.S. higher education.” “Research-intensive institutions, historically envied for their diverse revenue streams and lack of dependence on tuition revenue, have had their model of higher education funding thrown into disarray. The battle for tuition-paying students will only increase, straining the enrollments of less selective and smaller private colleges and regional public universities.” 

Please read part 2 of this blog for how all of this affected admissions this year.

Dear Parents of the Class of 2030

Dear Parents of the Class of 2030,

Congratulations on raising your amazing children. You have so much to be proud of. Your kids have worked incredibly hard, not just on their applications but for over 3 years studying, challenging themselves in many ways and making an impact in their communities. This is a great time before they hear back from the majority of their colleges to remind your children how well they have done and whatever decision they receive is not going to define them. They are all qualified for the institutions where they have applied and each place would be lucky to get them. Tell them they have done enough, worked hard enough and that there is nothing left to do. Yes, I said nothing. It is time for your kids to cut themselves a break and realize this is not all about them, but about whatever the college might need. Colleges are businesses and operate like such. They are concerned about putting together a whole class. Who gets accepted to a college is less about individuals and more about that college’s institutional priorities. So, what are often some institutional priorities?

A) Colleges need to manage their enrollment.
   

• Colleges have had a huge spike in applications since the pandemic. Last year’s 2024-2025 cycle a total of 1,498,199 first-year applicants submitted over 10 million applications, a milestone high volume, to the over 1,097 member institutions who use the Common App. These numbers have been steadily rising for over 5 years now and so far despite concern about the enrollment cliff, this year applications to the Common Application’s 916 returning members (colleges that have used the Common App for more than five years) increased another 5% for a total number of applications through November 1st of 962,284. Since 2020, the number of applications to Common App institutions has risen by almost 94%, and the number of applicants has risen by almost 49%. Simply put, more students are applying to colleges through the Common App, and because of that and the ripple effects of the resulting dropped admissions rates, some students are applying to more colleges than their counterparts did 5 years ago. The exception to this is international students. International student enrollment is down 17% this year because the current administration is making it difficult for students to obtain visas to study here. Early international applicants are down 9% from last year at this time. If international applications do not increase this will affect admissions, especially at institutions with larger international populations who count on those usually full pay students.
  
  

• Colleges are trying to have a set number of students in each class. Their class size is determined by many things, but among them might be: how much money they need to earn from tuition; how much space they have for students to live on campus; how large their other classes are; how many students they feel they can comfortably educate and serve. Hitting this exact number is tricky, especially these days. Colleges are making educated guesses on which applicants that they have accepted might actually attend and become part of their class. This delicate calculation is the job of a college’s enrollment manager. Some years, colleges do a great job predicting this number, and some years, they do not. Some colleges might have over-enrolled or under-enrolled last year or for more than one year, so they need to take fewer or more students overall this year. This is also where a college’s waitlist comes into play. Colleges use their waitlist as insurance to hit their desired enrollment numbers. Last year when many international students who were accepted to institutions either could not get visas to come here or changed their mind about wanting to study here we saw an enormous amount of waitlist action and increased merit aid offers. Syracuse University, whose enrollment is typically over 11% international, went on an unprecedented spree offering qualified domestic candidates who had turned down their offer of admissions very large merit aid packages to change their minds.
  
  

• So, why would a college take more or fewer students than in previous years? A college is managing its yield. Yield is the rate at which a college’s accepted students choose to enroll. According to the advocacy group Class Action, “In 2023, the yield rate for all colleges was 21%, half of what it was in 2001. This falling yield rate is a product of more students applying to more colleges. While most people still apply to just a couple of colleges, the students who apply to highly selective ones tend to spread their bets. In 2014, 8 percent of applicants using the Common Application sent out 10 or more applications. In 2021, 17 percent did, and the average applicant to a highly selective private college applied to 11 other institutions.”
  
  

• Other things can come into play when a college over-enrolls - a college might not have adequate housing for so many students. The University of Connecticut, Storrs campus,  recently grew its enrollment numbers from 18,917 in the fall of 2020 according to the university’s annual fact sheet to a preliminary enrollment number of 20,500 in the fall of 2025. While they eventually found housing for everyone there were many upset students and families who had to bear the significant extra expense of finding off campus housing. U Conn will have to either obtain more housing for students, drop their 4-year housing guarantee or enroll a smaller class for a few years.
  
  

• To manage enrollment, a college might enroll a large percentage of their class earlier in EA, ED I or ED II. Again according to Class Action, “Although ED remains relatively rare and the number of institutions offering it has not grown much in the past decade, the degree to which some highly selective colleges and universities rely on ED to enroll a significant percentage of their undergraduates has increased. The number of colleges and universities that admit more than 40% of their enrolled freshmen through ED—73 in total—has grown by almost 50 percent since 2015.” Please look at the chart below for how much ED has increased at many institutions. Of particular note is Northeastern which went from enrolling 9% of their class to 54% of their class ED and BU which went from enrolling 20% of their class to 61% of their class ED. Also of note is that many colleges who do not have ED enroll a large percentage of their class EA. Penn State often fills up their entire University Park campus with EA applicants, and the University of Maryland, College Park typically fills 90% of its incoming class in the EA round. At these colleges and many others, it simply becomes way harder to get accepted regular decision. 
  

From Class Action, “What Percentage of the Freshman Class is Enrolled through Early Decision, 2015 vs 2024

The percentage was calculated by dividing the number of early decision (ED) admits by the total enrollment. This calculation is an approximation of the actual percentage of the class admitted through ED, since some ED admittees may not enroll. The Common Data Set does not collect data on ED enrollments. Due to space limits, this chart only includes institutions where 40 percent or more of the class was enrolled though ED. Here is a link to the full set of data.” 

*=Institutions that did not have an ED program in 2015. **=Institutions for which 2015 data were not available, so data for 2016 were used instead. ***=Institutions for which no data were available for 2015 or 2016.

Chart: James S. Murphy - Source: Common Data Set - Created with Datawrapper

• Colleges must balance their budgets. This year with the “Dear Colleague Letter," the dismantling of the Department of Education, higher taxes on large endowments, budgets cuts to agencies that provide research dollars, the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education which was sent to nine institutions and expanded to all universities, plus the current administration’s blocking of international student visas there is huge concern about the current administration’s threats to withhold federal funding that has many colleges concerned about their budgets. Many institutions, even highly selective, wealthy ones like several of the Ivies, have hiring freezes in place. Some colleges may need to accept more full-pay students to help them balance their budgets and/or achieve other goals. Several colleges, including highly selective ones like Stanford and Duke made offers to waitlist students as late as August of this year and we think in part to help balance their budgets. Other colleges that have large international populations like BU and USC took more students this year than last year. For the class of 2029 according to their announcements with their regular decisions last spring, BU accepted 9,059 and USC accepted 8,700 students. Compare this to last year when they accepted 8,414 students and 7,750 students, respectively. 
  
  Perhaps Columbia is the best case example here. Columbia enrolled its largest incoming class of undergraduates ever this fall with about 20% more students in the Class of 2029 compared to the Class of 2028 (1,806 vs 1,499). Columbia has come out and said they are considering keeping this larger size for future classes and will make a final decision within the next month. In July, Columbia agreed to pay $221 million to settle investigations into alleged violations of anti-discrimination laws, in return for the reinstatement of the majority of federal research grants that had been withheld by the current administration. They also have a large population of international students - 17% of their undergraduates. Columbia’s acting president cited research funding and international student enrollment as “two big risk factors” they are considering in their decision-making process, in addition to successfully graduating their largest class to date last May. These changes are especially significant when you consider many of the universities who’ve been increasing their class sizes are located in cities and cannot easily make changes to accommodate more students, as well as the fact that their class sizes have been relatively fixed for a long time.
  

• Some colleges are prioritizing Pell-eligible, first-generation or low-income students. Many highly selective universities are partnering with community based organizations like QuestBridge College Match Programs to find these students. According to the Harvard Crimson, 20.5 percent of Harvard’s admitted students to the Class of 2029 are Pell eligible and 20.3 percent will be the first in their families to go to college. Duke admitted a record high of 113 students ED to their Class of 2029 through the QuestBridge National College Match Program.
  
  

• Some colleges prioritize letting in the majority of students with some type of tuition discount. This is the very concept of merit aid. An example is Lake Forest College, which offers merit aid to 100% of accepted students. Another example is Syracuse who has already come out publicly in their school newspaper The Daily Orange and said they plan to make stronger merit aid offers earlier in the cycle this season in order to get the desired number of students enrolled in their class.
  

• Some public colleges must prioritize in-state students. For example, the state of North Carolina mandates that any UNC campus can only have a maximum of 18% of its incoming class coming from out of state. Some states auto-admit a large percentage of in-state students. A good example of this is the University of Texas, Austin, which automatically accepts applicants who rank in the top 5% of students of their Texas high school class (UT Austin is also required by state law to have 90% of its first-year class consist of in-state students.)
  
  

• Some public colleges may need out-of-state students or, moreover, need money from out-of-state student tuition. Good examples of this are the University of Vermont and the University of Delaware. Neither state has enough students in-state to fill its flagship university.
  

• Some colleges prioritize certain groups like military families with things like yellow ribbon benefits and children of academic employees with tuition exchange programs. As an example, SMU and Villanova offer full tuition scholarships to 100 students via yellow ribbon benefits.
  
  

• Colleges will often accept students with connections to VIPs or the college’s Development office.
  

• Some colleges will prioritize Legacy students. Five states have enacted laws restricting legacy admissions, California, Illinois, Maryland and Virginia in 2024 and Colorado in 2021. 24% of four-year colleges/universities currently consider legacy status, which is down from 29% in 2022 and 49% in 2015. 11% of public (62) and 30% (358) of private colleges/universities consider legacy status in their admissions process. Legacy preferences remain the strongest at the most selective colleges and universities, with more than half (56%) still providing an advantage to the relatives of alumni. Some colleges that really still favor legacy are the Jesuit colleges, Dartmouth, Duke and Vanderbilt, among others. 

B) Colleges have athletic teams, school bands, school choirs, debate teams, and theater productions. 

• Colleges might need to fill an athletic spot. Smaller schools field almost the same number of teams and the same number of roster slots as larger schools. In smaller schools, filling teams can account for ¼-⅓ of the incoming class.
  

• Colleges might need a student who plays an obscure instrument.
  
  

• College might need a student with all sorts of special talents.

C) Colleges want students in all of their different majors. 

• This might mean that certain popular majors are much harder to get into than others. For example, Business and Engineering are very impacted majors in the country right now, meaning more students want to study them than colleges often have space to accommodate. Some majors, like Nursing, are not only popular but also constrained by the availability of clinical space.
  

• Some colleges might need to consider that a department is understaffed or unprepared to take students at this specific time.
  
  

• Some colleges will prioritize certain genders for certain majors. For example, male students might have a strong advantage in fine arts and fashion. When we visited Rensselaer Polytechnic last year, they spoke candidly about wanting to enroll more women engineers, while the University of San Diego spoke proudly about equalizing the gender imbalance among their engineering students.

D) Most colleges want to have a diversified class of students. 

• Colleges want students with diversified interests in and out of the classroom.
  
  

• By now, you’ve probably heard about the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (and, by extension, other colleges with similar programs). All colleges, except the military academies, currently ban affirmative action in admissions. Some words from the Court’s opinion that we believe are being closely followed by college admissions offices: "nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today." In their applications, we still encourage students to write about how their background influenced them, because universities are free to consider “an applicant’s discussion,” and we believe most colleges are still committed to creating an ethnically diverse class.
  
  

• Some colleges want a regionally diverse group from all 50 states and multiple international locations. Colleges might be trying to expand their footprint regionally, nationally, or internationally. They might prioritize one location over another. Every time I am on a college tour, I laugh at the requests for students from the Dakotas.
  
  

• Some colleges might want students from more rural or underserved locations. In anticipation of the 2023 Supreme Court decision and looking for alternative ways to create a diversified class, 16 prominent colleges, including Yale, Harvard and Columbia formed the Small Town and Rural Students College Network (STARS.) STARS has helped colleges identify and recruit more rural students than ever before.
  
  

• Some colleges want a good gender balance and prioritize men over women or vice versa. This article shows how at Brown, men have an advantage in the admissions process because Brown simply gets way more applications from women. In general, for the highly selective colleges, we have seen men having an easier time than women. An exception to this would be the UC system, which does not consider gender.
  
  

• Some colleges want a class that is diversified in sexual orientation, so they might prioritize underrepresented groups like LGBTQ students.
  
  

• Some colleges prioritize first-generation students or students who are re-entering college. The UCs are a good example of this.
  
  

• Some colleges, especially religious ones, may want a certain percentage of their students from their specific denomination/churches.
  

• Some colleges prioritize students who were in the military. 

E) Some colleges prioritize their relationships with certain high schools. 

F) Some colleges are prioritizing rankings and making decisions that maximize their place on US News and World Report. This is part of a larger conversation and probably best left for another day, but when you have time, look into how US News and World Report ranks colleges. Much of that data can be manipulated through recruitment and enrollment tactics, including yield protection. 

The true trick to acceptance for many students is when they fulfill multiple priorities of a college. For those of you with children who have already applied and those whose children have yet to apply, please remember this: if the decision is no, it is often not your child, it’s the colleges. 

So this holiday season, please celebrate your children and tell them how proud you are of all that they have done and who they have become. This is one of those critical parenting moments where we can not control the outcomes but we can control our reactions to the outcomes. Ask family members to please not let the conversation turn to college this Thanksgiving. Some students have already received a great acceptance and some are anxiously waiting. Others are still finding their way. Wherever you or your child is in their journey, it is their business. Do not let your well-meaning relatives and close friends add to the stress. Maybe even reach out before you arrive at a gathering to ask friends and family to, in the words of my dear friend College Marni, "leave college discussions off the menu.” Happy Holidays to all and thank you to so many of you for letting us be a small part of your children’s lives. 

Thank you to my colleague Meg Joyce for co-authoring this blog with me. It takes a village…

CONGRATULATIONS to the Class of 2029

This past year our students were accepted to 139 colleges in 35 states and 4 countries. They also received over $8,400,000 in merit aid. This list represents our students’ hard work and WE ARE SO PROUD! It takes a village, and we want to thank you for being a part of ours.

Congratulations to the amazing Admissions Village class of 2029. Our students have chosen where to enroll, and we can not wait to see the incredible things these phenomenal young people do in the future. We could not be prouder.

Barnard College

Bates College

Boston College

Boston University*

Carnegie Mellon University

Clemson University

College of Charleston

College of the Holy Cross

Cornell University*

Dartmouth College

Denison University

George Washington University*

Georgia Institute of Technology

Hamilton College

Harvard University

Indiana University Bloomington

James Madison University

Lehigh University

Mount Holyoke College

New York University

Northeastern University*

Pomona College

San Diego State University

Skidmore College

Southern Methodist University

The Ohio State University*

Trinity College

Tufts University*

Tulane University*

University of Albany

University of Connecticut

University of Georgia

University of Hartford

University of Michigan*

University of Richmond

University of St Andrews, Scotland*

University of South Carolina, Columbia

University of Tennessee

University of Vermont

Union College

Vanderbilt University

Vassar College

Villanova University

Washington University in St Louis

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

* indicates more than 1 student

Have You Seen Your High School Profile?

Thank you again to Meg Joyce for the heavy lifting on this blog and for co-authoring it with me.

Context. College admissions is all about context. Why do we tell student A that a 1350 SAT and 3 AP classes puts them in profile for X college and student B that they need a 1450 SAT and 6 AP classes to put them in profile for X college? We tell them this because they go to different high schools, and all students are always evaluated in the context of their high school. Colleges want to know what opportunities were available to you, whether you took advantage of them, and the impact you had when you did. 

So, how do colleges understand the context of different high schools? This is usually where a document called the school profile comes into play. 

What is the school profile? Approximately 2-4 pages in length and updated annually, school profiles provide an informational snapshot for colleges to refer to as they’re reviewing your application. School counselors attach them to every college application that comes out of their high school. While there is no standardized format or content for school profiles, there are guidelines that schools can follow, notably the ones that are published and periodically updated by the National Association of College Admission Counseling. 

What kinds of information do colleges look for in school profiles?

• An overview of the school community. Admissions officers want to know basic information on the size, location, population, and demographics of the school as well as the community or communities from which it draws its students. Also relevant are details about the average expenditure per student, and the percentage of the student body that receives free or reduced price lunch or are English language learners. Is the school public, independent, or charter, and is an entrance exam, application, and/or lottery required to gain admission?
  
  

• Contact Information. Colleges want to know how to reach school administration, including the professionals and staff in the college counseling office. Additionally, they look at the size and structure of the school counseling office in relation to the size of the student body.
  
  

• Academic Curriculum and Grading Systems. There is nothing more foundational to college admissions than a student’s transcript, but colleges need help deciphering it in a short period of time. They look to school profiles for summaries of higher level classes offered (AP, IB, Honors, etc.) and the grading scale that’s being used. We’ve seen high schools with grades up to 4.0, 4.33, 5.0, 12.0, 0-100, an IB scale of 7 possible points per class, to name a few, plus mastery transcripts with narratives instead of grades. Some schools assign extra points to honors and AP classes while others don’t, and some schools limit the number of advanced classes a student can take at a time. Others consider all of their classes to be at the honors or advanced even though they aren’t specifically designated as such. Sometimes a school will have specialized STEM or global programs, for example, that students can opt into. Clearly stating school policies and curriculum options is incredibly helpful for colleges, and ultimately it helps you, too, when colleges have at their fingertips all the information they need to make a fair assessment of your transcript.
  
  Here in the Northeast, it is very common for high schools NOT to rank their students. Colleges appreciate it when the school profile includes a GPA distribution chart, especially when they do not have much experience with the high school. Click here for an excellent example from one of our local public high schools, New Canaan High School. Note how they include weighted and unweighted GPAs in the bar chart and that they only focus on students’ core academic GPA.
  
  In addition to overall GPA distributions, we’ve seen some schools list grade distributions in typical junior year classes. This level of specificity provides additional context for colleges as they are trying to understand whether your B+ in AP Chemistry is actually one of the very highest in the class, and how your 3.8 compares to the rest of the GPA’s in your grade.
  
  

• Standardized Test Scores. Providing average and middle 50% ranges for SAT and ACT scores deepens colleges’ understanding of the high school environment. New Canaan High School’s school profile (linked above) also includes breakdowns of AP scores by subject.
  
  

• Postsecondary Outcomes. What percentage of the student body goes on to two year and four year colleges, the military or trade school? Matriculation lists are also helpful, especially when they indicate how many students are attending each particular college. 

Effective school profiles usually include a small number of tables, are factual, and to the point, quickly giving the reader a detailed overview of the environment and opportunities in and around the high school. 

Does every high school provide colleges with a school profile? Unfortunately, only about ¾ of high schools produce a school profile. A lack of a profile is often a matter of a lack of resources and time. A couple of years ago when she worked with one of our pro-bono students, Aly helped a parent and counselor rewrite theirs to provide more relevant information about their student body and school offerings. Outside counselors and parents do not typically provide input on the school profile, but in this case the school counselor was overextended and welcomed the help.  To further provide admissions offices with more similar information across high schools, especially those that do not provide a school profile, College Board developed Landscape. What is Landscape? From their website: “Landscape is a free, comprehensive resource that provides consistent high school and neighborhood information so admissions officers can fairly consider each student within the context of where they've learned and lived.”

Why are high school profiles so important? It is a matter of equity. If you put two school profiles side by side, and see that one contains a list of the 30 AP classes offered at that high school, along with the range of scores that students earned on each of those exams, and the other lists a total of just a few APs, admissions officers would draw different conclusions about a student who took two such classes at one of those schools versus the other. Similarly, consider two students who submit SAT or ACT scores that are slightly below a college’s range. The one whose score was a top score for their high school might still be an appealing candidate while the one whose score was in the bottom quarter of their high school’s middle 50% could face a tougher path toward admission, even though their scores were identical.

The same goes for a school in an affluent zip code with robust extracurricular opportunities. Colleges want to see whether you’ve taken advantage of what has been offered to you. This can take many forms. If your high school has Project Lead the Way classes and you are applying for engineering but didn’t take any of those classes, it will be noticed. If you want to study business and your high school has a business pathway with lots of classes, you should take them. At the same time, if you've held a job as a dishwasher for three years and that has kept you too busy to take many elective classes or your high school does not offer them, there is a lot you can show you learned about the restaurant industry and business as a whole from the great observations you make in your application. Your high school profile is the first step to providing context for admissions officers but please don’t forget that your application’s activities list, essays, and the additional information section are your best sources for completing the picture of who you are as an applicant.

Often the school profile comes as a surprise to students and families. Many if not most were unaware of its existence and that each student is evaluated in relation to their classmates. The school profile, in addition to your application, is what gives colleges the ability to do this. Typically, the most selective colleges are not going to admit candidates who are not in the top 5% or 10% of their class, and sometimes it even has to be the top 2% or 3% of your class. However, there are a select few high schools where that is not true. Aly’s high school, Horace Mann, is one of them. 316 out of 542 students in the last three graduating classes - 58% of the total - went on to attend 17 highly selective colleges. This is especially significant because as shown in the list below from the school counseling tab on their website, this represents only those colleges that enrolled more than 10 of Horace Mann’s graduates.

As we have said before, fair or not, which high school you attend often has a material impact on which colleges are in range for you. A recent article in The Harvard Crimson said 21 schools have sent AT LEAST 2,216 students to Harvard since 2009; most of them are private and nearly all are in the Northeast. The public schools that were on the list are in affluent, highly educated suburbs or have exam-based entrance.

A really informative, well written school profile is an important step in rectifying inequity throughout the college process, along with Landscape, Community Based Organizations (CBO’s), and organizations like the STARS College Network. STARS partners with selective colleges to help students from small town and rural areas successfully apply to and attend their undergraduate programs.

Any given college, even a relatively small one, can receive applications from thousands of high schools. Two years ago, St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college just a few miles from Canada, reported 1,900 separate high schools in their applicant pool! The University of Georgia received applications from almost exactly the same number of high schools, which is crazy when you stop to think about it. Even more noteworthy, this past fall Santa Clara University received early action applications from nearly 3,000 high schools, and they only have 6,100 undergrads. Each one of these thousands of high schools has its own grading system, academic and extracurricular offerings, location, and demographics. Without a school profile, it would be impossible for admissions officers to know and be current on everything about your high school, especially when coupled with frequent turnover in this very demanding job.

Don’t wait until your senior year to become familiar with your school profile. You need it in order to make informed choices during the admissions process. Nobody wants to go back to the days when Meg was a student and her high school posted everyone’s rank on a wall in the auditorium for all to see. Harsh as that was, it did serve a purpose because you always knew exactly where you stood. In this day and age of massive grade inflation (see our blog post from December 2022), our parents are often shocked when they discover where their child falls in their class. Look on the college counseling tab of your school’s website or Google the name of your high school plus the words “high school profile” to see if you can find yours online. If you’re unable to find it this way, ask your school counselor for it. Some schools are not going to be willing to share it with you. That makes your job harder but you should still try to determine your approximate rank as best you can. You should also consider the role that all the information contained in the school profile and what you tell colleges in your application will play in your admissions process. Knowledge is power. The more you understand about your context and the role it has in the admissions process, the happier you will be with your college choices.

Should I Do A Summer Program?

As I sit by my cozy fireplace staring into my snowy backyard, it is hard to imagine it is time for summer planning. I want to thank my colleague Meg Joyce for writing this super informative blog, “Should I Do A Summer Program?”

Every year at Admissions Village, we notice a new crop of summer programs aimed at high school students. Held for the most part on college campuses throughout the country (including some abroad), programs are proliferating and filling up more quickly than ever as awareness increases. Many of them are very good, but are they necessary? Is a summer program going to help you get into the college you want? The answer, like everything in college admissions, is: It depends, but they are NEVER a golden ticket in the world of highly selective college admissions.

To understand what we mean by this, it helps to remember colleges are thinking about many things when they evaluate the activities in your application. Of course, they like it when you’re involved outside of the classroom, but they are not just looking for an accounting of your time. Instead, admissions officers review your activities (and really, your entire application) to learn more about what motivates you and how you are using that to impact your community. Admissions officers are also looking for evidence that supports the major(s) you have indicated on your application. Gone are the days when high math grades and test scores were enough to allow you to check the “School of Business” box on your college application (like Meg successfully did when she was applying to college way back when!)

Without the demands of daily schoolwork and other commitments, summer is the perfect time to work on activities that help you answer these questions. For some students, attending a summer program will be super helpful, and for others, not so much - but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. Here is our breakdown of the factors to consider when deciding whether or not to attend one.

College Major or Career Exploration. Summer programs provide a chance to explore a potential career or college major interest. Attending lectures, listening to professionals, going on field trips to organizations, and working on group projects with like-minded peers are great ways to learn what this field or major entails and what can be done with it. Programs vary from broad overviews to very narrowly defined on a niche topic, so even if you know you want to study human behavior, for example, in college, you can still benefit from attending a program called Brain Basics: From Biology to Behavior or another called Social Inequality (both are on offer at Brown University Pre-College this summer). Gaining this type of knowledge helps you rule majors in or out, which is useful information to have when building a college list, choosing which courses to take in high school, and planning activities for the upcoming school year.

Summer Programs Help Students Build Evidence to Support Their Major. Taking high school classes in an area of interest is great, but colleges also like to see students back that up outside of school whenever possible. Attending a summer program could be the first step you make in this direction. You might also seek out specific programs to strengthen or expand an already solid list of experience.

The Chance to Experience Life on a College Campus. This can be especially valuable if you’ve never been away from home on your own and want to try being in charge of your schedule and having increased independence before you head off to college.

College Research. Summer programs can help you determine what kind of campus you prefer for college - urban, rural, big, small, self-contained, close to home, etc. Additionally, if this is a college you think you might apply to, you’ll get a sense of the culture, traditions, and values at that university, which you can use to inform your supplemental essays.

New Friends. Though short in duration, these programs are bonding experiences. We often see students make friends they stay in touch with afterward.

Confidence Boost. A new environment can be a big confidence boost for some students. It’s a chance to be whoever you want to be without anyone having preconceived notions about who you’ve been so far. Aly’s own son wrote his personal statement on how attending summer travel programs made him more courageous to the point where it became his signature trait.

If all this sounds pretty great, it can be. But there are many instances where you would be better served doing something else. First, these programs can be expensive. Costs vary and can run from several thousand dollars for a one or two week program to over $10,000 for programs that run longer than three weeks - and this doesn’t include travel expenses. You can save some money by attending the online version (if one is available), although we typically recommend attending in person in order to gain the full experience. A small number of the most highly selective programs are free of charge or well subsidized, but these are extremely challenging to gain admission to and/or devoted to certain student populations. Need-based financial aid is sometimes available.

You might already be off to a good start exploring and solidifying your interests. If that’s the case, you can often learn many of the same things you’d get from a summer program by doing something else. We recently worked with a student who expressed an interest in business. Hoping to raise chickens on her own, “Sophia” came up with the idea of a backyard egg business. She conducted market research with neighbors, calculated start-up costs (which she paid for with her carefully invested savings), investigated town regulations, and successfully presented her business plan and projected return on investment to her parents. One night, after Sophia’s Chickens had been in business for several months, a fox killed six of her hens, and Sophia had to decide how - and if - to restock. The bonus to all the hands-on experience Sophia acquired? Discussing her experience launching and running the egg-selling business made for great supplemental essays that supported Sophia’s interest in a business major; they were also memorable for the reader. Another example is a student who hopes to apply to medical school one day. They would learn as much or more by taking an EMT course and volunteering with the local ambulance corps, not to mention the good they would do for their community.

Both of the activities we just described had an impact not just on the student but on their communities. Sophia supplied reasonably priced fresh eggs for her neighbors, and the EMT provided basic medical care and sat with patients who needed someone to hold their hand when they were scared, allowing the more senior EMT’s to focus on advanced procedures. Colleges care about what kind of community member you will be on their campus. Stories like these help colleges visualize who you are, what you care about, and how you’re going to make the other students on campus have a better experience.

Attending a summer program is not the key that opens the door to admissions at highly selective colleges. A small number of summer programs are extremely selective. Students who attend one often go on to be admitted to the most selective colleges. Not to be too corny (and with proper credit to Sophia), but it is a question of the chicken or the egg. Was it having that summer program on their resume that moved the needle for them? Probably not. These students were well on their way to having outstanding applications, with or without that selective summer program. They would have done something noteworthy that summer regardless. Interestingly, many times they do not gain admission to the college that held the summer program. That is because - it bears repeating - summer programs are not the golden ticket to selective college admissions. Students are routinely accepted into highly selective colleges without them.

With a handful of exceptions, summer programs do not help students get admitted to the college where they were held. When they do help, it is only in EDI. The University of Chicago just launched a program called Summer Student Early Notification. Students who have completed any UChicago summer program earn the option to apply before October 15 under the binding Early Decision I plan and receive their admissions decision within three weeks or by November 1st, whichever is sooner. This effectively gives students who are not admitted to the University the ability to apply to a second EDI school. Students who reasonably believe they will be a competitive applicant at the University of Chicago AND are comfortable with EDI should probably consider their summer program, IF they can afford it. This is the only program we are aware of that has this benefit. That said, you only gain the right to hear back early. It, like every other summer program out there, is not a shortcut to selective college admissions.

And finally, if you decide a summer program would be a good fit for you, think of it as a complement to everything else that you do. One or two is plenty. Some tips:

• Look for programs that are run by the university where they are held, as opposed to ones that are run by an outside organization. You may need to do some sleuthing to figure that out. Words like partnership, etc. are good clues.
  

• Drill down on the specific program to see who is teaching it. Are they university faculty, adjunct professors, grad students, or professionals in the field? Our preference is always for faculty as they are trained, experienced educators. That is not to say you can’t have a great experience if someone other than a faculty member teaches, just please be aware. 

In the end, the most important thing is what you get out of the program and that you are doing it for the right reasons. Use it to gain knowledge, to learn more about yourself and what you want, and to set yourself on a path that has an impact.  

Finding your Right Fit College is Magical

This has been a rough few weeks. I have had many difficult conversations with students, parents, and families and have even seen some tears. These difficult conversations are, without a doubt, the hardest part of my job; I wish I could wave my magic wand and give everyone, students, parents, and colleges what they want. We all often speak about certain colleges, so it is no wonder students may think that the only good colleges are the ones they have heard of. Parents do not understand how much harder the current landscape of selective college admissions is than when they or even just their older children applied. There is a fear that not getting into X college is somehow failing and I am the bad guy who has to explain to students they are probably not getting into X college. First, getting denied from highly selective colleges is not failing. Far from it. Failing in this process is not doing your homework and finding the right college for you. I completely understand wanting everything for yourself or your children. I certainly do for my boys, but I can tell you that my number one concern as a parent is having happy, healthy children. I’m sure you feel the same. The rest of my life falls into place when my boys are good. So please, everyone, take a breath and let’s focus on that for a minute. Next, I am going to tell you that I visit a LOT of colleges every year and that many of my favorites are not at the top of US News and World Reports rankings. My favorites are sunny places, and I do not necessarily mean the weather, where I see smiling faces and students engaged in learning but also engaged with each other. I personally believe college is about WAY more than academics. It is about kids learning to navigate their way in the world, often for the first time without their parents. This is a dire plea: please get your students out there to see campuses. Try and plan visits for when students will be on campus as it is so much more informative. Try not to be so focused on names you have heard of, low acceptance rates, or where everyone else is looking, and instead focus on where you will learn, meet people you like, and enjoy yourself. I promise you will be surprised by what you discover if you open your search. 

A college is not better just because it is harder to get into. It is human nature that if someone else wants something, then maybe you should want it too. It must be better. The more selective a college is, the more desirable it becomes. I can point to numerous colleges that just in the last two or three years have cut their acceptance rate in half – and they are the exact same college they were just a couple of years ago (they might even be a worse experience because now they have a housing shortage due to increased demand!). People all of sudden attach value to it that has nothing to do with the actual college itself. People think if a college is not hard to get into then it must not be any good, and that is simply untrue. DON'T LET YOURSELF GET SUCKED INTO THIS!! I see kids every year apply to colleges that, even if they got accepted, they wouldn’t actually like. 

The current college admissions landscape for selective colleges is simply very, very tough. For several years running, admit rates have gone way down. We classify highly selective colleges as admit rates of 20% (the Common App classifies them as under 25%); that number of colleges has grown from 62 in 2019 to 71 in 2024. 29 of those colleges/universities have admit rates under 10% and 42 have admit rates between 10-20%. So why am I focusing on these colleges that the majority of students do not even apply to? Because as this category of colleges grows, it affects what happens with admit rates at all of the other colleges. 

As you can see from this chart with data from The Common App Report March of 2024, some super selective colleges got a little harder, and some got a little easier, but once a college reaches the highly selective category, they have all kinds of enrollment management strategies (see our past blog on institutional priorities) to stay there - which means they are all pretty much wildcards for even the most qualified of candidates. Who is getting into these colleges is often way less about an individual student and way more about that particular college’s institutional priorities. This and the high cost of college has driven many students and families to look elsewhere. That is why the Common App shows the highest growth in the least selective colleges. It is also what is driving the selectivity of the middle selectivity group of colleges. The University of Georgia has gotten significantly harder in the last 5 years, so students started looking at Tennessee and Auburn; students are excited by big sports wins, so that also contributes. As Boston College got more selective, more students considered Providence and Holy Cross and now Holy Cross has entered the most group of highly selective colleges with a 16% acceptance rate. We expect the College of Charleston (CofC) will be even harder next year as students look for alternatives to the University of South Carolina, which will see a big increase in apps because of their Women’s BB team win at March Madness. Over the past few years, while UVA has become increasingly selective, James Madison’s apps have doubled. We are losing our targets and likely colleges, as many students are looking for affordable places where they can be accepted. 

It’s important to note again that nothing significant has changed at any of these colleges. It is simply not possible in just a few years’ time. They are not fundamentally better than their peer schools who didn’t experience such big increases in the number of applications or reductions in acceptance rates. They simply benefited from certain factors and from enrollment management. Holy Cross, the University of Tennessee, and CofC are fantastic colleges, but they are not better today than they were 3 years ago, even though it is a lot harder now to get in. 

Many of the parents I speak to went to highly selective colleges themselves. They see their kids have straight As and assume they can also attend highly selective colleges. I understand; I would probably think the same thing. But the landscape is so different from when parents went to college. More students have ‘A’ averages and more students are taking APs and other college-level courses than ever before. Below are some then-and-now slides. 

Kids have worked super hard for over three years now. When they hear how difficult it is to get into many highly selective colleges, they can often feel like, what was it all for? I promise each and every one of these students it is because you are going to go to a GREAT college. It might not be the one you first thought of, but if you do your “homework,” it will be a GREAT COLLEGE FOR YOU. Finding the right college is about finding colleges that fit: a college the student can be proud to attend and that parents would be happy to invest in, and moreover, one where the student can be successful. So, while I might seem negative to some, I do not mean to be; I am trying to get students to stop focusing on prestige or only colleges they have heard of so they can start focusing on THEIR colleges. As hard as it is to hear in August, it is even harder to be unprepared for a wave of bad news next winter and, even worse, to be in the position where you didn’t apply to several schools that you are excited about and that you have a good chance of hearing good news from. Sadly these days, this is a time-sensitive issue like never before. There is WAY more pressure on students to apply early. When you apply has a lot to do with your chance of acceptance. There is a large difference in Early Decision, Early Action, and Regular Decision admit rates. At many colleges, your chance of acceptance is multiple in ED vs. regular decision. A college that might be a low reach for you in ED or sometimes even EA can become impossible in regular decision. Many selective colleges admit at least half or sometimes over ¾ of their class via ED and at admissions rates that are often multipliers of overall admit rates. At other places, certain majors like Engineering at Purdue fill up in early action, and certain campuses fill up early, like Penn State’s University Park. If a student spends too much time focused on a college that might not ever happen, they might miss the opportunity to get into their perfect match. 

So what can a student do to change their, in the words of Joan Didion and my colleague and friend Elisabeth Bassin, “magical thinking”? They can decipher their “priorities and must haves” in a college from their “it would be nice to haves.” They then can do their research to figure who has those must haves. We can not change the reality. Trinity College only gives need-based aid, and if you don’t qualify for it and cannot afford the COA, it will not become affordable, but Gettysburg might. I know you love U Michigan, but you can not get into the Ross School of Business if you do not get in the day you apply to Michigan, but at the U of Wisconsin or Indiana, you will still have a chance to move into the business school after your freshman year. Or you can decide to study Economics and go for an MBA later. GA Tech will not let you switch into Computer Science (CS) after you get there because it is direct admit only, but at WPI CS is open to all. Many large state universities will not let you easily switch from Liberal Arts and Sciences into the Engineering or Business Schools, but Syracuse will if you are a good student. Colleges all work in different ways, and you need to try and get past big names and cool football teams and figure out which one works for you. To me, it is magical when a student finds the right college for them. We are amazed every day by the brilliance and spirit of the students we are lucky enough to work with. They are truly incredible, and I want all of them and you, too, to realize that there is an incredible depth and breadth of fantastic institutions out there. Please get to work finding your yours.

Colleges Want More Of The Shrinking Pie

Recently an article came out in Forbes that explained all colleges, including the Ivy League, will get slightly easier to get into because of the impending demographic cliff. We disagree. What is the demographic cliff? The demographic cliff refers to how the number of traditional college-aged students will peak in 2025 and then decline dramatically for several years, the result primarily of declining birth rates following the 2008 recession. Currently, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 62% of all high school graduates attend college. 43% of high school completers immediately enrolled in 4-year institutions and 19% immediately enrolled in 2-year institutions. It sounds like it should make sense that if the number of students in high school decreases, then the number of students applying to colleges should also decrease. While that might be the case for the majority of colleges in this country, this is not unexpected and colleges have been planning for it. The selective colleges have the resources to plan the most effectively and we do not see them becoming less selective. Here’s why. They knew the pie was shrinking so they needed a bigger slice of the pie, or they needed to grow the pie (or both). How do they do that? By focusing on groups who historically have not attended college or at least not their colleges. 

In fact, this effort has been successful as you can see from this chart showing 6% growth, this year alone, in the number of students submitting applications via the Common App (CA). 

One of the major reasons colleges care about staying more selective and keeping their application numbers up, even if/when applications decline, is a college’s Moody’s bond rating is 20% based on their application numbers and acceptance rates. This determines the rate at which they can borrow money to build their capital projects. These capital projects in turn help attract more students to apply. In reality, we are part of the problem. We are all swayed by fancy dorms and beautiful campuses and these bonuses do not mean that a college is better. 

So how have highly selective colleges been creating a bigger slice of the pie? They have partnered with the many community-based organizations, programs, and networks that have been created to allow underserved population students more opportunity. Some examples below. 

American Talent Initiative

QuestBridge College Match Program

KIPP Foundation 

A Better Chance

Small Town and Rural Students (STARS) College Network

Posse Foundation

Colleges are partnering with these organizations and many more to recruit underserved students. They are using databases such as Opportunity Atlas and the College Board’s Landscape to determine the background of applicants, based on schools and neighborhoods. THIS IS AMAZING AND SHOULD BE APPLAUDED. Since 2019, low-income applicants have increased at nearly three times the rate of higher-income applicants, but they are still underrepresented in the applicant pool (source Common App Deadline Update March 2024). Colleges are working to add 650,000 more lower and middle-income students by 2030. This increased access for more underserved populations is incredibly important. First because where many of these students go to college has a profound impact on their lives, far greater than for students from privileged backgrounds. In addition, studies show that diverse college communities improve learning for everyone.

In the chart below, you can see how much higher the growth rate in applicants from lower-income zip codes and who are eligible for fee waivers has been recent, a trend that colleges and the Common App are working to continue. 

In addition, more colleges at the top are offering more aid plus no loans for the middle class and loans to international students. Examples are Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, and Washington University in St Louis which have all announced initiatives to this effect.  Many if not all of the top colleges have been working towards this. Two years ago when we visited, Lafayette told us that their priority was to admit more of the middle class going to college and to make it more affordable for them. 

You can see in the charts below that even internationally the colleges have been focusing on growing their applicant pools with countries where students did not typically apply before to the US, such as Ghana. I spoke with one admissions officer who said she could fill a whole class with students from Ghana.

Colleges are investing in this priority. In July 2022, Bowdoin became need-blind for international applicants, and they also use grants, not loans, to meet need. This is part of what caused their applications to rise significantly both last year and this year. Brown announced at the end of January that next year, they will be need-blind for international students. Colleges like Wesleyan offer special scholarships for international students from certain continents. Each year, they offer several full-ride scholarships to students from Asia and Africa. 

I want to digress for a minute. Last year’s Supreme Court ban on race-conscious admissions has not deterred colleges from their mission to solicit, attract, and serve students who were not previously attending their colleges. The Supreme Court decision simply accelerated the move toward a focus on socioeconomic background, rural students, more aid to middle incomes, and no loans. For example, this past cycle Duke admitted 97 students ED through Questbridge, which is almost double the number they admitted last year.

I am thrilled our selective colleges are becoming more diverse and equitable places, but part of the push for underserved population students and scholarships to accommodate them is this need to garner a larger segment of the student population than was previously applying to colleges. This is what we believe the Forbes article missed: we have and will continue to have an entirely new group of students applying to selective colleges. This increase in the applicant pool is part of why we have seen such a decrease in admit rates of highly selective colleges and it has created more uncertainty than ever before. The move to test-optional admissions for many colleges has also contributed to increased uncertainty about where a student will be accepted. This has led students to apply to more colleges. We used to counsel our students to apply to 8-10 colleges and now many of our students apply to 12-14. Again, we are all in part contributing to the problem. Unlike Forbes, I do not see our selective institutions becoming materially easier because of the demographic cliff in coming years, if anything I predict application numbers will remain steady or we might even see application numbers rise. 

College Admissions Glossary of Terms

College/University Terms:

• Accelerated Degree Programs: An accelerated degree program reduces the amount of time it takes to obtain an undergraduate degree by at least one year. Most accelerated degree programs allow a student to obtain a bachelor’s degree in three years or less. They are often combined with some type of graduate program like a 7 year BS/MD program. 

• Bachelor of Arts (BA): An undergraduate degree from a 4-year institution that is typically earned in an arts or humanity subject. Some majors, such as Economics or Computer Science, can lead to either a BA or a BS, with different required courses.

• Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA): An undergraduate degree from a 4-year institution that is typically earned in dance or drama studies, or in studio arts.

• Bachelor of Music (BM): An undergraduate degree from a 4-year institution that is typically earned in music studies.

• Bachelor of Science (BS): An undergraduate degree from a 4-year institution that is typically earned in a science or math subject. See BA description above for how some subjects can lead to be a BA or BS degree.

• College: An institution of higher learning offering a course of studies leading to a bachelor's degree. Colleges typically do not have graduate students. 

• Community College (CC) : A public institution of higher learning that primarily leads to a 2-year associates of arts or science degree. A growing trend is that an increasing number of CCs are offering 4-year Bachelor degrees.  

• Core Curriculum: Typically there are types of courses or particular classes that each student must take which are often called distribution or general education requirements. An example of this might be that each student must take 2 natural science classes, 2 social science classes and 3 semesters of a language etc. 

• Historically Black College or University (HBCU): In Title III of the Higher Education Act of 1965, Congress officially defined HBCUs as institutions of higher learning that were accredited and established before 1964, and whose principal mission is the education of Black Americans. 

• Honors College or Program: A smaller more individualized program for top students of that university. There can be many perks of being in an honors college such as smaller classes, special classes and housing and priority registration. There is usually more rigor and work with these programs as well. 

• Major: An academic field that a student chooses to focus on. Typically that student will need to take a large number of classes in that subject. 

• Minor: An academic field that a student chooses to focus on that typically requires a smaller number of classes than a major. 

• Open Curriculum: There are no or very few required courses and instead students choose whichever courses they want to take. Students will still need to satisfy the requirements related to their major.

• Private Colleges: Independent postsecondary institutions not substantially funded by the government.

• Public Colleges: Government-funded postsecondary institutions that generally offer lower tuition rates to state residents. These include universities and community colleges.

• Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC): Typically a private college that encourages a broad education with a student enrollment of under 3,000. 

• State Flagship: Typically the most prominent public university in the state. A major purpose of a public flagship is to provide a high-quality, comprehensive university that's affordable for a state's best students.

• University: An institution of higher learning offering many disciplines of advanced learning, conferring not only bachelors degrees but also graduate degrees. Most universities are made up of multiple colleges which could include, for example, a liberal arts college, a business college, an engineering college, a communications college etc. 

Admissions/Application Language*:

• Acceptance/Admission: An offer of admission to a college for its incoming class. 

• Activities List: A section within the Common Application where students can list and briefly describe up to 10 activities they have engaged in, ranging from arts and athletics to employment and other commitments such as caring for siblings. For more about activities read our past blog. 

• Admissions Decision: The outcome determined by a college's admissions committee regarding a student's application. Possible decisions include acceptance/admission, deferral to the regular decision pool (for applications submitted in the early rounds), placement on a waitlist, or denial of admission.

• Admission Rate: The proportion of the pool of applicants that is admitted to the college. Unless a college specifies otherwise, the acceptance rate refers to the entire applicant pool across all application rounds.

• Admission Requirements: Colleges specify the minimum number of high school courses in each academic discipline they want to see their applicants have taken. In order to be a competitive applicant at selective colleges, many if not most candidates will go beyond these requirements.

• Admissions Interview: A conversation between a student and a representative of the college (such as a current student, alumni, or staff member), either in person or online. Interviews can be evaluative (in other words, they play a role in the admissions review process), or informational only.

• Advanced Placement (AP): College level courses for high schools students offered by the College Board that have specific curricula in a large number of subjects. Students may take an AP exam in May to potentially earn college credit. Many students choose to report these scores on their college applications. 

• Applicant: A student who has submitted an application to a college or university.

• Application Deadline: The date and time after which applications for admission will not be accepted. 

• Articulation Agreement: An agreement between two and four-year public colleges that delineates which classes can be transferred for credit and what grades are necessary in those classes.

• Change in Progression Question: An optional question on the Common App for students who need to explain things like attending more than one high school, graduating early, taking a gap year, or having a break in schooling.

• Class Rank: The ranking of a student within their high school class, based on their grade point average (GPA).  

• Coalition Application: An alternative to the Common Application, this platform is accepted by over 150 universities in the U.S. and includes sections for a personal statement, activities, and other custom materials. It also offers resources for students with limited access to college preparatory services. The Coalition App was recently acquired by SCOIR, a college planning network.

• Common Application: An online application system accepted by over 1,000 universities worldwide, it consists of a “Common App” section plus each college within the “My Colleges” section asks students to answer questions specific to their college.

• Community Essay: A supplemental essay prompt that asks students to write about their involvement and growth in their community, whether that's a school, neighborhood, or another group.

• Courses and Grades: This is a part of the Common App where students report courses taken and grades since 9th grade that some colleges require students to fill out.

• Deferred Admission Decision: A decision where a student's early application is neither accepted nor denied but is instead moved into the regular decision pool for reconsideration with other applicants.

• Delayed Admission/Spring Start: When a student is offered admission to start in the Spring, rather than the fall. 

• Demonstrated Interest (DI): Students showing their interest in and enthusiasm for a particular college through means like virtual or in-person visits, communicating with the admissions office, interviewing, reading and/or replying to emails from the college. Many schools track DI and consider it in their admissions review process. For more on demonstrated interest please read our blog on college visits and our senior checklist blog. 

• Early Action (EA): An application plan where students apply by a specified date, usually before the Regular Decision application deadline, and receive a decision before the Regular Decision applicants. Early Action is non-binding, meaning students are not obligated to enroll if accepted. Most EA plans allow students to apply EA or ED to other colleges, though there are exceptions (see Restricted/Single Choice Early Action below).

• Early Decision (ED): Similar to Early Action, but students sign a binding agreement that, if accepted, they will enroll at the college. Parents and school-based counselors are also asked to sign a form indicating they are aware of the student’s ED application. Some colleges offer a second round of ED, called ED2. The only way a student can be released from a binding early decision (1 or 2)  is if the college does not meet their financial need as indicated by that college’s net price calculator. 

• Extracurricular Activities (EC’s): How a student spends their time outside of the classroom. 

• First Generation Applicant: Colleges can have different definitions for who is a first generation college student. The most widely accepted is that neither of the student's parents graduated  from a 4-year university. 

• Guaranteed Transfer: Sometimes applicants are denied admission as a first-year student but are offered the option to transfer into the college at a later date if certain conditions like minimum GPA and required courses are met.

• High School Profile: A document supplied by high schools to colleges that summarizes the school’s grading system, course offerings, standardized test score ranges, and other important data. High schools often also provide information about school and community demographics and college acceptances for recent graduating classes. Students should ask their school counselor for a copy of their High School Profile if it is not posted on the website.

• Holistic Review: An admissions approach where colleges consider a wide range of factors about a student, not just grades, rigor and test scores. This can include essays, recommendations, and details of a student's background, activities, and contributions to their communities.

• IB Diploma: A junior and senior year, 2-year high school program that consists of a series of higher level (HL) and standard level (SL) courses, a Theory of Knowledge class, a Creativity, Activity and Service (CAS) component, and an Extended Essay. The International Baccalaureate Program is considered very rigorous and emphasizes critical thinking and global awareness. 

• Institutional Priority: Sometimes referred to as “hooks”. Please read our blog to understand more about Institutional Priorities. 

• International Applicant: For application purposes, a student who is not a permanent resident or citizen of the United States, regardless of where they attend high school, is considered an international applicant.

• Legacy: Colleges define this differently, ranging from having a parent who attended the college to siblings, grandparents and other relatives. Being a legacy applicant can be an institutional priority at some institutions, while others and some states have banned it.

• Letter of Continued Interest: A letter sent by an applicant to a college expressing ongoing interest in attending after being deferred or waitlisted, often including recent achievements or further reasons for wanting to attend that college. For more on what to include in this letter please read our blog. 

• Letter of Intent: Not to be confused with a letter of continued interest. A letter of intent is a binding agreement signed by a recruited athlete committing to a Division I or II college program.

• Letter of Recommendation: Sometimes referred to as an LOR or “rec”, these are letters supplied to colleges by teachers, school-based counselors and other people who know the student well and who can provide an assessment of the student’s performance, notable characteristics and impact in the settings in which they have interacted with the student.

• Personal Statement: The student-written essay that forms an integral part of the college application. It's a chance for students to convey personal stories, reflections, and aspirations, helping admissions officers understand who they are beyond their grades and test scores. When used in conjunction with applications to international universities in Europe, the personal statement takes on a different purpose and should be used by students to explain their interest in applying for a certain course of study. For differences between the Common App and UCAS personal statement please read our blog. 

• Priority Deadline: Applications submitted before this date will receive preference, but students who submit their application afterward may still be considered.

• Regular Decision (RD): A non-binding application plan with due dates ranging from October until several months later. Many colleges only offer Regular Decision, while others offer early application options and receive the majority of their applications during those early rounds.

• Restrictive Early Action (REA): This is an application option that allows students to apply early without the obligation to attend if accepted. This is currently utilized by only two super selective institutions Notre Dame and Georgetown. Under REA, applicants are restricted from applying Early Decision to another institution until they receive a decision from their REA school. Typically they may apply early action to any other institution.

• Rigor: This is often used in the context of how challenging or advanced the courses taken by a high school student have been. For more on course rigor please read our blog and another.

• Rolling Admission: A flexible college application process where applications are evaluated as they arrive, rather than after a set deadline. This means students can apply anytime within a window that usually starts in early fall and continues through spring, or until all spots in the incoming class are filled. Colleges with rolling admissions typically send out decisions shortly after each application is reviewed, allowing applicants to hear back sooner than they might with regular admission cycles.

• Scattergram: A graphic depiction of past admissions decisions from your high school. These are often not the best way to determine your chance of acceptance. To understand more about this please read our blog. 

• Self-Reported Scores: This is when a student self-reports their test scores on the Common Application rather than sending their scores directly from the College Board or ACT.

• Single Choice Early Action (SCEA): This is an application option that allows students to apply early to one college without the obligation to attend if accepted. This is currently utilized by just a handful of super selective institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. However, under SCEA, applicants are restricted from applying early to any other private school, whether Early Decision or Early Action, until they receive a decision from their SCEA school. Typically they may apply early action to public institutions, service academies and international universities as long as they are non binding applications. After hearing back from their SCEA schools, they are free to apply to other schools if they wish.

• SRAR: Self reported academic record. Some colleges require students to fill this out and they use it instead of a student’s transcript. 

• Stealth Application: Applications that are submitted to colleges with no discernible engagement from the student beforehand. 

• Supplemental essay: A type of essay that some colleges require in addition to the main personal statement. Colleges can have more than one supplemental essay or none at all. 

• Test Blind: A college admissions policy where standardized test scores (like the SAT or ACT) are not considered at all, even if a student submits them. These colleges may still look at your AP scores. 

• Test Flexible: Some colleges allow students to submit scores from tests like the AP or IB program scores, instead of ACT or SAT scores, to satisfy their testing requirement.

• Test Optional: A policy adopted by some colleges where submitting SAT or ACT scores is not mandatory. Students can choose whether or not to include their standardized test scores as part of their application. For more on test optional please read this blog.

• Transcript: A record from a student's school listing all courses taken, grades received, and sometimes it includes test scores, honors and awards. 

• Transfer admission: The process for students who have started their college education at one institution and wish to continue it at another. This process varies by college but generally involves submitting all college transcripts, a new application, essays, and sometimes recommendations.

• Unweighted Grade Point Average (UGPA): A measure of a student's average grades that does not consider the difficulty of the courses taken. It represents a straightforward average of grade points earned across classes, and may be computed for core academic classes, or for all classes taken by the student including electives and requirements like Physical Education.

• Waitlist: A status used by colleges to indicate that they have not yet made a final admission decision for certain applicants. Students on the waitlist may be offered admission if spots become available after the initial round of acceptances.

• Weighted Grade Point Average (WGPA): A GPA calculation that gives additional points for courses that are more challenging, like Honors or Advanced Placement (AP) classes. 

• Yield: The percentage of admitted students who decide to enroll in a particular college. Colleges track their yield to assess the effectiveness of their admissions process and gauge how appealing they are to potential students

Financial Aid*:

• Award Letter: Sent to admitted students who applied for need-based financial aid, this document indicates the types and amounts of aid that will be offered to the student for the upcoming academic year. See Financial Aid Package for more detail.

• CSS Profile: An online financial aid application used by over 300 colleges (typically the most selective ones) and scholarship programs to award non-federal institutional aid.

• Demonstrated Need: The cost of attendance at an institution minus the ability for a student/family to pay according to whatever financial aid forms that colleges uses, so either FAFSA alone or FAFSA and CSS profile. What a family thinks they need is often very different from what those forms might indicate. 

• EFC (Expected Family Contribution): The amount an applicant is expected to pay for their college expenses each year calculated based on information provided to the colleges that use the CSS Profile. This amount is not known to an applicant until they receive their financial aid offer from each institution.

• FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid): A form used by U.S. students to apply for federal financial aid for college. Some colleges also use the FAFSA to determine eligibility for their own aid programs.

• Financial Aid: Funding that is available to students to help pay for college. This can include grants, scholarships, loans, and work-study programs. Some forms of financial aid need to be repaid, while others do not.

• Financial Aid Award/Package: An offer from a college that details the various types of financial aid a student is eligible to receive from the institution and outside sources in the next academic year. This package could include grants that do not need to be repaid, loans, scholarships, and work-study opportunities, tailored to the financial needs and academic profile of the student.

• Gapping/Unmet Need: The difference between the student’s financial need as determined by the college and the amount of the student’s financial aid award.

• Grant: A type of financial aid that does not have to be repaid. Grants are usually based on financial need, academic achievement, or specific personal criteria.

• Meets Full Need: A college that meets 100% of a student’s demonstrated financial need, as determined by that college. There are only approximately a couple of dozen of these.

• Merit-based: Financial aid that is given based on a student's skills, talents, or academic achievements, rather than financial need. Merit aid is a tuition discount. Merit aid awards can be for one year or all four. 

• Need-based: Financial aid that is awarded based on the financial need of the student and their family, as assessed by the cost of attendance, and each institution's financial aid forms.

• Need-blind/Need-aware admission: "Need-blind" policies mean a college does not consider an applicant's financial situation when making admission decisions. "Need-aware" policies allow colleges to consider financial need when deciding on admissions.

• Net Price Calculator: A tool offered on most colleges websites that allows current and prospective students and families to estimate the net price of attending that particular college. Typically the more detailed the net price calculator the more accurate it is. 

• Scholarships: Money awarded to students based on various criteria such as academic performance, special talents, or other qualifications. Scholarships do not require repayment.

• SAI (Student Aid Index): A figure used to determine how much money a student or their family is expected to contribute towards college expenses, based on financial information provided in the FAFSA.

• Student loan: Money borrowed to help pay for educational expenses that must be repaid, usually with interest. Loans can come from the government or private lenders and terms vary widely.

• Work-study: A program that provides part-time jobs for students with financial need while they are enrolled in college to help pay for their expenses. These jobs can be related to the student’s field of study and are usually on-campus but can be off-campus with approved employers.

Standardized Testing & Exam Terms*:

• ACT: A standardized test used for college admissions in the United States. It includes sections on English, mathematics, reading, science, and an optional essay. Scores range from 1 to 36 for each section and averaged to produce a composite score, with 36 being the highest possible section and composite score. There is also an optional Writing section which very few colleges require.

• PSAT/NMSQT: The Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT) serves as both practice for the SAT and a qualifier for National Merit Scholarships. Typically students will take one in the fall of their junior year in preparation for taking the SAT but some high schools have students take one every year of high school. Only junior year scores are NMSQTs.

• SAT: Another major standardized test used for college admissions, consisting of a Math section and an Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section. It is scored on a scale of 400 to 1600.

• Score Choice: A feature offered by the College Board allows students to choose which SAT scores to send to colleges, providing the option to send only the best scores from multiple test dates.

• Superscoring: When a college uses the highest score in each section of the exam across multiple test settings to create the highest possible composite score. 

*The term “college” is used to refer to both colleges and universities

It Takes A Village

Congratulations to the amazing Admissions Village class of 2028. They have chosen where to enroll and we can not wait to see the incredible things these phenomenal young people do in the future. We could not be more proud of you.

Bentley University

Boston College

Brown University

Claremont McKenna College

Colby College*

Colgate University

College of Charleston*

College of the Holy Cross*

Cornell University

Dartmouth College

Duke University

Elon University

George Washington University

Georgetown University*

Georgia Insittute of Technology

Lafayette College

Lehigh University

Macalester College

Miami University Ohio

Muhlenberg College

Northeastern University*

Northwestern University

Reed College*

Rhodes College

Rice University

Sacred Heart University

Santa Clara University

Savanaah College of Art and Design

University of Alabama

University of California, Santa Cruz

University of Chicago

University of Connecticut

University of Maryland

University of Miami - Frost School of Music

University of St Andrews, Scotland*

University of Pennsylvania*

University of Texas, Austin*

University of Toronto

Vanderbilt University

Wake Forest University

Wellesley College

Williams College

* indicates more than 1 student

At Admissions Village we celebrate with cookies. Thank you Just Desserts by Kristin Mc for your gorgeous and delicious handiwork.

College Institutional Priorities: Understanding Who Gets In with Aly Beaumont and Flourish Coaching

Thank you @Lisa Marker Robbins for having me on the podcast. Your knowledge of fit to major and understanding how major impacts future aspirations is awesome. I really enjoyed the conversation and love the takeaways you summarized below. Knowledge is power in this process.

From Flourish Coaching

In this episode, Lisa and Aly discuss:

• Common institutional priorities of colleges that drive admissions decisions for your teen. 

• Factors colleges consider beyond GPAs, test scores, extracurricular activities, and more (all outside of your student’s control).

• Why where to apply and when to apply affect if your teen gets admitted. 

• What impacted majors are and how they can affect your student. 

• Clues colleges give about their institutional priorities and how you can find them. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Colleges are more concerned about creating a graduating class as a whole than about your student specifically.

• Students learn better when they are learning with people who are not exactly like them. 

• An impacted major at one college is not the same at another. You can utilize sites like College Navigator to understand how many students are graduating in a particular major. 

• It’s not the size of the school, it’s what your student does there that makes it feel bigger or smaller. 

• Being more selective does not make a school better; it just makes them more selective.

“This is a highly charged process these days. It’s very emotional for families. It’s very stressful for families. It’s not a personal process. The reality is, this isn’t really about you. This is really about what colleges need to create this diversified class.” – Aly Beaumont

https://www.flourishcoachingco.com/podcast/123-college-institutional-priorities-understanding-who-gets-in-with-aly-beaumont/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3oIkS6MkbEGXmHiBhBXtbzJLz_lFrBxgMVxw70_WNpod3FISE3Fpv7hhw_aem_AeaPkZkgh4jrN_GBw3jLm8F-DdwJt7ZnKez836njplicXfl39nX7RWaVjGrq1BR3NHqvAIRGo_Qy5pAETjLk0Plt

IT TAKES A VILLAGE…

This year, our students were accepted to 125 colleges in 33 states and five countries and received over $8,000,000 in merit aid.

By Christmas, every student had at least two viable options. All of our students have multiple choices of colleges they are excited about, where they will be happy and thrive.

This list represents our students’ hard work, and WE ARE SO PROUD! It takes a village, and we want to THANK YOU for being a part of ours.

It’s Not You, It’s Them

At this time of year, social media overflows with posts of X kid with XY stats who did not get into Z college. Ivy Day is filled with disappointment because, hello, the HUGE majority of kids do not get accepted to these colleges. Harvard’s acceptance rate last year was 3%, and more colleges than ever before have acceptance rates that are in the single digits. Kids are asking, “What more could I have done?”. 

We have spent a lot of time talking about all the things students can do to help their chances of admission to highly selective colleges. Today, we are going to say that after you have done those things, studied hard in rigorous courses, participated in activities you feel passionate about, worked to be helpful to others you care about, spent time preparing good applications, studying for, and excelling at your standardized tests, the answer is NOTHING. 

Yes, I said nothing. It is time to cut yourself a break and realize this is not all about you. It is about these colleges and their institutional priorities. Colleges are businesses and operate like such. They are concerned about putting together a whole class. Highly selective colleges have tons of qualified applicants and can literally fill their classes ten times over with incredibly accomplished, amazingly smart, kind, and wonderful students. At colleges like Harvard, the majority of applicants have perfect or near-perfect test scores and grades. This is the elusive part of college admissions that so many students and families find so upsetting. This is not a simple equation of hard work = reward. So what does this all mean? What are often some institutional priorities?
 
  

A) Colleges need to manage their enrollment.
   

1. Colleges have had a huge spike in applications since the pandemic. This year applications to the Common Application’s 834 returning member colleges increased another 7% for a total number of applications through February 1st of nearly 7.5 million. Since 2020, the number of applications to Common App institutions has risen by over 39%, and the number of applicants has risen by almost 28%. Today more than 1,000 colleges are using the Common Application compared to only 400 colleges in 2010. Additionally, since COVID, there has been increased virtual access to students, and tools like The College Board’s Landscape have provided colleges with important data about high schools they might not be as familiar with. This has allowed colleges to reach out to more underserved populations both domestically and internationally. Simply put, more students are applying to colleges through the Common App, and because of that and the ripple effects of dropped admissions rates, some students are applying to more colleges than their counterparts did 4 years ago.
   
   

2. Colleges are trying to have a set number of students in each class. Their class size is determined by many things, but among them might be: how much money they need to earn from tuition; how much space they have for students to live on campus; how large their other classes are; how many students they feel they can comfortably educate and serve. Hitting this exact number is tricky, especially these days. Colleges are making educated guesses on which applicants that they have accepted might actually attend and become part of their class. This delicate calculation is the job of a college’s enrollment manager. Some years, colleges do a great job predicting this number, and some years, they do not. Some colleges might have over-enrolled or under-enrolled last year or for more than one year, so they need to take fewer or more students overall this year. In the past two years American University’s application numbers dropped from 20,668 for the Class of 2026 to 18,624 for the Class of 2028. So roughly a 10% decrease in apps, but American’s acceptance rate rose by 17% because they took 29% more students, (10,243 this year vs 7,937 for the Class of 2026). Conversely, Johns Hopkins’ application numbers have been fairly steady for a few years. For the Class of 2025, 38,725 applications were received. This year, they received 38,100 applications, but their admissions rate was lower. That is because they have steadily been accepting fewer students to get roughly the same size class. For their Class of 2025, they accepted 2,476 students, and for their Class of 2028, they accepted 1,749 students or 29% fewer students than they admitted just 3 years ago.
   
   

3. So, why would a college take more or fewer students than in previous years? A college is managing its yield. Yield is the rate at which a college’s accepted students choose to enroll. When I see numbers like this, I think that American’s yield must be dropping and Johns Hopkins yield must be rising. Another example is Boston University. BU’s acceptance rate this year was 11%, pretty consistent with last year’s 10.7% acceptance rate but way lower than its 18% acceptance rate for the Class of 2025. BU received more apps this year and last year (78,634 and 80,792) versus 75,733 for the Class of 2025, but that doesn’t fully explain the significant drop in acceptance rates. The story here is how much their yield must have risen. They accepted 13,884 students to the Class of 2025 and only 8,414 students to the Class of 2028. That is a 39% drop in the number of admitted students in 3 years! According to Admissions Blog, Kelly Walter, BU’s VP for Enrollment and Director of Admissions, said last year, “ since we have been significantly overenrolled for each of the past two years, it was absolutely critical for us to plan for yet another increase in yield. As a result, we had no choice but to significantly decrease the number of students to whom we offered admission.”
   
   

4. Other things can come into play when a college over-enrolls - a college might not have adequate housing for so many students. The College of Charleston recently sent out a counselor communication stating that because of their enormous growth in applications, 157% overall since 2019, they are becoming even more selective than they anticipated. Last year, their yield increased more than they expected and they enrolled their largest class in history. Their first-year retention rate has also increased, and now they do not have enough on-campus housing. These three factors– increased applications, increased yield rate, and increased retention rate— have prompted them to enroll a smaller class.
   
   

5. To manage enrollment, a college might enroll a large percentage of their class EA, ED I or ED II. Last year, Middlebury admitted 70-80% of their class through their ED 1 and ED II rounds. (70% for Sept start, 80% if you include their Feb starts.) Emory admitted 70% of their class ED 1 and ED II. Penn State filled up their entire University Park campus with EA applicants this year, and the University of Maryland, College Park typically admits 90% of their applicants EA. At these colleges and many others, it simply becomes way harder to get accepted regular decision.
   
   

6. Colleges must balance their budgets.
   
   

• Some colleges may need to accept more full-pay students to help them balance their budgets and/or achieve other goals.
  
  

• Some colleges are prioritizing Pell-eligible or low-income students. Many highly selective universities are partnering with community based organizations like QuestBridge College Match Programs to find these students. This year Duke admitted 97 students ED through Questbridge, which is almost double the number they admitted last year.
  
  

• Some colleges prioritize letting in the majority of students with some type of tuition discount. This is the very concept of merit aid. An example is Lake Forest College, which offers merit aid to 100% of accepted students.
  
  

• Some public colleges must prioritize in-state students. For example, the state of North Carolina mandates that any UNC campus can only have a maximum of 18% of its incoming class coming from out of state. Some states auto-admit a large percentage of in-state students. A good example of this is the University of Texas, Austin.
  
  

• Some public colleges may need out-of-state students or, moreover, need money from out-of-state student tuition. A good example of this is the University of Vermont. Vermont does not have enough students in-state to fill its flagship university.
  
  

• Some colleges prioritize certain groups like military families with things like yellow ribbon benefits and children of academic employees with tuition exchange programs. As an example, SMU offers full tuition scholarships to 100 students via yellow ribbon benefits.
  
  

• Colleges will often accept students with connections to VIPs or Development. 
  
  

• Some colleges will prioritize Legacy students. Duke has said it will continue to do this. Some colleges and/or states are banning Legacy admissions. John Hopkins, Amherst, Wesleyan, VA Tech, the entire UC System, and the State of Colorado among others, currently ban legacy admissions. Virginia is the most recent state to ban legacy admissions in its public universities. The state of CT has legislation pending to ban legacy preference in all of its colleges and universities, public and private.
  
  

B) Colleges have athletic teams, school bands, school choirs, debate teams, and theater productions. 

1. Colleges might need to fill an athletic spot.
   
   

2. Colleges might need a student who plays an obscure instrument.
   
   

3. College might need a student with all sorts of special talents.
   
   

C) Colleges want students in all of their different majors. 

1. This might mean that certain popular majors are much harder to get into than others. For example, Computer Science is one of the hardest majors in the country right now. Some majors, like Nursing, are not only popular but also constrained by the availability of clinical space.
   
   

2. Some colleges might need to consider that a department is understaffed or unprepared to take students at this specific time.
   
   

3. Some colleges will prioritize certain genders for certain majors. For example, male students might have a strong advantage in fine arts and fashion. We visited the University of San Diego last year, and they spoke proudly of their efforts to enroll more women engineers.
   
   

D) Most colleges want to have a diversified class of students. 

1. Colleges want students with diversified interests in and out of the classroom.
   
   

2. By now, you’ve probably heard about last summer’s Supreme Court ruling against the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (and, by extension, other colleges with similar programs). All colleges, except the military academies, currently ban affirmative action in admissions. Some words from the Court’s opinion that we believe are being closely followed by college admissions offices: "nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today." Because universities are free to consider “an applicant’s discussion,” we saw more application essay questions that aimed to learn about the ways in which a student’s race or background has shaped their experience. Most colleges are still committed to creating an ethnically diverse class.
   
   

3. Some colleges want a regionally diverse group from all 50 states and multiple international locations. Colleges might be trying to expand their footprint regionally, nationally, or internationally. They might prioritize one location over another. Every time I am on a college tour, I laugh at the requests for students from the Dakotas.
   
   

4. Some colleges might want students from more rural or underserved locations. Several top colleges including Yale, Harvard and Columbia have joined the Small Town and Rural Students College Network (STARS.) Many colleges are seeking out students by using databases like the College Board’s Landscape which gives colleges a breakdown of the demographics of a high school’s population.
   
   

5. Some colleges want a good gender balance and prioritize men over women or vice versa. This article shows how at Brown, men have an advantage in the admissions process because Brown simply gets way more applications from women. In general, for the highly selective colleges, we have seen men having an easier time than women. An exception to this would be the UC system, which does not consider gender.
   
   

6. Some colleges want a class that is diversified in sexual orientation, so they might prioritize underrepresented groups like LGBTQ students.
   
   

7. Some colleges prioritize first-generation students or students who are re-entering college. The UCs are a good example of this.
   
   

8. Some colleges, especially religious ones, may want a certain percentage of their students from their specific denomination/churches.
   
   

9. Some colleges prioritize students who were in the military. 
   
   

E) Some colleges prioritize their relationships with certain high schools. 

F) Some colleges are prioritizing rankings and making decisions to try and maximize their place on US News and World Report. This is part of a larger conversation and probably best left for another day, but when you have time, look into how US News and World Report ranks colleges. Much of that data can be manipulated through enrollment tactics, including yield protection. 

The true trick to acceptance for many students is when they fulfill multiple priorities of a college. For now, maybe when you start looking at colleges, you can also consider their institutional priorities. First, do those values line up with your own? Check out a college’s mission statement. Does it resonate with you? If you think a college’s priorities align with yours, maybe you are a good fit. If so, then yes, please do apply. Spend time on your applications and essays. Put your best foot forward, but realize you can only worry about what you can control. A college will consider the whole class. For those who have already applied and those who have yet to apply, please remember this: if the decision is no, it is often not you, it is them!

To Test or Not to Test?

I want to thank my colleague Meg Joyce for co-writing this blog post with me.

Test scores and test-optional admissions, which have been in the spotlight for several years now, are getting renewed attention as of late. Many colleges have still not decided if they will become permanently test-optional for admissions. Instead, they are tracking how their test-optional students do once they are on campus, and they will use that data to make a final decision eventually. Others have made big announcements in the last few weeks. This week,  Yale announced that they will require testing but that they are flexible on which type of testing, SAT, ACT, AP, or IB exam score. This is a new definition of the testing required and one we would love to see more widely implemented. That said, it is not without its challenges. For example, what if a student has some AP scores they want to disclose but not others? Yale has said if you want to submit AP scores in lieu of SAT or ACT scores they would like to see all of them. They do provide room for a student to provide an explanation of their scores. What if an IB student does not have any official IB scores yet? Yale has said they will not take predicted IB scores. February 5th, Dartmouth has reinstated a requirement for all applicants to have ACT or SAT scores. Both colleges will start their new testing policy with current high school juniors, the university class of 2029. 

Yale and Dartmouth both stated their belief, backed up by studies they have done, that scores are more predictive of academic success at college than high school GPA. In the past, Brown has referred to a similar study, so it will be curious to see if they also reinstate testing requiring. 

At the same time, other highly selective colleges have announced in recent weeks their intention to stay test optional. Among them are the University of Michigan and Northwestern. Yet both of those colleges according to their common data sets, have about 3/4 of all of their applicants submitting a SAT or ACT score. They also, in our experience, like applicants to have scores unless they fulfill an important institutional priority. For more on institutional priorities and how they affect admissions, please read our past blog post, The Admissions Process is Not Necessarily About You. Duke also came out with an announcement this week that said they will no longer assign a numerical score to standardized test scores, SAT or ACT or students’ essays. Yet 93% of Duke applicants submit standardized testing, and according to Duke, scores and the content of their essays will still be a part of their admissions review. 

We have also seen some highly selective colleges that were more open to applicants without scores in the first year or two of COVID have shifted in the most recent admissions cycles, increasingly seeming to favor applicants who submit scores. Last year, for example, 60% of Tufts’ admitted students had submitted scores, compared to 40% who had not. At Boston College, 2/3 of admitted students submitted scores. Some other schools that are admitting disproportionate amounts of test submitters are Colgate, Emory, Davidson, Notre Dame, UVA, Boston University, and Wellesley.

Perhaps not surprisingly, demand for SAT and ACT testing has been rising. It is not back to pre-COVID levels, but it is up 10-20% from previous years. For starters, students have adapted to the new normal. They are booking seats well in advance, sometimes as soon as testing registration opens up online, and they are prepared for last-minute cancellations at testing centers. Students are factoring disruption into their testing plans. But it is more than that. We are moving to a dual world, where often geographic location and the selectivity level of the schools on students’ college lists is driving their testing strategy. 

Public universities in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee have started requiring scores (or they never stopped requiring them). Large public flagships continue to see applications soar; it is significantly more difficult to gain admission to many of them without a score, even if tests are not technically required. Some of this has to do with an underlying preference for test scores, and some of it is the practical need to make blunt cuts based on grades, rigor, and test scores so they can process tens of thousands of applications. Notable exceptions to this are the UC and Cal State systems, which are test blind. In general, far fewer students submit test scores to colleges on the West Coast.

Some popular public universities in the Southeast, including Tennessee and Auburn, base their merit aid awards on test scores, often with a matrix that families can view on their websites. Students with these schools on their lists are financially motivated to take the SAT or ACT and to do as well as they can on them. At the Ivy Plus colleges (the Ivies plus University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT), approximately 85% of students who apply are submitting very high scores. To see what percentage of students submit scores, check their most recent Common Data Set, which you can usually find easily with a Google search. You can find this information under section C9, but remember this information, like all information from the National Center for Education Statistics, can have a year or sometimes even two year lag. 

Currently, MIT, Georgetown, Dartmouth, and now Yale, to some extent, require scores. At these and other most selective colleges, every piece of the application matters. To truly do well on these exams, students have to spend a lot of time preparing. Depending upon the schools on their list and how they have fared on the PSAT or practice tests, it might be better for some students to prioritize their time elsewhere. Certain colleges are more committed to test-optional admission than others; these are typically colleges that have been test-optional for a long time and not just because of the pandemic. Some of our favorite colleges admit the vast majority of students who are not submitting scores. 

We have heard admission directors at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Rochester, and the University of Miami state that 80% of test scores are just affirming their decisions, 10% of scores give students a boost, and 10% hurt. In this day and age of grade inflation, our goal is for our students to land in that top 90%, and not the bottom 10%. How does a student know whether to test and whether to submit their scores? Like everything in college admissions, the answer is: it depends. 

We advise everyone to take a mock SAT and a mock ACT – using real tests. Set up an appointment with your guidance counselor to discuss the results and how they relate to the colleges you are thinking about applying to. For example, students who are applying to highly selective colleges where the vast majority of applicants submit high scores and to state flagships in the southeast where scores are required should prep and test. Everyone else should seek help evaluating if it is worth the time to prepare and test. Some students do not need to go through the process and emotional stress of testing. Questions these students should be asking: 

• Is my high school transcript strong on its own? 
  

• Will it add undue stress and emotional toll on me to stress? ( We are very cognizant that one in two high school students have experienced some mental health challenges, and student well-being must be our top priority.) 
  

• Do I have the time to really prepare? (This is a test that is proven to benefit those students who prepare.) 
  

• Do I think I will get to a score that is high enough to be additive to my high school transcript and overall profile? (Many colleges score ranges have increased to very unrealistic numbers for the vast majority of applicants because only those with top scores are submitting them. Keep in mind you only need to be in range; sometimes even a score in the bottom 25% of the score range is additive.) 
  

We would really like you to read The Misguided War on the SAT. This article does a great job exploring what the role of standardized testing could/should be in the college application process, especially in light of grade inflation (according to the Higher Education Research Institute’s Freshman Survey in 2020, 68.10% of first-year students at 4-year universities had an A or A- average in high school, and we have heard that number has climbed to over 80% in 2022) and the desire to enroll diverse classes. We have all heard a lot about unequal SAT scores according to race and class. Is it the tests that are biased, or are the tests reflecting unequal circumstances? If scores are used as one factor among many, they could help identify qualified applicants from a variety of backgrounds, especially when considered in light of access to activities and academic supports.

We believe most schools will remain test-optional, and admissions offices will decide what role scores will play in their admissions processes. Currently, over 80% of colleges are test optional or test blind for SAT or ACT tests. Check out the list here at Fairtest. I make that distinction to say test blind/free for SAT or ACT because many colleges still consider AP or IB scores even when they are test blind. Test scores were at the heart of the Supreme Court case banning race conscious admissions, application volume tends to soar, and colleges can more flexibly fulfill college needs when scores are not required. These are reasons we think many colleges will be cautious about requiring them again. Remember, the majority of colleges accept most applicants, and with thoughtful planning, every student should have several colleges to choose from that they are excited about.

Lastly, at the end of last year, Aly recorded a podcast for Tests and the Rest with Rob Alexander, the Vice Provost and University Dean of Enrollment Management at the University of Rochester. If you are weighing the decision to apply with or without an ACT or SAT score, you might want to listen. What do Truly Test Optional Colleges Focus On?

There is Something About A College Campus Covered in Snow…

February and spring breaks are great times to visit campuses. For northern colleges, if you love them in the snow and cold, you will always love them. If you are visiting down south or out west, it is a great escape from the rough weather.

Here are some things to consider when planning college visits: 

1) Always try to book an official tour and information session. 

2) If all of the official tours and/or information sessions are filled but you still decide to visit somewhere, please, at a minimum, stop by the admissions office and sign in. It is important for a college to know that you have made the effort to visit. Demonstrated Interest is very important to colleges, and a visit is a great sign of demonstrated interest.

3) Is there a particular major or extracurricular that you are interested in? Reach out to a professor for a certain class or the head of the club you like. Maybe you can meet with them or sit in on a class while you are on campus. Maybe you like a certain sport and have time to watch a game. If food is very important to you, maybe the college allows outsiders to eat in the dining hall. It is a great way to check out current students and see how good the food is.  

4) Don’t be afraid to stop and ask current students questions. Mom and Dad, sometimes it is helpful if you do this for your child. I know it is not always “cool,” but it is usually a very valuable way to get information. Is the food good? Are the dorms nice? How hard is it to get the classes you want? Is the campus overcrowded? Are students living in triples or waiting in line for an excessively long time to eat in the dining hall? What are the hot topics on campus right now? What do you wish you knew about this college when you apply? Let the conversation take you anywhere. Asking for directions is always a great way to start a conversation. 

5) Make sure to explore not just the campus but the surrounding community as well. Check out College Trips and Tips for ideas on what to see and where to eat. 

6) Take time to explore any other colleges that might be close by. You never know when you will like something totally different than what you expected. 

7) Most importantly, take notes on every college you see. Keep your top priority questions in mind when you do this. You do not have to write things down while you are in the middle of your tour, but when you sit down for lunch or get back in your car, jot down a few notes on your phone. It will help you to remember what you liked and did not like about each college. You will also really appreciate having those notes when you have to write your  “why us?” supplement for that college. 

Questions to ask tour guide/students: 

•What do you like best about your college? 

•When did you last meet individually with a teacher? Is it easy to get help from your professors?  

•What is the glue that binds social life and students together (sports, Greek life, academics, outdoors?) 

•Can you tell me more about the advising system? And how does this college support undecided 

students as they explore possible majors? 

•How large was the biggest class you have had? Have you had many of that size? 

•Do you do a lot of group projects? 

•Do you have trouble getting into the classes that you want or need for graduation? 

•Is it common to interact with students from different backgrounds? 

•What clubs are the most popular; is there one type of activity that dominates? 

•What kind of events draw a crowd?  

•What do students do at night - parties, games, performing arts, what are parties like? 

•How many nights/week do students go out? 

•Can you tell me something about this college that really surprised you when you got here? 

•If you could change anything about your college, what would it be? 

•What are the big issues on campus these days? 

•How is the housing? Is it a stressful experience figuring out where you're going to live each year? 

•If the school was given a pot of money, what would you like the school to do with it? 

•Do you need to apply or interview for clubs, or can anyone join? 

•Is this an intense place or more laid back? 

•Is this a strong community? Is there a lot of school spirit? 

•Have you worked with alumni or the campus career office to get internships? 

Please remember that visits are the best way to decide if you like somewhere, and they are a great show of demonstrated interest. ENJOY!

It Takes A Village

The early results for the AV Class of 2028.

Before we get to the results, I want you all to realize that everyone will experience some disappointment and heartache in this process. For colleges it is all about creating a class and who fits what they need for their class. For more about this please read our blog post on institutional priorities from last year. Best fit makes it often hard to predict which college will say yes and which will not. This year we had incredible students offered spots in highly impacted majors like Computer Science at top programs, who were deferred from slightly less selective places. It can also be about the best fit to major. Another student was offered a spot at a highly selective public flagship with a single-digit acceptance rate for out-of-state students in a highly sought-after major, but that same student was denied or deferred at similar, less selective institutions. This process is not for the faint of heart, and we want everyone to realize they are not alone.

At this point in the process, slightly more than half of our class have decided where they are enrolling next year. Every student in our senior class has been accepted to at least two colleges they would be happy to attend, with many more decisions still to come. Our students have been accepted to approximately 100 colleges, and they have received over $5,000,000 in merit aid.

We are SO PROUD of our special Admissions Village class of 2028! These incredible young people researched each college on their list and really focused on finding their best-fits. This college list is as diverse as the students themselves and represents a lot of hard work. 

Thank you to all who helped make this early round such a success. It takes a village!

Appalachian State University - Auburn University - Belmont University - Bennington College - Bentley University - Binghamton University - Boston College - Brandeis University - Brown University - Case Western Reserve University - Claremont McKenna College - Clemson University - Colby University - Colgate University - College of Charleston - College of the Holy Cross - Colorado School of Mines - Colorado State University - Cornell University - Dartmouth College - Drexel University - Duke University - Elon University - Fordham University - Furman University - George Washington University - Georgetown University - Georgia Institute of Technology - High Point University - Hofstra University - Indiana University - Ithaca College - James Madison University - Lafayette College - Lehigh University -Lewis & Clark College- Loyola Maryland University - Loyola Marymount University - Loyola University New Orleans - Macalester College - McGill University - Miami University, Oxford - Michigan State University - Montclair State University - Muhlenberg College - NYU Shanghai - Northeastern University - University of Notre Dame - The Ohio State University - Pennsylvania State University - Purdue University - Reed College - Rhodes College - Rice University - Rutgers University - Sacred Heart University - Santa Clara University - Savannah College of Art & Design - Southern Methodist University - SUNY Binghamton - SUNY Purchase - Texas Christian University - Temple University - Texas A&M - Tulane University - - Union College - University College London - University of Alabama - University of Chicago - University of Colorado, Boulder - University of Delaware - University of Denver - University of Georgia - University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign - University of Iowa - University of Kentucky - University of Maryland - University of Massachusetts - University of Miami - University of Michigan - University of New Hampshire - University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - University of Oregon - University of Pennslyvania - University of Pittsburgh - University of Puget Sound - University of Richmond - University of San Francisco - University of South Carolina - University of St Andrews, Scotland - University of Tennessee - University of Texas, Austin - University of Vermont - University of Virginia - University of Wisconsin - Wake Forest University - Wellesley College - Western Connecticut State University - Williams College

Fall in love with your classes for next year!

Happy Valentine’s Day. Now is the perfect time to start thinking about your course selection for next year.

What classes should I sign up for next year?

A student's classes are often a big factor in college admissions decisions. 

1. All students should take a challenging course load. This is especially important to do in subjects you are considering pursuing in college. While colleges like students to take rigorous courses, they also want you to show maturity and not take on more than you can handle. In general, challenge but do not overwhelm yourself. Take classes where you can get a B or higher. 

2. Colleges like you to continue to take classes in all 5 core subjects all 4 years. English, Math, Science, History, and Foreign Language. Highly selective colleges expect you will take all 5 subjects all 4 years. These days, they want poets to be physicists and engineers to write poetry, even better if they write poetry in a foreign language or two. 

3. Take classes in subjects that interest you. Colleges like to see you dive deep into areas of interest, especially if you are considering them as a course of study in college. Also, you will always have better results in classes you want to take. 

4. This is a general guide and you should adapt this as it is right for you. 

So what does this really all mean:

• Most colleges would prefer to see a B in an AP or Honors class versus an A in an easier class.
  

• The more selective the college, the more rigorous your course load should be when applying. For example, highly selective colleges like to see students with at least AP Calculus AB and Physics, even those students not studying STEM fields. Business Schools want students to have taken Calculus and Statistics.
  

• Highly selective and selective colleges expect students to take the most rigorous course load their high school offers. That means a lot of APs if they are offered at your high school. Colleges usually get a school profile from your high school and they will realize if your high school limits how many APs a student can take and when they take them. Or for that matter if your high school does not even have APs. That said, to give you an idea, the middle 50% of accepted students at the University of Georgia have taken 7-12 APs. We have heard at some even more selective colleges the average number of APs for accepted students is even higher.
  

• Foreign language is better if it is the same language all 4 years. For highly selective colleges, it is good if you can get to at least the AP level of your foreign language.
  

• Sciences with a lab component are more rigorous than Sciences without.
  

• If you really hate language and are terrible at it, most colleges only require 2 or 3 years of a language.
  

Please keep in mind that classes you decide to take earlier in high school often determine what courses you will take as you progress through the years. It is hard to jump from all regular classes freshman year to all AP courses senior year. Try and think of your long-term goals at the beginning of high school and plan accordingly. 

Lastly, remember all of these rules can be broken. Colleges want to see you excited and engaged in what you are studying. it is Valentine’s Day; PLEASE take classes in subjects you love and are curious to explore more.

Please reach out with any questions and also check out this podcast I recorded with Tests and the Rest on course selection for highly selective colleges.

The One Thing We Can Be Certain Of Is Continued Uncertainty

Today’s blog was written by my colleague and good friend Meg Joyce. Please see our “About Us” page if you want to know more about Meg.

By now, you’ve probably heard about last week’s Supreme Court ruling against the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (and by extension, other colleges with similar programs). This ruling was anticipated, and colleges have largely remained silent over the past several months as to what they were planning to do if/when the judgment came pass, other than to confirm their commitment to diversity. It’s worth noting that nine states - California (1996), Washington (1998), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), Oklahoma (2012), and Idaho (2020) – already had bans on affirmative action in place. Military academies were exempted from the change on the grounds that they need a diverse group of leaders graduating because they will be leading diverse groups of soldiers.

Until this Supreme Court ruling, the idea was that in states where affirmative action had been permitted, public and private colleges and universities that receive federal moneys had an interest in the educational benefits that a racially diverse student body provides. That interest was justified only if race operated as a plus and as one factor among many being considered by admissions committees. A time limit meant to correspond with how long the country would need affirmative action was in place as well. 

So what does the end of race-conscious admissions mean for college admissions? The Supreme Courts ruling really only affects selective college admissions. The vast majority of the almost 4,000 colleges in our country admit almost all students who of apply. For selective colleges, it is too soon to know, but I want to review some of the possible differences I have been hearing about. 

First, some words in the Court’s opinion that I believe will be closely followed by college admissions offices: "nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant's discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. But, despite the dissent's assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today." Because universities are free to consider “an applicant’s discussion,” we can probably expect to see more application essay questions that aim to learn about the ways in which a student’s race has shaped their experience. We won’t have a complete list of college-specific supplemental essay prompts until August 1, when the Common App goes live for the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, but a few weeks ago, Tufts announced their (new) essay questions (choose one of the following three): 

·       How have the environments or experiences of your upbringing – your family, home, neighborhood, or community – shaped the person you are today?

·       It’s cool to love learning. What excites your intellectual curiosity?

·       Using a specific example or two, tell us about a way that you contributed to building a collaborative and/or inclusive community.

Likewise, students may want to write about their own very personal experiences with race in their personal statements. In a professional association group, I heard the term “pain Olympics” used with concern to refer to the way students may feel compelled to address how race affected their life. I do not intend this email to be political; that is not my job or role. But I do want to report on important events and the impact they may have on students. When students write about their experiences and the impact of those experiences, admissions committees are able to understand nuance and the student better, and this is at the heart of holistic admissions. At the same time, I am worried about the “pain Olympics” and the effect that could have on students, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a teen mental health crisis. I want students to understand that writing about the sport that they love or the summer they spent playing board games with their grandparents are still great essay topics. Students should not feel advantaged or disadvantaged because they have suffered more or less. I hope students feel reassured by something an Assistant Director of Admissions at a large state university stated over the weekend: that the burden should rest on the professionals, the high school counselors who write school profiles and letters of recommendation, the admissions professionals who visit high schools, review applications, and make admissions decisions. He went on to say the burden should not be on students to lay out the particulars of how they were impacted by racism so that admissions teams can understand.

We could see creative solutions where colleges strive to foster diversity and inclusivity while maintaining high academic standards. For example, universities may increase their outreach efforts into areas with high socioeconomic needs, the theory being that attracting high socioeconomic needs students can aid ethnic diversity. Recruiting and enrolling these students is expensive and, therefore, more viable at some universities than others. 

Published rankings (USNWR in particular) use metrics that weight factors, such as graduation rates, which are at odds with having diverse student bodies. We’ve seen several law and medical schools drop out of the rankings this year on the grounds those metrics devalued schools where many students went on to public service jobs, so it is possible we see undergraduate institutions either drop out of the rankings or pressure the publishers of those rankings to change their formulas.

The practice of advantaging legacy applicants at many colleges is likely to feel the heat. Already, Amherst, Johns Hopkins University, and the State of Colorado, among others, have moved away from considering applicants’ legacy status. Many people feel that if we are going to remove any special consideration for race, we have got to do the same for legacies. Legacy admissions and other institutional priorities, such as admissions advantages for large donors and faculty children, are known to advantage white students. If those policies remain in place, minority applicants lose the one advantage they may have had while white applicants keep theirs. 

With race off the table, socioeconomic status may play a larger role as colleges look to enroll diverse classes. Therefore, early decision (ED) plans may also come under fire (though universities rely on them to help with enrollment management and to fill their institutional priorities). If admitted, early decision applicants lose the ability to compare financial aid packages. When large percentages of classes are filled in the ED rounds, diversity suffers.

Test-optional admissions could be here to stay. Literally overnight, colleges shifted to test-optional admissions during COVID, and most of those colleges have continued with the practice, either on a trial basis or permanently. Test scores were at the heart of the case before the Supreme Court, and it is therefore unlikely that colleges that are committed to diversity will return to requiring scores. In fact, more colleges may adopt test-blind admissions, where they do not see applicants’ scores so that future lawsuits cannot bring in test scores (we do expect there to be more lawsuits in the future as there is ambiguity because students are allowed to write about their race). When the University of California system went test blind in 2021, there were huge jumps in applications from underrepresented minorities, Black and Hispanic students in particular. For colleges that still accept test scores, minority applicants may feel pressure to submit high scores to support their applications. 

There is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen to race-based scholarships. Some of these scholarships were set up long ago, and the original donor is no longer here to advise on them. 

More public universities may establish auto-admit policies. Some states – Texas and California, in particular - automatically admit all students in the top X% of their high school’s graduating class to the state’s public university system and/or the state’s flagship (though oftentimes excluding popular majors). This can help get students from majority-minority high schools into the state’s top universities and add to diversity. More states may add similar mandates.

The bottom line is that we are all guessing and will be watching how things unfold over the coming months and years. Nine states have already been operating under a system that disallows race-based admissions. The diversity of Michigan and California’s colleges really suffered in the first ten years after they banned affirmative action. In California, test blind admissions really boosted their numbers, but they are still inconsistent with the state’s overall numbers at the most selective universities, in particular for Black students. A lot has been learned from those states’ experiences, and colleges will be better equipped today to attract and enroll diverse classes. Colleges are committed to diversity, and students say they, too, want diversity because everyone learns more/better in diverse classrooms.

The one thing we can be certain of is continued uncertainty, which is something we have been feeling acutely since the start of COVID. I will continue to advise students to apply to a range of colleges, to demonstrate interest, and to apply to more colleges than they would have a short time ago. I will advise some students to write about their experience as it pertains to race but not to engage in the pain Olympics. I will continue to put students’ well-being at the forefront of the process. The process is broken, but we can do our part to retain sanity and even some growth and joy in it.

Meg

P.S. - There was another big decision this week when the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s plan to forgive at least $10,000 of federal student loans for eligible borrowers earning less than $125,000 per year. I wish college in the US didn’t cost so much, this is another broken system. I hope to write more on this in the near future.

P.P.S.  Monday afternoon, after I finished this, three groups led by an activist group called Lawyers for Civil Rights, filed suit to end Legacy admissions at Harvard.

Some articles related to the Supreme Court’s decision

Five Ways College Admissions Could Change, The New York Times

How the Supreme Court Ruling Will Change Admissions, The Chronicle of Higher Education (you may need to sign up for a free subscription to access)

The Problem with Elite-College Admissions

https://apple.news/AOjgy-aIiRW6fzKdxb6A9ew

Supreme Court strikes down Biden's student loan relief plan and limits LGBTQ rights, NBC News

Some Schools See Opening in Affirmative-Action Ruling, Wall Street Journal

I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions, The New York Times

Can Colleges Be Racially Diverse Without Affirmative Action? Experience Suggests No, Wall Street Journal