How Did We Get Here? Part 2
PART 2: College Admissions are increasingly more unpredictable for everyone, colleges included.
The downside to a more robust, diverse applicant pool is that college admissions are increasingly more unpredictable. To combat this, students are often applying to more colleges than they used to. We used to recommend that students apply to 8-12 colleges, and now we recommend they apply to 10-14. This flood of applications is not just unpredictable for students. It has also created a great deal more unpredictability for colleges. We know that institutional priorities motivate admissions decisions, but colleges do not advertise what their priorities are, and priorities change from year to year. We can sometimes make inferences based on what we are seeing, but we aren’t always sure that our conclusions will carry over into the next cycle. What we do know is that colleges always care about managing their enrollment, and the increased number of applications has made it that much more challenging.
Earlier in this blog, we mentioned many colleges had fewer applicants this year. That might not be as true as the numbers lead us to believe. Because of a reporting change, colleges can no longer include an incomplete application in their application numbers. Side note: the desire to convert incomplete apps to submitted apps is why many colleges extended their application deadlines. We expect more of this going forward.
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 year applications were down fairly significantly at both Tulane University (down by 11,231, which is 26%) and Williams College (down by 3,859, which is 25%.) But, because both colleges didn’t need to admit as many students as they had in the past, their acceptance rates ended up only rising slightly. American University had an appreciably lower drop in applications this year, but their acceptance rate rose more significantly because they accepted 416 more students than last year.
As we stated in part 1 of this blog, we talk a lot about admissions to highly selective colleges because when highly selective colleges admit fewer students, it trickles down and puts pressure on selective and less selective colleges as those denied students are looking for seats. Barnard, Boston College, Cal Tech, Colby, Colgate, Duke, Emory, GA Tech, Rice, MIT, Pitzer, Swarthmore, University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia all took fewer students.
Some colleges that took a few more students are Brown, Cornell, Tufts, and Colorado College. CC is interesting because its admit rate increased significantly from 12% to 20%. Their applications decreased by a third. Not exactly sure what is happening there, except maybe the fact that they pulled out of the US News and World Report rankings had something to do with it.
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. Tulane’s yield rate has increased significantly in the past few years. In 2016 their yield rate was 26%, and in 2021 it was 45%. Tulane simply needs to accept fewer students because more of the students they are admitting are enrolling. Another example is Boston University. BU’s acceptance rate fell this year even though their applications were actually slightly down. That is because they admitted 25% fewer students! According to Admissions Blog, Kelly Walter, BU’s VP for Enrollment and Director of Admissions, said, “ 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.” Maybe American and Amherst yields have fallen because, despite getting fewer applications this year, both took more students. We have heard that Syracuse’s acceptance rate fell from 59% last year to 36% this year because they overenrolled last year. So this year, they took way fewer students.
Other things can come into play when a college over-enrolls - a college might not have adequate housing for so many students. A good example of this is the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. They have overenrolled in the past couple of years, and they have a huge housing crisis going on. They have students sleeping in a town that is 30 min away. St. Andrews cut their offers by 5% this year, and they are working on increasing housing for the future.
Colleges like early applications because they help them to manage enrollment better and focus on their institutional priorities. This year, early applications were even more popular than ever. Interesting side note: Early apps were up at many places, even at some colleges whose overall apps were actually down.
Most selective schools experienced a slight rise in early application numbers that continue to be very high. From Collegiate Gateway’s Early Admissions Trends for the Class of 2027: “Colleges that continue to break early application records and whose numbers rose from last year include Barnard (up 11%), Brown (up 10%), Dartmouth (up 14%), Emory (EDI up 10%), Notre Dame (up 15%), NYU (up 14%), UVA (ED up 22% and EA up 17%), WashU (EDI up 12%), and Williams (up 16%). “Interestingly Notre Dame and Williams had large increases in REA and ED, respectively, but Notre Dame was only up 2% in the regular round, and as we discussed earlier, Williams was down 25% overall.”
Again from Collegiate Gateway, “Colleges that continued to see high early application numbers that only rose slightly or stayed relatively flat compared to last year include Boston College, Penn, and Rice.
Some schools did see a drop in early applications. For example, Columbia’s ED apps fell by 9% from last year. MIT’s Early Action applications dropped 19% compared to last year, which is not surprising since MIT reinstated their standardized testing requirement this cycle after two years of a test-optional policy during the pandemic.
In general, ED and REA acceptance rates have continued to decline, however, they remain significantly higher than Regular Decision acceptance rates. Several selective colleges broke school records with their low early acceptance rates, including Brown (13%), Dartmouth (19%), Duke (16.5%), Williams (27%), and Yale (10%).”
Keep in mind that the presence of high numbers of early decision and/or early action applications usually means regular admit rates are significantly lower than overall acceptance rates. Some exceptions to this off the top of my head would be USC this year, U Chicago, and Georgetown normally.
Colleges especially like Early Decision to help them manage enrollment. Early Decision applicants agree to enroll if they are accepted. What easier way is there for a college to predict enrollment? Therefore, many colleges, especially those with two rounds of ED, continue to accept large percentages, often over 50%, of their class early. This can be even more true for colleges that have two rounds of ED and an early action round.
Washington University in St. Louis, Tufts University, and Bates are three I often think of that take somewhere between half and two-thirds of their class in their two ED rounds. This year Middlebury accepted more than 70% of their class in their ED 1 and ED 2 rounds. This includes their students scheduled to start in both September and February. Acceptance to Syracuse has gotten considerably harder in the last two years’ regular decisions because they have added ED2. Acceptance to Boston College has gotten significantly harder in recent years because they added Early Decision; this year, they accepted around 57% ED. Barnard’s overall admit rate dropped this year to 6.5%, and they took over 60% of their class in their two rounds of ED. Tulane is a great example of a college that accepts most of its students early through their two rounds of ED and their EA round. Last year they caused a stir when they accepted just over 100 students in their regular round. This year we heard they took around 300 students in the regular round.
ED 2 is usually harder than the ED 1 round, although this is hard to prove because most colleges do not break out their ED rates by the two rounds.
Many colleges like to accept students early because it allows them to manage their yield and focus on other institutional priorities. Some colleges want to lock in more full-pay students and their recruited athletes. This is why most privileged students benefit so greatly from ED at most selective institutions. However, we have seen in recent years that the most highly selective colleges, the Ivies and the like, are using ED to lock in their underserved populations. This goes back to a conversation we had with the director of admissions from Swarthmore last year. He said in order to yield one student from an underserved population in the regular round, they had to admit 10. So Swat started to prioritize accepting them in the ED round. These colleges have such huge endowments that their Institutional Priorities are different. They don’t have to worry about locking in their full-pay students early in the same way.
Another thing colleges use to manage their enrollment is deferrals; this year, they are utilizing them more than ever before.
USC added Early Action to its admissions cycle for the first time this year and received a whopping 40,600 early apps! USC admitted 5.9% of EA applicants and deferred all applicants who were not accepted.
From Jeff Selingo’s article a couple of weeks ago in the NY Times`"Most admissions deans I talked with said they don’t fully review the deferred applications again during regular decision, when they’re already facing another thick pile of files. They might look at new information they receive, namely grades from senior year. Those grades can help push someone over the acceptance line but, for the most part, only if the applicant also fulfills other institutional priorities.”
We saw this as mostly true, but let’s break it out a bit.
The vast majority of our students who were deferred from EA did not ultimately gain acceptance, but most of the small handful who did were some sort of institutional priority.
This can often be dependent on how many students a college defers, to begin with.
Colleges like MIT and Harvard defer almost all students who apply early. Brown and Yale are good examples this year of colleges that only deferred a small percentage of their ED or REA students.
We even have one student deferred from the EA round at a state flagship with a roughly 80% acceptance rate, who did not get waitlisted but just received a positive decision on April 19th.
So remember, good senior-year grades are very important.
Next in Part 3:
We will discuss how admission rates are not always what they appear.