A great blog by Jim Jump. A teaser:
There is an ongoing debate within the college admissions world about whether the admission process is, or should be, a meritocracy. That debate encompasses a subdebate about whether merit is real, or merely a code word for privilege. Is meritocracy really “privilegeocracy”?
It’s worth the quick read!
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I’m thankful that most of our students are admitted to their top choice schools in the EA, ED 1, or ED 2 rounds. But every year, some students are not so strategic with their choices and, therefore, are not as successful in these rounds. Each year since it was posted, I have revisited a wonderful article on rejection by Adam Grant. It begins by reminding us of what both students and parents can fast-forget when dealing with a college rejection:
When someone rejects you, it helps to remember that there’s another you.
You are not in this alone! A college with a 15% admit rate rejects 85% of applicants, so you’ve got a lot of company. Remember that you have to play to win, and when the game is over, the best thing you can do is move on confidently.
As someone who has been rejected an appropriate amount, How to Bounce Back From Rejection is something I know well! Yet, it’s not something that can always be taught or that we can prepare students for, especially if a student is used to coming out on top. During a sea change year (i.e., this year and… honestly…the pathreet 3 years!) and when there is a lot of misinformation and misguidance around how hard it is to get into selective schools in the US, results can feel even more confusing.
What Grants also points out that I hope all students and parents can keep in mind is rejection often happens for a reason that is not personal to the applicant: lack of fit. Fit is not all about where the student thinks they will be the best fit academically, culturally, etc. Fit is determined based on what a college needs (its institutional priorities)—it’s a moving target and not always a two-way street. Students don’t control, and in many cases don’t even know or understand, a college’s institutional priorities. How can they be when colleges are not transparent about it? What constitutes a fit in one applicant pool might not be a fit in another, and this can vary from school to school and year to year.
Students, please remember:
We are more than the bullet points on our resumes. We are better than the sentences we string together into a word salad under the magnifying glass of an interview. No one is rejecting us. They are rejecting a sample of our work, sometimes only after seeing it through a foggy lens.
Hang in there. In the end, as hard as it will feel to accept in the moment, things almost always work out just how they should.
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In 2022, Education Reform Now released the first brief in their Future of Fair Admissions series. The brief contained the most comprehensive research on college admissions early decision plans, which provide an applicant an admissions decision in mid-December in exchange for the student’s commitment to enroll if admitted.
The chart linked below from ERN shows the 84 IHEs where a third or more of freshmen were enrolled through early decision (ED) programs in 2022 plus 6 more that enrolled more than a third of their freshmen ED in 2020 but did not share data for 2022. The Common Data Set does not publish the number of students who are enrolled through early decision. Since early decision is binding, you would expect a very high share of all students admitted ED to enroll. Blank spaces represent years when data were not available. 0% represents years an IHE did not offer ED.
Congrats to all of our seniors!
Arizona State*
Bard*
Barnard
Baylor
Boston College
Boston U
Butler
CalPoly SLO*
Case Western*
Chapman*
Clemson*
College of Charleston*
Colorado College
Cornell*
Drexel*
Duke
Elon*
Fairfield*
Florida Gulf Coast*
Florida State
Fordham*
Georgetown*
Georgia Tech*
Haverford
Holy Cross
Indiana University + Kelley School of Business*
JMU*
Lehigh*
Loyola Marymount
Loyola MD*
LSU
Mary Washington
Miami Ohio*
Michigan State*
NJIT
Northeastern*
NYU*
Ohio State*
Penn State*
Providence College*
Purdue
Quinnipiac
Reed*
Rice*
Santa Clara*
Sarah Lawrence*
Scripps
SDSU*
Seton Hall
Southern Methodist University*
St. Johns
SUNY Binghamton*
SUNY Buffalo*
SUNY Geneseo
SUNY Stony Brook*
Syracuse*
Tampa*
TCU
Towson
Tulane*
University of Alabama*
University of Arizona*
University of California, Berkeley*
University of California, Davis*
University of California, Irvine*
University of California, Santa Barbara*
University of California, Santa Cruz*
University of California, San Diego*
University of Colorado, Boulder*
University of Connecticut
University of Delaware*
University of Denver
University of Illinois
University of Florida*
University of Illinois*
University of Maryland*
University of Massachusetts, Amherst*
University of Miami*
University of Michigan*
University of Minnesota
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill*
University of Oregon
University of Pittsburgh*
University of Rhode Island
University of Richmond*
University of Rochester*
University of South Carolina*
University of Southern California*
University of Tampa*
University of Texas, Austin* (including Plan II Honors)
University of Texas, Dallas
University of Vermont*
University of Washington*
University of Wisconsin*
Vanderbilt*
Villanova*
WashU*
Wellesley
and probably a few more (not all students report full results)!
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We must keep it real: most students are not admitted from the WL at highly selective schools.
Our primary advice? Get excited about where you have been accepted! Applying to college is hard; when a college says YES, that means something. Lean into those schools—you won’t think twice about where you were waitlisted a year from now.
Before implementing any waitlist strategies, it is important to deposit at a school where you have been admitted. Take advantage of admitted student days and other events that connect you with potential future classmates, including joining “Class of 2027” social media groups. These forums are often very informative, and fun, and can help you take your mind off the waitlist waiting game. Again, try to get excited—college is simply awesome. Where you go is not nearly as important or impactful as what you do once you get there to make it all that it can be. It can be everything you want it to be; it’s up to you to make that happen no matter where you go.
If you do want to stay engaged with your WL options, first get familiar with the WL data from past years. How many students are offered spots on the WL? How many accept their spot, and more importantly, how many does school X ultimately admit? Some of these numbers are dismal, but it is best to know what you are up against. Look at the Common Data Set first (http://www.commondataset.org/). A few other sites to review:
Once you have accepted a spot on the WL, deposited elsewhere, and familiarized yourself with the waitlist data, consider the strategies below. Not all of them are novel, but without much to lose, why not do all you can so you can look back without any what-ifs?
Additional strategies…
You don’t need to…
More questions about the WL? Email us!
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From Jeff Selingo:
March Madness is, of course, synonymous with college basketball, but there is another college tradition it might also describe these days: admissions.
The admissions process is now one that essentially runs year-round. Still, this month is when colleges typically send out their final batch of decisions. And this year is a particularly maddening one for applicants and the big-name colleges that, yes occupy a small subset of the higher education ecosystem, but also drive a lot of the narrative about admissions.
This year’s seniors submitted more applications to colleges than any group before them—at least in applying to the thousand colleges that are part of the Common App (which is a good proxy for the overall national numbers).
That huge surge in applications has resulted in an unusually large number of deferrals from early action. Here was a group of students who had applied early action (in November) for the purpose of getting a decision early (in January) but were told to wait until now to find out if they’re in or out.
The number of deferrals at many top-ranked colleges way outstrips the number of potential spots in the freshman class. As I wrote in the opinion pages of The New York Times yesterday:
Wisconsin deferred 17,000 of its 45,000 early action applicants. U.S.C. deferred around 38,000 — or some 94 percent — of its early pool (they accepted the other 6 percent and rejected no one). Clemson told nearly 15,000 of its 26,000 early applicants to wait another two-plus months for a decision (it rejected only 300).
The problem is that as applications have skyrocketed—they are up 32 percent at selective institutions over the past three years—the campuses have encouraged early action to spread out their workload and have more time to yield the accepted applicants they really want.
USC and Clemson did that this year by adding early action for the first time. Admissions officials at both institutions told me that as a result they were unsure how the applicant pool would shake out.
“We didn’t know if the early-action deadline would skew the high-quality apps to the front, so we were extra cautious,” said David Kuskowski, associate vice president for enrollment management at Clemson.
In other words, if they said Yes to the early academic rock stars, then they’d have to hand out more No’s in the regular-decision process to avoid over-admitting, but could still risk losing the early admits to other top-ranked colleges. Ah, the intricacies of enrollment management.
Kuskowski said he was “not in love with the way we had to manage the process this year.” He hopes that Clemson can apply what they learned about this year’s application trends and yield rates to next year’s cycle. “I believe that next year we will have more denials,” he said.
My piece in yesterday’s New York Times was the result of a phone call I got from Frank Bruni in December, when he told me that he’d be taking a few weeks off from his weekly newsletter and was asking others to fill in. Frank has long had an interest in higher ed and college admissions—he is now a professor at Duke—so he assumed there would be something to say about admissions in March.
I accepted the generous offer without knowing what I’d write about. But then I started hearing from parents and counselors about the wave of deferrals coming in from colleges. And I was also hearing the same names again and again: Clemson, USC, UVA, Wisconsin, Richmond, Villanova, among others.
As I started calling admissions deans about all the deferrals, however, they didn’t really want to talk about it or share numbers. To many of them, it wasn’t a big deal: the admissions process wasn’t over and they were simply telling students to wait. But the reason students applied early I told them was precisely to get an answer early. A deferral wasn’t an answer.
What’s more, if you’re a senior sitting on multiple deferrals they don’t necessarily mean the same thing from every campus. For some colleges, they might mean what they did at Clemson: we want to wait to see how the early pool compares with the regular pool. For others, it means they want to see more information—mostly senior year grades. And yet for others, a deferral is much like the wait list in the spring: deferred students fill gaps in the class when a school might need more humanities majors or boost enrollment of underrepresented students or need more students from a particular region.
Once again, I was reminded that colleges admissions is about the institution and not the student. That’s fine, we all get colleges are a business. But the secrecy surrounding these numbers also means that students and their counselors can’t figure out what to do next because they lack the context of the applicant pool.
Read the rest of Jeff’s article here.
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Could not agree more with Rick Clark’s recent post about institutional priority. It’s something we talk about a lot with families and that needs to be taken seriously in the college admissions process. Who a college admits is ALL about them and their needs.
If you are a senior, many colleges will release decisions in March. If you are denied from a selective college, my hope is you won’t question your academic ability or lose sleep trying to figure out what was “wrong” with you or what you “could or should have done differently.” IPs mean admission decisions do not translate to “We don’t think you are smart” or “You could not be successful here.”
Read more here!
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Inside Higher Ed’s headline, not ours 😉
But yes, it’s still ED or bust at many top US colleges, and those spots are getting even harder to come by. As the ED application numbers rise, a change in strategy is often needed. Our prediction:
“In” in 2023 –> match schools in ED.
“Out” in 2023 –> overreaching in ED (or SCEA or REA!).
Find an interesting article on the use of early decision here!
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Everyone should read the Georgia Tech admissions blog.
Read rick Clark’s recent post here. For juniors, this section for seniors is important. Read it now, and read it again this summer when you finalize your college list.
Be reminded that your chances of being admitted to a school with an admit rate below 20% do not go up 20% by applying to 20% more of those schools. Trade out “dream school” for IRL colleges. Apply to a group of schools (you figure out the number but generally more than 2 and less than 10) where you know you will be thrilled to get in and excited to go.*
*and we might add: where you can actually get in! Thanks always, Georgia Tech, for keeping it real!
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