Cartoon by Jinle Zhu
What with all the buzz about Early Action and Early Decision notifications after they started arriving last week, it seems apropos to focus on EA/ED and highly selective colleges for this week’s Special Edition of The CHILLS Counseling Courier.
If you/your kiddo plans to go right into the workforce (DWF), complete a workforce development program (WFD), enter the military (MIL), attend one of Maine’s community colleges/trade schools (CCT), or further education at a reasonably accessible four year college/university (FYC), you can just ignore this edition and thank your lucky stars.
This is all about admissions at elite colleges with <15% acceptance rates, aka: Highly Selective, Lotteries. Rejectives, IvyPlus, t20, etc.
The Truth About College Admissions Podcast
It is a rare occasion indeed that I do something other than listen to music as I “pregame” on my 35 +/- minute morning drive into work. Like Bowie the Lobster rare.
But every other Thursday I check to see if Maria has dropped her podcast yet. I always wait until the drive home to listen, but I like to know what she is serving up in her new episode (it has since gone live and is great!).
She had not posted hers yet, but I did notice that there was a new podcast by The Truth About College Admissions team of Brennan Barnard and Rick Clark, in which they interviewed Jennifer Wallace about her NYT bestselling book Never Enough: When Achievement Pressure Becomes Toxic, which is EVERYWHERE right now. I have read the book, and a bunch of what has been written in turn about the book–the themes are so timely (especially given the ED decisions being released presently) that I put off cranking the 80s deep cuts that I favor to hear what she had to say.
Wallace has a high school senior this year (as well as two younger kids), so the themes that she discovered in her research and wrote about in the book are playing out every day in her own home. Having this huge body of knowledge gave her an immense advantage, an opportunity to be especially planful about how they handled the college process at home. This is not a pie in the sky theory. Given the knowledge that she unearthed while writing the book, she has a central guiding principle that is the bedrock of her actions right now–this is my last year with my senior, so I’m going to enjoy sharing it with him. I’m not going to ruin it for him, or let anybody else do so.
One of the key pieces of insight that she writes about in the book (and iterates on the podcast) is the idea of home being a sanctuary that protects kids from the external pressures associated with the college process. This is a BIG ask for parents, who admittedly have a lot of skin in the game regarding what their kiddoes do after graduation, especially now given the uncertainty about…well...everything.
So there is little chance that parents can simply be disinterested parties.
But parents have a unique role and opportunity to keep the wolves at bay in a way that nobody else can. If you slink around the house looking for an opening to talk college like Cato waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting Inspector Clousseau, you will be compounding the problem. If–as hard as it is–you establish clear boundaries around the college process with your teen and keep them as the protagonist, you may all actually be able to enjoy their final year at home.
One extremely impactful strategy that Wallace and her family are using is negotiating one time a week (yes, you read that right, just one) when it’s open season on discussing college with your teen. Save your questions, do your research, jot down some notes, but under no circumstances reference college with your kid until the appointed hour. The peace of mind that this will give your teen will be so welcome in a milieu where everything is college, college, college.
Rather, she suggests actively seeking at least one time a day when you can surprise your kid with the enthusiasm of a puppy–absolutely unbridled, sloppy, unconditional love. Not for something that they have accomplished, but simply for who they are. Methinks that they will protest too much–but secretly love the attention and affection (much more about mattering here).
Don’t look now but we’re in the midst of the holidays, which increases the likelihood that someone (more likely lots of someones) in your kid’s sphere of influence will go rogue and ask them about college unbidden. Wallace points out that people often ask questions simply to make conversation, not out of any genuine or compelling interest. It’s just small talk (the bane of Introvert’s existence…) Asking about college seems to be a thing to do when you don’t know what else to talk about with a teen. So, help your kid out; tell Great Uncle Fred that talking about college is off limits until the big reveal when a decision has been made, but you can talk about x, y, and z that are important to your teen. Hopefully you won’t need to resort to a Sheldon-esque approach to making the rules of engagement clear.
Another concept that Wallace has frequently spoken about is a focus on HOW you will college and not WHERE. This shift in language and perspective is monumental. If you focus on where, you're looking for specific schools. If you focus on how, then you’re looking for elements of college that your kiddo would like to have at the college they attend. As you visit campuses, ask your teen to build a picture in their mind of what they want; once the vision is complete, turn to discovering actual colleges that match that vision. This aligns perfectly with our favored model of Goldiloxin’ sophomore year. Goldiloxin’ is all about experiencing different features that colleges offer and then constructing a personalized model in their mind of the best fit once they have visited different schools. Then and only then do you start trying to connect the dots between the model and the reality. Done well, this can help you all ascend above choosing schools based on external pressures rather than what feeds your kid’s fire.
Jeff Selingo’s NEXT Newsletter
Selingo’s groundbreaking Who Gets In and Why pulled back the curtain on the contemporary admissions process; it is a must read if you even hope to begin to understand how dramatically things have changed since Gen X applied to college.
He continues to be a prominent thought leader in the field, in part through his newsletter, the latest edition of which addresses the trends emerging from this year’s admissions cycle. I encourage you to sign up for the newsletter, but in the interest of including this article in the EA/ED Special Edition of The Courier I have pasted below:
Rethinking Admissions
I occasionally hear from college leaders who go through the admissions process with their own kids and say to me, “So, this is what our families face.”
In the last three years, Martin Van Der Werf, a former colleague from The Chronicle of Higher Education (and in my much earlier life, The Arizona Republic), went through the admissions process with his two sons and recently wrote not only about what he learned during the second go-around, but how the system might be reformed.
You can read the entire series here. Last week, I emailed him about what prompted him to write the series and his big takeaways. His responses follow:
There's a lot of information (some might say "noise") around college admissions. Why did you decide to write this series?
It started with me just wanting to write about my son's process of finding the college that he went to. And I did write about that. But I had taken a lot of notes, and once I read them again, I thought they might be observations that were interesting and useful to others—about what colleges do right and wrong, how parents and their kids get intimidated by the application process, how people in the middle of it are being slammed by recruiting and deadlines and don't know in the moment if they are doing the right thing. I had just finished going through the process for the second time, and I wanted to put what I had learned out there.
It is more "noise," yes, but I don't have an angle: I am not trying to steer people toward a particular choice (other than against Early Decision!), and I am not trying to make money or anything. I just want to help people take a calmer rational approach
You've been covering higher ed for more than two decades. Did you learn anything from writing this series that you didn't know before or appreciate?
I've written a lot about colleges, but never about admissions. I had read and written about the difficulties that small colleges have attracting applicants, and as I skimmed through the hundreds of emails and pieces of mail that my sons got, I started feeling bad for some of these colleges. They are up against astronomical odds, and I really began pulling for them a little bit. My son applied to Clark University, for example, which I think is a wonderful but little-known college in Worcester, Mass. I came to appreciate how precious it is to win a student in the recruiting war for Ursinus College, Albright College, McDaniel College, to name just a few that got students I know to enroll.
But I kept wondering how unsustainable this seems. You have to be able to scale these recruiting wins, and win two kids at every high school instead of one. So it got me thinking a lot about how these colleges can break through. That's why I wrote about the blandness of much of the recruiting materials I saw and thought about how some colleges might be better off recruiting students as a group. Given the current state of affairs, they have very little to lose by trying to do something completely different.
How is the college search different for those who cover this or work in higher ed (like you do) and then go through it as a consumer/parent?
There is a real temptation to drive the bus. I know a lot about colleges, right? And I thought I could put that knowledge to work. But I wanted to stay neutral because I thought if Reid went to a college only because I wanted him to go there, he might resent it and not make the college experience his own. A person only gets to do the full-time residential undergraduate experience once—it was fundamental for me because my parents were very hands off.
The closest I got to steering him is I would look at the list of colleges that were sending representatives to his high school and suggest which sessions I thought he should go to. But I learned that my 60-year-old mind couldn't always express to his 17-year-old mind why I liked a certain college, and why he should consider it. And so a lot of the time he didn't listen to the colleges I thought would be good fits for him.
But I think he appreciated my advice on other issues, like whether he should submit SAT scores. That was when I felt I could use my knowledge and experience to benefit him. For a lot of the rest of it, I felt like I was just along for the ride. I am a lot more knowledgeable of a consumer than most people in this process, but I tried to relax and let him drive.
As I write in Who Gets In and Why: “No one sends high school juniors a glossy brochure explaining that the top liberal arts colleges are pretty similar. Or a viewbook about engineering co-op programs that says here are a couple of good options for you. Who can blame students for focusing instead on individual brands? Remember that’s what colleges are selling." So as a result, I was interested in your one piece about marketing in groups. It seems like such a good idea, especially as student search becomes more expensive. Why don't you think colleges adopt that?
In one word: pride. Every college starts immediately by telling you how "different" it is. And it feels like they are competing against all 4,000 four-year colleges in this country. But that isn't how consumers see it. Most people looking at colleges are considering only a small group, in similar locations with similar profiles.
Students self-select into niches. One student is generally not looking at six colleges in the Carolinas and one in Oregon. They are very likely to stay in the Carolinas. Another student who wants to study music isn't looking at technology schools. So a college doesn't have to wrest a student away from 4,000 competitors, it only has to beat 4 or 6 similar colleges. Every college knows what the other colleges are with the most overlapping applications. So they should focus on how they can win students over those closest competitors. And I think the best way to do it is to embrace the idea that students are considering you head-to-head, and if you give us equal time on the same stage, I can win enough students over by talking about our commonalities and our differences. That would require a pretty big shift in recruiting, however.
You write about the trap of early decision (ED), which we’re in the midst of right now. Most kids apply regular decision, but more selective schools are leaning more into ED than ever before as their yield rates fall. So how can students not fall into the traps that colleges are setting up everywhere if they want a chance to get in or get merit aid? This seems to be a game where colleges set the rules and win more often than not. How can students/parents become more like consumers in other sectors and maybe win at the game sometimes?
It may be the only game I can think of where the only way to win is not to play.
Colleges have used Early Decision to create artificial scarcity. I think it is a red flag when a college admits half of its class through Early Decision. That is not a college that is being honest and fair with its applicants. It is heartbreaking to see people take out $50,000 loans to attend a particular college for one year when they could have gone to any one of five dozen other colleges that are just as good.
We have this sick obsession that a person will be defined for the rest of their lives by the college they went to (see Huffman, Felicity). And so these people are dying to get into a particular college. But I think you have to look at it from the flip side: there are a lot of colleges that are dying to have your child. And they will pursue the applicants that they really want with merit aid. But you will never know how well you could have done if you play by the college's rules.
Application Inflation Continues
The numbers keep rising—of applications to colleges, that is, according to the last data from The Common App.
What’s happening: Total application volume through December 1 to the 834 institutions that were part of the Common App last year have risen 12% so far over the 2022-23 cycle.
Some 4.5 million applications were submitted through the Common App through December 1.
Meanwhile, individual applicants have only increased by 8%.
So that means students are applying to more schools, with the average number of applications filed per student up 3%.
Yes, but: As you can see in the chart below, growth in applications since 2019–20 was slowest for the most-selective institutions (those with admit rates below 25%) and highest for less-selective institutions (with admit rates at or above 75%).
Driving the news: In the wake of last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in admissions, many colleges have either held off on transferring data from the race/ethnicity box applicants check on the Common App or colleges hide it from those reading the applications.
Still, the Common App is collecting that information, and in its December report said applicants identifying as an underrepresented minority race/ethnicity increased by 15%, driven largely by growth in applicants identifying as Black or African American (15%) and Latino (15%).
While the fact that the pool is larger is good news for colleges worried about a drop off in minority enrollment this year, it’s unclear if those applications are going to the most selective colleges, where the use of race in the past allowed colleges with limited seats to diversify their classes.
By the numbers: To submit or not submit a test score to test-optional schools is perhaps the No. 1 question I get from applicant families these days.
So far this year, slightly more students have chosen not to report than to report for the first time since there was a major disruption in test-taking during the 2020-21 application cycle (see chart below).
“Growth is meaningfully faster over the past year for students not reporting test scores, indicating that this dynamic may accelerate going forward,” the Common App reported.
Bottom line: Reading various Facebook groups and online forums over the weekend, after many ED/EA decisions were released, frustration continues to build among students and their families about a process that is overwhelmed with applications—even at what were long considered less-selective public flagship institutions.
To me, college admissions remains a ticking time bomb where one side needs to change tactics—either colleges stop using all the enrollment management strategies they employ (like deferring most of their EA pool to protect yield) or students apply to fewer colleges. Who will blink first? Feel free to hit reply to give me your thoughts.
“I have been thinking about the concept of luckocracy, and I think it has application not only to the job search but also the college search. That is particularly true for students applying to colleges and universities where rejectivity is a strategic goal and a reality.”
Parent Tips for When College Decisions Land
“‘Tis the season. For decking the halls, lighting candles, and other holiday traditions, and also for a steady stream of early admission decisions. While for some, there might be cause for celebration, for others who applied early, the news might not be as joyful. Parents often struggle with how to best respond to the range of emotions that this time elicits for their college-bound children. Like most aspects of parenting, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, however, the following tips can help increase the likelihood of harmonious holidays.”
The Role of Parents/Guardians in College Admission
“So, the next time I’m on a panel or webinar and the question about the role of a parent/caregiver comes up, be assured I’m referencing this blog series. I am convinced that what colleges want, the blueprint for students, and the ultimate focus of parents is the same—Choices and Options.”
A Candid Message for High School Seniors
“Tens of thousands of early-round application decisions have already begun to appear on student portals, but many more of you are still waiting. December 15 usually marks the crescendo of December results. Students, are you ready? Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m typically a touchy-feely encourager type, sometimes told I “care too much.” I am sorry if this message seems harsh in contrast; I write it only because I fear no one else will.”
A Fiendish Trio: Three Ways Well-Meaning Parents Heap Unhealthy Pressure On Their Kids
“Students who have worked hard for years are agonizing about whether their efforts and sacrifices will pay off in the form of an acceptance to one of their top-choice schools. For those who get a yes, the joy and affirmation will be profound, almost as profound as the disappointment and invalidation for the overwhelming majority who get a no. The cultural affliction saddling both groups, long before they are bifurcated, is a fiendish trio: narrow definitions of success, high-stakes-outcome beliefs, and parental overinvolvement. The word “affliction” is apt because unhealthy pressure has contributed to rising rates of adolescent anxiety and depression.”
Paying for College 101 Facebook Group
It started out as crowdsourced information just about financial aid, but has morphed into a complete college resource. Over 200K people can’t be wrong.
Here’s a timely entry from the group…
“A little Math to share with those dealing with Early Decisions that aren't going your way. Based on a quick Google search there are 31,824 high schools in the US. The Ivy Leagues had a combined incoming Freshman class in 2023 of 14,904 students. That means that if every High School Valedictorian in the US applied to at least one Ivy League school, and the Ivies accepted only Valedictorians, less than one half of HS Valedictorians (46%) would be accepted to and end up at Ivy League schools. Except we know it's far worse than that. Admissions numbers show that most of the kids with the highest acceptance rates aren't Valedictorians. They're athletes and/or legacies. Being smart matters, but recruited athletes and legacies have by far the highest acceptance rates and have the most grace for low scores and grades. And they're taking spots from your non-legacy kids with perfect stats.
We also know that roughly 3.8M kids graduated from US High Schools in 2023. There's one spot in an Ivy League school for every 254 kids graduating every year. Cornell is by far the largest Ivy and their incoming class size is roughly 3,500. Penn is the second biggest with 2,400. All six of the other Ivies are around 1,500 freshman matriculating each year. When people here who work in admissions or counseling say it's literally a lottery they're not kidding. If your kid isn't a legacy or recruited athlete you have a maybe a 2% chance of getting accepted even with the most elite scores, transcript, and extracurriculars.
Okay, sure. There are elite schools beyond the Ivy League. Let's expand it a bit to other super elite schools. Going by the US News list to include other top 20 schools Stanford has an incoming freshman class of roughly 1,700 every year. MIT's is under 1,100. Cal Tech's 2023 freshman class was only 263(!) students. Duke, Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and Northwestern are all small colleges with 1,500-2,000 students per class. It's not until you hit #15 UC Berkeley that you have a big state university with a large enrollment and an incoming freshman class size of 9,700. #15 UCLA's freshman class size is roughly 6,600. Let's go one beyond twenty to #21. Michigan has an incoming Freshman class of 7,500. If you take the 4 big public universities in the US News list that make up the top 21 schools, Cornell, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Michigan basically have more spots (27.3K) for incoming freshman than the other 17 schools combined. Take Michigan out and the top 20 schools on the US News list have a combined incoming Freshman class of less than 50K students.
Simply put. It's a numbers game that isn't favorable to kids. On top of 3.8 millions US High School grads, US Schools like to accept foreign students because their parents usually pay close to full cost of attendance. Public schools typically don't have preferences for legacies, but do have to give preferences to in-state kids. So if you're not in California your chances of getting into Cal or UCLA are far diminished.
There are over 30K high schools in the US. Over half of them won't have a single student who goes on to attend an Ivy League school. As the math works out, roughly one kid per high school is going to attend a top20 school. The most elite schools haven't expanded their campuses or their enrollments at all in most cases over the last 20-30 years. Those that have have expanded far less than the increase in demand for higher education overall. There are more and more kids competing for fewer and fewer spots. The schools that are growing are not "elites." They are usually the schools people in this group aren't nearly as excited about. Directional State Universities.”