It’s been five years of change and turmoil in the world of college admissions since March 2020.
Would love to share our reflections on how the landscape has changed, and what new trends you are seeing, or think will be coming as a result of the new world we live in, as pertains to college admissions.
TLDR; I’ll bullet point trends as we note them. Those with a ? indicate lack of consensus.
the fall and rise of standardized tests.
the emergence of AI as an admissions tool.
the ever increasing numbers of applications.
continued decline or increase of URM accepted students?
UCs becoming more reliant on AP scores.
less emphasis on diversity in essays, but perhaps more emphasis on respecting different views and fostering tolerance?
Decline of apps highlighting activities such as founding nonprofits or pay to play opportunities.
AO preference for real world experience, such as jobs, or competitive fully funded summer activities?
Will student “research” continue to be a selling point in the eyes of students and parents?
Rising popularity of southern universities
Fewer target or safety school for unhooked high stats kids.
Admit rate up, yield down as a whole.
But for top schools, admit rate is lower and yield is higher.
Some Ivies offering free tuition depending on income level.
Or what hasn’t changed. D19 applied just before the pandemic, and there was a lot of talk about how that was likely the peak in competitiveness because of demographics. But 5 years on and admissions seem as competitive and unpredictable as they were then. I’m guessing part of it is the number of colleges that are test optional now.
Yes, and TO isn’t going away. But demand is rising again. Students feel they need to take these tests, even if a college is test optional. I am a test prep tutor, and business is booming.
The CB reports SAT participation increased from 1.91M in 2023 to 1.97M in 2024. ACT participation remained steady at 1.4M from 2023 to 2024. While the number is substantially up since when students could not safely test during COVID, the rate of increase more recently seems quite small.
However, I don’t doubt that the test prep business is booming in your area. The overwhelming majority of students taking SAT/ACT are not paying for private test prep. That’s a small minority that is not well representative of the overall population. I expect many of that small minority are targeting Ivy+ type colleges, a significant portion of which have changed to requiring standardized testing. 80-90% of 4-year colleges still do not require standardized testing. The Ivy+ colleges that require testing are the exception, rather than the norm.
I suspect that AI will be used to detect certain key words in essays and apps that might help them screen for either red flags or for desirable traits. Maybe those apps will get extra scrutiny initially. I definitely think apps will still be read by people.
So I have no data for this other than a sense of different attitude in D19’s year vs now, and this may be California specific, but the CC-UC option seems much more “accepted” now vs having to justify then. Not sure whether that is driven by cost or by how much (more) of a crapshoot UC admission has become (possibly because they dropped standardized testing in this period). For context, large well-regarded Bay Area public that sends a number of students to T20s, Cal and UCLA among others, and by far the most popular CC seems to be Santa Barbara for its residential option that “feels more” like college than most CCs.
Before then, UCs weighted SAT/ACT relatively less than HS GPA compared to many other colleges, such that the “UC disappointment” threads that tended to pop up here were mostly from applicants with high SAT/ACT relative to their HS GPA who were surprised that their high SAT/ACT did not counterbalance their lower HS GPA.
Was thinking more of the increase in applications they’ve seen because of that, like other colleges, mathematically making admission harder. Quick Google search tells me Cal had 87k applicants in fall 2019 and 124k in fall 2024, for example.
I’m also interested to see how colleges will continue to react to the 2023 SCOTUS decision re using race in admissions. I think last year’s data did show fewer URM applicants matriculating at some notable schools, but I’m not sure if colleges won’t yet find ways to get the applicants they seek in order to build diverse classes.
