Yes the QB growth was dramatic this year:
Applicants: 17900 vs. 20800: 16.2% growth
Finalists: 5613 vs. 6683: +19.0%
Matched: 1755 vs. 2242: +27.7%
Remember also that QB estimates about 40% of unmatched finalists are admitted to at least on college partner in other application rounds.
Posse and QB are the largest college access orgs, but the relatively selective schools have partnerships with hundreds of other of these orgs as well.
There are many strong disadvantaged students who didn’t get this message, IME.
Are those strong disadvantaged students even applying to highly selective schools where it matters? Many do not.
I would say it matters at the vast majority of selective schools, not just the highly selective.
I agree that many strong disadvantaged students don’t apply to selective schools for the many reasons we have discussed on numerous threads, but yes…many students who applied this year to selective schools didn’t get the memo to discuss their race in context. I expect more schools to add supplemental essays that specifically ask about this next cycle, like Sarah Lawrence’s from this year:
- In the syllabus of a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the author notes: “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced, or affected by the Court’s decision.
Ours had this – an IB Diploma kid automatically got “most rigorous” checked, for example. Our school didn’t rank.
Is this true? Almost every application we dealt with had a question that was pretty blunt about it.
It’s true IME. My institution didn’t ask a specific question about this, and many underprivileged applicants didn’t address/write about their race in their essays.
Candidly, any disadvantaged applicant who is sophisticated enough to find Sarah Lawrence and not put off by its historical reputation as the most expensive college in the US probably doesn’t need that prompt to begin with. They get it.
They may not have written about it, but you managed to figure it out anyway from the application despite there being no racial checkbox.
I don’t exactly disagree.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of FGLI students is not college ready. Making them all take the SAT is not going to change that.
Absolutely true that the SAT can’t rectify inadequate K12 prep. It isn’t supppsed to do so. It can help identify those who over-perform despite inadequate K12 prep.
I don’t think anyone is pretending that “making” someone take the SAT magically transforms them into “college ready”. The goal is to encourage? gently cajole? those kids who have managed to swim to the top of the academic pond at their local HS to start to think “four year college” instead of the local CC for an LPN certificate
I know that in many HS’s where the guidance counselors are busy testifying in court, working with social workers to help stabilize a living situation for a kid who has been bouncing between foster parents and group homes, get a newly pregnant teenager an appointment at a clinic, etc. the high performing kids become background noise. Friend of mine is Assistant Principal at one of these schools- getting a solid cohort of kids to graduate is considered a triumph; trying to figure out whether Suzy should apply to Dartmouth or Cornell is just not on the docket as a priority (not that they don’t care… there just aren’t the resources). So get Suzy to take the SAT. Maybe Dartmouth finds her that way.
My friend says that there are three “after HS” options for his kids. Military (if they can qualify based on the physical requirements). Community College/Trade School (which they try to steer the kids to, given how lousy the career prospects are for a kid who doesn’t have even a certificate program or any apprenticeship-ready skills). The criminal justice system. So some artificially imposed mechanism for identifying the one kid every other year who IS high potential-- probably a win for society.
And his is a majority white community. You can’t conflate low income/disadvantaged with race and the supreme court decision. We are failing our white teenagers as well…
This, I absolutely agree with.
In the end, it is really California disadvantaged students who will suffer-Dartmouth can pick up its FGLI students from Michigan and Illinois and Florida and the many other states where nearly everyone takes the test. Easier and faster.
I’m surprised that they have to estimate. I’d have thought the relationship tight enough that they’d know with certainty but I guess not. Do unmatched kids just apply RD via the common app? And then voluntarily report results to QB?
BTW I recall the first time I read that Sarah Lawrence prompt my immediate thought was that they took the very most cautious approach so as not to run afoul of what Roberts meant. Quote the man, then frame the questions as an exact parallel to the quote. I agree that other schools will follow this approach, especially if other lawsuits pop up…
They can do that, and QB wouldn’t have visibility there. Also for unmatched finalists some schools allow them to still get in the ED and EA pools too using the QB app, in addition to the RD option. So, I would think they know those numbers exactly.
Interesting. I did not interpret the prompt as a desire to be cautious. I thought that they were choosing to be direct rather than using euphemisms or beating around the bush. While the prompt can be answered in many ways, it pushes all applicants to grapple with repercussions of the court’s decision, which will affect all college students not just underrepresented minorities. My kid didn’t apply to Sarah Lawrence, but that prompt seems much more blunt than the various prompts that she answered for her applications.
Rather than framing the decision as something that only impacts underrepresented minorities and crafting a question that makes room for those students to discuss their background, the question can credibly answered by all students. You can be a wealthy student, a FGLI student, or a student of any race and still discuss the potential impact of the court’s decision on your life. You could talk about how you think that decision might change your personal educational goals or affect the people in your life. Or you might imagine it might or might not change the culture and composition of Sarah Lawrence’s campus, and your hopes/fears about attending a school with or without socioeconomic diversity. Or maybe the court decision might spur some students to change their career goals --maybe a kid who previously was interested in corporate law become interested in becoming a judge or vice versa. Applicants could also discuss their family life, the organizations that they belong to, their high school experience (do they anticipate Sarah Lawrence and Yonkers to be more or less homogenous than their high school or hometown), or they could discuss their experience collaborating with people from different backgrounds inside or outside of school. The one thing that applicants can’t do is avoid considering the decision at all.
I agree in the abstract, in the sense that more than one thing is true at the same time.
But I recall reading a statement in the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision, from the primary group which funded the case, saying that they’d be watching vigilantly for schools they felt were running afoul of the decision. The threat of further legal action was all but unspoken.
ETA: thinking further, I think it could be posited that there’s an ever so slight amount of provocation to SL’s approach. Like, okay, just try.
A 1996 law or legal decision I think.
Let’s not forget that CB is a business with an army of lobbyists. It took a health risk (pandemic) to create a major change. How are high schools and colleges being influenced right now?