the college application process benefits the top colleges, private high schools and the college app industry, it does not benefit students who are stressed like they’ve never been.
College admissions, higher ed are industries that need disruption and innovation, the status quo is untenable.
By publishing similar information as for college admission, such as the range of student stats for those awarded the scholarships. Obviously, some scholarships will consider essays, recommendations, etc. that are inherently less observable or transparent from outsider points of view, but even just GPA and SAT/ACT score ranges will give a better idea of how competitive a merit scholarship is than the wild guess that one may have to make now.
I typically see colleges (limited number of merit scholarships I have investigated) disclose thresholds established for even being able to apply for GPA/test scores or give that info for recent winners. But even with that info because so many of the non-automatic merit awards are subjective and thus something of a lottery, for the reasons you note above, we will see a lot of kids applying to a lot of colleges. And as college costs continue to rise well beyond increases in incomes, I think that we will see more kids taking that approach. Only alternative is to go with automatic merit aid with a limited number (sometimes one) of college applications.
@northwesty, I like the fact that you’re being creative but I have to disagree with a lot of your solutions.
How would that be done? Would we expect already overworked GC’s to now be responsible for checking the form they filled out for every senior in the school against the form the college received? How would the school handle teachers who don’t bother to check their LORs? Would the kid’s offer be rescinded? Who at the college would be responsible for checking all of the score reports, transcripts, and other information against what the student submitted?
It seems to me this would create much, much more work for both colleges and high schools.
Who would decide which the top 30 are? Whose ranking would you use and what incentive would the schools have for going along with this? Are you talking about the top 30 LACs? The top 30 national U’s? How would small colleges handle sports recruiting?
Don’t forget that those kids who now apply to one school ED would be applying to a dozen or more schools instead.
I agree.
My “If I were King” solution would be to ban college rankings altogether. They are a lot of what drives this anxiety, both because they feed the notion that it’s possible to put schools in precise order from best to worst and because they provide an incentive to colleges to drive up their application numbers by any means possible. This results in kids who have no chance at a school getting what looks like a personalized invitation to apply and kids applying to schools simply because they’re ranked higher than the school they really belong at.
On forums on which kids post on CC you can find many sad examples of kids asking “What’s the highest ranked college which has [X subject]?” instead of “What are the best programs in [X subject] within my budget?” I suspect this results in kids applying to more schools than they might otherwise because they feel they need to apply to more highly ranked colleges.
Drive down the number of applications kids have to submit and you’ll make it easier for them to tackle the real bear-financial aid. Ideally I’d like to see the NPC standardized so that kids can more easily compare expected financial packages but at the very least if you could control the number of applications kids feel they need to submit it would lessen the work required to research FA at all one’s schools.
It can be hard to sort the real merit scholarships from those designed to lure full pay kids. Many schools offer small merit awards to full pay kids with unremarkable stats because they know those awards flatter kids and their families and because a few thousand dollars may make a difference when they’re deciding between otherwise equal school offers.
@theloniusmonk Colleges are a business offering a service. As such, the students applying that want a college education (and that are “stressed like they’ve never been”) will tough it out because they want the service being provided.
Being a student/teenager is stressful in general. No amount of streamlining will make it significantly less stressful for students to apply to college.
And by the way, it’s easier than ever to go to college, as long as you only care if it’s an accredited institution that will offer you a degree. The stress comes in when kids apply to progressively more selective schools; they can only apply to a couple of safeties, get merit aid (although that aid is a bit hard to peg down beforehand), go to college, and graduate with a degree. However, they choose not to. They choose to apply to some safeties, yes, but also to matches and reaches and The Dream School. These kids applying to top colleges do not have a right, per se, for the process to be as stress-free as possible. Teenagers incur the stress upon themselves because they want to throw their hat in the ring and see if they can snag a spot at a top school.
The College Admissions process is broken. The Common App is unwieldy. Lots of students think they have submitted their app, but haven’t submitted the supplemental essays. The rec letter application is hard to use. In general, hooks are so prevalent that unless you have one, you are SOL in elite college admissions. There’s such a fever pitch for applying to 19+ schools just to get into a top college. The College Board often screws up sending the scores which necessitates checking and resending scores with redundant costs. To interview or not? It’s still a toss up whether the interview is evaluative or informative. The whole demonstrated interest thing creates a frenzy about making sure you like colleges on facebook and attend numerous, expensive info sessions through road trips. There’s a whole cottage industry that arose around bus trips on spring break to visit colleges. It’s a feeding frenzy where elite colleges are the winners in a seller’s market. The whole ED1, ED2, EA, and regular admission has complicated things and benefits the college, not the student. Yeh…real simple.
But note that the minimum threshold to apply may not give a realistic chance of actually getting the scholarship. An analogous example for college admission is that the minimum HS GPA to apply as a frosh to a UC is 3.0 for California residents, 3.4 for non-residents (weighted and capped by the UC method). But it is unrealistic to expect any significant chance to get into UCLA with such a HS GPA.
HS GPA and test scores for students who were actually awarded the scholarships is much more useful in helping assess reach/match/safety for the scholarships, although caution must be exercised when subjectively graded criteria are also used (just as with college admission).
Same is true for 25th and 75th percentiles for admissions. Kids just under the 25th think they stand a chance but reality is without a hook, its unlikely.
Actual GPA/test scores for merit award winners when the process is subjective may not be very useful at all. Kid who wins the award with lower GPA and test scores may have had a hook of some sort (incredible ECs or LoRs or an amazing interview). Kid with those same test scores/GPA but garden variety ECs or LoRs and ordinary interview doesn’t really stand a chance. And there will be kids with perfect GPAs and near perfect test scores who don’t win the merit awards. Report that and no one will want to apply.
In the end, I think people should understand that pretty much any merit award will be competitive. With little certainty of winning it. And I think most people understand that which is reason why you see so many kids looking for merit aid applying to large numbers of schools.
At least if you are under the 25th percentiles, you would see that the college is a reach.
Merit scholarships have another aspect where there is less transparancy: the amount can differ. So if a scholarship can be any amount from $1 to a full ride, then the applicant may have even more difficulty estimating reach/match/safety for the amount s/he needs to make the college affordable.
As it is, generally, applicants looking at merit scholarships that are not automatic for their stats should put them all into the reach category. Obviously, this encourages greater numbers of applications in hopes of getting at least one affordable choice.
How do you change the transparency of the amounts of merit awards in a meaningful way? Colleges now tell kids/parents that awards could be up to a given amount. Will kids change their approach if they are told it can be between $1 and full ride?
Not sure I see how more transparency would change kids who must have merit awards to go to a given college anything other than reaches.
They could, for example, publish stat ranges and award rates for scholarships of a given amount or higher.
Some schools already provide that info. And they still get huge numbers of kids applying for the scholarships. But based on the subjective nature of non-automatic merit awards, the lower reported range of stats are expanded by intangibles that make certain kids attractive for the merit awards. Without those intangibles you don’t really stand a chance with the lower level stats.
I know a lot of people (both personally and on this site) who apply for merit scholarships that are known lottery shots. Large numbers of kids applying with a very limited number of awards. Doesn’t stop the application.
Need based scholarships are increasingly insufficient for an increasing number of families. Loans not being a great option, merit based scholarships become the preferred gap filler. Many (I suspect most but have no way to prove that) of families know the long odds (maybe not down to the 1 in x or specific percentage getting various awards but just that its much more likely to not get the award) but apply anyway. Increased talk of “elites,” rankings, etc. puts even more pressure for many to find merit awards. More transparency may well increase the number of applications to increase changes with what may be viewed as worse odds with more info.
Our son, who just took his last BAC exam, applied to 5 schools: 4 in the UK and 1 in Canada, McGill, where he will go. (He refused to apply in the US after the election, which didn’t bother us, particularly given the cost and the hassle of financial aide forms.) The applications were simple and straightforward, McGill didn’t even require interviews, and essays were standard, nothing ridiculously fancy
What was the most difficult was prepping for exams in the fall, UKCAT and SAT, with topical SATs. He also had to take an English language proficiency test for McGill, as he applied as a French national to get Canadian tuition rates.
We were most pleased by the process and hardly stressed.
The Common App has occasional glitches, yes. As does any website… That hardly contributes to the aforementioned “broken” nature of the applications process.
Yes, getting into elite colleges is difficult. Who knew? Do you expect the colleges to discard the hooks and take students solely on GPA and test scores? That would create the most vapid class of grade-grabbers the college would have ever seen. “Hooks” are the reason those colleges accept those kids: because they think they can do something in the world once they graduate. Not to mention, making the admissions process entirely numbers-based would severely disadvantage poor applicants who can’t afford private tutors for their harder classes and to get a perfect ACT score. Top colleges can assemble multiple classes of valedictorians and grade-grubbers out of the hordes of “average excellent” students that apply–but they don’t, and for good reason.
Again, minor technical issues do not constitute a glaring error in the US college admissions system. And if you sent your scores earlier rather than last minute, you would have some wiggle room. 
Interviews are, in your view, part of what make college admissions difficult and broken? These interviews are optional, have little to no effect on your admissions decision (the only time they do is if you act very rudely or something to the alumnus/a, in which case your application is seriously in hot water, and frankly, at that point, you don’t deserve to attend that college anyway and should rethink your method of social interaction), and are more of an opportunity for the colleges to have an alumnus/a tell you about how great the school is, so that if you are accepted, you’ll be more likely to attend. In other words, it increases colleges’ yield. But that’s about it. It is probably the least important part of the application (hence, its optional status).
The top colleges you continually cite care little, if at all, for demonstrated interest, and they impart as much on their websites. Those “cottage industry” bus companies have sprung up because there is demand to visit colleges–but only for students that genuinely want to visit colleges, or that are visiting post-application to try to decide where they’re going to matriculate. Not sure why you’re blaming independent companies for filling a niche that is entirely consumer-created, and has no effect on a student’s admissions decision (when talking about top 20 schools). There are many schools for which it does matter, but those are generally less selective (although there are some selective LACs that take demonstrated interest into account [and if you really were interested in those specific schools, then demonstrated interest should not be a problem {and you don’t need to break bank to show that either}]).
You’re right about this one thing, at least. Elite colleges are in a market. Kids that really want to apply to them will be able to stomach a few supplemental essays and an entirely optional interview.
They benefit both the student and the college. The college gets higher yield rates, and the student gets their application looked at sooner before all the hooked applicants applying RD to all the Ivies (although a lot of those hooked applicants do indeed apply early). If you don’t want to deal with finishing your application sooner, it’s simple: don’t apply early. They don’t shove it down your throat. It’s entirely voluntary.
The college admissions process may be stressful, and expensive, and terrifying. But it works just fine. The reason kids are applying to so many colleges is not because it’s difficult to get into college: it’s because it’s so darn easy to apply to an amalgam of colleges. Maybe instead of railing against the system, we should encourage kids not to abuse the system by applying to the top 15 schools on USNWR’s list, and instead apply to schools they genuinely would love to attend.
@mohammadmohd18 ^^^I’m sorry it doesn’t “work just fine.” And I outline why. Just because you tried to counter each of my assertions with your own argument doesn’t mean you are right and I am wrong. If you have something to do with the Admissions Process in your work, use it as constructive criticism. Yes, having gone thru the admissions process twice in recent years with my two students, it is stressful, expensive, terrifying and doesn’t result in top students getting into top colleges necessarily. So something is broken or wrong.
Oh, and BTW, we always requested that College Board send scores well ahead of time, and guess what, the colleges still reported they didn’t receive them and we had to pay multiple x to get them resent. It has nothing to do with requesting “too late.”
re #28 - I question just how much at 25th percentile is a reach…my DD’16, with no hook (although I suspect our ability to be full pay was indeed a “hook”) applied to multiple schools where she was at and even slightly below the 25th and she was accepted…to every single school she applied too, something like 12 schools.
Nor do I think it’s ranking prestige or ease of application that is the driving factor to multiple applications…it’s knowing the 25th - 75th range that causes the stress. My kid applied to 12 schools precisely because she was panicked about being accepted, to any school.
I think students should be able to self report scores and classes/grades, with official confirmation after acceptance. ACT/SAT will fight that hard of course.
Doesn’t the common app this year have self-reported classes and grades? I thought I read that was new this year.
@preppedparent I am confused how someone can submit an app without submitting the supplemental essays. The CA doesn’t let you press the button until everything that is required is complete, as I recall.
@labegg I said it was unlikely a kid without a hook was getting in under 25th percentile. Not impossible. And as you note, your daughter had hook. And the likelihood of below 25th percentile unhooked kid gaining admission will vary by school.
Sounds like your daughter applied to all reaches (at least the 12 schools at which she was below 25th percentile). There aren’t many kids who do that. Vast majority apply to some reaches, matches and safeties (admit and financial).
@saillakeerie She actually applied to a range of school, reach, match and safety. I just said that multiple schools were in the 25th range a couple below, a couple at or just above.