It seems every college is experiencing record numbers of applications and, consequently, their acceptance rate is the lowest ever. It also seems this has been the case for several years.
Am I the only one worrying about where it all ends?
I encouraged my daughter to apply to way more colleges than I really think should be necessary, out of fear that she might not get in anywhere, so I readily accept that I’m part of the problem. I think it would be a brave and possibly somewhat foolish parent who took a stand and went the three reach, three possible, three safety route. I’ve seen it suggested the common app makes it easier to apply to multiple schools but each school, in our experience, also required additional essays and information so I’m not totally sold on this theory. I’m more inclined to think the acceptance rates creeping ever lower are what drives us to submit more applications, which, drives down the acceptance rate, which drives us to submit more applications….
As it stands I only see more disappointment on the horizon and more pressure unfairly put on children’s shoulders to get an edge, to outperform. How did we get here, and can anything be done to change it? This current system is surely not healthy for our kids or working to the benefit of anyone.
@Jon234 IMO applying to a ton of colleges will probably only hurt and contribute to more pressure. If you are applying to too many colleges, the quality of the essays will be diminished and your returns will be dismal. If you can, try visiting college campuses and don’t apply to too many (I’d say ~12 max). Visiting college campuses will help with writing the supplements since the writer got to know the campus for themselves. I don’t see this “vicious cycle” changing anytime soon especially because of a rise in international interest. Because many international students would be willing to be full pay, the competition will only continue to rise.
I am right there with you! (DD2016 applied to 12, DD2018 to 17) I am reluctant to lay the entirety of the problem at the foot of the Common App/Coalition App or ease of application too (only 4 schools for DD2018 were Common App). I think some of the issue is the move to more holistic review of applications. If you knew for certain that School X only takes students with a 3.5GPA and test scores of ACT 27+, you could eliminate scores of schools right off the bat. As it stands, you see that your student falls with in the stated stat range, maybe even a bit below, and you are left guessing whether their ECs, awards, recommendations and essays are going to be the factors that push them into the yes pile. Transparency in the application process, across the boards from admission standards, to financial aid packages would go a long way to helping. Limiting the number of schools that any given student can apply to would help a lot too! What if students were only allowed to apply to 9 schools in total (9 should give enough room to accommodate discrepancies in financial aid awards and give a sufficient field of choice)?
I think that this is an inevitable consequence of university admissions becoming unpredictable and seemingly random. When having superb grades, superb SAT scores, and superb references and being top in your high school does not get you into schools where the #2 and #3 students in your high school got in, then you either need to apply to a lot of schools, or you need to apply somewhere that is both a very good school and truly safe. I have seen cases where kids who were 0.5 higher on GPA and 350 points stronger on SAT scores did not get in to a selective school, when their lower stats friend did get in. I am not convinced that this was doing a favor to the lower stats student who now has to handle the course load.
The only schools that we have found that are both very good and truly safe are either our in-state flagship, or out of the country. Other schools can be worth applying to, but with unpredictable admissions are not safe.
We are lucky that we have a very good and affordable in-state flagship, and live close enough to the Canadian border to have very good out of the country schools that are relatively nearby. Many Americans don’t have either luxury.
One of my daughter’s friends applied to 25 schools. I think that this is going to become more common.
“This current system is surely not healthy for our kids”
The stress that we are putting on our students is insane. The number of high school students who are already on medications to deal with stress is insane.
“I think it would be a brave and possibly somewhat foolish parent who took a stand and went the three reach, three possible, three safety route.”
Hm, not sure I’m brave so guess that puts me in the foolish category? DS’ original list was 15+. I helped him cut it down to 8. Don’t remember the distribution but it wasn’t 3/3/3, it was more like 1 safety (which did rolling admissions so he had that acceptance by October/November I think), 2 matches and the rest reaches. Few matches because he wasn’t thrilled about any of them and at full pay, he probably would have just gone to the safety if he hadn’t been accepted in the reaches rather than pay a huge price for a match school he wasn’t totally in love with.
Everybody looks at this differently and of course different students have personal strengths/weaknesses, but my theory was that for the reaches especially - most of the applicants have great grades and test scores; the admit/reject decision comes down to ECs (which you have little input into by the time the app is done), LORs (which, again, you’ve mostly handled by app time) and essays. Essays are a big deal for reach colleges, especially essays that talk about “why this college.” It’s very time consuming to do the research about what each particular college is interested in and what unique aspects of that college your kid wants to mention in the essays. Maybe it’s because my kid wasn’t an especially fast writer, but there was no way he could have done more than 4-6 top quality jobs with essays for reach schools. And even 4-6 was a “reach” for him.
When I read the posts of kids with outstanding grades, scores and ECs that are rejected everywhere, I always suspect that at least part of the issue was that their essays were too generic. Top schools want to know that the kid understands exactly what that school offers and is able to articulate why s/he would fit there. Hard to imagine how a kid could do that really well in apps to a dozen schools.
But yes, I agree with your overall premise that the spiral is self-perpetuating. Every kid is applying to many more schools than should be necessary, but they do it because admissions continues to get more competitive and the spiral continues…
I have to disagree. Last year, my kid’s college counselor at her school recommended crafting a list of no more than 8 colleges. I was skeptical, but she was spot on. If you do your research well, choose in a realistic, strategic way, and are not just hoping for “lottery” type schools, 8 or 9 is a very reasonable (and manageable) number and you’ll end up with choices. We were chasing merit $ and FA, so that was a factor for us. Applying to schools EA meant she was all done and had her decisions before the holidays.
I also found a ton of really helpful info and tips on the website “BestCollegeFit.com” – the blog is authored by Peter Van Buskirk, who for many years was Dean of Admissions at several fine colleges. Lots of great, sound advice and resources there.
International interest is declining (only slightly so far) due to the current government being blatantly anti-immigrant, so that part of the equation is easing up a little.
A well-chosen ED school beats the shotgun approach in terms of student stress. Visit, interview, show as much love as you can, and don’t reach too high, and you can get though the admissions cycle the easy way.
We didn’t ED and didn’t shotgun (just two reach-for-everyone schools). Because we don’t qualify for enough need-based aid to fit our ideal family budget, we didn’t ED. This left things open as far as deciding on whether the elite schools were really worth the loans. But, DD finished “just off the podium” on her two “lottery school” reaches. Deferred then rejected at one, and waitlisted at the other. If we had had more than two reaches or if she had committed ED, that might have been just enough to get an acceptance.
That being said, one of DD’s dual-enrollment profs really pushed the “avoid student loans” narrative so hard last term that she’s not even doing the letter of continuing interest at the waitlist school. She just doesn’t want even the standard federal student loan, and we live in a state with a desirable state flagship where she is accepted and can attend without borrowing.
A lot of that pressure is based on misconception. The vast majority of jobs in the United States are from small to medium size companies. They hire locally and regionally because it’s more cost effective. On a practical standpoint, they don’t spend time researching college rankings because most of the talent comes to them locally. As any employer, they’re more interested in whether you can do the job.
Limit the amount of applications and you have the same number of fish in a smaller applications pool. It increases an applicants chances of admission and increases each applicants access to fin aid. Unfortunately it is not in the interests of the universities/colleges and so it will never happen.
You could diligently research to find good fits to ED and ED2 to and find several safeties/rolling you would be happy with (either in the US or overseas).
Then accept that schools with an RD acceptance rate below 20% (pretty much all of the private elites) will be lottery, so if you already have acceptable offers, fire off however many you like in the RD round but with limited expectations.
For that to be effective, most of the US universities would have to be relatively predictable and transparent in their admission practices and thresholds.
Actually, increased transparency in admissions would be the most helpful. Universities which admit by stats formula should publish their thresholds (by major, if applicable) after every admission cycle, so that future applicants can get a good idea of which ones are realistic to apply to. Those with holistic admissions can publish an admission rate stats grid (by major, if applicable). And do something similar for transfer admissions.
If that information were made available, there would be fewer unrealistic reach applications, and less need for large numbers of “safeties” if some applicants can more easily find an assured admission one that is affordable.
I have to disagree with the 8 - 10 camp of parents. My daughter got rejected from her ED choice, Columbia, but got in very unexpectedly to Penn and WL’d at Harvard. If she hadn’t applied to more reach including elite LACS she never would have had the choices and opportunities she did. I don’t subscribe to the lottery theory of elite college admissions, but there is a piece of it that is driven by luck and you need to maximize your chances and take lots of shots to get the ball in the basket. The more shots you take, the greater your chances of sinking that basket.
Some wonder why McGill has a 45% acceptance rate The answer is that those below the minima generally do not apply. There are no “Hail Mary” applications.
"The more shots you take, the greater your chances of sinking that basket. "
Sort of. Except I think that the effort involved in writing good essays for college apps for most students isn’t comparable to shooting baskets. It’s more comparable to doing 50m sprints pushing a weighted sled. You can shoot dozens of baskets in a row without suffering significant decline in strength or quality, but just like sprints pushing a weighted sled, most students can’t pump out dozens of well-tailored applicable essays that demonstrate their knowledge of and fit for a very selective school without suffering fatigue and declining quality.
If you have a kid that researches and writes quickly with quality and has time to do all those apps - then definitely more apps will give you more chances. Or if you’ve identified a group of colleges who values very similar things and can blanket target that way, you can also send apps to that group without much effort. But if you have a kid that is already spending 60-70 hours a week between school and ECs and also takes time to research and write polished, targeted essays, then they’ll find the quality of those essays starts to decline after a little while.
There’s another thread where a kid is asking if his waitlisting at UChicago is a hint that he’ll be accepted at Stanford and Brown. Take that set of colleges as an example. I could be wrong, but I believe those three schools - while all top colleges - are looking for different things in a student and most students who don’t research what each one of those is looking for and just writes one set of essays to send to all three is not as likely to be admitted as a student who tailors his/her essays to what each of those schools is looking for.
These top stat American kids should apply to UK schools they have far better chance of admission. @HazeGrey 's kid was rejected from every Ivy and accepted to Oxford… he was good at, and had a passion for maths that is primarily all they consider.
Currently, kids encouraged by parents and marketing campaigns, are shooting off more and more applications in order to land that golden ticket to the promised land and becoming more miserable and stressed in the meantime. College admins are wringing hands and gnashing teeth, oh woo is them, they have far too many qualified applicants while shoveling application fees in through the back door.
“These top stat American kids should apply to UK schools”
Mine did. And yes, the app process was much easier (and far less subjective) for the UK schools. And the fact that it only takes 3 years to get a degree and that if you’re full pay for US schools, the UK schools cost a fraction of the US school price were very, very tempting.
But again, you have to know your own kid and yourself. It’s very silly and emotional, but as a mom I couldn’t help but worry more about not just the distance but the idea that under the hands-off UK approach DS could be dead in his apartment for 2 weeks before anybody noticed. The UK offers were so, so tempting, but I can’t help but be glad he’s choosing a US school.
For son #2, I’m sure it will be a different story. Just like new parents are very concerned with proper nutrition and sterilization and by the time they have multiple kids they aren’t too worried if the younger ones eat out of the dog’s bowl… by the time #2 goes to college, I’ll be totally ready for him to go abroad for college without a second thought.
^milee30. “dead in his apartment for 2 weeks” contrary to things you may have read recently, Great Britain is still first world. My eldest is in Scotland has had the time of her life made many friends from all over the world. The academic rigor is how you make it, if you go to lectures and tutorials, read the material, write cogent essays and hand them in on time you are going to be fine, my daughter has never had an issue accessing her professors/lecturers.
ED is an excellent option for those families who can manage it. The problem is most people need to compare financial aid and merit offers. The best you can do is find one or more acceptable colleges with EA or rolling admissions. There is nothing as freeing as having an acceptance in hand. After that, you are free to be very selective in whom you target. Unfortunately, not everyone can find a college that meets there needs, is within reach and has EA and/or rolling admissions.
