Do you have a gift link?
I sent it as a gift link. I guess user error. I’ll try again.
Ok so sending again as a gift link. Now I’ve used two of my gift links for the month 
so I hope this one works! If not, sorry!
https://wapo.st/3CJZ26U
It’s free but seems to require readers to sign up for a free account. No worries, thank you for sharing.
Thanks for sharing. Given what I know about current demographics, this actually isn’t shocking. But, it is an important message for the vast majority of students out there who aren’t gunning for Harvard and the like (hard to imagine on this particular message board, I know).
Super interesting article, thanks OP!
Now I have to go back and look at the data. I thought that we were hitting a peak of high school seniors graduating this year or last which is then supposed to go back down. So we have MORE high school graduates, but FEWER going to college. Very interesting dynamic.
Schools are bracing for the looming “enrollment cliff”
Reality check: A shrinking candidate pool may make it easier for your kid to get into less competitive schools, but it’s not going to be their ticket to the Ivies.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/03/education-enrollment-cliff-schools
That chart is interesting for sure and shows how skewed people’s perceptions are when focusing on T30 ish.
This is an extremely important article if you are interested in what is really going on with college admissions today, and it is the foundation for a variety of interesting possibilities. Like, if, say, you have a high numbers kid, it is arguable as bad or worse than ever to try to use those high numbers to get into a “T-n” school where n is a very small number. But it is an increasingly fertile era if you want to use those high numbers to chase merit.
By the way, if you are interested in enrollment trends, there is a lot of data being collected here:
A few select charts worth considering. First, overall undergrad enrollment peaked in 2010:
However, most of that decline is actually concentrated in public 2-year colleges, with public four-year colleges continuing up:
Still, some of the decline was among privates, including private four-years. However, THAT decline was among for-profit privates:
OK, so this helps explain a little why the overall decline has not been felt more among the sorts of families only looking at public and non-profit-private four-year colleges. Those still trended up in enrollment, the decline was among two-years and for-profit private four-years.
Still, the linked article is basically breaking this down even further and showing how even within in those markets, there are colleges going in different directions when it comes to admit rates.
The article gives the impression that since qualified students are applying to so many schools, and of course can only attend one, colleges are increasing their acceptance rates in anticipation of low yield rates. This would also explain 2nd tier schools greatly increasing the percentage of the class they admit via ED.
This Is SO true! There are often debates on this forum about whether/how much ED actually helps. The answer is undeniably “it depends on the school”. For some school ED offers very little advantage. But there are many “2nd tier” schools where it clearly offers a HUGE advantage, even accounting for athletes, big donors etc.
Yes, although I do think that is very complicated. Many colleges simply do not get enough ED applications for it to even be possible to fill a lot of their class that way. Others apparently have calculated that even if their yields are low, they are predictable enough they can still get the enrolled classes they want with enough admits. Others maybe calculate they can get into that second situation with an efficient merit program. And so on.
I personally think we need to be careful about words like “advantage” as I think they can easily be misinterpreted.
What I do think happens at some schools is if they are looking at a kid with very good numbers, they know they are often like 10th on a list of 15, 15th on a list of 20, or whatever. This is actually not likely to happen at most schools in the broader universe of schools. But if your school is, say, located in a particularly popular area, but is not one of the top couple colleges in that area, you might know you will get a lot of applications like that.
In cases like that, they may well waitlist or even reject high numbers kids who they think they have virtually no chance of actually enrolling. Again, at some schools they may accept some and offer them merit. But if they have little or no merit, they may just not accept them. Some people talk about this like they are trying to manipulate their published statistics. But I think it is a more basic issue–they don’t want to make an offer and then have to wait around until the decision deadline just to find out it won’t be accepted. If there is a decent chance the kid will yield, sure. But if their yield model says it is like a 5%, 1%, or whatever chance, not worth it.
OK, so now you are applying to a school like that with high numbers. If you are in fact just throwing them in as like your 15th of 20 schools, and you very likely will enroll somewhere else–eh, oh well. In fact, I might suggest you look around instead for colleges that will be more likely to offer you merit, to keep things interesting.
But let’s say that is wrong. In fact, you actually do really like this college. They are not 15th of 20, they are like 1st of 10. So how do you let them know that?
Well you can tell them in words, but . . . how much can they rely on that really?
However, if you apply ED? Now you are actually bound, and the college can rely on that. And now they can just accept you if they actually want you, and not have to worry about you going somewhere else if they do (technically it appears to me the yield from ED is probably more like 97% than 100%, but it sure beats 0-5% or whatever would trigger an RD waitlisting/rejecting).
OK, so now maybe it is actually true a sufficiently high numbers kid would get accepted ED and waitlisted or rejected RD by such a college, because by doing that they moved themselves from the very low yield category to the very high yield category.
But is this an “advantage”? I mean yes, in that precise sense. But it didn’t happen automatically. The setup is they would want you in RD anyway, but they would think you would enroll elsewhere anyway, but for you that is not true.
And if all that lines up, OK, cool. But what I instead see is a lot of unhooked kids who are applying to far reaches ED in the hope that they will get some automatic ED boost. And I am fairly confident these kids are almost always among the ones who just get rejected RD, or at most deferred. And that is because they don’t meet that basic requirement of the college knowing it would want them RD too, and the college’s real concern being the assumption the kid will have a lot of other options they will end up preferring.
This is what I’m worried about for my S25. My older guy, HS class of 22, applied to a school he SHOULD have gotten in to. His grades, test scores, leadership, clubs, sports etc all put him at or above the group typically admitted from our HS (and in fact above several kids admitted that year) but he got wait listed. We had a private college counselor and asked her why she thought that happened - she called a colleague who does admissions for that college (but not our county, thus not our kid) and the colleague said it sounded like he was one of the yield protection WL kids. It turned out fine, as he had other good choices and he wasn’t sure about the school, but that was our in-state school and his other choices were out of state privates, that, even with merit, cost about $20k more/year. By getting waitlisted, he never looked at it again, as he wanted to go to a school that wanted him from the outset.
Now, my S25 is applying to one highly unlikely reach, and all the other schools SHOULD be matches. I’m worried that they’ll see his stats - which are well above what their similarly situated applicants tend to have on average - and think they are a safety for him, which they aren’t. In his case, his true top choices should be “easy” admits, but I’m afraid they won’t be, because of yield protection again… So yeah, we’ve been wondering a lot how to make it clear that he’s really interested. He’s done the in person visits, he’s interacted with the AO, he’s applied to honors programs, he’s noodled around on the websites and done some virtual events. We’re hoping this will be enough.
The good news is I think in the greater universe of schools, this is often enough.
Like, Rochester is a popular application in our high school because among other things, they have a reputation for NOT yield-protecting our kids, but instead admitting them and offering them merit. And we can tell their yield from our HS is not very high, but it isn’t 0% either, and this appears to be an arrangement Rochester is happy to continue. That said, our college counselors will suggest you need to make sure you demonstrate interest in the normal ways to Rochester, write a careful application, and so on. What they will NOT say is you need to ED to Rochester, because a lot of people do in fact get admitted RD.
If you instead ask our college counselors about, say, Tufts–they will likely tell you not to try to use it like Rochester. Just too much uncertainty about what Tufts will do if you apply RD. Not that no one ever gets admitted RD and goes to Tufts, but you need to be aware of this issue when forming an overall list.
OK, so in a greater scheme, I do believe way more colleges are like Rochester than Tufts. The problem, in certain circles, is everyone wants to apply to Tufts, and far fewer kids want to apply to Rochester, or whatever would be the appropriate equivalents for them.
But the good news is if you have, say, 2 Likelies and 2-3 Targets that are like Rochester (for you, whatever that means in practice), that is probably enough. You can then add more schools that are like Tufts (again, meaning whatever that actually means for you), and just see what happens.
Again, though, easier said than done sometimes. There obviously may be important financial considerations–although a lot of times, chasing merit and avoiding yield-protection actually go together. You also need to get your kid to buy into all this, and depending on what their peers are saying, that can be a challenge sometimes.
But my point is I think there are in fact plenty of colleges like that out there. You just have to be willing to seek them out, apply, and attend as warranted.
So in the world outside the top public High Schools.
I substitute teach in some large, not highly ranked, public high schools in Florida. In the non AP/Honors world, when I talk to Seniors about what they are doing after graduation, about 1/2 of them dont know a thing about going to college. Some mention trades. Then from those that will attend college about 1/2 are looking to start at the local 2 year school. The rest are applying to colleges, but mostly state publics. I need to find a sub job in some of the more advanced classes to see what the thought are there. Interesting that the graduation rate is around 90% but only about 20% pass at least AP test.
I do think the push to go to 4 year is going to decline, and the 2 year option will continue to be staple as the population to pull from declines.
I agree with everything you’ve said - especially this part!
I mean I think your analysis is solid. But to me it boils down to this…there are SOME schools where, if you want to get in, you really have to ED or it’s a lottery. Definitely not all schools.
At my kids HS…
Over the last 4 years the only people who have been admitted to BU have been ED applicants. All 8 (2 per year) were admitted and no one else (34 others…some with WAY higher stats). No athletes.
Only one person per year is admitted to Villanova EA/RD and all 8 of the others who were admitted were ED/ED2. Only one per year has been declined ED/ED2. 34 people were declined EA/RD over 4 years, many with much higher stats than the ED admits. No athletes.
100 percent of Tulane ED/ED 2 applicants have been admitted (9 over 4 years) and only 20 percent of EA applicants (8/40 over 4 years) have been admitted. No athletes.
100 percent of our ED applicants to LMU and SCU have been admitted over the last 4 years, compared to 40 percent of our EA/RD applicants. No athletes.
These are anecdotes of course and not every school has a similar experience. But it’s impossible to ignore the much higher likelihood of admission for ED applicants from our HS at these colleges (and some others)
Maybe our school is different than others but I don’t really think so?
I mean, you can check their CDS to find out, assuming they report ED statistics.
So, we can start with BU:
BU does in fact report ED data, and so we know 1791 people were admitted ED in this cycle. 8733 were admitted in total, so we know 6942 were admitted non-ED. That was a ratio of about 3.9 non-ED admits for every 1 ED admit.
You are instead reporting 0 non-ED admits for every 1 ED admit at your HS.
So in this case, we basically know what happened at your HS recently is not representative of what is happening at most other high schools when it comes to BU. It can’t be.
Villanova also reports:
1657 ED admits, 5810 total admits, so 4153 non-ED admits, ratio of about 2.51:1 non-ED:ED. You are reporting 0.125:1 for your HS, off by over a factor of 20, so again obviously not typical.
Tying this in to the broader conversation–I think it really pays to understand that things in college admissions, even at just one college, can look very different for different applicants, or similar applicants but from different high schools, or so on.
In this case, a lot of the perceived “advantage of ED”, or I would say more accurately “disadvantage of RD”, is specific to that particular HS. But I think this sort of thing is way more common than many people realize, that whatever apparent admissions strategies or patterns or so on exist for a given college at a given high school may not at all be the same for that same college at a different high school.
I have observed over the last several years that many campuses in the CSU system in California have become less selective. In the early 2010s, probably around 18 out of 23 campuses were impacted, meaning that the campus did not have enough capacity to admit all students who met baseline CSU eligibility*, so competitive admission (stats-only plus campus-determined bonus points for local area residency and other factors) was used. Now, only 7 out of 23 campuses are impacted, meaning that around 11 went from competitive admission to baseline admission except for a few competitive majors (nursing being the most common such major).
However, you wouldn’t hear much about that on these forums, because most forum posters looking at CSUs look at the most popular ones that are still impacted, such as CPSLO, CPP, SDSU, and SJSU.
*Baseline CSU eligibility for California resident frosh applicants is now a 2.5 HS GPA (as recalculated for CSU with limited weighting for honors courses); before COVID-19, it used to be a sliding scale of HS GPA and SAT or ACT score.
Colleges still have plenty of ED cards to play though. More can start offering significant perks for those who apply ED (which some schools already do)…early move-in, early registration, priority housing, sports tickets, even merit scholarships. I expect every year we will see more of this which in turn may drive more people to apply ED, especially if the school has an accurate NPC and/or does FA pre-reads.