College Admissions this Fall: New Rules, Same Playing Field

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?? Save the date: August 12 at 8 p.m. ET for the first in a series of virtual discussions about admissions in the Covid era aimed at high-school seniors, their parents, counselors, and college admissions officers.

• First up: the challenges of applying to college during a disrupted senior year, as well as what's happening with admissions testing. I’m co-hosting this first one with Grown & Flown and will be leading the conversation with admissions deans from Washington University in St. Louis, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Indiana University.
• Register for free here to watch live or on-demand at a later time.

When one brand-name college analyzed 130,000 applications it received over the span of a decade, just 18% of high schools were responsible for 75% of applications and 79% of admitted students.

The rituals of the fall that are subject to change this year start at what most of us think of as the front door of colleges: the admissions office.

A vigorous debate has emerged in recent days on the email listserv for the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). The topic: fall visits to high schools. The discussion list is made up of high-school counselors and college admissions officers and this is normally the time of year when they are finalizing their calendars for high-school visits.

The fall recruitment visits, where admissions officers log hundreds of miles in rental cars and 60- to 70-hour work weeks dropping into high schools for information sessions, has long been a feature of how colleges build the top of their “funnel” of prospective students.

• The visits influence where students apply and enroll, according Megan Holland, author of Divergent Paths to College and a professor at the University of Buffalo.
• But which colleges visit and how many is highly correlated to the wealth of a high school, researchers at UCLA have found.
• Nearly half of high schools that receive visits by private colleges and universities are in neighborhoods earning more than $100,000 annually, although those zip codes make up only about a third of American households.  

In my forthcoming book, one of the chapters is subtitled “High School Matters.”

• Among the students I followed was one who went to a high school where he was more likely to see a military recruiter than a college representative.
• Suburban high schools welcome as many college representatives in a day as visit rural schools over a two-month period in the fall.
• During my time inside admissions offices, I found that the unit being evaluated was less often the applicant than the applicant’s high school. Colleges, in essence, are recruiting and evaluating high schools.

By the numbers: When one brand-name college analyzed 130,000 applications it received over the span of a decade, just 18% of high schools were responsible for 75% of applications and 79% of admitted students.

What it matters: During this upcoming admissions cycle, colleges are going to be flying a little blind when it comes to applicants. They’ll be missing test scores, some grades, and extra-curricular activities. The question is whether they will lean even more into the high schools that have long sent them bundles of applications.

What’s next: Like everything with this pandemic, technology is transforming how we conduct face-to-face business.

• Rather than visit just a handful of high-schools in a week, colleges can now bring together students from a region.
• “We can offer something even better,” Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management at Oregon State University wrote in one of the posts on the NACAC listserv this week. Those students who never had a representative visit their high school “can come to us, and sit in a room with students from the schools on everyone’s visit list and learn about our universities.”

Bottom line: The playing field that high-school seniors are competing on this fall isn't changing, but like professional sports during the pandemic, some rules will be modified. The question is which ones will stick once the pandemic is over.

Read more: The Introduction from my book, exclusive for subscribers of this newsletter.

If you pre-order the book now, you’ll also get these bonus goodies. Feel free to forward this offer to a friend.

SUPPLEMENTS

A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND: This analysis from my friends at Open Campus looking at where college students in New York hail from. New York continues to expand its list of travel-advisory states, requiring visitors, including arriving students to quarantine for 14 days.

NEED STUDENTS? JUST ADD FOOTBALL: A new report on impact of adding football on enrollment at smaller colleges. Bottom line: Short-term boost, but no long-term gain.

COLLEGE SURVIVAL: One of the questions I get the most from parents and counselors these days is whether colleges will survive in the coming years. The Hechinger Report just published a new tracker that looks at key metrics of a college's financial health.

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