The number of stories I’ve heard in the course of my son’s application process of schools receiving record numbers of applications this year is off the charts. I can name multiple LACs whose acceptance rates have shrunken literally in half in the span of just a couple of years (e.g., St. Olaf, Trinity U, Grinnell, etc), and these aren’t exactly household name kinds of places. My D’s school, Olin, got 30% more applications this year than last!
So what’s the deal? Didn’t demographics peak a year or two ago? Are kids just applying to an ever greater number of colleges, even though the common app has been around for years now? Is it international students? Are a greater fraction of high school kids applying to college because it’s seen as increasingly mandatory for satisfactory employment? Someone help me out here.
Yes to all the above:-) I think you are spot on. However, don’t let it scare you. I think the percentage of kids applying to more than 15 colleges is very small. I would say 6-8 is average nowadays. My D just went through this. We worked really hard to make a balanced list and I think she did most things right. She got into 7 of 12 (2 too many, in retrospect), waitlisted at three (2reach, 1 match) and denied at two tippy top schools. She was offered merit aid at 5, (2 don’t offer merit aid.) Most of D’s friends had similar results, as our counselors are pretty good. Interestingly, the one kid who churned out a bunch of apps applied to mostly all Top 20 colleges. Got into her two safeties. No others.
I think a lot of kids just throw out apps, hoping they might get lucky. But it shouldn’t be that way. If a kid does her homework, and applies to colleges that are realistic for her stats, expresses interest (if applicable), selects good recommenders, and makes a good effort on their essay, she can expect to get into some colleges, and probably more than one. It isn’t about pumping out the most apps, it’s about doing it the right way.
I think more kids are catching on to the fact that privates offer financial (or merit) aid and so therefore they are not limited to public colleges near home the way they used to be. Just one factor among many, most of which you listed, And from what I hear many kids are applying to an awful lot of schools.
Congratulations on Olin Rayrick. Ten years ago when we looked at it, it was more selective than MIT.
There are a finite number of prestige schools (or what many perceive to be prestige schools), and many students want a name brand. Add in the increasing numbers of applicants from overseas (there are 300,000 students here from China, for example). Limited places + desire for prestige = tons of apps.
It’s been pointed out that every year there are 100,000 US high school seniors who are either 1st, 2nd or 3rd in their graduating class. A great many of them feel they should be accepted to a top school. The numbers are mind-boggling.
All the above reasons are no doubt true but in many cases these schools are simply getting their messages across to a national audience where they had not done so in the past. We discovered Grinnell and Macalester, along with several other colleges that I’d never heard of, at the ‘Eight of the Best Colleges’ road show when S was a high school sophomore. When S later determined that he was an LAC kind of guy, those schools were on the radar and he applied to them alongside local west coast LACs and well known east coast ones. Without their marketing efforts, S’s application would have been entirely coastal.
Back when it was possible for a student to work part time to pay for college, the bling value of the college wasn’t a big deal:
Low cost = Low expectations.
Now that the cost has escalated ridiculously (3x CPI escalation) to the extent that college costs as much as a house, buyers’ expectations of value for money has escalated commensurately:
High cost = High expectations.
Supply and demand.
More and more lower and middle income families expect their kids to attend college.
However, we’re building very few new colleges.
Most of the schools in the US News top ~100 were built 100-300 years ago for much smaller US populations.
Aid…I think many families chase the perception of the aid…either true financial based aid or tuition discounting in the form of merit. Apps rise for colleges that cost less and that changes just slightly over time if colleges reign in their discounting or others go for it.
Schools are sending recruiters farther afield these days than they used to, which is also a contributing factor. I know of several smaller schools that are now recruiting in parts of the country where they had little to no name recognition a few years ago.
Agree with chasing merit aid, among other reasons stated. I only applied to 5 schools (meant to do 7, but after I was accepted to a top choice EA I got lazy with my RD apps); one of those was to a school I had never visited, and was not truly passionate about, but applied due to a friend of mine with similar stats receiving an amazing scholarship the year prior. I go to Northeastern, which is not the most prestigious but still a well-respected school; I think a large reason we get such a huge number of apps is that people know NU tosses merit scholarships out like candy, and everyone wants to test their luck. A lot of my friends in the Honors program here have similar stories of applying knowing nothing about it, and then visiting and falling in love after admissions gave them a $20k scholarship.
When you see big jumps its usually due to a change in the application process like reducing or eliminating supplemental essays or eliminating the application fee. Point and Click .
Drexel and Boston College did that then realized the applications were not real in terms of interest or qualifications and changed backed and applications plummeted in one year. Really plummeted.
Bucknell, Colby (just recently), Franklin & Marshall have tinkered with things to gin up applications. Colby is the latest school to go down this road. A few journalists have written about this practice. Even Swarthmore had a 50% increase one year after watering down the essay requirement.
The unintended consequence is yield drops. It fell from 33% to 8% at Drexel. Colby dropped from mid 30s to 28% last year, and probably will drop a lot again this year.
Schools encouraging as many apps as possible so they’ll look more selective and then kids/alumni will perceive them to be a better school even though they are the same school they’ve always been.
Common App
More kids knowing about more places. Reed College in Portland (where I used to live) is a prime example…10 years ago, they were rarely talked about on the east coast.
Fear. As it becomes (at least perceived) harder to get in, kids apply to more and more and more colleges to assure that they’ll have colleges to choose from.
Money. Particularly with the merit awards (especially the “named” scholarships), there’s a perception that you need to apply to many to maybe get one.
All of the above reasons have been pointed out. I hope to add a couple new, maybe, ideas. Prestige/reputation is part of it, but I would add ideas like high-end and the perceived need to have it all like stainless steel appliances and granite countertops recently. Each state provides academic options for excellent students to those who are average; it is silly and foolish to think that state schools offer lesser educational opportunities unless the state government has made some strange financial or other decisions. Magic!!! Students are variously prepared socially and academically for college, use a range of study skills and show ups and downs in motivation and have irregular attendance, especially in boring classes. Some kids to not take advantage of learning opportunities. One a tutoring or other assistance program is launched to help kids with poorer grades you may find, as I did, that the requests for help comes from stellar students and little response from poor students. Yet, I find many do not know or understand all the personal pieces needed to thrive in college.
High school students who sought test do-overs, extra credit opportunities, incomplete grades and similar options find college faculty are generally don’t include second chances. agic. Students, and their parents, sometimes think that elite schools have a better faculty which will lead to improved performance or, at least, grades. Excellent faculty are pretty much all over because of career and personal choices. Besides, faculty reputations are so often based on published research and their time and energies are devoted to research. Those faculty may also be excellent teachers, but may not be widely available to undergraduates.
The best preparation for college is the student! Whatever s/he brings to college from high school is on based solid high school prep and personal and learner characteristics that are often applied, maximized and increased in college.
I’m liking the ease of application theory as at least a significant contributing factor. The mere existence of the common app doesn’t quite do it for me, because that’s been around since well before my daughter was applying 4 years ago (thanks for the congratulations on Olin, by the way @compmom, but she’s actually a graduating senior now ). Meanwhile, acceptance rates have continued to plummet since then (such as the St. Olaf trend @TytoAlba helpfully illustrated). I suppose one would have to go case by case to quantify the effects of various kinds of tweaks to the application requirements, e.g. dropping a difficult supplemental essay or the application fee. It would make an interesting research project, actually. Chances are it’s already been done by some higher-ed quants out there.
But it does feel like it makes for a sort of pointless arms race. If everybody’s acceptance rates go down, presumably the rankings remain in roughly the same order, but I suppose no one wants to unilaterally disarm. Nevertheless, I’m sure it makes all the admissions officers’ lives more difficult, both from the standpoint of having to read more apps, and by making yield prediction more challenging.
And the same sort of arms race happens at the student end, I think. They see these increasingly scary acceptance numbers and think that a) they have to do even MORE to make their resumes spectacularly awesome, and b) they should apply to ever larger numbers of schools in hopes of tilting the odds in their favor (thereby further exacerbating the problem in a negative feedback loop!). I’m stunned at some of the numbers I’m seeing on these forums for how many schools kids are applying to. My son (who just decided to attend U. of Puget Sound, by the way – Go Loggers!) only applied to five schools, because we only found five he was genuinely enthused about and that number was sufficient to span a reasonable range of admissions likelihoods. He had rather specific criteria that helped narrow the field, however, and he wasn’t (for the most part) gunning for the very most selective institutions in the land.
I remember back when D was doing this, she very nearly applied to Whitman. But they had at least two supplemental essays with rather tough prompts and that ended up being a deal-killer for her when it got down to crunch time. I noticed during this go-round that they’d replaced all that with one micro-essay with a very straightforward prompt. I also noticed their applicant numbers have been among those trending smartly upward over the last few years. Coincidence? I think not
“BC saw its applications decline by 26 percent after it made a strategic effort to raise admissions requirements. The school added a supplementary essay to its application, university officials said, with a goal of attracting more serious students and deterring less interested ones from applying.”
). Meanwhile, acceptance rates have continued to plummet since then (such as the St. Olaf trend 