I was looking at my kid’s HS Naviance vs last year and, for the most part, it appears to me that application volume may be lower this year than last year.
That is only if as I understand it that Naviance indicates a school has been applied to even if a kid has simply added it to their linked CommonApp account but have not actually applied to the school.
If that assumption is wrong, then I think app volume is considerably higher than last year because the EA/ED volume in some cases in higher than the total application volume last year.
A good question, but hard to answer. I think EA/ED applications to highly selective schools will be up (again) because of the uncertainty of admissions these days. How much of the volume is driven by certain kids applying to more and more schools is another question.
Of course common app doesn’t have all the app volume (probably 60%-70% or so)…the UCs have significant volume, and many schools also offer their own app.
I assume you are talking about college specific pages in Naviance? Naviance is generally set up to only pull colleges applied to, but counseling staff can enter some data manually if they choose. The school counseling staff would be the ones to tell you what the Naviance data show, they are in control of what is in there.
DS2022 added ~8 more RD applications in Naviance after he was deferred in December,
when many of the colleges’ merit scholarship offers were a lot lower than we hoped.
“Unofficially” Duke ED has almost 2000 more applications compared to last year which is a significant jump. The official numbers are not released yet, but it was said on a zoom.
At our HS, at least, the Naviance application counts per school do seem to reflect transcript requests.
For the school where my kid is applying ED, which typically has 20-30 applicants per year, the numbers blew up across September and mid-October and have since trickled up by a just a few, stopping at 27 applications. Because of when the volume shot up (weeks before the Nov. 1 ED deadline), it’s clearly not related to actual application submission.The transcript deadline for all schools a kid plans to apply to is tied to when their first application is due. I don’t know a single kid not applying EA or ED somewhere, so this should account for the vast majority of intended applications.
Looking at all of the schools where my kid is applying, at least, the volume seems largely unchanged from last year. Same with a few other popular schools at our HS (on average—one popular school seems significantly down, while another seems significantly up).
I’m sure they make exceptions and allow kids to submit one-off transcript requests past the deadline, especially after ED/EA decisions come out, so we might see another little bump in mid-December, in the few days before winter break. But I suspect 90% of the final volume is already accounted for.
I note at our HS, you only need to move a college to Applying in SCOIR at least 10 days in advance of actually applying (to trigger the counseling staff getting in all the documentation).
So presumably our kids sometimes move a lot of colleges over to Applying only after the mid-December early notifications come out. But that will presumably be a function of how many kids are doing ED I, or otherwise are done if accepted EA/REA, and then how many are not accepted to such a college. Which could well be a variable each year.