Thanks for the Duke info.
Will be interesting to see if selective schools divulge the number of TO students accepted and ultimately enrolled.
2 Likes
I stand by my opinion HomerDog. I am also a current NESCAC parent and grew up in a NESCAC family on a NESCAC campus. I am well aware of the community. You are free to differ but my pervious opinion has not personally been swayed. We shall see what happensâŠ
2 Likes
I know that a lot of schools are saying that they will admit more first year students this year, but Iâm not sure how much to believe that. Sure, some could adjust and have a smaller sophomore class and very large freshman class without impacting housing and course availability too much, but others will have a harder time doing that.
I donât think too many schools would advertise the fact they will be taking fewer incoming students than normal. âHey, everyone, donât bother applying here! Itâs crazy-competitive this year!â
Maybe Iâm too cynical.
2 Likes
Most schools will look to have their total enrollment full, so they can balance the books. That means a bigger freshmen class and/or admitting more transfers.
Also, theyâre struggling to predict yield and will hedge towards a full class. This means they are likely to have a few more than expected enroll in the fall.
Get ready for schools to be short dorm rooms.
2 Likes
I think colleges will adjust and, more than ever, will manage enrollment by liberal use of the waitlist.
I know colleges like Vanderbilt were going deep into the waitlists this past summer as uncertainty about CV-19 was in full swing. No reason to think they wonât do it this year.
I donât think most colleges will be overenrolled unless itâs on purpose to makeup for the revenue shortfall associated with gap students this past year, the additional expenses associated with CV-19, and lower number of full pay internationals and the like.
When colleges like Duke say they want the same number of freshman as last year, I believe them that they will reach their ideal numbers.
5 Likes
Trust the NESCACs to have their own sources within the Deep State. Wesleyanâs is also a former FDA commissioner. Scott Gottlieb `94.
5 Likes
Total enrollment is not the only thing a college has to worry about. The distribution of students across class levels also matters.
Frosh level courses are more general and can be taught by more faculty members than upper level specialized courses, some of which only one or a few of the faculty in the department are best qualified to teach. In addition, frosh level courses can be taught as large lectures with TA discussion sections, while the upper level courses are more numerous for the same number of students, requiring more faculty. Even LACs which have small faculty led classes at the frosh level may find differing needs with 25-student frosh courses versus 5-student upper level courses.
It is not just in classes that the distribution of student class levels matters. At many residential colleges, frosh tend to live in the campus dorms, but upper class students live nearby off-campus. An extra large class one year with a smaller-than-normal class another year can create shortages of campus dorm space one year, but empty dorm rooms another year (and the demand for off-campus house can also be affected).
2 Likes
Yes, but the ED #'s this year arenât much different than the year before last⊠my Dâs class of 2023, there were 4,852 ED apps, with acceptance of 882, or 18.2% acceptance rate. Last yearâs early app #'s were way down.
1 Like
I think the reason their numbers are higher is due to the way they are handling the pandemic. Cornell had everyone back on campus this fall. They have been testing every student, on campus and off campus students, twice a week and their infection rate is less than .2%. Students want to be on campus instead of doing it online.
1 Like
Thatâs reasonable, though I am afraid it works only for high-level colleges. For local colleges it would be just a headache to test their students twice a week, etc.
Regarding whether colleges will admit fewer students due to the COVID gap year bubble, I had heard that Stanford, Princeton and Williams were not going to reduce their admit numbers but instead would accommodate a larger class if necessary. The thinking is that it would not be fair to the incoming applicants. The colleges can always manage a bubble class as they have during prior crises.
@homerdog thank you for posting about UVMâs proposed cuts in the humanities. The administration is proposing cutting 23 departments! Classics, Religion, Asian studies, Latin American studies, gone. Language departments slashed and German as a major, gone. The programs that are being cut are those that bring other cultures and diversity onto campus. It is clear that there are divergent opinions on the value of a liberal arts education verses a STEM, pre-professional or professional education. But at the state flagship level, there should be room for both. Particularly in a residential setting where the kids from the different schools (engineering, nursing, arts & sciences) live together and interact, the kids get significant value from having these programs and being exposed to different ideas. What a shame!!!
Oh, and evidently there is some push-back because the school is spending $95 million dollars on a new sports center. But the administration says that money comes from a different pot, so there is no connection.
Other colleges will be facing these kinds of issues soon enough with the looming higher Ed crisis. We need to think long and hard about where our priorities lie, and what kind of education we want our colleges to provide.
7 Likes
It seems that the increase in early applications isnât caused by how well the school handles the pandemic. If it were, how do we explain the increase in early apps at UNC Chapel Hill and many others?
Itâs more likely that test optional policies are driving the surge in early applications in many places. More applicants may feel they have a shot at gaining acceptances at colleges they wouldnât have a chance otherwise. The unlikelihood of more tests during the winter COVID surges may also push some applicants to apply early.
4 Likes
Princeton hasnât yet indicated whether, and how, class size will change in this cycle (at least thatâs what it told its alumni interviewers last week). Since the vast majority of Princeton students â and ALL freshman and sophomores â live on campus (and off-campus housing is limited), itâs not clear to me that the university can admit a normal-size class if a large number of gap year students return. A few years ago the yield for the freshman class was unexpectedly large, and the university had to create some temporary housing for freshman (including converting some nondormitory space into dorm rooms).
2 Likes
Welcome, @LoidLiu!
I had the privilege of attending several zoom meetings between Wesleyan alum and its president, Michael Roth, over the course of the pandemic and this question of enrollment management came up in one of the very first meetings. He seemed supremely unperturbed by the idea of the college not filling every bed. He was much more consumed by the nuts and bolts of hybrid and in-person classes and keeping people safe, the thinking being that if you took care of that first, students would come. At our last meeting a few days ago, he clearly felt vindicated. The faculty did their thing; in-house staff were trained to collect and ship 5,000 rna/pcr tests a week to Broad Institute. And, nearly 9 out of 10 Wesleyan students chose to return to campus. Roth did mention the fact that it didnât hurt having a billion dollar endowment when it came to deciding priorities; he was perfectly prepared to go fully remote had he felt Wesleyan was unable to offer a campus experience that was as safe as it was attractive - and, he felt that it was able to. He also revealed for the first time, that as he and others in the administration pondered at what point Wesleyan might have to shut down for a second time, they brainstormed numbers as high as 100 students in quarantine or isolation (they had commandeered the entire downtown Middletown Inn for that purpose.) In the end, there were a total of 20 positive student cases.
5 Likes
Yeah. From talking to other parents of current HS seniors it looks like people are focusing on safe choices. Top ranked schools and instate flagships.
Kids here, who would have normally used ED, have decided to send a LOT of RD apps instead. D knows where most of the top ten percent of her school are applying and there are quite a few SCEA but only a scattering of EDs and most of them to schools where they are legacies and the parents know the school well or the student is a recruit. Iâll be curious how this works out fot these kids since, in a normal year, most of them would have gone ED somewhere in the top 25 schools. Not noticing that kids are staying more local necessarily but I guess we will see more about that when they decide to go. I think that, by fall, going far away for school wonât feel as harrowing as it did six months ago. At least I hope not!
2 Likes
Seems like the issue is that very few students are choosing majors in those departments (NCES data suggests that fewer than 10 students in a recent year completed bachelorâs degrees in each of the listed majors).
https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=vermont&s=all&id=231174#programs
They might also not be big attractors of research grant money.
It is probably at least in part of the increasing perceived necessity of pre-professional preparation in college, in part due to the rising cost of college and the increasingly competitive job market that new workers are facing. The COVID-19 economic shocks may be accelerating these trends.
Sure. I mean, it should be obvious that the pandemic has been a confounding factor during this yearâs admissions cycle. And, consider what it does to the concept of a âdream schoolâ, if your dream school was erupting in virus cases all Fall. Also, did anyone else notice the almost complete absence of a major USNews thread this year? Itâs almost Christmas and no one sees the sense of nitpicking every change in ranking between otherwise peer colleges in a year when the bottom line was, âWill your school re-open in 2021?â
3 Likes