I know we haven’t seen a process like this yet, and it is hard to predict what admissions may look like for the '21 highschoolers.
One of my teachers brought up an interesting point that admissions could likely be more competitive as student may drop grades to apply this year. They could be waiting for the pandemic to cool off, hoping for higher chances of admission, hoping for higher financial aid, optional testing, etc.
Do you think there could be a significant amount of student applying who are not graduating in '21 that might impact the admissions for those who are?
While it may seem logical that there would be more applicants this fall, the fact is that most students had their admission offers in hand before lockdown. Some accepted and will enroll. Some accepted and deferred. Some accepted their second/third/fourth/fifth choice because it was closer to home or declared early on that the fall would be virtual. Some turned down all of their admissions offers and are waiting things out. Whether those that decided to wait things out and apply again are in significant enough numbers so as to make this fall’s applicant pool extra large remains to be seen. Those numbers may well end up being balanced out by 2021 grads who decide to delay college hoping that the pandemic will have completely burned itself out in 2022.
There was no pandemic through the entire Fall 2019/Spring 2020 application process, so I don’t see why there would be an expectation that a lot of 2020 graduates would have decided to wait a year. There’s no way they would have known or expected optional testing policies the following year.
I don’t think a student who applied last year and was accepted/rejected would be able to reapply to the same schools under the new rules.
I suppose that if a fair number of students deferred admissions for a year there might be fewer slots for next year’s class. So admission numbers may be lower, but not because a significant number of last year’s students are applying.