I understand the reasons that it seems applicants are applying to many
more schools. And that number is increasing, but it’s not nearly as high on average as some of the examples on this thread.
Through Feb 15, the average number of common app applications per first year individual applicant this year is 5.6. That compares to 5.46 and 5.28 the last two years.
Of course common app doesn’t reflect the full set of applications, but remains an important metric for the industry.
Every year there is a news story about a student who was accepted to an insane number of colleges, maybe 100. This is typical: Jasmine Harrison Gets Into 113 Colleges With $4.5 Mil. in Scholarships
She deserved those acceptances, of course.
Some high schools actively encourage this, as it might incentivize some kids to go to college who might not consider it otherwise.
A student can only apply to twenty schools via common app. Students who are applying to more than that are sometimes looking for the best merit aid. Or they are using free apps, app fee waivers, or filling out the app via the college website. I’d love to know how many parents are paying fees for 57 apps. That’s lunacy.
I live in a wealthy county north of a major metropolis and work with high schoolers professionally. As far as I can tell, most kids seems to be applying to about ten or twelve schools. Definitely kids are still applying to fewer than that. Applying to 57 colleges is clickbait. I’ve seen YouTube videos of kids who apply to 30 colleges, literally all top 30 in the USNWR. That’s just dumb. They want bragging rights, or they think they are buying lottery tickets without understanding that it’s not a lottery.
I think the main driver currently is the uncertainty created in the last two years about test scores. A LOT of kids are going test optional right now and aren’t sure how good their app is. They are applying to more schools to cover themselves in case nothing they really want works out.
EDIT: Guidance counselors should crack down on this nonsense. That’s a LOT of extra work for them too. I hope they are explaining to those seeking bragging rights that if they are tailoring their apps for the colleges they are applying to, they have a better chance of getting in and won’t need to submit 30 apps.
I think the average number of applications isn’t a good indicator, because the average is heavily distorted by the large number of students who applied to only a few local colleges.
I don’t disagree, but that’s the point…tons of students only apply to a couple of schools, and that includes some relatively high achieving students. Note also that many community colleges are not on the common app. Unfortunately we don’t have a look at the entire application system!
If we assume about 1.9M students will enroll in college Fall of '22, common app applicants (1.161M as of Feb 15) represent around 61% of that (not every applicant will ultimately enroll either). Of course some of these students also applied to schools not on the common app (UCs, UTs, HBCUs, and the many schools that use Coalition app or have their own app).
Fun fact of the day: Jon Boeckenstedt tweeted the other day (Feb 25) that 7% of all US college students attend a California community college.
The median would be a better indicator, but I don’t think it would be much different. Many kids apply to a few local schools and that is it. Because CC is over represented by parents (and kids) from UMC+ communities there is a tendency to think that what happens here is reflective of society as a whole - and it is not. Anecdotally, my son applied to 8 schools and most of his friends applied to 5-8 schools. We live in an affluent town in MA. Granted, my kiddo and his friends aren’t at the very top of their class (although all are good students taking rigorous classes) -perhaps among the top 10-15% students kids are applying to 10+ but I haven’t seen it personally.
My opinion may not be as popular, but this is all about grade inflation and the general dumbing down of education. Quite unfortunately, average kids are applying to prestigious schools because their high school handed out As like candy. They don’t even have to take the SAT anymore…because it’s racist somehow. It’s sickening how bad it’s gotten. Public schools in Baltimore, for instance, have most high school age students reading at an elementary school level. My teenage daughter is taking French. She’s getting an A but hasn’t spoken a word of it all year. This is true with all of her classes. She’s bored out of her mind, even in AP classes, so we will be putting her in a magnet program for her junior/senior year. It’s a government school…what did we expect?
From what I have seen it is these exact kids that are applying to 15+ schools. They never intended to do so, but after a deferral from their top choice they applied to as many schools as they could manage. And let’s be honest, if these are the kids we are talking about, writing more essays is not a problem. Many applied to T1-T20 with no thought to major or fit, which is ridiculous, but you can still apply to that many schools in a thoughtful way. We used to tell kids that if the were above the 75% they had a solid chance at a school, but we also tell kids that applying to top 20 is a lottery. I’ve seen it said here over and over “two years ago this was a solid list but this year you probably wont get in.” I don’t think its all that surprising that kids that fall in that 75%+ at the most competitive schools are trying to maximize their chances buy “buying more lottery tickets.”
Students in CA inflate the average # of schools because applying to UC’s is one application and you just check the box to apply to multiple schools (UCLA, UCB, UCSB, UCSC etc). Same with CalStates. So in 2 applications you could potentially apply to up to 9 UCs and 23 CSUs. I don’t think anyone would apply to all because you do pay additional $ for each school and they are very different but it does make it quite easy to apply to many at once. So what this does is make the waitlist game crazy for UCs.
Really? That’s interesting. Among my kiddo’s friend group, most applied to schools ranked T50-100 with, maybe, one reach in the T30-50 range. Only one (and he is higher up in the class) applied to a top 20 school (rejected). The rest eliminated those schools from the get go. I think our guidance department does a pretty good job of steering kids away from applying to lots of T20s - outside of kids in the top 15% (and about 10% of the class gets into a top 20 each year). Kids in the top 15-30% of the class may apply to one reach in the top 20 but it isn’t as if kids are shooting applications to the whole list.
Re: low expectations, I have noticed a similar thing in D22’s large suburban public school. Even the AP courses are not as challenging as I would expect - I don’t think D22 has been asked to write a true research paper at any point during the most rigorous English track available, for instance. My viewpoint is probably skewed by my own experience of attending a small private school with a very demanding curriculum, which public schools typically wouldn’t have the resources to replicate for a very small percentage of their student bodies. But still, I do worry that despite top grades/test scores, D22 would be in for a shock as a humanities student at a T20 school.
I quickly looked up how many schools don’t require a supplemental essay and cross-referenced it with schools that accept the coalition. All of the schools that don’t need the additional essay, I believe, take the common app. So theoretically, it seems you can apply to around 40 schools between both apps and use the same essay.
I find it amusing that in this clearly broken system, many (including some on these threads) put the burden on the students who have naturally become increasingly anxious (and similarly, their parents and perplexed GCs) but it is an entirely justified and expected behavior pattern. The random walk nature of outcomes is particularly pronounced for the group of high-performing students whom the colleges see as one of the biggest challenges in their yield management games. As a result, each student is trying to figure out what is the best application strategy for them individually and spending an incredible amount of time to figure out paths/likelihood of acceptance rather than thinking about the best fits. Shouldn’t the onus be on the colleges, with their obsession on their brand perception and focus on yield management (and their marketing approach to use those metrics in their marketing material for the next cycles)? No chance of happening, of course but how about this instead: what if colleges were prohibited to report and market based on number of applicants and yield? Let them only use the (blind) profile of the accepted/attending applicants, including their GPAs, test scores, EC profiles, financial aid metrics, etc. Oh well… one can dream. In the meantime, nobody should be surprised with the increasing number of applications, especially from the high-performing students. Colleges (and their trustees) should look themselves in the mirror and ask what they are trying to achieve - rather than playing meaningless games based on game theory, and trying meet other social and financial objectives at the same time.
Believe it or not the number of students enrolled full time in college is actually declining and has been since 2010 from about 18M to 16M. Assuming there are roughly the same number of colleges, that means, in total, it is not getting any harder for kids to get into college. What is getting harder is which kids can get into which colleges. The profile of accepted students is changing. For some kids, this is great news, as they would have previously been shut out from many colleges because of reliance on test scores or legacy consideration or any number of other factors. For others, what used to be a clear path has now changed. One thing we do know now is that there are way more deserving students than there are seats at the top schools.
The ground is shifting as we’re trying to walk and no one knows how it will end up. Just realize that for every student who is finding they are not getting into the schools which used to be a given for them, there is another deserving student who is getting in that maybe wouldn’t have before. The real problem is there aren’t enough seats or affordability at the good schools. Until that is fixed there will always be some cohort of deserving students on the outside looking in.
Yes I posted on another thread that we need college rankings to be “denominator-blind” to start combatting the incentive for colleges to solicit rejectable applications!
Different people have different definitions of “good schools.” Many on this site have a very narrow definition. That complicates things. But making things more complicated than they need to be and then complaining about how complicated they are is an odd approach.
Yes, good schools are subjective and situational. How about this:
The real problem is there aren’t enough seats or affordability at the schools students want to attend.
Why should college be such an exclusive undertaking? Just like high school, what if everyone who wanted to attend could?
Some top tier schools are going test-optional and using a more holistic approach to build their student body, while other lower ranked schools are pulling in high stat kids by offering merit aid based strictly on GPA and test scores. In four years, which school will be putting out the best “product”? I don’t know the answer.
With a little research, planning and family conversation, a well-constructed college list is doable at 12 or less (even less than 10) even when looking for merit - the exception being those looking to get into impacted programs like engineering, CS, nursing, etc.
The lists get long when families don’t talk about finances ahead of time, don’t research the reality of merit opportunities or talk about the costs associated with shipping their kid to a college 2000 away. I can’t tell you how many posts I’ve seen on college message boards from parents inquiring about merit from a college that is notoriously stingy on merit - and then are shocked to read post after post confirming the lack of merit (coulda saved that $75 application fee). Or OOS parents who assume that their kid will receive some magical gift of in-state tuition at a school that doesn’t offer it to anyone (and then get angry at the school about it). Or those who think their “tippy top” stats are a shoo-in everywhere they apply…the list goes on and on.
As a parent who had to pay all the application fees, I would not have allowed either of my kids to “shotgun” applications to (1) schools we weren’t willing to pay for unless they had published stat/merit info which my kids would qualify for (2) schools they had no intention of going to (3) schools that were too far from home, resulting in significant additional travel costs (4) schools with single-digit acceptance rates.
Test optional certainly adds a new layer to the process but choosing enough safety/likely/matches and then possibly trying test optional to one or two reaches, can still keep the list manageable. Many people have cited the inability to visit during as a reason to add many more schools to the list, but I’m not sure how not being able to visit 7-9 schools and then adding 10 more non-visitable schools to the list, helps the decision process - it ends up being a virtually impossible number of schools to visit before making a decision.
To each their own, I guess. I never had the problem - I had to twist arms to get my kids to do the 7 and 9 applications that they submitted.
Does it become a little bit of a herd mentality? Other kids are applying to 20 plus schools so you have to, to keep up. Hope it doesn’t become a new normal
Do we know this, though? It is a worthy goal, but do we have evidence it is happening? Or are the “top schools” (T5 or T20 or T50 or however you want to define them) mainly still taking the same old students, just in a jumbled up way? For example, maybe in the past Buffy applied to 3 schools and ended up at her top choice and best fit school Dartmouth, while Tripp applied to 3 schools and ended up at his top choice and best fit school University of Pennsylvania. But now both Buffy and Tripp apply to 25 schools (with the help of an expensive private college counselor) and by the current opaque system, Tripp is accepted at Dartmouth, while Buffy ends up at University of Pennsylvania, neither of which was a top choice or good fit. (Meanwhile, disadvantaged kids are mainly still going to the nonselective local schools they always went to, or are not going at all.) I mean I hope this isn’t the only thing we are getting out of all this chaos.