Take it down, rip it up, and forget it. The college-admissions calendar, on which an entire industry depends, is kaput.
Last week, as the threat of Covid-19 shuttered dorms and silenced quads, the lights in many enrollment offices stayed on late. Huddled around tables, scrawling on whiteboards, harried officials confronted a difficult question: How do you reel in a freshman class during an unprecedented national crisis?
After all, the pandemic that’s disrupting the world is upending the enrollment timeline, too. For decades, the profession has clung to well-defined seasonal rituals, governed by deadlines that ordered the phases of the admissions process. At many prominent colleges, the calendar has long revolved around May 1, the national deposit deadline for applicants.
But that won’t work this year, some enrollment officials say. As of Sunday night, at least three dozen institutions — including Augustana College, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago — had pushed back their deposit deadlines by a month, and several more were poised to do so this week. Concern for applicants and their families is driving those decisions. So is concern for the bottom line. The traditional deadline might leave some colleges too little time to yield the class they plan to enroll — and the revenue they expect to bring in.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Oregon State University got the ball rolling last Thursday, when it announced that it would extend its deposit deadline to June 1. Jon Boeckenstedt, vice provost for enrollment management, urged his counterparts to do the same. “Really, people,” he wrote in a tweet. “Moses did not bring down May 1 from the mountain top.”
In Austin, Tex., on Thursday, Christine Bowman, dean of admission and enrollment services at Southwestern University, considered the chaos unfolding everywhere. Colleges were sending students home and going online-only. High schools were closing. The stock market was tanking, and the oil industry, which looms large in Texas, was crashing.
Bowman, the mother of a high-school senior, considered the family-friendliness of a May 1 deadline at a time when so much, especially families’ finances, was uncertain. “All of a sudden, it just didn’t feel right,” she said. “Is trying to make a final educational investment at the forefront of their minds? No. Do we have an idea of how this is going to play out? No. So why not just eliminate one of the stress points, and let’s see where this goes, together?”
The next day, Southwestern announced that it would extend its deposit deadline to June 1. That step, Bowman hoped, would help the university work around a problem that colleges and families alike are facing: Covid-19 has forced institutions to cancel their yield events, which give admitted students a chance to visit campus, attend a class, meet professors, sample the ice cream in the dining hall.
At Southwestern, students who visit are twice as likely to enroll as those who don’t. But since visits aren’t possible right now, Bowman and her colleagues must find creative ways to replicate “touch points” they build into on-campus events for admitted students.
Last Friday she emailed faculty and staff members to ask for their help in connecting remotely with prospective students. Within 15 minutes, 25 wrote back to say they would be happy to hold those one-on-one chats, via email, telephone, or Skype. During this crisis, many face-to-face conversations will be virtual.
Southwestern is delivering online-only instruction until mid-April, when officials there plan to assess whether face-to-face instruction can resume. If so, the university could hold its lone remaining visit day, scheduled for later that month. With all of May beyond that, the university might invite families to attend a few half-day events, Bowman said, designed to reveal “some element of life on campus.”
The extent to which the pandemic will be grounding travel by then is unknowable, though. Families who can’t visit a given campus — either for the first time or for one last, in-depth look — might end up making different decisions than they would have otherwise.
“How can we ask them to invest in this,” Bowman said, “if they are simply shopping online?”
‘The Rules Just Keep Changing’
Todd Rinehart, vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver, kept asking himself the same question last week, during which he got maybe five hours of sleep a night. Predicting enrollment outcomes, never a picnic, is especially challenging amid rapidly changing circumstances.
Early last week he and his colleagues saw no reason to cancel a major campus event on Friday, which about 100 admitted students, plus 200 high-school juniors and sophomores, had planned to attend. But by Thursday afternoon, following the rapid spread of Covid-19 and a slew of new recommendations from health officials, things looked a lot different. In the name of safety, Denver canceled the event, knowing that some families had already boarded planes for Colorado.
“The rules just keep changing,” Rinehart said.
Uncertainty calls for contingency plans. For weeks Denver has been considering ways to convey the essence of the campus to students and parents who might not be able to visit anytime soon, if ever.
Video will play a large role. This month Denver recorded its chancellor interacting with parents during a question-and-answer session on the campus. Last week the university recorded one of its admissions counselors’ leading an information session.
It also instructed student tour guides to start recording short videos on their phones. “We told them to make it a day in the life,” Rinehart said, “to make it authentic, personal, and real.”
Thirty-second interviews with a favorite professor. Footage of what classrooms and laboratories look like. Firsthand demonstrations of how the 3-D printer works. Denver plans to piece together many of those snippets and send them to prospective students.
University officials canceled one on-campus yield event, scheduled for early April. They will hold off on deciding about two subsequent events until later this month.
The university is also considering pushing back its deposit deadline, Rinehart said. But that’s not an easy decision to make. Colleges are accustomed to driving students to a deadline; extending it too much, some enrollment officials worry, could cost them enrollments.
Rinehart has pondered various scenarios. What if Denver pushes back its deadline to June 1, reschedules its campus-visit programs for May, but when May rolls around, Covid-19 has grounded all travel, and no one can go anywhere?
Still, he suspects, something will have to give. “If all these other industries are delaying and postponing, the admissions profession can’t step to the side and say, ‘We’re not going to make some adjustments.’ We have to figure out how to change the timeline to make it work for our families, and still make it work for our process.”
A Calendar Already Fraying
Amid conversations about shifting calendars, some perspective is in order. For one thing, the admissions calendar was already fraying. Under pressure from the Justice Department, the National Association for College Admission Counseling recently changed its mandatory ethics code to a statement of best practices. That move, some admissions officials predict, could erode the profession’s adherence to many of the code’s fixtures, including the sanctity of the May 1 deadline.
Yes, at Ivy League institutions, highly selective liberal-arts colleges, and many flagship public universities, May 1 is a big deal, a date with meaning. But it’s important to remember that many colleges don’t lock down their first-year class by May 1 — not even close. Moreover, for the numerous institutions that continue enrolling students throughout the spring and summer, May 1 is just another day on the calendar.
Disruption is affecting those campuses, too. Last Friday, Tony Sarda, director of undergraduate recruitment at Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex., was trying to figure out how to adjust his operation.
Really, people. Moses did not bring down May 1 from the mountain top.
Lamar, which admits applicants throughout the summer, gets about 15 percent of its applications after mid-March. So its recent decision to cancel more than 100 recruitment events throughout the state was a big deal. Those events include high-school presentations and coffee nights at Starbucks, which help generate interest in the university, especially among students whose decisions about whether to attend college unfold as they’re finishing high school.
Sarda described Lamar’s admissions process as “procedural, not date-driven.” The university accepts about four-fifths of its applicants, and admissions officers help many applicants with tasks like completing the aid-verification process and submitting campus-housing contracts.
Now more of that assistance will happen virtually, Sarda said. Online chats. Webinars. Social media.
Starting on Monday, Sarda’s staff members, who previously met once a week, will meet daily. He plans to talk with them about how to balance two things: helping students enroll and being sensitive to the difficult circumstances that many might face as a result of a crisis with no end in sight.
“Yes, our work in admissions has to continue,” Sarda said. “The question is, how can we stop for a second and acknowledge people’s humanity?”
