Boston College saw a 26-percent decrease in applications this year, a drop officials largely attribute to a new essay requirement.
Last year the private Jesuit institution received a record 34,051 applications for 2,250 spots in its freshman class. This year approximately 25,000 students applied, and all of them had to do one thing their predecessors did not: write a supplemental essay, of up to 400 words, in response to one of four prompts.
Although some enrollment officials have nightmares about big one-year declines, John L. Mahoney, director of undergraduate admissions at Boston College, described the numbers as good news. After all, he said, the quality of this year’s applicants—as measured by their ACT and SAT scores—did not go down, compared with last year. “Probably what we’ve done is right-size our applicant pool,” he said.
In an era when many colleges are asking applicants to do less, some institutions have asked them to do more, purposely thinning the ranks of prospective students. If nothing else, Boston College’s move reveals the slipperiness of application tallies, widely viewed as a meaningful metric. If the addition of one short essay can drain a quarter of a college’s pool in one year, how much did those numbers say in the first place?
“The big question is, How many apps are enough?” Mr. Mahoney said. “It’s diminishing returns.”
For the last decade, selective colleges have operated according to their own laws of nature: Each year, applications rise, acceptance rates fall, and the trends seem as inevitable as gravity. In the competition for high-achieving students, bigger applicant pools have long been understood as better. And “more, more, more” is often the mantra of recruitment.
The boom has brought plenty of challenges, too. A deluge of applications has made the admissions process less predictable, for applicants and colleges alike. More students applying to more colleges means more questions about who’s a serious applicant and who’s not.
As Mr. Mahoney watched his applications swell by more than 50 percent over the last 10 years, he saw the college’s yield rate—the percentage of accepted students who enroll—sink. In 2004, Boston College’s yield was 32 percent. It fell to 23 percent in 2011, then rose to 25 percent last year.
Some of the forces that have long driven application increases were beyond any college’s control. The long-term surge in high-school graduates. The rise in foreign applicants. The growth of Web-based communications.
Yet colleges do control the content of their applications, and how quickly a student can apply.
The ‘Why Not?’ Applicant
Years ago, Boston College asked applicants to respond to a handful of essay prompts, including “Why Boston College?” Then, in 1998, the college joined the Common Application. After that, applicants were asked to write only the personal essay it required.
Recently, Mr. Mahoney and his staff discussed the potential benefits of adding an essay. They wanted more than they were getting from responses to the Common Application’s prompts, something that might provide better insights into each applicant. “We wanted to identify students who were more serious, more thoughtful, and more deliberate about applying to BC,” he said.
The admissions staff invited several students to participate in focus groups. They were asked if an additional essay would have deterred them from applying.
The consensus: no, because they had been serious about enrolling. In fact, some students recalled wishing that the college had required an essay allowing them to express themselves further—and to convey their interest in the college.
One of the new questions mentions St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, and asks how applicants plan to serve others in the future. Another quotes the author and historian David McCullough, who said during a recent commencement speech there that “facts alone are never enough.” The question asks applicants to describe a time when they “had all the facts but missed the meaning.”
The college’s regular-decision application deadline was on January 6, and Mr. Mahoney expects the new questions to inform many discussions of applicants. It’s too soon, he said, to say how a smaller pool might shape admissions decisions or enrollment outcomes (presumably, the college’s yield will rise).
Mr. Mahoney describes the essay as an evaluative tool, as well as a means of suppressing frivolous applications. The overall decline—which included a 15-percent drop in early-action applicants—did not cost the college many of the most-competitive students, he has determined. “It seems that we’ve lost the ‘Why Not?’ applicant,” he said.
Less Is More
Ursinus College has sought to do the same thing. In 2005 the college, in Pennsylvania, embraced “fast track” applications, waiving both essay requirements and its $50 application fee. At the time, the strategy made sense, said Richard G. DiFeliciantonio, vice president for enrollment. After all, the college needed to increase its freshman class by about 100 students—the faster, the better.
In one year, applications doubled. Within a few years, Ursinus went from 1,700 applications to more than 6,000. Yet Mr. DiFeliciantonio saw a problem: The yield rate plunged below 15 percent. Fast-rising applications had filled his funnel with thousands of applicants who would never come. He had to hire additional staff members to help process a wave of dead-end documents. “If you think about it in terms of efficiency, it didn’t make much sense,” he said.
A couple of years ago, Ursinus, having enlarged its freshman class, ditched fast-track applications. It started requiring students to submit teacher recommendations and a graded writing sample. “We erected a significant hurdle,” Mr. DiFeliciantonio said.
Applications fell, from 6,000 to 4,500 to 3,500, before rising again, to about 4,000 (for a class of 450). Mr. DiFeliciantonio insists that the quality of enrolling students has not changed, even though the college’s acceptance rate has risen again. “You can start to kid yourself when you look at these app numbers,” he said. “You look more selective, but a lot of it’s not real.”
Last fall the University of Pennsylvania started requiring a second essay on its supplement to the Common Application: It asks applicants to respond to a quote from Benjamin Franklin. The goal, according to Eric J. Furda, was to give admissions officers a better view inside the heads of applicants, many of whom have similar grade-point averages and test scores.
Mr. Furda, dean of admissions at Penn, said he and his colleagues have struggled to reconcile the tension between “what’s an additional opportunity for one student and what’s an additional hurdle for another.” He believes the essays, in some cases, help his staff make better decisions. Dropping the two essay requirements, he suspects, would bring in even more applications.
And yet, thinner by several hundred words, they would tell the university less about applicants—and their intentions.
