F orget the blooming flowers and chirping birds. Spring’s the time for writing triumphant news releases about how many applications your college received. More than last year! More than ever!
The ritual has an air of redundancy. Many selective colleges that just announced unprecedented application totals this year did the same in 2015, 2014, and so on. All the record-breaking tallies have become a broken record.
Even as colleges proudly report more and more applications, at many places the percentage of accepted students who enroll has been declining.
So let’s examine this annual rite more closely. Sure, it might seem like nothing more than numerical boasting of the “size matters” variety, and for some colleges, that’s true. Beyond that, it’s a crucial means of signaling success to constituents on and off the campus, some admissions officials say. For donors, legislators, and anyone else who’s eager to see prestige or progress, application counts are a seductively simple measure.
But applications are going up — way up — just about everywhere, so the meaning of any one college’s surge can be murky. Sure, an institution can make itself more accessible by joining the Common Application or waiving application fees, but that’s not the same as becoming more popular. Plenty of students apply to colleges they have no intention of attending. As metrics go, application numbers aren’t what they used to be.
And yet those big numbers tend to make presidents and trustees feel good. Attracting more applicants over time can help a college promote itself, especially if those applicants are well-qualified and serious about attending. “Applications are an indication of an institution’s market reach, a signal of strength in a competitive environment,” says Michael S. Kabbaz, vice president for enrollment management and student success at Miami University, in Ohio. “Students don’t want to go to a college in decline.”
This year Miami got nearly 30,000 applications, a 62-percent increase over 2011. In those five years, the university has carried out a robust recruitment plan, attracting more high-performing students from a wider range of locales. When Miami proudly shares that news with reporters, it hopes to reach more than prospective students and parents, says Mr. Kabbaz: “Alumni want to feel that the institution is advancing, that it’s a place in demand.”
People who work on campuses, especially those who play a role in recruitment, want to hear that, too. News of application growth means more to an internal audience than to an external one, says Pamela T. Horne, vice provost for enrollment management at Purdue University, which received 47,475 applications this year. That broke last year’s “all-time record,” set the previous year, a recent news release proclaimed.
Those who teach and serve students, and who keep a campus clean and running, have a stake in a university’s reputation. Application growth, Ms. Horne says, “provides a tangible measurement of their effort and is a great morale booster and source of pride.”
If cheerleading is one motive behind these annual pronouncements, diplomacy is another. Two decades ago, the University of Southern California didn’t promote application totals like it does today. In late March, the university sent an announcement to various media outlets and posted it on Facebook. An accompanying graphic depicting the university’s 16.5-percent acceptance rate affirmed that this year’s admitted students were part of “USC’s most selective class ever.”
What’s the point of saying that? “It’s not to crow,” the dean of admission, Timothy Brunold, insists. As the university has become more selective, it has received more questions — from families, high schools, and, yes, journalists — about admissions outcomes. Announcing the acceptance rate can help put those outcomes in context. “It’s a way to say, Here’s what we’re up against,” says Mr. Brunold, whose office received 54,000 applications for about 9,000 spots. “It’s laying groundwork for explaining why someone didn’t get in.”
A low acceptance rate like USC’s can cut both ways. Mr. Brunold has worried it might deter promising students, especially underserved ones, from applying. That’s one reason this year’s announcement includes descriptions of admitted students’ socioeconomic diversity, as well as the university’s commitment to financial aid.
Yet Mr. Brunold admits that selectivity benefits his institution. “It’s human nature,” he says, “to want something that’s seen as rare or hard to achieve.”
Applying Versus Enrolling
On any campus, though, selectivity is something of a mirage.
A 2014 report by Moody’s Investors Service describes how more students are applying to a greater number of colleges than ever before, either to attain the best possible aid package or to hedge their bets at highly selective institutions. Between 2004 and 2013, the total number of applications to private colleges rose by nearly 70 percent, while the number of high-school graduates in the United States rose by just 5 percent. That application growth, the report says, “leads to an artificial and inflated view of increased demand.”
Those findings underscore a major concern: Even as colleges proudly report more and more applications, at many places the yield — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — has been declining. No college has cranked out a news release about the rising numbers of applicants who turn it down.
These days, the size of the pool doesn’t necessarily predict the size of the class, Beth Wolfe, director of recruitment at Marshall University, in West Virginia, has found. Last year, applications there fell slightly, but the number of incoming freshmen went up. “I’ve pretty much quit looking at app numbers as any kind of indication of where we’re going to end up with the freshman class,” Ms. Wolfe says. “It’s not that the numbers don’t mean anything, but the underlying reasons that get students to come are so much more complex than numbers going up or down.”
So is an application total something to trumpet? Not for the bulk of the nation’s institutions, says Adam J. Castro, vice president for enrollment management at Bloomfield College, in New Jersey.
The most selective colleges, the kind major newspapers fixate on, operate in a much different environment than tuition-dependent institutions like Bloomfield, which last year accepted 63 percent of its applicants. That’s just about the national average (65 percent) for four-year colleges, most of which are notable for admitting — not denying — a majority of their applicants.
A big jump in applications means nothing, Mr. Castro says, if the students a college most wants to serve don’t come.
Although Bloomfield, which just joined the Common Application, has received about 20 percent more applications so far than it did last year, Mr. Castro is bracing for a drop in yield. Many more of those applicants live well beyond the college’s traditional recruitment area, he says, which means they’re much less likely to enroll. Sure, Bloomfield has received nearly 100 more applications from out-of-state students this year, but it expects to enroll just four or five more of them.
“Very few colleges, save for the elites, can afford to publicize these app increases as a stand-alone story, not knowing what the yield is going to be on those apps,” Mr. Castro says. “I would be doing nobody any favors by getting their expectations up and saying, ‘Hey, look at us.’”
No matter the setting, wise enrollment managers don’t just celebrate — they educate. Ms. Horne, at Purdue, spends a lot of time contextualizing the application boom for deans, professors, and trustees, explaining that more applications don’t necessarily mean more, or better, students. They get it, she says.
Officials at Miami have discussed what a “comfortable” number of applications might be when recent increases almost certainly slow down. “This isn’t a forever fountain,” says Mr. Kabbaz. Those glowing news releases just make it seem that way.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
