The numbers get bigger each year. Now they’ve reached a mesospheric level of madness.
Yes, we’re talking about application totals at highly selective colleges, a fixation for a jittery subset of the planet. In the 2020-21 admissions cycle, many of the final tallies broke records — and, surely, record numbers of hearts. The more applicants that apply to a hyper-competitive college, the more rejections it must deliver.
But what do such metrics really tell us? What, if anything, does the annual OMG-ing over these statistics add to up to? Let’s pause here and remember that application inflation isn’t new: Acceptance rates at many institutions have been plummeting for years. Also, a 35-percent increase like the one Tufts University just saw didn’t mean there was a 35-percent increase in highly qualified applicants with a prayer of getting in, or a 35-percent increase in applicants who meet each of the institution’s many needs.
The Covid-19 admissions cycle was a lot different from previous ones, for sure. But application tallies from big-name colleges overshadow the challenges facing most institutions in higher education’s vast ecosystem, as well as the struggles of many students within it. Those eye-popping numbers can create a false sense of a never-ending boom — and obscure human stories within each admission statistic.
First, let’s consider a big-deal development: the suspension of standardized-testing requirements. After most of the nation’s big-name colleges adopted test-optional policies for the 2020-21 cycle, they all but guaranteed a surge in applications from students who otherwise wouldn’t have applied. When that surge came, some admissions deans publicly expressed surprise that their testing requirements apparently had been suppressing applications from underrepresented students all along, just as critics of ACT and SAT requirements have been saying for decades.
When Allison Mendoza learned that she could choose whether or not to send scores to the colleges atop her list, she felt hopeful. She had taken the SAT just once, in her junior year, before the pandemic shut down testing centers. Her score, an 1100 (out of possible 1600) left her devastated. So it was a relief to know she could omit it: “I just let my application do the talking for me without a four-digit number defining who I was.”
Nonetheless, Mendoza, a high-school senior in Arlington, Tex., had plenty of reason to feel anxious. She had looked up the acceptance rate at the University of Pennsylvania, her top choice — 7 percent in 2020. She knew that the test-optional trend was a double-edged sword: No, colleges couldn’t hold her middling SAT score against her, but, yes, she would be competing with legions of students with top-notch credentials who also didn’t submit test scores. That unsettling realization was a key part of the experience of applying to highly selective colleges in 2020-21.
Mendoza, who plans to major in architecture, applied early to Penn but was deferred. She scoured Reddit and other websites, reading about an applicant’s chances after being deferred. Not so great, she concluded.
So Mendoza set her sights on the University of Southern California even though her mother, a Colombian immigrant who cleans houses for a living, wasn’t too keen on the idea. Before applying to USC, the teenager didn’t even look at USC’s “middle 50” SAT scores, the range between the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of admitted applicants. “It didn’t even cross my mind,” she says.
Mendoza did look up the university’s student-diversity numbers, its study-abroad opportunities, and data on graduates’ outcomes. And she stared at USC’s low acceptance rate, 16 percent in the 2019-20 cycle.
And it was about to shrink.
College admissions is full of contradictions. On many campuses, it’s a high-volume business that requires practitioners to review each applicant one by one, at least in theory. Balancing that is no cinch even in a normal cycle.
Greg W. Roberts, dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, which saw a 17-percent increase in applicants this year, recently told The Wall Street Journal that he was concerned about his staff’s ability to stay focused while reviewing so many applications for months on end: “Can colleges and universities continue to read in a way that allows them to make the best, most thoughtful decisions when they’re dealing with such a high volume?”
Such questions are echoing inside the many admissions offices that had to adjust their processes over the last year to handle a flood of applications. Mendoza was one of a record 71,000 students who applied to USC, 20 percent more than a year ago, and 7 percent more than its previous high, in 2018-19.
That increase was good news for the university, says Kirk Brennan, director of admission. A bigger pool tends to mean more qualified applicants to choose from — and better odds of meeting many different enrollment goals. “If grandmom sends me to the store to get six apples for a pie and there are only six apples, I just have to hope those are good apples,” he says. “But if there are hundreds of apples, I want to look carefully through them all and make the best choices.”
But in a world where the pie must be baked in a timely fashion, there are some drawbacks to having an overwhelming number of choices, Brennan says: “In admissions, you don’t get a 20-percent increase in staff to account for a 20-percent increase in applications.”
USC adjusted its reading deadlines and extended the usual time period for evaluations. Not having test scores from more than half of all applicants complicated the task of sorting the pool and getting an early sense of its strength. There, in one giant applicant pool, two storylines combined: ever-rising application totals, and the sudden growth in test-optional policies necessitated by the pandemic.
The university, which previously required ACT or SAT scores, plans to continue its 2020-21 test-optional policy for another two cycles. USC, Brennan says, has long seen value in how those scores help predict students’ grades at the university. Still, he believes his staff was able to make sound decisions without them: “Frankly, we’re probably relying more on things that should matter.”
Each year during staff training, Brennan and his colleagues spend a lot of time talking about the role of standardized tests — and what their limitations are. One goal is to help those who read applications feel confident in putting the best candidates forward without fretting about whether their colleagues might agree.
“If a reader is not confident in how that decision will be seen down the line, they might think it’s safe to rely on measures like test scores,” Brennan says. “That part, to me, is where test-optional is really exciting. We kind of cut off a safety net, in a sense. We are now really counting on a human decision rather than a formulaic process. I think that will mean a more exciting class.”
Ultimately, USC admitted just over 12 percent of its applicants, down from 16 percent last year. Of those 8,800 students, 55 percent submitted scores, and 45 percent did not.
In Arlington, Tex., Mendoza had convinced herself that she had no chance. Had the test-optional policy helped her? Or would she be one of a record number of applicants left out?
Go on, gawk at those colleges with super-low admit rates if you must. But those aren’t the only places where drama is unfolding.
Consider Cleveland State University, which admits about 85 percent of its applicants. The university serves many commuters who work at least part time, and about 40 percent of its students are eligible for federal Pell Grants.
“We’re not focused on selectivity,” says Jonathan Wehner, vice president and dean of admissions, enrollment management, and student success. “We’re focused on access.”
And on growth. In March, Cleveland State announced an aggressive, multimillion-dollar plan to to enroll 4,500 more students by 2025. That would be a major feat for the urban university of about 16,000 students in northeast Ohio, where the population is shrinking. The university’s enrollment has declined in recent years. As of early April, transfer applications were down by 20 percent.
The university plans to recruit further afield in other states while also bringing in more students from its own backyard. Last fall, the university nearly doubled its enrollment of graduates from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Time will tell if Cleveland State’s aspirations are realistic or not. But the stakes, for the institution and its community, are clear. “The city of Cleveland bouncing back from the pandemic is really going to depend heavily on growth in the work force and in high-tech jobs, computer science, and health care,” Wehner says. “Institutionally, we really feel that we’re at the center of that.”
As of early April, applications were up 34 percent over last year, which Wehner attributes in part to enhanced marketing strategies and new initiatives, such as the 2-For-1 Tuition Promise, in which students who finish the fall semester with at least a 2.75 grade-point average get the difference between their aid package and tuition covered by the university in the spring.
Wehner, who has worked at several kinds of institutions, has been around long enough to know that any enrollment official with a big enough marketing budget can generate more applications in a hurry. It doesn’t mean much unless those students enroll, persist, and succeed. “When I look at these numbers, I do think there’s a lot of variability,” he says. “That’s why I tell my president I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Concordia University Texas, in Austin, is a Hispanic-serving institution, or HSI, that admits students right up until classes start in the fall. Last year, the institution accepted 94 percent of its applicants.
“When I hear about those 3-percent admit rates, I think about the other 97 percent of families, what their next step is,” says Jennielle Strother, associate vice president for enrollment services. “Because that’s what we do here.”
Sure, Strother would welcome more applications. Last fall, the university didn’t quite match its 2019 enrollment numbers. But in a given moment she’s most concerned about the percentage of prospective students who have completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
Each year, the institution helps families complete the arduous form. Admissions officers and student financial planners walk applicants through each step of the process, breaking down the details of financial-aid award letters, making sure they get in all the necessary paperwork, and helping them develop a payment plan before they’re allowed to submit a deposit.
“If we don’t get to have that conversation with these students,” Strother says, “the likelihood of them enrolling anywhere is low.”
While mainstream newspapers were reporting on application spikes at the nation’s wealthiest colleges this spring, Strother was monitoring the institution’s FAFSA-completion rate. As of early April, 57 percent of Concordia’s admitted students had completed the the form, down from 60 percent a year ago.
“We’re not going to meet our work-force demands as a nation if we don’t figure out how to serve our Latino families in ways that are impactful,” Strother says. “Until we stop focusing on what some people call highly rejective institutions, we’re missing the point.”
Read enough articles about the great application boom of 2020-21, and you just might think that most teenagers applied to at least one hyper-selective college this time around. But that just wasn’t the case.
Sure, some years Cathy Longstreet, a school counselor at Hastings High School, in Michigan, advises just one or two students who apply to an out-of-state institution. This year, about a dozen did so. “Some seniors just up and applied to big-name colleges, just throwing Harvard into the mix to see what would happen,” she says.
Still, by April Longstreet was seeing something else: Dozens of students who hadn’t applied anywhere yet. “There’s just too much going on in their lives,” she says. And as usual, many students had applied only to in-state public institutions; some were scared off by the sticker price at private colleges.
The obsession with brand-name prestige that some families have? “I don’t see that so much with my students,” Longstreet says. “In some cases it’s because their parents don’t know enough about the process in the first place.”
Elsewhere, counselors confronted an age-old fact of college advising: A college’s low acceptance rate can both attract and repel applicants.
“Some students, because of their background, their socioeconomic status, their whiteness, naturally gravitate toward those colleges with an acceptance rate of 15 percent or less,” says Crys Latham, director of college counseling at the Washington Latin Public Charter School, in Washington, D.C. “But those numbers can scare kids who look at them and say, ‘I don’t have a chance.”
Sometimes Latham, a former admissions officer, nudges such students to consider applying anyway, reminding them of what they bring to the table — and how the overall acceptance rate doesn’t reflect the chances of each and every candidate. The challenge during this cycle: The usual metrics Latham uses to help gauge applicants’ likelihood of admission went out the window in a year when many of them didn’t send ACT and SAT scores to colleges.
“This year it’s just that there are a lot of you,” Latham told several of her students. “A lot of you with great GPAs who aren’t submitting scores.”
Allison Mendoza, the aspiring architecture major in Arlington, Tex., never looked at USC’s middle 50 SAT score ranges for 2020. So she never knew that the 1100 she got on the exam fell well below the range for admitted students, 1400-1560 in the previous cycle. Last year, that score might well have kept her out of the running; this year, her score didn’t matter.
A couple weeks ago, Mendoza was in the middle of a high-school softball game when she started thinking about USC, which, she knew, was about to announce its admissions decisions. After jogging in from center field, she sat down on the bench and picked up her phone. It was 5:32 p.m. when she saw that she had a new message from USC. Let’s see my rejection, she thought.
Click. All of a sudden her screen filled with confetti and peace signs. She had been accepted for the spring term of 2022, and was among a record 1,760 first-generation students (20 percent of the class) admitted to the university this year.
Between innings, Mendoza jumped off the bench and ran over to her mother in the stands, saying “Mom, Mom, Mom, I got in!” Her mother, who had warmed to the idea of her daughter attending college in California, was so happy that she cried.
And there was no number for that.
