The Future of Admissions

When Covid-19 shut down campuses last spring, colleges were nearing the end of their annual admissions cycle. Enrollment leaders thought the move online was temporary, merely inconveniencing their April on-campus open-house attempts to reel in their next class. Like most everyone else, admissions deans were thinking in terms of weeks, or at most months. Will things be back to normal in May? Maybe June?

The Pandemic Year

Fifty-two weeks ago, campuses closed and higher education as we’ve known it came to a halt. Ever since, we’ve been asking two questions: How will the pandemic change higher education? And how many of those changes will stick? Read on.

• 24 Hours in Higher Ed, One Year Into the Pandemic
• Enrollment Managers Are Flying Blind
• The Stranded
• The Scholar With the Skeleton Key
• ‘Zoom Fatigue,’ Gratitude, and Purring Cats: A Peek at Life During the Pandemic
• Why Haven’t More Colleges Closed?
• What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching
• How Much Has Covid Cost Colleges? $183 Billion

Then as summer arrived, and the College Board and ACT struggled to offer enough testing sites, something happened that ensured this year would be different: Some 600 colleges, including nearly every selective institution, announced they wouldn’t require test scores for the high-school Class of 2021. By the fall, as high schools across America opened virtually, admissions officers accustomed to being on the road recruiting students started to map out a new enrollment playbook.

Admissions is often described as a mix of art and science, and in recent years the rise of “big data” has tipped the balance toward science. The rule in admissions is that if you alter how you recruit or admit or enroll students — whatever you do — do so gradually. That way you know — or at least can guess — which lever you pulled had caused which shift in your enrollment model. But the pandemic reshaped almost every dimension of admissions — and did so all at once. Admissions officials have been left trying to untangle cause and effect.

Among all aspects of higher education, admissions is perhaps the most tradition-bound due to its recruiting calendars and campus tours, common application deadlines, and rigid rating scales for assessing applicants. But a year since the coronavirus took hold in the United States, the debate among enrollment leaders is no longer about when the traditional customs of admissions will return, but what changes from this year will stick, and whether colleges should speed those changes along.

“We all have disparate pieces of information right now. We’re all measuring different things. It’s hard to make sense of it all,” said Charles Deacon, dean of admissions at Georgetown University since 1972. “Some traditions and routines will survive, but they all won’t.”

Admissions is a game with complex rules. Selective, elite colleges typically set the rules of engagement because they’re rich and inundated with applicants; colleges with fewer resources that educate the vast majority of undergraduates follow along where they can. But the pandemic is widening that gap as regional public colleges and less-selective institutions struggle to attract applicants, leading to a vicious circle of falling revenue, tightening financial-aid budgets, and cuts in programs and the faculty.

Even before the virus hit, the cornerstones of admissions — early decision, testing, deposit deadlines, wait lists — were constantly shifting based on a college’s priorities. That’s still the case, but now the virus has a big say, too, and will continue to have a say well beyond this year. The pandemic is no longer a crisis to be managed in the short term, but rather an opportunity to reform the way colleges handle admissions in the long run.

Nowhere is the virus’s impact more apparent than in how it is shaping the future of testing. Already dozens of colleges have announced an extension of test-optional policies for a second admissions cycle, including the entire Ivy League, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. It’s clear the SAT and the ACT will not return to their pre-pandemic prominence. Even the ACT’s chief executive admitted as much in a recent blog post. Some colleges will remain test-optional when the pandemic is over, but how far up the pecking order will that change stick? And will applicants trust colleges enough to judge them without test scores to stop taking the exams entirely?

Let’s pause for a moment to remember what things were like before the pandemic. Test-optional policies were ubiquitous among less-selective institutions and a small set of selective liberal-arts colleges, but they were almost unheard of among big public universities and elite private institutions. The outlier was the University of Chicago, which went test-optional in 2018. Still, most applicants to Chicago submitted scores — around 85 to 90 percent before the pandemic — and the university admitted about the same proportion of students with scores.

Statistics like that signaled to applicants that test scores still mattered, especially at ultra-selective colleges. Think about this: Even as the number of test-optional colleges grew in recent years, so too did the number of students taking the SAT or ACT. So last year, when hundreds of colleges went test-optional — some reluctantly — a lot of high-school seniors and their counselors didn’t take them seriously. In a series of Zoom sessions I held with counselors and parents last fall, the most frequently asked question by far was whether testing was really optional. Even the National Association for College Admission Counseling put out a statement telling families to trust the test-optional policies.

The skepticism started to dissipate in December, when a handful of colleges released their early-decision results. Tufts University announced that more than half of its early-applicant pool had applied test-optional, and 56 percent of those accepted had applied without test scores. Nearly one-third of the University of Notre Dame’s early admits had applied without scores. At Boston University, 71 percent of early admits were accepted without scores.

The vast majority of college applicants apply for regular decision, with deadlines around the beginning of January. The numbers from this year’s early-decision rounds were reaching high-school seniors just as many of them were applying for regular decision. For a certain set of prospective applicants — namely upper-middle-class and wealthy students — the early numbers seemed to indicate that applying test-optional might be the way into a selective college. Unable to take campus tours in person or meet with college representatives visiting their high schools, seniors were already hedging their bets and applying to more colleges than usual this year. If Harvard or Stanford or NYU doesn’t want a test score, why not send in an application to one of those places?

“It was ridiculous,” Diane Campbell, director of college counseling at Liberty Common High School, in Colorado, told me. “My students were applying to 15 to 20 schools on average. Usually, they apply to five to 10.”

Students nationwide applied to more colleges than usual this year. Application volume rose by 10 percent, according to the Common Application, although the number of unique applicants didn’t increase as much, and first-generation and low-income applicants declined. Most of the increase in applications went to selective private colleges and big public universities, while smaller and less-selective universities were left to beg for students. In other words, the rich got richer. The University of California at Los Angeles received more than 160,000 applications, a jump of 25 percent over last year. Colgate University saw its applications more than double. Pennsylvania State University was up 11 percent; Harvard, 42 percent.

As we come to the end of this admissions cycle, a critical question is emerging: Just how much information will the new class of test-optional colleges share about the applicants they accepted? Releasing too many details is a double-edged sword: If a college accepted a high proportion of students without test scores, it could encourage another surge of applications next year and tax the admissions staff once again; but if it accepted too few, it risks the wrath of critics who will question its commitment to equity (test scores are highly correlated with family wealth).

The other question facing colleges is more fundamental: Should they go back to the tests at all?

At Emory University, where applications rose 19 percent and nearly half of them arrived without test scores, “it wasn’t just an additional set of applicants; it was a different group of applicants,” said John Latting, the university’s dean of admission. More applicants were from Georgia, and more were from underrepresented groups. “I think testing is a specter out there for certain students,” he said. “It’s a deterrent. It’s much more powerful than I ever realized.”

Left unsaid, of course, is that it wasn’t a test score that had kept those students from applying. Rather, it was how Emory and hundreds of other colleges considered those test scores that had kept them from applying. Colleges every year publish their average scores. Anyone who glances at the U.S. News & World Report rankings sees a column with a list of the middle 50 percent of test scores for each college. For would-be applicants, those figures are like a flashing red sign: Don’t bother applying if you’re below this range.

One view in admissions is that the SAT and the ACT offer a critical balance for assessing students who come from high schools of widely varying quality. But that perspective isn’t universally shared. Numerous studies show that grades, by themselves, are a better predictor of a student’s success in college than are test scores on their own. Yet studies also show that both metrics, taken together, are the best predictor of success — better than either measure alone. Test-optional colleges are now trying to answer this question for themselves: Are test scores just noise in an application already crowded with grades, activities, and recommendations, or do they really send a useful signal?

That calculation will help determine whether institutions extend their test-optional policies indefinitely. Another factor will be how much they want to curb the growth in applications or navigate the politics of standardized tests among faculty members, alumni, and politicians. Faculty members control the admissions policies at many colleges, and despite being criticized as left-leaning, they tend to view test scores as the standard-bearer in a sea of academic measures they believe are inflated; alumni feel similarly, and state politicians often push for admissions testing as a metric by which to measure elementary and secondary schools.

Without test scores to consider, most admissions offices are leaning into two other measures: the rigor of the classes that applicants took in high school and their grades in them. For those applicants who submitted test scores to the Georgia Institute of Technology this year, most had high scores to begin with, said Richard Clark, its director of undergraduate admission, rendering courses and grades more useful anyway in the review process. Case in point — 93 percent of test-optional applicants to Georgia Tech took calculus in high school, which isn’t covered by the SAT’s math section per se.

History shows college applicants tend to travel in clumps from high schools: Campuses receive applications from several thousand high schools, not tens of thousands. As a result, when a college enrolls a significant number of graduates from a particular high school — say, 10 students over the course of several years — it can track the grade-point averages and eventual degree completions of those students from that school.

At the University of Washington, application readers use a GPA-comparison tool for nearly every high school in the state, as well as many outside the state. The tool compares the average GPA of prior students who enrolled from a specific high school and then their GPA after freshman year at the university. The data indicate to those reviewing applications how grades in one high school translate into grades at the university. “Maybe a student has a lot of B’s in some rigorous courses, but the data can show B’s at that school are quite impressive,” said Paul Seegert, the university’s director of admissions.

The problem is that if colleges rely too much on such data, they risk exacerbating existing inequities by taking more students from high schools that have long supplied a significant portion of their incoming class, at the expense of students from underperforming schools.

But Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me colleges could use such data to swing in the other direction, too. “There are students in our admit pool this year who historically wouldn’t have been admitted because faculty expressed concerns about whether they could succeed because of test scores,” he said. “But we didn’t know that they couldn’t succeed because they were never accepted. This year, we can make assumptions based on average SAT scores for the high school, but we can also use that data to admit them and funnel those students into our support programs.”

Even as enrollment leaders grapple with how to wrap up recruiting this fall’s freshman class, they’re also looking ahead, wondering if the tweaks they made in the evaluation process this cycle will work in the next one as well. While the pandemic disrupted the admissions calendar for the high-school Class of 2021, those students were more than halfway through high school when the pandemic hit. Application readers made assumptions that what students were doing up until March 2020 would continue through their senior year.

Members of the high-school Class of 2022 were only sophomores, however, when the pandemic disrupted their education. They were just finding their footing in high school. Already admissions officers report reading vague recommendations for members of the Class of 2021 from teachers and counselors who know their students primarily through a screen. And those reviewing transcripts have noticed some of this year’s seniors retreated from rigorous classes if they were mostly in school online. Both trends are likely only to increase among next year’s seniors.

And it won’t end there. Many parts of applicants’ admissions files are baked long before they begin the college search — from the courses they take (or don’t take) in eighth grade, to the activities they start in elementary school, to the teachers they get to know as freshmen. As long as this generation of students makes choices about what they do or don’t do in school based on their experience this past year, the effects of the pandemic will live on in college applications for years to come.

In the end, college admissions is a business. The selection process is not about the applicant; it’s about the college. It’s not about whether an applicant is “worthy,” but whether he or she fits into a college’s agenda, whatever that might be. Every college has different needs that could change by the year. The uncertainty of the pandemic — the lack of test scores, the surge in applicants, questions about who will show up if accepted — is giving institutions “license to lean into their priorities even more this year,” said Clark, the admissions director at Georgia Tech.

I spoke to dozens of admissions deans and their staffs over the last 12 months. And while each talked about different priorities — more full-payers, more majors to fill a new program that is a favorite of the president, more men, more students from a certain ZIP code — it was notable how often their stories followed the same narrative: an unwillingness to rethink the qualities they consider in applicants or to reform the admissions process entirely.

If they wanted to, elite colleges could use this moment and their wealth to expand their freshman classes to take more of the highly qualified applicants they now reject rather than advertise yet another year of record-low acceptance rates this spring. Rather than confuse potential applicants with ambiguous test-optional policies, they could disclose who gets in and why, without test scores, or stop considering scores altogether. Colleges could use the expertise they gained with virtual events during the pandemic to connect with feeder high schools, while using their limited fall travel budgets to reach, in person, prospective students who lack access to college counseling. And colleges could eliminate some of the enrollment-management tactics that needlessly raise the anxiety of applicants every year: binding early decision, demonstrated interest, multiple financial-aid forms, and ballooning wait lists that promise to grow even bigger as this hectic year shakes out.

However, all of those things will require trade-offs that colleges have been unwilling to make to this point: expanding their narrow set of admissions metrics, living with higher acceptance rates or lower test scores, maybe dropping a few places in the rankings. Indeed, it seems the only time universities are willing to change is when they are pressured to do so or rewarded for their actions. Take, for example, the push to enroll more low-income students at elite universities. It became an institutional priority on many campuses only after years of negative media attention and when U.S. News started to measure social mobility in its college rankings.

In the modern history of higher education, there have been several significant periods of change in enrollment strategies. Those changes typically came at moments of great social or technological transformation: affirmative action during the civil-rights movement, in the 1960s; the growth of direct marketing when the last of the baby boomers left campus, in the 1970s; the rise of the Common Application, in the 1990s, after the birth of the World Wide Web.

Caroline Hoxby, a professor of economics at Stanford, described the result of those shifts in a 2009 paper as a “re-sorting” of students, in which their choices were driven less by distance and “far more by a college’s resources and student body.” The proliferation of direct mail combined with the ease of interstate travel and the expansion of discount airlines in the 1980s allowed high-school seniors in Massachusetts to more easily picture themselves on a campus in California. Admissions — and higher education as a whole — moved from a largely regional business to one that was nationalized, and eventually internationalized.

Now another reshaping of the admissions landscape may be underway. Student mobility could slow in the coming year as teenagers enroll in colleges closer to home. Sure, we’re right to be skeptical of the surveys, and it might be a one-year blip, if one at all. But if students have a good experience at some nearby campus, expect word to get back to their high schools, potentially creating new migration patterns in the years ahead.

Families may also put slightly less weight on prestige and more on affordability in an economy ravaged by the pandemic. They might rethink the value of the in-person experience after a year of Zoom U. And they might place additional emphasis on the return on their investment in a college degree in a competitive job market after the pandemic lifts. This public-health crisis also comes at a time of racial reckoning and just as the number of high-school graduates is expected to fall, and the racial, ethnic, and economic composition of students in the college pipeline is quickly shifting.

In my interviews with admissions officers, I was often reminded that for all the focus on standardized testing now, the test itself is a symptom, not a cause, of deep inequities. Yes, test scores don’t create inequities; they reflect them. But colleges and universities get to choose what to do with those scores. Institutions are the central actor in a moment ripe for another re-sorting in admissions, when colleges can choose to step away from the herd and write their own rules for a new recruitment game.