How much information does a college really need to make an admission offer to a student?
The question is propelling several recent experiments in which colleges admit (or pre-admit) students who haven’t applied, which The Chronicle described in an in-depth article published on Monday. As a few readers noted, so-called direct-admission programs have been around in some form for decades. Way back in 2001, The Chronicle wrote about the then-growing practice of on-the-spot admission offers, which one student at the time hailed as a “great stress relief,” and some skeptical college counselors described as a marketing gimmick that could harm applicants by forcing them into a hasty decision.
Today’s “flipped admission” experiments are happening on a much broader scale than ever before. Several states, along with the Common Application and Niche.com, are now gauging the effectiveness of extending conditional admission offers to prescreened students who meet specific academic criteria. The goal? To help colleges increase enrollment — and attract more low-income and first-generation students.
The most innovative of those new approaches is Greenlight Match, which bypasses official applications. Instead, high-school students are invited to create free, anonymized online profiles by inputting the basics (such as high-school courses, grade-point average, Expected Family Contribution). They also answer a series of questions (“Are there any classes you really love?”; “What is your dream job?”).
Then students’ counselors verify their information and upload their high-school transcripts into a portal — no essays or test scores required. Participating institutions review the profiles and offer admission to qualified candidates. Thus, a “match” is made, and students then decide whether to continue the conversation with the college.
This approach intrigues Jessica Sullivan. She’s the assistant vice president for admission at Susquehanna University, in Pennsylvania, where 25 percent of last fall’s incoming class was eligible for federal Pell Grants, and 34 percent were first-generation students. The looming demographic cliff, she believes, will compel many institutions to simplify the act of applying to college.
“The admissions process is too complicated to begin with,” Sullivan says. “We have to analyze why we are asking for what we’re asking for, and does it make sense. The colleges willing and daring enough to eliminate certain pieces of the application can potentially make it easier for students to apply. This is a way of getting in front of students who might already have a difficult process ahead.”
Susquehanna, a liberal-arts college enrolling about 2,200 students, is among nearly 80 postsecondary institutions participating in Greenlight Match during the current admissions cycle. The program, which started in Chicago during the 2021-22 cycle, has expanded to six more cities, including Dallas/Fort Worth, New York, and Philadelphia. Its partners include schools and community-based organizations (CBOs) that serve low-income and first-generation students.
Access to those partners holds great appeal for some colleges seeking new pools of diverse prospects. Sullivan, who calls herself a college-access advocate, sees Greenlight Match as a meaningful way for Susquehanna to build and bolster its relationships with CBOs in New York and Philadelphia, two areas where the university hopes to continue expanding its recruitment. “Not everyone is familiar with Susquehanna,” she says. “This gives us an opportunity to get in front of a subset of students that we might not have through admissions travel and existing relationships” with high schools and college-access organizations.
Relationships matter in most any endeavor, but they’re especially important when recruiting underrepresented students, who often have concerns and challenges that other students don’t. Sullivan — who works on a rural campus where three-quarters of students are white — describes Greenlight Match as a long-term investment in building trust among college advisers who support low-income and first-generation students.
“Students being able to have trusted professionals in their lives recommend them to specific colleges, there’s a lot of power in that process,” Sullivan says. “We have to be able to show that there is a match, and there has to be trust in what we’re going to provide for those students. So we as an institution have to prove ourselves and show that we are going to make this place affordable.”
Creating a new way for low-income students to snag acceptances is one thing; handing them affordable options is another. Colleges participating in Greenlight Match aren’t required to meet a specific threshold for financial aid offered to students they admit.
Jonathan April, managing director of College Greenlight, tells The Chronicle that many of the program’s college partners were identified by high-school and CBO counselors as being “supportive and generous” to underrepresented students. And some of them, he says, have committed to meet full need for Greenlight Match students.
The admissions process is too complicated to begin with. We have to analyze why we are asking for what we’re asking for, and does it make sense.
“The design of our platform inherently provides an incentive for institutions to offer generous scholarships,” April says. “This is because institutions get value from our platform only if a meaningful percentage of students ultimately enroll, which can only happen if students are receiving admission offers they can afford. And it’s a competitive environment. Institutions don’t want to lose a potential student because a competing institution offered a larger scholarship.”
Still, there’s a limit to how much money most colleges can provide. Susquehanna, Sullivan says, isn’t able to meet the full financial need of students admitted through Greenlight Match or its traditional application process (though it does have agreements with CBOs to meet the full need of a limited number of students those organizations serve). The university, which has a cost of attendance north of $70,000, offers merit scholarships totaling $36,000 to $42,000 a year to qualified students.
“It will be a partial scholarship, but it’s a conversation starter,” Sullivan says. With Greenlight Match, “students have that scholarship as a starting point. That way, they are like ‘OK, it’s not going to cost $70,000, it’s going to cost $30,000.’”
Some college counselors who welcome new ways of connecting students with colleges have expressed concerns about nontraditional admission offers that don’t come with enough aid. Alicia Oglesby, associate director of college counseling at Winchester Thurston School, in Pittsburgh, thinks experiments like Greenlight Match can help students by exposing them to institutions that they haven’t considered or even heard of: “If this is a way in which students can be better seen by colleges, I’m for it.”
But Oglesby thinks that participating colleges should meet a minimum threshold of students’ financial need: “Affordability has to be part of the acceptance.” If it’s not, then matching with a college, just like receiving a traditional acceptance, might stoke false hope.
Sullivan says she appreciates that concern. “I would not want to market false hope to students,” she says, “but I also wouldn’t want students to miss an opportunity within their reach that they’re not even aware of.”
One thing she likes about Greenlight Match: It offers a degree of reassurance that students using the platform have a college adviser who can help them assess their aid offers and make a sound choice. “A student that I’m seeing at a college fair or sending mailings to might not have that,” she says. In an age of mass recruitment mailings and email barrages, Sullivan sees Greenlight Match as a potential means of casting a small but effective net.
But nothing is perfect. Though the program was designed to streamline the application process for students, it requires extra work from admissions staff, which, on many campuses, are worn thin. Before signing on, Sullivan asked herself if her office had the capacity to fully commit to the project. “We knew we had to put some elbow grease into it,” she says.
As of mid-February, Susquehanna has reviewed 240 student profiles on Greenlight Match and extended offers to nearly all of them. And 75 of those students have since indicated that they are interested in the university. If four or five of those students end up enrolling this fall, Sullivan says, she would be thrilled.
Four or five students would be a tiny fraction of a projected first-year class of 590, a reminder that Greenlight Match and similar experiments are happening on a small scale. However those experiments turn out, the Ivies are still gonna Ivy, and many highly selective colleges will continue to require applicants to jump through many hoops — essays, short answers, optional interviews — just to have a chance of being admitted.
How much information does a college really need to make an admission offer to a student? Is a high-school transcript and the answers to a handful of questions enough?
Maybe there’s more than one good answer. Your own might well reflect the kind of institution you work for (super-selective or not so much), or what you think the act of applying to college should entail (months of self-reflection and discovery, or a fairly quick and simple exchange of information).
Either way, it’s fair to say that what many people think applying to college should involve has been greatly shaped by outliers: institutions with elaborate applications that reject the vast majority of their applicants. But most colleges are kind of like Susquehanna, which accepted more than three-quarters of its applicants last year.
A reminder: Some prospective students in the universe have plenty of confidence, college-going know-how, and support from their families. But others have none of the above.
“For students who are scared and not sure what to do, the admissions process can feel like a hurdle,” Sullivan says. “We’re not in a position to be putting up hurdles.”
