Dr. P. Shares Key Trends & Takeaways from This Spring's Admission Cycle
This spring’s admissions decisions brought hours of regret for Ivy towers that won’t be climbed. But, 2022’s April showers have also bestowed powers for those who choose to learn from the past and plan their own college application journeys wisely. (As a college counselor, I always recommend planning!)
In this post, I’ll break down some recent trends in the world of college admissions. Then, I’ll suggest some takeaways that these trends imply for the Classes of 2023 and later.
Highly selective colleges got even more selective.
Just when we thought it couldn’t go any lower, the acceptance rate of my own alma mater, Harvard University dipped to 1.9%. (Harvard accepted a second Crimson Coaching student this year!) Yale and Brown experienced similar trends, thanks to total application numbers that rose between 7 and 9% over 2021’s numbers, themselves record-shattering.
Great public institutions did, too.
Institutions such as the University of Virginia (where two Crimson Coaching students are enrolling this fall) and the University of Michigan (where another Crimson Coaching student got in) experienced similar increases in applications and consequent declines in admission rates.
The SAT might’ve mattered.
The jury’s still out on 2022. But admissions data from the University of Georgia (where another Crimson Coaching student was admitted to the Honors program and received a $38,000 scholarship) demonstrate that students who applied early with SAT or ACT scores in the Fall of 2020 were admitted at roughly double the rate of those who applied without standardized test scores.
Photograph of Dunster House, where Dr. P. lived during her last two years as an undergrad, as seen from Weeks Footbridge over the Charles River, by Clay Banks at Unsplash
As a college counselor, I’ve developed two main suggestions for families and students based on these trends:
Students should prepare for and take the SAT or ACT.
Doing well on these exams won’t just help students gain access to the more-selective-than-ever colleges. (For example, one Crimson Coaching student who I coached for the SAT, on which he scored a 1580, got into Princeton this spring.) Preparing for the exams may also identify important gaps in students’ knowledge. For example, I noticed that two of my current SAT students cannot take 10% of 100 without using a calculator. So, we spent time reviewing our base 10 number system and arithmetic basics. The students need these skills not just for the “no-calculator” section of the SAT, but for life!
Lastly, it’s possible that the “test-optional” admissions pendulum is starting to swing back in the other direction. Rampant grade inflation at individual high schools makes it difficult for admissions officers to accurately assess students’ skills and content knowledge. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it would once again require either the SAT or ACT. Other colleges, including Georgetown University, followed MIT’s lead.
Many students don’t know where they’ll apply until the senior year. By then, it’s too late to begin preparing for the tests. Therefore, as an SAT and ACT tutor, I strongly suggest that students who have taken Algebra II as sophomores start preparing for one of these tests in the summer after tenth grade. Knowing a student’s score by the junior year spring makes building a college list and visiting colleges much less stressful and more efficient not just for a college counselor like me, but for parents and teens, too.
Photo by Elliott Reyna on Unsplash
2. Students should apply to a balanced list of “safety,” “target,” and “reach” schools. More importantly, they should be happy to attend any of them – not just the reach schools.
An amazing roster of schools -- including Harvard, Princeton, Boston University, University of Southern California, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design -- admitted Crimson Coaching students this year. Harvard and Brown and Cornell also either rejected or waitlisted some. Except for one extraordinary candidate and another who might’ve aimed a bit too low, no one got accepted everywhere they applied. But all earned admission to one or more schools that are both “good fits” for the students and have excellent reputations. In my opinion as a college counselor, this balanced outcome should be the aim of every student applying to college.
Got any unusual or interesting college admissions news to share? Got any thoughts on my takeaways? Drop them in the comments below. Until next time,
