By Erin Avery, D.Min., C.E.P.
Let’s pretend it’s the Monday after the Super Bowl and review my many predictions of what would enfold in college admissions throughout the pandemic. Enrollment management, or the predictive algorithmic planning that colleges do to calculate the likelihood of enrolling students and securing their tuition dollars, is not a science. (That’s why some of us were placed in triples in college because too many accepted students chose to enroll that year.) So it shouldn’t be any surprise to us that big data has now completely infiltrated college admissions. With the arrival of software tools such as Slate, colleges can track every click-through, every second spent on social media posts, every attendance on a virtual webinar, and every active engagement reply to their vast marketing monstrosities.
College admissions and enrollment management are also significantly risk averse. During the pandemic, where the room and board line items of college incomes disappeared, college budgets were significantly devastated. Admissions teams are ever more attentive to locking good students in.
It has always been statistically beneficial to apply early decision because colleges are guaranteed 100 percent enrollment if they accept that student. Colleges don’t have to fight with 12 to 20 other schools on average to yield that applicant once accepted so, as predicted, last year early decision benefited applicants and made for many happy senior years. Some colleges enrolled over 50 percent of their incoming class through their early decision pools, actively shrinking the percentage of selection for the regular pool.
Once those early spots are taken up by recruited athletes, legacies and other institutional priorities, let’s just say most of the seats from the musical chairs game have disappeared and the bloodbath ensues when the music stops.
Predictably, colleges also went hard to their – and this is an unpopular and unsavory word these days – “feeder” schools. For example, fully nine seniors from Delbarton were accepted early decision to Boston College. Being risk averse, colleges honored mission-appropriate fits and dependable school relationships.
I also predicted that financial aid dollars would be spent heavily on first-generation, low-income students, recruited athletes, and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Trustee letters, while ultimately honored, for example, at Georgetown, were highly scrutinized in the early action pool and less than a handful of applicants with “trustee support” were accepted early, though most got to the finish line in the end. Relationships with persons of power looked like privilege but, as it turns out, privilege doesn’t enjoy being snubbed.
And while predominantly Caucasian, the sports teams that got cut at Stanford and their alumni fought back with their pocketbooks and many of those unfairly targeted athletic programs were reinstated. Stanford claimed to have been motivated by saving money but when has Stanford ever been guilty of thrift?
Lastly, the vast majority of students and families were happy to pocket thousands of dollars that they might have spent in test prep when many schools waived standardized test requirements because of the pandemic. But good test takers persevered, submitting test scores and successfully skewing all test score statistics higher.
Now what remains are GPA and course rigor. So, if you have a student entering high school who has the ambition of attending a selective college, I would counsel them to take as rigorous of a course load as possible and to strap in for a three-year GPA marathon. And even if a student maximizes their high school curriculum, colleges will still be looking for demonstrations of intellectual curiosity above, beyond and outside, of their school’s course offerings.
Ultimately, what are our COVID “keepers”? Affluent students had best get a summer job, coding is still critical and readers remain leaders. I want to encourage all of us to keep close in our minds what it felt like to make time for family meals together, and to be in close physical proximity with the people that we were put on this earth to love best.
Because even if you go to Hotchkiss and Harvard, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be tolerable company at a Super Bowl party.
Erin Avery is a lifelong resident of Monmouth County and is the founder of Avery Educational Resources, LLC, a comprehensive one-stop consulting organization specializing in college, career, transfer, boarding and graduate school as well as test prep and exam simulation serving a domestic and international clientele. She is a commissioner of the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners. Her book, “The College Labyrinth: A Mindful Admissions Approach” is available on Amazon.
This article originally appeared in the Aug. 19 – 25, 2021, print edition of The Two River Times.
