10 Ways COVID Changed College Admissions
What just happened?
May 2022
The pandemic has entrenched early decision as a worshipped guardian of both selectivity and the revenue stream. Admitting 50% of a freshman class via early decision is now the norm; Grinnell moved upwards of 60% this season, to their distinct advantage. For a deeper dive into the background, head to my After Words entry, “The Perils of Early Decision,” but expect “early” to continue to play an outsized role in college decision-making.
“Test Optional” has been around for decades, but the pandemic elevated it to global superstar status, a meteoric rise I described in my April 2020 After Words article, “A Crack in the Ivy.” So what happens now? First, colleges that were already test-optional prior to 2020 will remain so. That one is clear. In addition, schools that boldly went “test-blind” (not considering scores at all), like the University of California system, will continue that policy. I also think that a preponderance of the schools that adopted test-optional policies during the pandemic will stick with them. They discovered that they could admit a perfectly good class without scores, and many saw an accompanying rise in their numbers of under-represented and international students, a welcome benefit. Some schools will follow the lead of MIT, which recently announced that it would return to requiring standardized testing for applicants in the current junior class. In due time, others, probably including some Ivies as well as some large public university systems, will follow suit. Moving forward, however, expect the number of test-optional schools to be significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels. (For more on test optional, read my May 2022 After Words, “Navigating the Choppy Waters of Test Optional Admissions.”)
For good or ill, SAT Subject Tests (also known as Achievement Tests and SAT IIs) are gone. They were an enormous revenue drain for College Board, which jettisoned them with little fanfare and apparently neither remorse nor eulogy. (Find mine in After Words, “RIP Subject Tests.”)
Advanced Placement Exams on the other hand, are alive and kicking, although Browning remains nearly the only school in our peer group to administer them. After racing to implement an abbreviated, computer-based version in May 2020, College Board returned to full-length tests in 2021, but offered a choice of paper-and-pencil or electronic versions. Much to my surprise, all 2022 exams are paper-and-pencil, though I suspect that the transition to fully digital may not be too far off. In the absence of Subject Tests, it remains unclear whether selective colleges will start looking to APs to fill the void and how that might live in a test-optional world. Stay tuned.
Sanford Pelz ’71 leads a college guidance lecture with students.
In-person high school visits by college admissions officers also took a pandemic hiatus, as did college fairs, considered by most adult participants to be textbook examples of super-spreader events. I anticipate that, as long as the coronavirus does not toss us another crippling variant (there are lots of letters left in the Greek alphabet,) those in-person events will return next year, augmented by continued access to virtual contact opportunities.
Colleges prefer to admit students who are likely to enroll, so for the last 20 years, many have been tracking interactions that students have with them before and during the application process. Often that meant that a campus visit was perceived as a de facto requirement for admission. Now, however, with the cost of travel so high and a plethora of virtual alternatives, the in-person visit has faded as an expectation. Colleges that care about demonstrated interest still care but consider a wide array of contact opportunities as evidence.
I have been saying for years that, in the wake of legal assaults on affirmative action policies, I did not believe that legacy admission could withstand a Supreme Court challenge. A constitutional lawyer pointed out to me that legacy admission was not a constitutional issue, but I replied that I did not think that mattered; the days of legacy consideration were numbered.
So when Amherst College threw down the gauntlet last fall and announced that they would no longer consider legacy as a factor in admissions decisions, I was not terribly surprised. According to Inside Higher Ed, in January, a “A new bill [was] introduced in the Senate and the House of Representatives that would ban any college that participates in federal student aid programs from offering admissions preferences to children of alumni or donors,” and, in March, “A bill was introduced in the New York Assembly and Senate to bar public and private colleges in the state from offering either legacy admissions preferences or early decision.”
Neither bill is expected to gain much traction just yet, but the writing is clearly on the wall. And it is ironic (or, perhaps, insidious) that opposition to legacy consideration, ostensibly proposed to address systemic issues of equity and inclusion, neatly coincides with the arrival into the college admissions pipeline of a large cohort of children of alumni of color. (I can hear Martin Landau in North by Northwest: “Neatness is always the result of deliberate planning.”)
Every few weeks a parent or a board member sends me a link to a news article about declining enrollments on college campuses. “This is good news, right?” Not really. Every article, several paragraphs in, makes crystal clear that the downward trend is primarily impacting low-selectivity public institutions. At the highly selective, mostly private institutions to which our boys aspire, applications are up. Often way up.
Worse, some of the institutions that are feeling the pinch may not have the financial security needed to ride out the wave. Large state and city university systems and community colleges are the backbone of American higher education, serving millions of young people struggling to make better lives for themselves and their families. Many of these fine institutions are already seriously underfunded and cannot afford the loss of tuition revenue. Collectively, they are a key driver of the U.S. economy so their continued health is in everyone’s best interest.
Similarly, The Chronicle of Higher Education is hawking a collection of articles under the moniker: “The Missing Men on Campus.” This, too, is good news for neither our highly aspirational boys nor the country as a whole, and for essentially the same reasons.
Meanwhile, there seems to be no upper limit to application numbers and virtually no extent to which colleges will not go to drive the numbers ever higher. Even as they are inundated by files, necessarily spending less time with each, they are encouraging more students, qualified and unqualified, alike, to apply in order to drive down their precious admit rates. (After Words, “A College’s ‘Admit Rate’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think.”)
All this notwithstanding, the takeaway should be that the process has not changed all that much. Skyrocketing applications, driven in part by a COVID-induced surge in test-optional admission, present the perception of an insanely competitive environment, but a good portion of that increase consists of students who are clearly under-qualified for the institutions to which they are applying. Those students may lower the admit rate, but they do not represent competition for more qualified candidates. And yes, more thought needs to go into crafting an “early” plan and deciding which schools get test scores, but in the end, the characteristics that used to matter most still do: curiosity, engagement, drive, and excellence. (After Words, “At the Nexus of Curiosity and Purpose.”)
Sanford Pelz ’71 is in his 47th year of teaching at Browning. Read more of his college guidance blog here.
