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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Unpacking This Year's 'Craziest' College Admissions Season
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Unpacking This Year's 'Craziest' College Admissions Season
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This is all of it. I'm Kusha Navadar in for Alison Stewart. Hey, thanks for spending part of this rainy Wednesday with us. I hope you're staying dry. And as always, I'm sorry. So glad you're here. On today's show, we've got a live in studio performance with the band and some cast members from the Off Broadway musical Dead. Outlaw country legend Alice Randall joins us to discuss her new memoir and her new album and Were you raised by Wolves? Podcast host Nick Layton will be here to talk about wedding etiquette and take your calls about your dilemmas and experiences. That's the plan. So let's get this all started with why this year years college admissions process has been so harrowing. Over the past few weeks, high school seniors across the country have probably been compulsively refreshing their email boxes, waiting to find out if their college application decision has been posted. I got to tell you, the anxiety is real. I remember it very well personally. And applying to colleges is a stressful, sometimes traumatizing experience. But over the years, applying to college has become much more competitive, opaque, and an unequal and this past season was one of the craziest. That's according to Jeffrey Salingo, an author and journalist who covers higher education. A lot of schools dropped testing requirements since the COVID pandemic, which generated a surge of applicants for each school. And in recent months, calculation issues with the fafsa. That's the federal financial aid application system. It caused major processing delays for students who needed financial support. Plus, to add on top of it, the Supreme Court just struck down affirmative action last June. So applying to college now feels like a game of chess, but kind of like you're playing it in the dark. Students and families are navigating this new set of rules, but Salingo argues that there's only one real winner, and it's the small group of elite colleges who effectively run the entire admissions game. And these schools in Slingo's eyes, are more fixated on protecting its prestige, quote unquote, to meet its enrollment and revenue goals than they are making the process accessible and fair for applicants. And with us to talk about this year's college admission cycle is Jeff Salingo. Hey, Jeff, thanks for joining us.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Absolutely. And listeners, we want you to help us report this story. Did you or a loved one recently apply to college? What was that experience like? Were you confused or did you figure out a specific strategy that worked out for you? Or maybe you have a child who's prepping for college applications in the next few years? Is there a specific part of that that feels overwhelming and you have your mind on it? Give us a call. The number is 212433. That's 212433, WNYC. You can call us, text us, you can hit us up on social. We're at Oliveit, wnyc. Jeff, you've been covering higher ed for decades now, and it's always been competitive, confusing, very difficult. But what was different about this year?
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B
Well, I think there are a couple of big things going on. First of all, we have the continuation of test optional admissions, which really took off during the first year of the pandemic when students couldn't for the test. And so what ends up happening is that especially at the more selective schools, more students are applying every year because they're not requiring a test score. So you've just seen this incredible increase, 30 plus percent at the most selective schools in terms of applications over the last four years. They're up another 7% this year. You had, obviously the other thing you mentioned, the end of affirmative action in admissions, which really affected the most selective schools where seats are scarce, but there's a lot of applications. And so that's where race conscious admissions really did matter in the past. And then the third piece again, all coming together this year is the FAFSA debacle, which last fall didn't really seem like much of a problem because the FAFSA was going to be delayed. But the Education Department said no problem, we'll just start it a little bit later than we normally would, open it up a little bit later. But now what you're finding are these huge delays and a lot of mistakes. It seems like there's a mistake every week that the Education Department is reporting. So you have all three of these things coming together this particular year at the same time. You have large senior classes. We're about to enter a demographic cliff in the next couple of years in terms of senior classes, but you still have a pretty sizable high school senior class this year.
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So a perfect storm of both, I guess, to summarize it. Trends that are obstacles and trends that grow the number of applicants. And we want to get into all of those. Let's start with those growing number of applications that you had mentioned in this article that you wrote for New York magazine titled Inside the Craziest College Admission Season ever. You start your article by following the dean of undergraduate admissions at duke. Duke got 48,000 applications just for the regular decision cycle. When you were looking and observing at their process, what was it like watching the officers of that university, or at least hearing about it, what was it like learning to how they sift through all those applications?
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Yeah, so it actually I didn't get to observe Duke this year. A couple of years ago, I got to observe three colleges and universities, Emory, Davidson and the University of Washington. For my book who Gets in and why. I actually wanted to get back into the process this year where I could actually sit in with them. I approached a dozen schools in the last couple of months and they all said no to me. Most of them were afraid of having somebody observe their system during the first year where they couldn't use affirmative action and couldn't use race in admission. So I actually just had to hear about it from triangulating conversations with admissions officers. But what's clear to me is that at all of these schools, they're getting inundated with applications and we're talking, you know, tens and tens of Thousands, you know, 48,000 just in regular decision to Duke and add another couple thousand for early decision. And most of these colleges are doing regular decision between January and March. Right. So there's only so much time that you have, which is why you see most of these colleges really leaning into early action or early decision or trying to get more applications earlier in the process, which just by the way creates even more anxiety among applicants who now have to submit applications essentially in October of their senior year. They're a month or two into school and they're already applying to college.
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C
You know, one of the elements that you just touched on was. And so I'm hearing, right, like early action, early decision. Right. It's a, for folks who might not be familiar, it's a non binding application process where students can find out their results much earlier than the regular deadline. It kind of falls, falls into that portfolio of different application paths that certain students might take at These elite colleges, who benefits from the early action process? Jeff?
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So the early action process, which is different than the early decision process. So early decision is binding you. You learn in December if you get in early decision, and then it's a binding. You're. You're basically done with your process. Early action, you just find out earlier. But what's actually happening is because more schools are doing early action because they want to get. Get applications in the process earlier, so they could read them earlier. It also is an indication of student interest. If you apply to a school early. It shows that you're more interested in potentially going there if they accept you. But part of the problem is because more schools are doing this and more students are applying earlier. In fact, this year with the Common app, there were almost as many applications filed for early action and early decision as there were for regular decision. And that's a big change. Most students usually have applied regular decision. Well, what's happened is they're getting so many applications for early action is that they're deferring most of the students because they don't even have enough time to get to all those applications. So even though they're coming in earlier, they don't have enough time in the fall to get to all of them. Plus, they know that students are applying to 10, 15, 20 schools. You could get into multiple schools, but you could only go to one. Right. So the yield, who actually ends up going, is so important to colleges. Well, if they defer you in early and you continue to show interest, they know you're interested in going there, and then maybe in regular, they'll take you. So in other words, you have all these students applying early, and all they do is get deferred, which is stringing them along even more. This is why I love your analogy of your playing, you know, chess in the dark. That's essentially what this is.
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And, you know, when we talk about yield rates, that seems to be an even more important metric for these schools than how many students apply. Can you talk us through why admissions officers are fixated on yield specific specifically?
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Yeah, because remember, they, at the end of the day, they have to fill a class. And so as I said, you could, you could apply to 10 or 15 schools, and many students are applying. You know, one of the reasons why we have so many more applications, you have almost the same number of students, but they're just filing more and more applications, which creates even more uncertainty with colleges about who's really going to come if we accept them. Well, to get your yield rate I. You have to. You. You don't want to accept too many students, right? Because then that makes you look less selective. So there's this balance where you want to accept just enough students to yield just enough students. The highly selective colleges are still yielding incredible amounts, right? So Duke, for example, their Yield rate is 60%. That means, you know, 60% of students they accept come to Duke. So it still means 40% are saying no to an acceptance to Duke. But, but, you know, as I point out in the story, Brandeis, George Washington, Syracuse, 20 years ago, they had a similar yield rate to Duke. Now their yield rate is like 25%. At Brandeis, George Washington's like 19%. Syracuse is 16%. That means, you know, at Syracuse, that means 16% of the students they accept say yes to them. Well, you know, that's a pretty low rate. And so you kind of have to just keep accepting more and more students to get and yield as many students as you have in the class.
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We're talking to Jeff Solingo, who's an higher education reporter and just wrote an article for New York magazine about this admission cycle, which has shaped up to be the most competitive and escalating all of the ways that students might feel nervous or traumatized even by this application process. Listeners, we want to talk to you. Do you have personal experience with this? Do you have questions about why the system is the way that it is? Give us a call, 212-443-39692. That's 212-433, WNYC. And we have a caller, Heather in Brooklyn. Hi, Heather, welcome to the show.
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Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. Yeah, we're in a year behind this year's traumatized class. So, you know, but in some ways, it's like trying not to reverb the trauma, you know, onto our junior in high school. But I think things like early decision are just terrible. I think it's, as you mentioned, I think, and the guest did as well. It's like it puts so much pressure on families and students, and it's independent of your financial aid decision. So there's just so many factors that I think are against students or sort of anti student in some ironic ways. So that was my comment, and I'll listen off the air. Thank you, Heather.
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Thank you so much for that call. And speaking of, you know, the financial aspect of it, we also got a tweet that just came in. It reads, my son applied this year. The system is ridiculous. Everything in the USA is being slanted to favor the rich and powerful. This is no different. And it's getting worse. Jeff, all of these comments make me think of fafsa, which is an important element of what's being difficult and what's changing. The recent financial news is that this year, FAFSA's enrollment process suffered from a calculation error, and it delayed a lot of the responses and ability for students to get the information and the, you know, the outcomes that they needed to get financial support seems like a huge deal. Can you share how this impacts applicants and both students that are applying and students who are already enrolled?
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Yeah, it's a. It's a huge debacle from the Education Department. And it was, it was supposed to do the opposite. Right? It was supposed to simplify the process. That's what the new FAFSA had. A lot fewer questions. It was supposed to be so much better, and it will get better. I, you know, unfortunately for this year's seniors, it's not. But I would hope by next year they're going to have this all figured out. And. But what's happening now is colleges, because the information they're getting from the federal government has been so delayed. So students fill out this fafsa, the Education Department then sends out the data to colleges and universities. All that has been not only delayed, but there have been a million mistakes, it seems, over the last couple of weeks. And until colleges get that information and get the right information, they can't send out a financial aid package to students that includes any sort of federal aid, a federal student loan, a Pell Grant, you know, all these things that students depend on to go to college, to pay for college. And because of that, if you're a senior and you're waiting on those packages to make a decision, do I want to go to school A or B or C? Because it depends on how much money I have to go there. You're just sitting now, just waiting. And the problem is that May 1, most colleges say they want to know if you're coming. Well, May 1st is only a couple weeks away. Some colleges have extended their deadline further into May or even into June already. Other colleges have not. And so if you're sitting at home right now waiting for these financial aid packages, you know, the anxiety just keeps going up because you're not quite sure where you're going to go because you don't know how much money you're going to get.
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C
And we just got another text about the FAFSA debacle. This is from Stacy in Irvington, New York. She writes, my daughter is a high school senior who had applied to a wide range of colleges, from an Ivy League to a CUNY and everything in between. For a total of 10 schools. She was accepted into all but two. But because of the late Fafsa, we still haven't received financial packages from all schools. Jeff, kind of what you were referring to. It was nice that some schools pushed their deadline for commitment, but not all. And she's stuck in a place where she has to decide by May 1 without knowing how much school is going to cost. It's a big financial risk. Jeff, it sounds like a lot of this is about if you know and for so many people, if finances is a driving factor of where you go to school. There are so many obstacles that are popping up now, new hoops that you have to go through. Difficult to choose. We're talking to Jeff Salingo, higher education reporter and writer of the article Inside the Craziest College Admission Season Ever from New York Magazine listeners. We want to hear your experience with the college admissions process. Give us a call, 212-433-9692. We have more calls ready to go. We're going to dive into some of those other aspects that you were discussing, Jeff, at the top. We'll be right back after this. Stay with us. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Kusha Navadar in for Alison Stewart, and we're talking to Jeff Salingo, higher ed reporter and writer of the article Inside the Craziest College Admission Season Ever. For New York Magazine listeners, we're talking about the latest college admissions cycle. It is bewildering for a lot of students, a lot of families. The financial pressure is enormous and there are more applicants than ever to these especially selective schools. We want to hear your story. Give us a call, shoot us a text. We're at 212-433-9692. And Jeff, we have another caller who I understand is a current student. We've got Maxine from Putnam, New York. Hi, Maxine. Welcome to the show.
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Hi there. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm a really big fan.
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Thanks. What's your story?
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So I'm 17, I'm a senior this year. I just got my last decision back last year Thursday. And I'm just about officially committed to University of Pittsburgh, which is really exciting.
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Congratulations.
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But thank you. It's very, it's just it's been a very weird admission cycle, especially for me and some of my friends because, you know, we've Been told our entire lives, our entire school lives that, you know, if you get a 4.0 and if you take, you know, three AP classes, and if, you know, you're good at clubs and whatnot, then you know, you have a chance and you have a shot at getting into these bigger universities. But kind of what I've seen is happening, like another point of this turnover is colleges are now just kind of expecting the impossible from students, especially these more elite colleges. I see videos of people all over Instagram and all over TikTok, people saying the way to get into these colleges now, like the quote unquote hack, is to start a nonprofit or to start like a shelter or something like that. And so I think it's just, it's another level of colleges expecting the impossible, and it's not great.
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And Maxine, can I ask for the test optional requirements? Did that affect you in any way, your calculus about taking, you know, SATs or ACTs?
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Yeah, it did. The SAT does not work out in my favor. You know, I'm a 4.0 student. I have five APs, I'm president of three clubs. I have all that stuff. But the SAT math section really did not go in my favor. So I went to SAT optional for most of my schools, except for a few. I had to go in with Georgetown because they did not go SAT optional. And then some other schools, like state schools for New York, I went in with my sat.
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Got it. Maxine, thank you so much for sharing that and congratulations again. And you know, Jeff, we heard from a student right there who talked about having to navigate this test optional aspect and just kind of building this sounded almost like a brand of what you wanted the school to know about you as a product. Can you talk about what the intent was behind this decision of making tests, tests optional, especially at some of these more elite schools?
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Yeah, I mean, they started it during the pandemic because it was hard to get. It was hard to get tests, to take a test during the pandemic. And then they kept it because they like the flexibility of choosing the students. They want to choose whether they have a test score or not. And when, you know, back in the day when I reported my book, for example, and I was at Emory or any of the schools I was at, and, you know, if there's a student they really wanted, but they scored A, A, A 1200 on the SAT, they could take a few of those. But, you know, when they announced that class that when I was there, it was a, you know, average SAT score was 1500. And the more 1200s you accept, that lowers your average score. Well, when you have test optional, you're only going to report the test scores you get. And normally the only students who send in a test score are those that have a really high score. But the caller also brought up something else that I think is critically important. One like at the end of the day, what do these schools want? Like they are setting in many ways an impossible bar. And, and there was a fascinating part of the story in New York magazine that just kind of floored me. And it was the dean of admissions at Duke talking about. It used to be this wall. They used to talk about a wall of fives at Duke. And 5 is the highest score you could get on an AP exam. And you know, you used to get 8, 10, 12 fives on an AP, on a, on AP tests. An applicant would, and that would kind of move the needle.
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Needle.
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10 years ago @ Duke, as he said, it doesn't move the needle anymore. Eight, ten or twelve fives. And I looked up the stats as I put in the story. Only about 15% of all AP tests administered last year were even scored a 5. And only half of American public high schools even offer more than five AP scores. So we have kind of this huge, really high bar that we're asking students to get over. And by the way, even when they do that, that it's still not enough.
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C
You know, your 2020 book, who gets in and why? Followed the college application review process of three universities. You're just talking about the enormous bar that these colleges are now setting four years down the road. Since you published that book, do you see the process changing from the perspective of students as they strategize appealing to these colleges?
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Well, what I hope they do, I'm actually working on a follow up book now to try to get this. I mean, part of the problem is that we've had have so many applicants applying to the same set of 20, 25 schools out there, all of which are pretty small by international standards in terms of their undergraduate class and they haven't increased the size of their freshman class. You know, you take the Ivy League, for example. You know, Yale is at it, maybe, you know, a couple hundred students over the years. Princeton has added some students, but most of these schools have remained the same size. But they're getting, you know, 30, 40, 50% more applicants than they did 10, 20 years ago. So you're, you're getting all these students trying to get into a smaller number of schools. And, and what I think students need to do is there are thousands of colleges out there in the US Alone. There are hundreds of great colleges in the US Alone. I think we need to, like, increase the aperture of the lens that we're looking at higher education and start to apply to, you know, schools that actually you can get into and that would want you and by the way, that I think you're going to have a pretty good experience.
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C
Can you go a little bit more in depth about why these applications are rising so the volume of applicants going? Is it just that maybe the test requirements have been eliminated from some places so incentivizes new students? Is there what, what's going on there?
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I think that's some of it. We're also seeing, you know, college admissions, especially at these selective schools, has really been internationalized. So, you know, everybody around the world wants to the most talented students around the world want to go to the same colleges or universities are highly ranked because we believe that ranking really leads to success in life, which I think we should question. Right. If you think about the most successful people in your life, you, by the way, you might not even know where they went to college. Right. I don't know. How often do people ask you where you went to college? Right. Like maybe years later, Nobody really cares that much. They care that you can actually do the work. But we have this belief that your life is going to be changed if you go to one of these top 10, top 20 colleges. And because of that, everybody wants to go there.
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C
We're talking to Jeff Salingo, who's an higher ed reporter, and we're talking about the difficult and enormously more competitive admission cycle this year for colleges. There's one piece that I would love to hear about from callers, and that's about affirmative action. That just changed last June from the Supreme Court. Has that Supreme Court decision affected you either as an applicant or as a currently enrolled in student? Give us a call. 212-433-9692. You let's go to some other calls, Jeff. So we've got Jill in Westchester. Hi, Jill. Welcome to the show.
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Hi. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm so glad that you're talking about this topic. I just spent the last two spring breaks doing college tours with my junior who's in high school. And I've been through this before because I have twins who graduated from college in the class of 2022. And I noticed some big changes that I find really concerning. First of all, there's a huge shift towards computer Science and the computer science programs are small in a lot of.
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These schools because they can't get the.
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Faculty, which makes them increasingly hard to get into and also ups the competition. The other thing I noticed is I go on the, I went on a couple Reddit threads to ask about colleges and see what kids were feeling. These kids are so stressed from trying to build these brands, as you said. And I also wonder what with the elimination of the test scores, do they take these rejections a lot more personally? Because they're working four years to sort of what they think is to like create a Persona and then they get rejected and they feel or they get wait listed and I just don't know what we're doing in this, in this race for these small number of schools that are increasingly impossible to get into. If you see what these kids have done, it's incredible. And yet they're still not getting into what they think are the schools that are the key to success, which as you said, is not true.
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Jill, thank you so much.
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I took my answer off the air.
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Jill. Well, thank you. We just actually got a text that dovetails with this question that you're asking about with building up that brand. Jeff, this is for you as well. You write pretty bluntly that college presidents are responsible for policies that are making the application process more stressful and confusing than ever. Have you been in rooms with them? Are they cognizant of this responsibility? And you know, we hear Jill talking about how much more personally are students taking these rejections. Any insights on both of those? Like parallel tracks?
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B
Yeah, you know, as I pointed out in my book a couple of years ago, and it's even more so now, college admissions is not about the applicant. It is about the college and their needs and their priorities. At the end of the day, these colleges are businesses and the students are their customers. And they want to get in the right students to fill their needs. So they may need, you know, they want a mix of students from different states, they want a mix of gender and race and ethnicity. They want a mix of majors. I think the college. The caller brings up a really good point about majors right there. There's a huge decline in the number of students applying and enrolling in the humanities, for example. And a lot of college presidents are worried about that. They have to fill every sports team they have on campus. They have to fill the orchestra. So there's all these needs that they have and they love full payers on top of that. Right. So there's all these needs they have and that's how they use admissions. They don't really care about the, the applicant and their needs. And it's, it's a. It's hard to say because I think we have this kind of love affair with higher education. I think many of us who went to college 20, 30, 40 years ago, like many of us, still love our alma mater because it changed our lives in a certain way. At the end of the day, these are just businesses and they treat families like that. And it's unfortunate. It. And the only way I think it's going to change is if families start to become smarter about this and, and start to say, you know what? We're not going to apply to Harvard. We're not going to apply to these Ivy Leagues. We're going to go elsewhere where it's a better fit, where we're actually going to get a decent amount of aid, where we can get in, where we're going to get a good experience. That's the only way that these elite schools are going to change is if people stop applying to them. And unfortunately, the evidence shows they're not.
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C
And I want to thank all of the callers. We, we had so many more than we had time to hear from. But thank you so much to everyone who's sharing these stories. And Jeff, as we listen to them, I could hear that element you were talking about, about, I want to set myself up for the best way in life that I can. And so that might mean the most prestigious school that I can get into. You just talked about what it would take to what you hope would change that culture. So in the time we have remaining, just one more question for you. What do you think it would take to actually see that culture change?
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B
Change? I think that the more data that we have on outcomes, and we're getting better at this, the U.S. department of Education publishes this thing called the College Scorecard, where you can look up salary outcomes of college graduates by college, by program, actually. And what you'll find out, for example, is that on in many programs, the outcomes are pretty similar across the board at different colleges, again, we perceive that a degree from Harvard or Yale or Princeton or you name the top school school is worth more than these others. And yes, you're buying a network. I get that. I totally get that. But for the most part, the outcomes at, like, less selective schools are just as good in terms of getting you a job and getting you a good job just as much as those top schools.
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C
Jeff Salingo is a higher education reporter and writer of the article Inside the Craziest College Admissions Season Ever for New York Magazine Students. If you're listening to this this congratulations on whatever path you are choosing to go down. We wish you the best of luck. For those of you that just went through the college applications process, we also wish you the best and some well earned rest. Jeff thank you so much.
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B
It was great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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A
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B
Let's go.
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E
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