It’s the collective groan that college bound seniors at Casady and
beyond are making these days in the face of emerging college application
trends.
Take, for example, the University of California-Berkeley.
They just broke the all time record with over 90,000 applications.
Vanderbilt and Yale just surpassed the 30,000 application marker.
It seems every school from the Big XII to the Ivy League are saying
the same thing.
Applications are up.
Acceptances will certainly be down.
Harvard’s Dean of Admission, Bill Fitzsimmons, anticipates that
America’s oldest college will accept less than 6% from their application volume
of over 35,000.
Harrowing statistics like these confirm what colleagues in my field
have been forecasting for years – the perfect college admission storm.
Why is this?
Prognosticators point to five inimical forces converging in college
admissions.
The rise of both high school graduates (roughly 70% of 3.2 million) and the spike in 1st generation
college students.
The influx of international students to US colleges (249,439 in 2012).
The popularity of the Common Application (922, 827 applications; 13.6 submissions per second; 3,014,132 teacher recommendations – and all just in the month of December).
And the billion dollar “attract to reject” marketing model (attract the application; reject the applicant).
So how then do you, the student, not only survive the maw of the
college admission storm, but, more importantly, emerge on the other side with excellent
college choices?
That's what we will be exploring in the next five posts.
