For generations, applying to college has followed a familiar ritual. The student submits grades, activities, recommendations and a personal essay, then waits while a committee decides whether he is worthy of admission. That arrangement is beginning to reverse: colleges are now applying to students.
Beginning this month, 234 colleges and universities will send offers of admission to students who never applied to them. The offers are part of the Common Application’s expanding direct-admissions program, which allows participating colleges to identify qualified students from information already entered into the Common App. No campus visit is required, and no supplemental essays have to be written. So there will be no anguished attempt to explain how playing the trombone or working at Dairy Queen produced a life-changing revelation. In many cases, the first communication a student receives from a college will be an acceptance.
Last year, more than 800,000 first-generation and low- and middle-income students received at least one direct-admission offer. According to the Common App, one-quarter of them subsequently applied to a college they had not previously considered.
This is more than another attempt to simplify college admissions. It reveals something the higher-education establishment seldom advertises: American colleges have divided into two very different markets. At one end are Harvard, Stanford and a few dozen other famous universities that receive tens of thousands of applications for a small number of seats. Students compete for their attention, and the colleges preserve their prestige by remaining extremely difficult to enter.
On the other end are hundreds of perfectly respectable colleges competing to find enough students to fill their classrooms. They are not sorting through an endless supply of applicants; they are searching for customers. Most families hear far less about these schools because national attention remains focused on the rejection factories at the top.
Harvard’s acceptance rate of approximately 3% reinforces the impression that getting into college has become nearly impossible. But it has not. While getting into a small group of celebrated colleges has become more difficult, much of the remaining higher-education system faces the opposite problem: there are too many seats with too few students willing or able to pay for them.
Demographics are part of the problem as the number of traditional college-age students is declining in many parts of the country. There is also increasing skepticism about the cost and value of a four-year degree. International applications through the Common App also dropped sharply during the last admissions cycle due to shifting U.S. immigration policy, even as domestic applications continued to rise. Colleges that once waited for students to approach them must now go looking for students themselves.
Direct admission also exposes how much unnecessary machinery has accumulated around the application process. If a college can determine from a transcript and basic biographical information that a student is academically qualified, why should they need another essay, another recommendation and another application fee? These requirements were created when colleges possessed more leverage. Students were expected to demonstrate interest, explain why they belonged and persuade the institution to select them, but that relationship changes when empty seats appear.
This does not mean every direct-admission offer is automatically a good one as affordability is an important consideration. A college may admit a student instantly and then offer so little financial assistance that attendance remains impossible. An acceptance letter is not a foregone conclusion unless the price, academic program and other details make sense.
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Families should therefore treat an unsolicited admission offer as an opening bid, not as a command to enroll. They should ask what the college will actually cost after grants and scholarships, then examine its graduation rate, student debt, strength in the intended major and record of placing graduates in jobs or professional schools. If the college wants the student badly enough to offer admission without an application, the student may also possess enough bargaining power to request additional financial assistance.
That is the lesson families should take from direct admission. Except at the most selective institutions, applicants often possess considerably more power than they realize. Students have been trained to approach every college as supplicants, polishing their resumes, hiring tutors, accumulating activities and rewriting essays repeatedly in the hope that an admissions officer will recognize their worth. Yet many colleges need those students just as much as the students need them.
Direct admission could eventually produce a healthier and more honest system. Colleges would state the academic qualifications they require, and students meeting those standards would receive offers. The real decision could then focus on cost, educational quality and whether the institution is a sensible match, rather than on a contrived essay about the afternoon that changed a teenager’s life forever.
The mysticism surrounding “holistic admissions” would not disappear at Harvard or Stanford. Those universities can continue selecting a freshman class from a surplus of exceptionally qualified applicants, but they are not representative of American higher education. They occupy the luxury end of the market, where scarcity is part of the product.
Across much of the country, the balance of power is moving in the other direction. Colleges are no longer merely judging students; they are recruiting them, courting them and, increasingly, admitting them before they even ask. At Harvard, the student still applies to the college. Across much of American higher education, the college is now applying to the student.
Gerald Bradshaw is an international college admissions consultant with Bradshaw College Consulting in Crown Point.