Why the “Elite” Colleges Have No Choice But To Google College Candidates
The Numbers Speak for Themselves
AN ABRIDGED VERSION OF THE FOLLOWING ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT BUSINESSINSIDER.COM
The annual college hunting season is now in full swing.
U.S. News & World Report, Forbes and The Princeton Review have all published their annual college rankings further reinforcing the already strong brand names of the nation’s elite universities. High school seniors are back in school and busy completing this year’s Common Application while simultaneously cramming for SAT and ACT exams. Kaplan Test Prep is getting ready to release this year’s survey of college admissions officers while paid college admissions consultants, tutors and essay writers are once again fully engaged in the process.
The news for the college class of 2018 isn’t very rosy. Millennials have borne the brunt of declines in government spending on higher education. According to The New York Times, state and local spending per college student hit a 25-year low in 2012. As government has cut back, universities have passed on the (ever-increasing) costs of college to students. Nationally, the share of households owing student debt doubled between 1989 and 2010, and the average amount of debt per household tripled, to $26,000.
While tuition costs continue to rise, admission rates at the nation’s top schools continue to fall. Whether it’s Stanford’s 5.69 percent, Harvard’s 5.79 percent, Yale’s 6.72 percent or Columbia’s 6.89 percent, the numbers are so astonishingly low that Cornell’s 15.15 percent admission rate seems downright reasonable. Understanding the drivers behind these numbers is essential to devising a strategy for navigating admission into these elite schools.
According to The Center for Education Reform, there are 30,000 public, 11,850 private and 1,450 catholic high schools in the United States producing an estimated 3.2 million graduates in 2012. By the numbers, these high schools generate 43,300 valedictorians and 43,300 salutatorians while 320,000 students finish in the top 10% of their class each year.
These numbers are staggering and cast justifiable concern on how select colleges make their acceptance decisions among so many smart, talented and qualified students.
In 2013, the eight Ivy League schools accepted a combined total of 14,000 freshmen selected from a pool of 250,000 applicants. The numbers are not much better at the so-called “Ivy-esque” schools, where some admitted fewer students than their Ivy League counterparts. According to The New York Times, Stanford accepted 5.69 percent of its more than 38,800 applicants; the University of Chicago accepted 8.8 percent of its more than 30,300 applicants; Vanderbilt accepted 11.97 percent of its more than 31,000 applicants; and Duke accepted 12.93 percent of its more than 31,000 applicants. The University of Southern California reported receiving more than 47,000 applications this past year. That’s 10,000 more students than just two years ago.
Besides organic population growth, factors such as the widespread adoption of the Common App; the growing influx of international students seeking an American brand name education; and the disappearance of the concept of regional schools have generated an unprecedented influx of applicants to the nation’s top schools.
First, the Common Application, launched in 1997, is a single, standardized college application that is now accepted at over 500 member schools including many of the country’s elite universities. According to the most recent survey by the NACAC; “Each year since 1997, a healthy majority of colleges (between 64 and 78 percent) reported receiving more applications than they did the prior year.” Applicants no longer need to complete a free-standing specific application for each and every school they wish to attend. The NACAC data supports a causal relationship between the ease of applying to additional schools by simply clicking a box via the common application and the increasing number of applications received by colleges nationwide.
Second, the growing influx of international students seeking an American brand name education has further increased competition for domestic enrollment. Ivy League freshmen who are from outside the United States now make up approximately 10% of the incoming class.
Third, the concept of regional schools has disappeared with the relative ease and affordability of air travel from point to point within the U.S. Where the Ivy League was once the sole purview of the well-to-do northeastern establishment, their gates are now equitably open to students from all over the country and the world seeking the same benefits and prestige that an Ivy League education has to offer.
The burden of reviewing this deluge of applications has fallen squarely on the backs of college admissions counselors. Colleges reported that in 2011 the average admissions counselor was responsible for reading 622 applications, up from an average of 359 in 2005. With this ever increasing workload, how do admissions counselors at elite institutions possibly quantify viable distinctions among the abundance of qualified applicants?
While not all applicants will meet an institutions’ minimum eligibility requirements, a conservative estimate is that 70% of the applications received are worthy of serious consideration. An Ivy League admissions officer is quoted as saying “some 70 percent of kids who apply are qualified to come to school here, and we have space for one in ten. We can be as choosy as we like. It almost always comes down to whether or not you’re a likeable person.” Likewise, a Yale admissions officer stated that “the college could have tossed all its acceptances in the trash and culled a statistically identical and stellar freshman class from the reject pile.” The reality is that there is simply not enough actionable data available for college admissions counselors to properly vet such a large pool of similarly qualified applicants.
Given the surging number of qualified applicants, SAT/ACT test scores together with high school grades and honors serve as nothing more than perfunctory minimum eligibility requirements for these top schools. The Common Application collects and generates additional reviewable data by permitting applicants to upload a personal resume, teachers’ recommendations and an essay not to exceed 650 words. Although member schools are permitted to add school specific supplemental information requests to the common app, only a few are thought-provoking while most simply add an additional short essay request along the lines of “why college X.”
Essentially, college application data collection techniques have not kept pace with the growth in applications received. Twenty years ago, admissions counselors could review their allocated applications, read some essays and perhaps personally interview several dozen candidates to determine those who will be selected for the last remaining class seats. Beyond today’s intensified competition among a field of relative equals, there is also the need for these institutions to assemble a diverse and well-rounded freshman class. We posit that there is simply not enough granular information collected through the standard college application process to support quantifiable, rational and objective acceptance decisions.
For many college applicants and their parents, this analysis points to a painfully obvious conclusion. We live in a digital age and many high school students today document much of their lives online. Whether colleges admit to it or not, one can subsume that in order to fill the void of actionable data delivered by the common app and supplements, colleges admissions counselors are referring to social media sites to gain further insight into their applicant pool. According to the most recent Kaplan Test Prep survey of 350 admissions officers, more than 25 percent of school officials said they had looked up applicants on Facebook or Google. And of those officers screening applicants’ social media profiles, 35 percent said they found something that negatively impacted an applicant’s chances of getting in, nearly tripling from the year before. Many suspect that the actual number of admissions officers utilizing social media is much higher than reported. The 2013 Kaplan Test Prep survey will be released within the next few weeks and the expectation is that these numbers will trend at an accelerated pace.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+, Instagram, Vine and other social media platforms and online blogs provide college admissions officers with a readily available window to assess the applicant’s transparency, credibility, maturity, genuineness and likeability. Access to this information is fast, easy and anonymous. Without doubt, this trend is unfair to the applicant who likely has viewed these platforms as a casual outlet for private interactions with friends. Nevertheless, what is shared online has no half-life and is accessible by anyone with an interest in finding you. And find you they will.
Harvard College’s Allison Otis has said she regularly checks out potential students’ social media pages. Otis, a former Harvard interviewer posted, “When you apply to college you spend such a long time crafting an image through your applications and essays that to be careless about your online data is just silly.”
Another college admissions officer states “Tumblr is where I inadvertently see pretty personal stuff from kids. It is something people aren’t thinking about yet. A few months ago, I happened to be looking through my college tags on Tumblr, and I came across a post from an applicant saying, “I’m applying to [X college] and these other schools, and I don’t really want to go to [X.]” That put a damper on it. Then the post under that was about her using Ben Wa balls. Just because it isn’t Facebook and you’re not putting your name on it — I still [have ways to] know who it is.”
As college applicants are becoming increasingly aware of potential virtual stalks by college admissions counselors, some have opted for a full social media lock down or have simply changed the name on their Facebook profile. The risk of this approach is that colleges could rightly conclude that the lack of a social media presence means the applicant has something to hide. Moreover, if colleges are looking then that applicant has missed a golden opportunity to make a strong, positive impression upon the admissions counselor.
Just because admissions officers are looking at an applicant’s online profile doesn’t mean they’re necessarily searching for red flags either. If they choose to look, they are likely looking to find actionable reasons to take one applicant over another. Therefore, an applicant’s online presence should be optimized to remove questionable posts and photos and then enhanced to showcase and expand upon the same interests and activities they chose to highlight in the common app and essays. Applicants should post photos from their community service projects and other significant extracurricular activities, share relevant articles about news events they’re following, and engage with people and organizations that interest them. LinkedIn has recently launched their University Pages which is a great place to begin building a personal brand.
College applicants should be embracing social media as a vehicle to set themselves apart from the other qualified candidates who are vying for acceptance into their dream school. Social media should be viewed as a virtual resume for the world to see. Given the large number of applicants to this nation’s most competitive colleges and universities, it is imperative that serious applicants consider their digital presence as a natural extension of their college application.
