Disrupting College Admissions
When my son, Jackson, now a sophomore at Georgetown, looks back on his high school days, his fondest memories are of the times he was given the freedom to discover, explore and to be creative — time that was not spent in direct pursuit of flawed metrics.
During Jazz Band rehearsals, he discovered how much he liked improvisation. He was allowed to go off script and use his imagination to create music. “We didn’t need any sheet music…we just did our own improv,” he said. He was so passionate about improv that he wrote about it in his college essay.
Another highlight was when he acted as Hamlet in a locally filmed video for an AP English class assignment. “Our teacher gave us a broad directive…any setting, or time period was allowed…It was fun because everyone at school watched it. We won the viewer’s choice award at the New Age Film Festival.” Seeing him recite entire Hamlet soliloquies in a perfect English accent was impressive. Plus, he and his fellow Shakespearean actors looked like they were having fun…yes, actual fun while fulfilling their AP English requirement.
As we move into a world driven by visual communication, colleges are adapting their admissions and social media strategy to keep up. An analysis of the flawed inputs of the admissions process provides a fresh perspective that may result in you actually enjoying high school by realizing the new stories you can tell that go beyond the traditional metrics. It’s time for the admissions process to change and allow you to showcase your digital skills.
According to Eric Hoover, senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “One reason some people are really eager to use different kinds of submissions is the issue of authenticity. I’m hearing it more — we want a more authentic view of the applicant. Especially for young people who have grown up watching and making videos of themselves, it seems raw or like a more authentic form of expression.”
Eight minutes or less is how much time some admissions offices spend reviewing your college application, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal. You don’t have much time to make an impression.
In 2017, Yale permitted applicants to submit a video, audio file, image or document using the Coalition application portal. Digital submissions had to include a 250-word written description. In the 2016–2017 admission cycle, 317 applicants or 1 percent, chose to apply through the Coalition portal allowing digital submissions.
Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid at Yale, said: “We need better inputs. The inputs we have predict success academically. Now we have the ability to get to know a student better from a different type of submission.”
For Justin Aubin from Oak Lawn, Illinois, his video was a game changer and resulted in his admission to Yale. He submitted a four-minute video depicting his Eagle Scout project, filmed by his brother, in response to a prompt about the impact a student had made on their community. His project involved building and overseeing a monument to veterans in his hometown.
Mr. Quinlan said, “People sat up in their chairs. You could see how he handled his leadership role, and we felt like we got a good sense of him in a way that we didn’t get from recommendations.”
Check out Justin’s Eagle Scout project video that was his “in” into Yale:
Jim Nondorf, Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at the University of Chicago, spoke about changing inputs for college admissions:
“Our requirements and admission process has not changed much in the past fifty years or so. Students and the skills they have, their comfort with technology and the technology itself have developed a lot over those fifty years, so I think it’s definitely time to think about other ways of measuring, engaging, viewing, and allowing students a greater flexibility in sharing who they are with us.”
Changing inputs provide a huge opportunity for college applicants to take advantage of. Putting your story into video form is the newest way to stand out in the college admissions game.
Ted Dintersmith has some innovative thoughts and ideas that shed new light on what he sees as the downside of the whole college application process. He’s a venture capitalist and author of two books about education. Ted also funds the Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success Innovation Grants and the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC) whose mission is to transform the high school transcript.
Leading private schools like Phillips Andover, Phillips Exeter, Spence, Chapin, and Dalton have joined the MTC with plans to adopt the Mastery Transcript to take the place of the traditional transcript. The new Mastery Transcript is organized around performance areas and mastery standards and has no grades indicating performance. It is vastly different from what students send to colleges today. Mastery points and microcredits will be used to communicate student achievement instead of grades, and each school will have their own unique system of mastery evaluation. It will be digital and include a dashboard where schools can opt to view students’ written, audio, visual, or video work.
“This electronic Mastery Transcript allows college admission officers to dive deep within a transcript to see the specific standards of the sending high school and actual evidence of student work and mastery, thus giving depth and transparency to the student’s work record,” according to the MTC website.
Ted advocates that college admissions criteria should cluster around the concept of what the student has done to make the world/their community/their family a better place. He believes students need to get off the treadmill of taking as many AP classes as possible, including AP calculus, trying to get the highest scores on the SAT or the ACT, working only for the best grades possible, and fitting in community service or service trips. In fact, Ted thinks using calculus as a prerequisite to gain entrance to elite colleges is completely unnecessary. The steps to solving an integral calculus problem can be found by searching an app on your iPhone (Photomath App) and no longer need to be calculated by hand. So why are colleges evaluating students by how well they do in AP calculus?
Chasing flawed metrics makes no sense. Using technology to apply to college does. Seize the opportunity to pursue what you love and plan to document it by creating videos that tell your story to colleges.
I hope you enjoyed this post — if you want to connect, you can reach me here via email Kimberlya.norton@gmail.com or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Also, you can find my book, STORY: the art of standing out on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H94D3L1
