Eric J. Furda - The college conversation: A Practical Companion for Parents to Guide Their Children Along the Path to Higher Education

You Are an Ironman

The Gatekeepers

Imagine what its like to be a teenager applying to college at the outset of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Arrayed before them is a dizzying menu of more than two thousand four-year colleges and universities in the United States alone, several dozen of which admit only a small fraction of those who apply. A handful of the most exclusive and best known go a step further and turn away nearly all would-be students. Meanwhile, the majority of the nations bachelors-degree-granting schools, many of them fine institutions of higher learning flying well below the radar, offer admission to most applicants. Some of those colleges even struggle to fill their first-year classes each fall, to say nothing of generating sufficient revenue to keep the lights on or perhaps face the prospect of shutting their doors.

How can high school juniors or seniors possibly surveylet alone take the measure ofthe offerings across this vast, confusing landscape and figure out where they might fit in?

As they seek to differentiate one campus from the next (and the next), the colleges bombard them with marketing materials, delivered via U.S. mail, email, text message, social media, and sometimes live phone calls from students or even prerecorded robocalls. The schools use contact lists purchased from the College Board, the purveyor of the SAT, as well as from the American College Testing Program (sponsor of the ACT test), which are then customized by students zip codes, test scores, academic and extracurricular interests, and grades (all reported by the students when they signed up for the test). Day after day throughout their junior year and senior fall, the utility bills in their familys mailbox are crowded out by lush full-color brochures illustrated with panoramic campus photos and punctuated with stats that trumpet measures of student success (95 percent of our graduates have a job or are enrolled in graduate school within six months of graduation) or satisfaction (Ranked fifth by U.S. News & World Report in the category of A-Plus Schools for B Students). By early 2020, there were signs of a backlash against these practices, including the filing of a lawsuit by the parent of a Chicago public school student, challenging the sharing of minors personal data, for profit, with the colleges. But there was no immediate indication of the potential impact, if any, on colleges recruitment efforts.

Meanwhile, prospective enrollees email inboxes clog each day at dawn with pop quizzes from their suitors. (Spoiler alert: the correct answer to each question is always the name of the college reaching out to them.) There are also Letterman-inspired top five lists of tips for applying to college; come-ons, including testimonials from famous alumni and odes to creature comforts like Tempur-Pedic mattresses in every dorm room; and so-called fast apps.

The latter are the college admissions worlds version of a preapproved credit card form: a one-page application that has been prepopulated with their name, address, and other personal information that they supplied to the College Board and that was also made available to the colleges for purchase. Opening an envelope emblazoned with designations like First Priority Scholar, candidates are told that they appear to be such a strong prospect for admission that the standard application fee is being waived, and that in lieu of composing an original essay they need only submit a graded paper from high school. Indeed, all they really need to do is sign on the dotted line. More than a few students who felt buoyed by their first priority designation have been surprised to find themselves later summarily denied by these very institutionssome of them well-known brand names.

Meanwhile, throughout the fall of senior year, representatives from the admissions offices that will consider all these college applications typically spend several months not only crisscrossing the United States but circling the globe in search of international students who might be persuaded to apply to their institutions. Among the objectives of these recruiting trips is to identify candidates who would add to the campus community not only by virtue of their academic achievements, life experience, or, in some instances, their ability to pay full freight, but who might also make the admissions process that much more competitive.

Then the tables turn, and it is time for the students applying to make the case for acceptance.

In contrast to the applications their parents may have filled out decades earlierone at a time, by typewriter or sometimes by handthey will likely find themselves working through the Common Application, usually referred to as the Common App, which is accepted at nearly nine hundred institutions. This platform enables them to save time and effort by typing their personal information on the Common App website just once and to respond to a series of generic essay prompts intended to yield personal statements of several hundred words. These will then be shared with each of the institutions to which they apply that accept the Common Application.

Many of the schools that accept the Common Application also require completion of a series of additional essays, known as a supplement, that are specific to their institution and often intended to gauge the extent of the homework applicants have done about that school and the intensity of their ardor for attending it.

While the Common Application may be the most widely used method of applying to colleges and universities in the United States, it is hardly the only one. By the fall of 2017, more than 150 institutions had committed to accept the Coalition for College, which they designed collectively with the particular intention of helping low-income and other students historically underrepresented on the nations college and university campuses. Other application forms that are shared by multiple institutions include the Universal College Application (accepted in the fall of 2017 by nine institutions) and the Cappex Application (more than 125 schools).