William & Mary: #4 for College with the Happiest Students

NOTE FROM COLLEEN:

SHANNON IS TAKING OVER TODAY WITH A TOPIC THAT I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT FOR YEARS. I’M ALWAYS FASCINATED BY THE FEEDBACK I HEAR ABOUT WILLIAM & MARY FROM KIDS IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA. I HONESTLY DON’T UNDERSTAND IT!

SO MANY STUDENTS HAVE SOMETHING NEGATIVE TO SAY BEFORE THEY HAVE EVER SET FOOT ON CAMPUS, YET THE ONES WHO END UP ACTUALLY GOING THERE JUST LOVE IT - I HAVE MULTIPLE STUDENTS THERE NOW AND THEY COULDN’T BE HAPPIER.

AND WHEN I ATTENDED A COUNSELOR DAY ON CAMPUS A FEW YEARS BACK, I COULD NOT HAVE BEEN MORE IMPRESSED. SO I WAS GENUINELY CURIOUS TO GET THE REAL SCOOP FROM SHANNON! HOPE YOU FIND IT INTERESTING TOO :)

HERE IT IS…

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As a proud College of William & Mary alumna, I’m always excited when I hear good news about my alma mater. And last week brought some fantastic accolades for W&M from the Princeton Review - we are now ranked #4 for Happiest Students and #15 for Best Quality of Life! 

When I first learned about William & Mary, I was just beginning my own college search process at my New England prep school - I probably googled something like “medium-sized colleges East Coast” and went from there.

I was drawn to the gorgeous campus and the warmer Virginia weather, but what sealed the deal for me was the feeling, from the moment I stepped on William & Mary’s campus, that it was a place where I could be the “real me.”

So much of my application process felt disingenuous to who I was as a person (hence my passion at DC College Counseling for making sure each application is authentic and unique to the student!) that it was a relief to walk into a place that seemed accepting of every part of me, not just the skills I tried to emphasize on my application. 

I still remember meeting everyone at orientation, listening as student after student introduced themselves and said they were from “Nova.” Wow, I thought, how are all these kids from the same town?

It wasn’t until after I had moved in, met my (still) best friends and hallmates, and discovered that Nova wasn’t just a single town that I learned about the rumors that plagued William & Mary from the in-state students - students at William & Mary are terrible overachievers, the quality of life is horrible, no one is having any fun.

I was completely shocked by the rumors because they were so far outside of my William & Mary experience. I don’t want to dwell on “suicide rates” in this post, because I don’t want to reduce a widespread mental health issue to a statistic, but rates for students at William & Mary, while deeply tragic, are the same as the national average.

I think that W&M has come to bear the brunt of rumors that speak more to a general concern for the mental health and well-being of high school and college-age students than to any particular aspect of the William & Mary community.

I don’t mean to diminish the problem - it is essential that W&M, like every higher education institution, put more emphasis on mental health resources for students. I am hopeful that the campus’s new McLeod Tyler Wellness Center, home to mental health services including the new Center for Mindfulness & Authentic Excellence, is a step in the right direction by a school that is committed to caring for its students.

I met my best friends in this dorm freshman year, so we had to come back and take a photo before graduation!

The new Princeton Review rankings are much more representative of my time at William & Mary than any rumors I have heard. The idea of “Authentic Excellence” is a way of life for the Tribe, and throughout my four years of college, I was never dissuaded from the knowledge that my authentic self was accepted at W&M.

That sense so many students experience in high school, of feeling “uncool”? You will never feel it in Williamsburg. W&M students are unabashedly uncool. Everyone is nerdy about something: pop music production, marine biology, obscure 18th century literature, MLB statistics, you name it and someone on campus is willing to geek out with you about it. The tight group of friends I made during college have a wide variety of interests and experiences, and I love hearing about their passions because I never fail to learn something new. And I promise - we had a lot of fun too! 

Even though COVID-19 means that I have to miss homecoming this year, I will always consider William & Mary my home, and I’m counting down to the day when I can step back onto campus and visit all of my favorite Williamsburg places.  

In our William & Mary gear, making sure Thomas Jefferson is ready for Mardi Gras!

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COLLEEN AGAIN! IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN W&M, CHECK OUT THIS INCREDIBLY HELPFUL SLIDE FROM THE COUNSELOR DAY I ATTENDED:

I KNOW IT’S A LITTLE HARD TO READ, BUT HERE GOES - IT’S ABOUT QUESTIONS THAT W&M ADMISSIONS STAFF CONSIDER WHILE REVIEWING APPLICATIONS:

• IS THE STUDENT PREPARED TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN OUR ACADEMIC COMMUNITY?

• HOW DOES HE OR SHE COMPARE TO OTHERS IN OUR POOL?

• HAS THE STUDENT GONE ABOVE AND BEYOND TO PURSUE A RIGOROUS CURRICULUM IN A WAY THAT DEMONSTRATES AN INTEREST IN DOING SO IN COLLEGE?

• DOES THE STUDENT HAVE A MATURE WRITING VOICE?

• IS THE STUDENT INTERESTING WITH A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE ABOUT THE WORLD?

• DOES HE OR SHE HAVE SPUNK, ZEST, OR AN INTERESTING ATTITUDE THAT WOULD ADD A NEW DIMENSION TO CAMPUS LIFE?

• WHAT IS THIS PERSON GOING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY?

• WOULD HE OR SHE BE AN INTERESTING ROOMMATE, CLASSMATE, LAB PARTNER?

#UVA24: An Analysis

2/5/2021 Update: This page is getting a ton of hits with the release of the #UVA25 Early Action decisions this evening. I just wanted to make sure that readers are aware that this was posted last year. Check out today’s blog post for some initial thoughts on the decision release. We’ll have more to come later after we can spend some time with the data!

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I originally said that I’d wait to post an overall impression of this year’s early round until I learned all of the EA and ED II decisions. Still not quite there yet (looking at you for EA, Virginia Tech - and while 3 out of our 4 ED II applicants have been accepted to their respective schools (YAY!), we are still waiting on the 4th).

I decided to go ahead and share my interpretations of UVA’s early results, anyway, since we had some uncharted territory this year with the return of ED.

March 2019 - I was (coincidentally) on campus the day after the RD decisions were released!

If you weren’t aware, UVA re-introduced a binding early decision option this cycle to supplement their non-binding early action process, after almost fifteen years with no binding application plan).

Most everyone had no clue what to expect this year as a result. Would it become easier for applicants who were willing to commit? Would it become more difficult for everyone else? We all know that ED makes a huge difference in outcomes for William & Mary applicants (as is typical at most institutions), but UVA staff kept reiterating that this type of situation would not necessarily be the case there.

Well, both the ED and EA results are now in, and here’s what I have to offer after a few hours playing with the numbers:

• The number of early decision applicants this year turned out to be quite small. When UVA first decided to stop offering an early decision plan in 2006, they received about 2,500 ED applications each year, representing approximately 15-17% of an overall applicant pool numbering between 14,500-16,000. This year, with the re-introduction of ED, there were only 2,159 ED applications - but the overall applicant pool has steadily increased to one that now exceeds the 40,000 mark. Therefore, the percentage of ED applicants only represented about 5% of the overall pool this year. That’s significant. There are so many explanations for why this could be - perhaps Class of 2021 students had already mentally committed to applying ED elsewhere before the option to apply ED to UVA was announced in the spring of their junior year. Or maybe it’s just that UVA has always been a relatively predictable school in terms of admissions, and qualified applicants didn’t feel like they needed to apply ED to be admitted.

• At least when it comes to the limited information we have (i.e. we have no data about the qualifications of the admitted students), it does not appear that in-state students who applied early decision had much of a statistical advantage over the ones who applied early action. The ED acceptance rate for this year’s pool was about 40% for Virginia residents, compared to a 35% (ish) acceptance rate for Virginia residents who applied EA. When you consider that many schools have ED rates that are triple the size of their EA rates, this is really interesting.

• On the other hand, there was a very significant advantage for out-of-state students applying early decision. The acceptance rate was about 28% for ED out-of-state students, compared to 15% for EA out-of-state students. Applications to top public universities have skyrocketed in recent years as a result of all of the restrictive and single-choice early action policies, and the landscape has created a situation where it’s nearly impossible for these admissions committees to determine who wants to come and who is actually just mass-applying to all of the top public schools in the United States. This has resulted in what I like to call the “Michigan Effect” - with mass out-of-state deferrals across the board that don’t even really seem to correlate with candidate qualifications. So, the decision to prioritize out-of-state students who apply ED (vs. out-of-state students who apply EA) feels very fair to me.

• The EA acceptance rate for in-state students went from 43.4% last year to 35% this year, which represents a 19% drop from year to year (don’t forget that the rate is statewide and is not representative of the Northern Virginia applicant pool - I highly doubt that NOVA students are admitted at a 35% rate). That means that 1 out of every 5 in-state students not admitted early action to UVA this year would have been admitted last year.

• But if we compare the total number of applications from last year (RD + EA) to the total number from this year (RD + EA + ED), they are REMARKABLY similar. So even though more kids applied early this year, less applied regular.

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Here’s what I think happened this year - I feel like a bit of a conspiracy theorist, but hear me out!

-UVA may have been particularly conservative with their decisions, particularly in the ED pool. At the time the ED decisions were released, the RD deadline hadn’t passed and so much was still unknown in terms of the overall number of applicants. Especially in the wake of the Virginia Tech enrollment debacles of the last several years, I could certainly see UVA deciding that a conservative approach in the face of change would be much better than an over-enrollment situation.

-Perhaps more applicants who might have initially applied RD chose to apply EA instead after ED was added. This makes sense given that some other schools have started to indicate that students need to either apply EA or ED to be competitive applicants when both options are offered; RD has almost turned into an afterthought in those situations. Of course, this is not the case at UVA, but it’s very possible that applicants didn’t realize this. So that would explain why the combination EA/ED numbers were greater than EA alone during the 2018-2019 cycle, while the RD numbers were down.

If I’m right in terms of the intentionally conservative approach, I think that this may extend through RD because the overall yield may be hard to predict. For example, if all the people with UVA as their #1 choice applied ED, the EA/RD pool should have a lower yield since that “#1 choice group” is no longer part of it. But how much lower? It’s so hard to say. Ultimately, I think that since there’s still so much uncertainty, we may see more waitlist movement than in past years.

I can’t help but wonder about two things:

1. Given that ED acceptances were released before RD applications were due (in other words - the committee had to make the ED decisions when it looked like the total number of applications was trending upwards, before it normalized).. and given that the situation this year was unpredictable for everyone - including the UVA admissions committee - maybe UVA will be a bit more generous in the ED round next year?

2. Given the same issue, it will be very interesting to see if deferred ED students are admitted this spring at the same rate as the deferred EA students. Or even admitted from the waitlist, for that matter! It would not surprise me if we saw a greater ED advantage emerge down the line, either in RD or from the waitlist.

Only time will tell!

Impact of College Admissions Policy Changes at UVA and Virginia Tech

What is it with 2019? Just as it seems as if the college admission world is coming to terms with a recent scandal or seismic policy change, something new hits!

This week, everyone is talking about two major pieces of news from public universities in our very own state. These announcements from UVA and Virginia Tech will dramatically impact the admissions process for the state’s residents, especially students in Northern Virginia who generally face more competition in contending for spots at the most selective Virginia schools.

Here’s a breakdown of each announcement and what it might mean for your kids:

UVA

The Announcement:

UVA has added a binding Early Decision (ED) option in addition to their existing Early Action  (EA) option.

The Context:

UVA actually offered a binding ED option for decadesbut removed it in 2006. Their purpose for getting rid of it? Equity. Due to the nature of the binding commitment, ED plans favor students who do not need to rely on merit scholarship funding and who don't need to compare scholarship offers to get the best deal. UVA has been pretty outspoken about this issue since they first removed the option, which makes this announcement even more shocking.

What this Means:

Is this good or bad for students? It depends on the perspective of the student and their goals.

For students who have their hearts set on UVA, this is a very good thing.

Especially for students in our geographic area, applying to the school as ED applicants will enable them to stand out amidst a sea of other applicants with similar demographic profiles. Even better, they will hear back from UVA before the holidays.

Because UVA’s EA notification is so late (end of January), students have not been able to strategize with a combination of an EA application to UVA combined with an ED II application to another school if the UVA application wasn't successful. A lot of families struggled with this decision because holding out for UVA meant substantially limiting a student’s chances at other ED and ED II schools. Now, this will not be a problem for students applying to UVA ED, because they will have time to apply ED II at another school if their UVA decision isn’t favorable.

On the other hand, students whose second choice is UVA are more disadvantaged than before. Historically, UVA admissions decisions been very predictable (I previously blogged about this here) because they haven't taken demonstrated interest into account. A student with straight As, the most challenging course load available to them, and a 34+ ACT from any high school in Northern Virginia should have been admitted provided that they had good essays, activities, and recommendations. Now that demonstrated interest is a factor, this won't necessarily be the case.

UVA, like other schools with ED, will very likely select some slightly less qualified candidates-- students who may not have gotten in when ED wasn’t an option-- because they are willing to make the binding commitment. In turn, this will very likely make getting into UVA by applying EA or regular decision more competitive.

Bottom line: for kids who are hoping for an Ivy (or similarly competitive top-tier private school - Duke, USC, Northwestern, etc.), UVA’s ED option is problematic.

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Virginia Tech

The Announcement:

Virginia Tech has over-enrolled their freshman class in a very substantial way, particularly in the following majors:

General engineering (or undecided engineering)

Mechanical engineering

Aerospace engineering

Biomedical engineering

Biology

University studies (undeclared)

Exploring technologies (part of university studies)

Students pursuing majors in these subject areas were contacted this past week and offered three options for deferring their admission:

Guaranteed Admissions Program - GAP2020: Take a gap year with guaranteed admission to Virginia Tech in Fall 2020. This option allows you to take a gap year and receive an additional $1,000 scholarship renewable for up to four years. You’ll now have the opportunity to travel, work, engage in a service project, or any other endeavor that is important to you. We will honor your current Virginia Tech scholarships and give you priority for on-campus housing when you enroll at Virginia Tech next year.

Guaranteed Admission Transfer Program GRANT2020: Wait a year to enroll at Virginia Tech while taking classes at your community college. Choose this option and save your first day on campus for fall 2020! You'll still be guaranteed admission and we will honor your current Virginia Tech scholarships and give you priority for on-campus housing when you enroll next year. This option also provides you with a grant equal to the costs you will pay for tuition and fees for attendance at a Virginia Community College System (VCCS) institution during the 2019-2020 academic year. Additionally, you are eligible to apply for a grant of up to $5,000 to support an internship, cooperative learning experience (co-ops), study abroad or other experiential learning opportunities during your enrollment at Virginia Tech. We will provide academic advising support to ensure that your VCCS credits will transfer and count toward your Virginia Tech degree..

Experience 2020: Summer start and summer finish tuition-free, with fall or spring enrollment on campus. Start taking courses at Virginia Tech during our summer session (which begins July 9) with 6 credits (2 courses) tuition-free. Then enroll full-time (15 credits) beginning in either the fall or spring semester. During your term away from Blacksburg, you can choose to enroll at a community college or take a semester off to travel, work, engage in a service project, or any other endeavor that is important to you. Return to campus to finish the academic year in the summer of 2020 with up to 9 credits (3 courses) tuition-free. An additional grant of up to $2,000 will be available to you to support internships, co-ops or other approved experiential learning opportunities during your enrollment at Virginia Tech. Regular tuition and fees apply for fall or spring semesters.

(Source: Virginia Tech Fall 2019 Summer Enrollment Options)

These “opportunities” are purely optional and none of the students are forced to participate.

The Context:

 This past year, Virginia Tech added an EA option to their existing ED offering (essentially the opposite of what UVA will be doing next year). This over-enrollment snafu further highlights the importance of applying ED if Virginia Tech is a student’s first choice, because we will see a major difference in acceptance rates between students applying ED and EA for Fall 2020 admission.

What this Means:

Unlike the situation at UVA, where some stand to benefit, this is not good news for anyone from an admissions perspective.

For the HS Class of 2020, Virginia Tech's over-enrollment will have a trickle-down effect. To make up for the extra 1000 students the school enrolled this spring, they will have to under-admit in the upcoming admission cycle. This will very likely lead to another record-breaking year with the lowest-ever acceptance rate (by quite a large margin). We saw the exact same scenario play out this year at UCLA in the wake of substantial over-enrollment during the 2017-2018 admissions cycle.

 Another interesting part of this announcement to keep in mind is that almost half of the over-admitted students are enrolled in the College of Engineering. And almost half of that particular group are enrolled in just two majors: computer science and computer engineering. Unfortunately, while applicants hoping to pursue these majors will be most substantially impacted, all engineering applicants, and even students pursuing admission in other undergraduate colleges, will face greater admission challenges than previous years. Non-engineering students entering the university with an undeclared major were also heavily impacted, by the way.

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Now, before you throw your hands up in exasperation, try to find some peace of mind in knowing that this shouldn’t change the way your child is approaching the admissions process.

 No matter what is happening in the news cycle with regard to college admissions, students need to focus on what they can control: trying their hardest and taking every opportunity available to them while narrowing their strategy and approach to the admissions process. The more work completed in advance in terms of research, school visits, applications, and essays, the easier the process will be.

Struggling with these kinds of decisions? Set up a strategy session today to kick off your college admissions process on the right foot!