We hope everyone had a happy St. Patrick’s Day and a great week (and isn’t too tired from springing ahead)!
BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK
REGULAR DECISION RELEASE DATES
It is that time of year again - many of our students are receiving regular decision news from colleges! Fordham, American, Bucknell, Northeastern, and Dickinson were among the colleges to release decisions this week, and we expect to hear from UGA, Swarthmore, UCLA, and Boston College today! For more updates on release dates, we recommend following College Kickstart’s list - it is updated almost every day with new information.
US CANCELS DEBT FOR STUDENTS OF FOR-PROFIT COLLEGES
For-profit colleges in the US have a long history of taking advantage of students, and the Department of Education has decided to forgive $1 billion in debt for students who have been scammed by these institutions. DOE will also work with these students to improve their credit after carrying loans from these private, for-profit college systems.
IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON COLLEGE ADMISSIONS
CNN released an interview with the Senior Vice President of Enrollment Management at NYU, discussing the impact of the pandemic on college admissions. As we’ve recounted on the blog before, schools that interest our students are seeing huge application increases (17% at UVA; 42% at Harvard; an enormous 103% at Colgate!).
But community colleges and other institutions are seeing enrollment fall due to COVID-19, and are providing incentives like debt forgiveness and extended application deadlines to encourage students to enroll. Mills College, a private women's college in Oakland, CA, is the latest institution to close its doors due to economic struggles caused by the pandemic.
BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK
This week saw the release of Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues on Wednesday - check it out! This interview with one of the creators is also worth reading. Those who made the movie believe that with the notoriety around the scandal, this type of “side door” into college admissions will never open up again. I hope this is the case! We were also excited to see other independent consultants featured in the film… and thought it was funny that we got invitations to some watch parties this week! Maybe we will host one ourselves :)
Schools across the country (and here in Fairfax!) are starting to reopen, and some students are headed back into the classroom for the first time in a year. This New York Times article captures some of the excitement and nerves that students are experiencing during this time, as well as some of the safety measures that schools are taking right now in line with new CDC guidelines on the reopening of schools.
This WSJ article provided more information that aligned with the interview above, including raw numbers. I liked the quotation from Sam Bigelow from the Middlesex School, who disagreed that test-optional admissions is ”tipping the scale on access and equity.” He noted (and I completely, 100% agree with this): “More than anything else it’s just making these applicant pools disturbingly big. It’s by and large just making more kids for them to reject.”
And as our juniors are busy with their college essay work, this piece from the New York Times gives a great sampling of college essays from the Class of 2021. I enjoyed reading about the breakdown of topics submitted:
The coronavirus was the most common theme in the essays submitted to The Times, appearing in 393 essays, more than 40 percent. Next was the value of family, coming up in 351 essays, but often in the context of other issues, like the pandemic and race. Racial justice and protest figured in 342 essays … Family was not the only eternal verity to appear. Love came up in 286 essays; science in 128; art in 110; music in 109; and honor in 32. Personal tragedy also loomed large, with 30 essays about cancer alone….Some students resisted the lure of current events, and wrote quirky essays about captaining a fishing boat on Cape Cod or hosting dinner parties. A few wrote poetry. Perhaps surprisingly, politics and the 2020 election were not of great interest.
All things being equal, I maintain that it’s better to break away from trends in essays if possible. I definitely remember how tedious it felt to read the same type of essay over and over and over again when I worked in admissions. That said, I understand that all things aren’t always equal, and sometimes writing about a popular topic is the right choice for a given applicant.
OFFICE HAPPENINGS
Shannon attended a series of talks this week for CACHET Counselor Conversations, learning more about many different STEM programs. We are definitely starting to see how different schools will handle testing going forward - as we anticipated, extremely selective private schools and large state schools will be looking to use testing in admissions as soon as possible, while other institutions may leave it behind for good. MIT will be placing “more weight” on APs in admission than in the past in the absence of SAT Subject Tests, while WPI has shifted from a test-optional to a fully test-blind model going forward. Case Western expects to admit more students than last year and see a lot of waitlist movement to make up for a smaller class in the previous cycle, while Purdue does not expect to see much if any waitlist movement for their engineering program.
One thing we were happy to learn was that this cycle overall, as a Purdue admissions officer put it, was the “most empathetic review” of student applications that many of these schools have ever done, taking into account the impact of COVID-19 on applicants. Want to learn more about the STEM programs who make up CACHET? Check out their Virtual College Fair for students March 29-31.
If STEM programs aren’t your thing, there are still plenty of upcoming college fairs to check out. Register for the National Catholic College Admission Association fair on March 25, or the Colleges that Change Lives fair on March 23-24.
Lastly, this blog post would feel incomplete if we did not mention that we were deeply saddened and angered by the events in Georgia this week. We stand in solidarity with our many AAPI clients and the wider Asian community. If you are looking to do more to combat rising anti-Asian violence, we recommend participating in this free bystander intervention training or making a donation to one of the organizations on this list to support Asian communities.
Enjoy your weekend!
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