Weekly Update: June 19!

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

Geez, where do I even start with this week?! I feel like I could have written a whole post on “biggest college-related news of Thursday, June 18” itself, haha.

VIRGINIA TECH

I posted last week about new schools accepting the Common Application and mentioned that I hoped JMU would follow suit, joking that I had already given up on Virginia Tech. Well, pigs are flying because Virginia Tech made their own announcement yesterday afternoon! They will accept the Common Application and this is HUGE for so many Virginia residents!

Several years ago, VT switched from using a somewhat-inconvenient-but-not-terrible institutional application to being one of the few schools in the country that required applicants to use the Coalition Application exclusively, i.e. there was no other choice. If you haven’t had to complete a Coalition Application, you may not understand why I’m so excited, but take my word for it: this is very, very good news for anyone interested in Virginia Tech. The Coalition App is just terrible and I’d be so happy if I never had to log into it again!

(Note: as of the time I am writing this post, there has not been an official announcement and it does not even appear that their website has been updated to reflect this, but that’s what they told counselors behind-the-scenes yesterday afternoon).

TEST-OPTIONAL ADMISSION

Nearly all of the most competitive schools that hadn’t yet made announcements did so this week. All of the Ivy League schools, Vanderbilt (that was today), Duke, Notre Dame (also today), NYU (yesterday), etc.

PRINCETON

They get their own category! Princeton dropped single-choice early action yesterday and will only have one application deadline of January 1, 2021. I’m pretty excited about this, actually, as I am not a fan of SCEA. I think we will see more deadline/app cycle related shifts over the months to come.

ACT

The ACT announced last fall that it would provide students with the opportunity to re-take the test one section at a time beginning in September 2020, if the students had already completed the full test at least once. Yesterday, they made the announcement that this initiative has now been postponed until sometime in 2021. Honestly, this is no big loss - to my knowledge, not a single college or university had agreed to accept scores taken through this method and now at least students aren’t making decisions based on something that most of us behind the scenes knew was highly unlikely to pan out.

ERIC FURDA

Ok, so maybe not enormous news but I was sad to hear that Eric Furda is leaving Penn for the “other side of the desk.” I really liked him a lot and he always struck me as very down-to-earth and funny, and we can’t forget his passion for the Eagles! Those kids at Penn Charter just won the college counseling lottery, that’s for sure!

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

A New York Times piece examines decision-making and risky behavior among college-age students, writing that the plans to return to college this fall “border on delusional.” I have spent my entire career working with students ages 14-22 and I would definitely agree that this age group is not exactly known for their prudent choices, haha. But maybe they can turn things around and serve as an example for the rest of us?

Several days later, this College Reality Check snippet agreed with the first article and said what everyone in higher education is thinking right now: “Colleges have come rushing forth to announce that they will be inviting students back to campus this fall. But as I’ve spoken to college officials over the past few weeks — usually not for quotation — I’ve been struck by the difference between their public optimism and their private uncertainty.”

That’s so true. Regardless of what’s going to happen and whether this is a good idea (I truly have no clue anymore), there is no question that there is a major, major difference in what is being said publicly right now and what’s being said behind the scenes. This Washington Post article about the aftermath of the Great Clips exposure in Missouri made me feel really optimistic, though. If only everyone would wear their masks!!!

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

Tons of meetings with rising seniors - all of whom will be receiving an email on Monday to let them know that our August availability is live on the website! We’re also continuing to hold Meet & Greets with rising juniors and are continuing to fill our roster for the Class of 2022!

Speaking of our roster, we’ve reached capacity for the Class of 2021 and at this point will be moving to our annual Late Start Waitlist. We’re able to take a number of kids this way every year after we finish up our work with the first cohort, and this will likely happen sooner than usual this particular year because so many of our students were able to make substantial progress during COVID closures. Not to mention the fact that SO many supplemental essay topics are being released early! If you are interested in working with us, fill out the linked form above and we’ll give you a call to discuss how the waitlist works and what you can expect.

Families who’d like to start right away can instead purchase one of the membership vault plans launching Monday! The highest tier option is a great alternative to a traditional package; it includes quite a few hours of college counseling and essay coaching services and an incredible amount of DIY resources for just over half the price of our least expensive package.

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That’s all for now! Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there :)

Weekly Update: June 12!

Happy first day of summer, Fairfax County! And we are at Phase 2 of reopening - be safe this weekend, everyone.

BIGGEST COLLEGE-RELATED NEWS OF THE WEEK

More testing news! A whole lot of kids found out yesterday that their previously-confirmed June 13 testing administrations would be canceled after all - with less than 48 hours notice. Ughh! It is always something.

Schools continue to shift to test-optional, including Yale, which actually announced the policy while I was writing this post; Johns Hopkins; the University of Washington; and here’s the CRAZY unexpected one- CalTech went TEST BLIND! Definitely did not see that coming. Again, check out my post from April about the difference between test-optional and test blind. This happened on Monday, and I was waiting all week long to see if any other schools would follow. So far, not yet. CalTech is by far the most selective school to go this route.

The colleges are all continuing to release plans for the fall: some students at Duke will be living in hotels (which, to be honest, does not sound so terrible!) and Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education has informed faculty that most fall instruction will take place online.

Purdue made headlines this week because of their fundraising effort to pay for PPE - this has not gone over particularly well from a PR perspective (to put it mildly) but they’ve raised over $112,000 so far! The reason this has gotten so much backlash is that the president, Mitch Daniels, has been one of the most outspoken proponents of reopening colleges and universities this coming fall.

At a reception at Purdue this past fall inside the stadium. That was definitely one of my most fun college visits!

On a more serious note and one that has not actually been covered much yet in the mainstream media, Betsy DeVos issued an emergency rule yesterday that banned colleges and universities from extending CARES Act relief funding to non-citizens, to include students who are DACA, Temporary Protected Status, and asylum recipients. To give you an idea of what a big deal this is, half of the state of California’s 2+ million student community college system is estimated to be impacted.

Now for some GOOD NEWS (it’s about time, right?!) Common App released their list of new members and there are some really great additions for kids hoping to head south. We already knew about UGA, but I had not known about the additions of Auburn and CLEMSON!! So excited about Clemson in particular because I have a ton of kids apply there each year. If JMU would just join this list, it would make me so happy. Please? (I have given up on VT and the University of Texas system!).

If you missed my video on Facebook, UVA released their 2020-2021 supplemental essay topics on Monday. The engineering essay is completely different from the prompt of years past, and some of the others have slight modifications. The last “choice” prompt is brand new - I said this on my video, but I’d be careful about what you write here. Don’t pick something too common. Protesting Black Lives Matter is beyond admirable but there are so many kids who will write about that for this essay. If you did something to contribute in a larger way like Avi Schiffmann - by all means, WRITE ABOUT IT! But I would not write about marching down Maple or you’ll blend in with all of the other kids in Fairfax County, as awesome as that was.

This is not really college-related, but I also put a lot of information about Gov. Northam’s return-to-school plan on facebook. You can find the entire 126-page document here. We are supposed to learn more next week about how FCPS will implement these guidelines.

BEST ARTICLES OF THE WEEK

I enjoyed “March 10: The anatomy of a day” article from Duke’s campus newspaper - it was interesting (and sad) to read about the different perspectives and the ways that different lives in the Duke community were impacted.

Inside Higher Ed’s piece on how private colleges “report vastly different circumstances” is definitely worth a read. Some of this was not surprising - if you’ve ever been to Bucknell or Kenyon, you will understand exactly why they are highly sought-after options this year. They are in the middle of nowhere, literally!

I took this picture about 18 months ago just before driving onto the Kenyon campus - check out the cows!

I did find the part about NYU surprising, but it will be interesting to see how many students pull out down the line, particularly because NYU was one of the most inflexible schools I dealt with this past spring when it came to deposit extensions. This makes me wonder how many kids just went ahead and double deposited to keep their options open? Time will tell!

In “Rich Colleges Can Afford to Spend More,” Paul Campos asserts that colleges with large endowments should start spending them to be able to avoid budget cuts. I’m not an economist, but at the same time, I don’t feel like it’s quite that simple…

This New York Times article is definitely worth reading for any athletic recruits, and discusses how the process has become very tricky this year given that coaches can’t see prospective student-athletes play in person. The girl they mentioned who is emailing five coaches per day is SMART! That’s exactly what she should be doing. This is definitely an issue right now, and that’s why we made sure to include resources for prospective student-athletes in our membership vault, from a player profile/athletic resume template to guidance for sample emails to coaches.

OFFICE HAPPENINGS

I try to make our office run as efficiently as possible and am a big fan of automating whatever we can. This cuts down on back-end administrative tasks that aren’t client-facing and gives us more time to spend providing great service to our clients! With so many essays and application edits coming in at this time of year, I decided that there had to be a better way.

Several hours later, I came up with the following online submission forms:

Wow Editing Submissions - this is ONLY for edits related to Wow Writing Workshop

Editing Submissions - this is for everything else - supplemental essays, cover letters, resumes, applications, you name it!

We started using these with a few kids this week and will continue to roll it out slowly with all of our students over the next two weeks. From now on, instead of emailing to indicate that something is ready for review, all students will fill out one of the above two forms every time they have something ready. They will also fill out the second form at the end of each essay coaching meeting so that their progress from the meeting will continue to have the second level of review.

I have a lot of fancy automations and rules set up on the back end in our project management system, so these will route directly to my to-do list and will even end up in the right category, depending on the type of edits needed. I’m really excited about it and I definitely think it will also cut down on the amount of lead time I’ll need to edit an essay!