The bad news: In 2022, the college application landscape is more unforgiving than ever. Kennedy into Harvard, even though his Choate report card includes cringeworthy grades: a 55 in French, a 50 in physics, and 65 in algebra. Gone are some of the rich kid legacy perks that got C-student George W. While no other colleges have made that announcement, the mood is shifting against privilege and in favor of first-generation and under-represented minority students. Months before the pandemic, Amherst College announced it would no longer consider legacy in admissions decisions, following Cal Tech’s, UC Berkeley’s, and Johns Hopkins’ earlier decisions. This movement was intensified by Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The Anti-Elitist Movement Still another factor that’s moved the needle with college essays and applications: the trend against elitism and legacy admissions. The applicant rate soars, but the real estate – the number of dorm rooms - stays the same. In the latest cycle, 149,000 students applied to UCLA, compared to 113,761 just two years before. Just before lockdown, the University of California system went “test blind” - no tests accepted, on the theory that testing is biased against minority and low-income students who can’t afford high-priced test prep. College applications swelled for other reasons, too. The number of kids going gap rose to some 130,000, about double the previous year. They’d spend the bonus year burnishing their credentials and try again.
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Who wanted to start Harvard on Zoom? And whose parents wanted to pay for an Ivy education via laptop? Many others, disappointed with their acceptances, sat the year out, too. That first year of Covid, upwards of 20 percent of those admitted to HYPSM took a gap year. This left thousands of super high-achievers feeling they’d only been accepted at the University of Crushing Disappointment, safety schools they never imagined would be their only choices. As college applications exploded, college admissions rates plunged, some as low as 3 percent. Eighteen, 20, or even 25 submissions became the new normal. And because this was uncharted territory, they tried to cover their bases.
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They top-loaded their lists with reaches and skimped on targets and safeties. They applied in droves to HYPSM (Harvard Yale Princeton Stanford MIT) and to many other high-ranking colleges. With the doors to the kingdom wide open, students with crummy SATs or none at all changed the landscape.
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Others were magically at liberty to leave that space blank. Those who’d taken the tests could submit their scores and did if they were high. When the Covid lockdown closed SAT and ACT testing sites for more than a year, even the most competitive universities were forced to go “test optional,” beginning 2020-21. Numbers have shrunk from Northwestern University to Northeastern, from UCLA to Bates College in rural Maine. For the last two years, it’s been harder than ever to get into an Ivy League or one of the nation’s many selective colleges. The upcoming cycle is likely to be much like the last two: crazy high application numbers, crazy low acceptance rates, and enough disappointment to power a small country.
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College Admissions 2023-23 is Mind-bending Call it a variant of long Covid: the drastic effect the pandemic will have on college admissions 2023, based on the last two college applications cycles.