We all remember the great toilet paper shortage of 2020: supply chain issues limited access to this precious resource, and to ensure a sanitary bathroom experience, households began stockpiling…which compounded the problem. Good thing those days are behind us, right? Unfortunately, they might be more ever-present than you think.
While (thankfully) toilet paper is once again a free-flowing commodity, a similar problem still plagues college admissions, resulting in a more highly selective admissions landscape.
After universities dropped testing requirements, they were flooded with applications, and admit rates plummeted. Once this news hit the presses, panicked families began to apply to even more schools hoping to increase their child’s chances of getting into at least one school. But without physical space increases, that meant further decreases in the percentage of applicants schools could admit, which affected applicant behavior in the following year…and so on and so forth in a downward spiral every year since.
NYU is a great (or alarming) example of this process. In 2020, it had an acceptance rate of about 21% (not super high, but not totally rejective, either). For the 2022-23 cycle, NYU admitted just 8% of its first-year applicants — a drop of over 60% in just three years! In more personal terms, while your class of 2021 child had no problem getting into NYU, your even-more-brilliant younger child applying now has next to no chance of following her older sister.
But plummeting admit rates are only half of the story – join us this Thursday, June 15 at 6:00 pm for The Persnickety Process: highly selective admissions. We’ll be taking an incisive look at the second half of the story and sharing our expert advice on what you need to know and do to support your child in an increasingly difficult admissions landscape.
The fact is that the admissions topography of today stands in marked contrast from that of just a few years ago, and is wildly different from what stands as general knowledge for the vast majority of people. And in order to be successful in this new world, students and their families need to recreate their understanding of exactly what constitutes a “selective” or “highly selective” institution, not trust their general sense of what it might be. Families also need to understand how to look beyond admit rate to understand true admissibility. That’s where we come in.
We hope you join us Thursday at 6 pm PST to gain clarity on this changing and seemingly chaotic scene, and to learn how to set your child up for admissions success. Register for free HERE. And if you’d like to claim your free Student Success Call to get targeted admissions advice based on your child’s specific profile and admissibility, we’re here to help.
