Research is Key to Identifying Best Fit Colleges

While the Covid pandemic may prevent students from touring colleges of interest, there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t engage in an even more productive activity – research.  A college investment is one of the largest expenses most families will face in their lifetime.  Yet many students and parents find themselves choosing an institute of higher learning without doing any serious homework that could help identify best-fit colleges where students could prepare for the career of their dreams, at an affordable cost, with the likelihood of earning an impressive salary over the course of their career.

A good place for families to start their research is at CollegeBoard.org.  There they will find a College Search database that contains information on more than 2,000 four-year colleges in the United States.  By selecting specific criteria regarding school size, location, availability of on-campus housing, choice of major, and other aspects of college life, students can easily identify colleges that might be a great match.

There’s Still Time to Submit College Applications

If you’re a high school senior, with hopes of attending a great college in the fall, all is not lost if you have not yet applied to, or gotten accepted to, your dream school.

Although the application deadline has passed for all of the Ivy League schools, and many other elite institutions, there are several hundred colleges whose application deadlines for the 2021-2022 academic year fall on or after January 15th.  

While this is not the ideal time for college-bound students to begin the application process, those who find themselves in this boat – due to procrastination or any other reason – should follow a few guidelines.

Sharp Decline in Early Acceptance at Elite Schools

Getting accepted into a top college has seemingly become even more competitive during the Covid 19 epidemic.

Colleges had already been posting extremely competitive acceptance rates, with eight percent, or fewer, applicants gaining acceptance to the top tier schools, according to statistics from U.S. News and World Reports. These institutions include Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Princeton, University of Chicago, Yale, Brown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Pomona, Dartmouth, Duke, Julliard, U.S. Naval Academy and University of Pennsylvania. To increase their chances of acceptance, students frequently choose one university and apply early decision or restrictive early action. 

But the fall of 2020 saw a dramatic rise in early admission applications, making it even tougher to gain acceptance to these highly selective schools.  At Harvard and Yale restrictive early action applications rose by 57% and 38%, respectively, according to The Wall Street Journal.  The result is that, although both of these schools accepted 14% of their early applicants last year, only 7.4% were accepted to Harvard and 10% to Yale this academic year.

Students get a Second Chance at “Early Decision”

Students who have gotten bad news in recent days from their Early Decision college – either being turned down or being waitlisted – should know that all hope is not lost.  They still have another option, which could bring them exciting news and get them off the college application merry-go-round, early in the new year.

Many colleges offer Early Decision II, with a January application deadline and notification in February – close to two months prior to the typical April 1st college response date. The main advantage of applying early decision, in addition to getting an early response, is that colleges usually accept a much higher percentage of early decision applicants.  Because early decision is binding, colleges know that any students they accept will definitely attend – increasing their “yield” (percentage of accepted students who enroll). The main downfall of applying early decision is the fact that it is binding, preventing students from comparing different financial aid packages that they might receive from different colleges. 

Asking Questions to Best Identify Ideal College

Asking questions is the key to getting information in so many areas of life – including the choice of college.  The key to truly finding out what your college experience would be like at any given school is to carefully research the answers that are readily available, and then seek out the answers that may not be so obvious.

Every college hosts a website offering statistics in a wide range of categories including its number of students, the percent of students that live on campus, the most popular majors, and the sticker price to attend. The website bigfuture.collegeboard.org offers a gamut of additional information on almost every college in the country regarding average SAT scores and selectivity, diversity of the student body, sports and activities, learning support programs, and much more.

Online Surveillance in College Admission Process

While most high school students maintain an active online presence, they often have no idea that colleges are monitoring their actions and “scoring” them accordingly.  

The Washington Post reported that admissions officers at the University of Wisconsin installed tracking software on their school website that indicated when a student visited their site, which pages were viewed, and how long the student spent on each page.  Additional information profiling the student was provided, and the student was assigned an “affinity index” estimating his/her likelihood of attending the school, if accepted.

University of Wisconsin is not alone.  According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, “enrollment officers at Seton Hall University, Quinnipiac University, and Dickinson College know down to the second when prospective students opened an email from the school, how long they spent reading it and whether they clicked through to any links.”

Lifetime Salaries Can Literally Vary by Millions

As millions of students prepare to graduate from high school and head off to college, well-meaning parents often encourage them to choose the major of their dreams.  Sometimes, students have known for years the particular career that would be perfect for them.  Other times, students enter college “undecided” and end up making a decision as they move through their coursework. But few students realize the economic impact of their choices.

On average, an individual with a bachelor’s degree earns nearly twice the lifetime income of someone with a high school diploma. But just as significant – from a monetary point of view – is the choice of major that can either launch a student into a high paying career or leave the graduate struggling to pay off skyrocketing student debt. In fact, college graduates with the highest-paying majors earn $3.4 million more than those with the lowest-paying majors, over the course of their careers, according to a study by the Georgetown University Center of Education and the Workforce.