"After Decades of Competitive Admissions, Getting into College Has Finally Become Easier"

There are whole industries feeding the noise and frustration around college admission these days.

As an educator first, I am so often disappointed by the messages broadcast by folks selling test prep, student counseling, pay-to-play summer programs, faux "research" to make a little spending money for grad students, and other strategies that use fear as a tactic to take families' money. There are certainly good actors in the counseling and test prep spaces, but it often feels like they are the minority.

At the same time, I follow online parent groups with over 200,000 members, all completely panicked about their children's chances of getting into a "good" college, while that definition has narrowed enormously. Pro tip: huge numbers of students are "clustering" their applications to a limited number of schools that have become popular in our monoculture of social media, and too often missing the places that actually deliver on life-changing undergraduate education.

Well, here's some good news for a change, from the 30,000 foot view.

https://www.aei.org/education/after-decades-of-competitive-admissions-getting-into-college-has-finally-become-easier/After 

Highlights below:

While college enrollment surged during the 2010s, giving schools more leeway to reject applicants, the pendulum has now swung back. Colleges are competing for a smaller pool of potential students, and as a result, those who do apply enjoy higher odds of admission.

But better admissions odds aren’t the only benefit for students. While college tuition used to be one of the fastest-rising prices throughout the whole economy, that has changed. On average, published tuition rates are now falling in real terms. Financial aid reduces the cost burden even further. Higher admissions rates mean colleges must compete more fiercely to attract students, and for many that means slashing tuition.

The next few years will be an interesting time in college admission. The long-predicted "demographic cliff," a drop in the number of traditional college-age students, will begin to be felt in the admission marketplace next year.

As I have long maintained, there is a good college for every student who is at least a little bit engaged in their education and wants to go. That's one reason I built and have revised and re-released the Moody's Quick & Dirty College Prism List Starter. It's a sortable database of 380 of the most applied-to colleges by students from other states. That's a subgroup of under 15% of the nation's four-year degree-granting colleges and universities. It turns out you can be discerning without limiting yourself to 20 colleges that everyone applies to.

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