Running Against the Wind...

"Well those drifter's days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in, what to leave out..."

- Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band

After my last post, and the subsequent articles that resulted from our decision to drop our early action program, I received many comments from counselors and parents that were very supportive of our decision (thank you for the kind words and messages). However, I also had more than a few comments from readers who were surprised at the notion of  “shaping our class”, a reference I made regarding the process of trying to recruit, admit and ultimately enroll students with a variety of personal characteristics. This appeared to some as a dubious activity at best – providing an unfair advantage to some at worst. In reflecting about these comments, I realize that for many students, parents and even counselors, the concept of “enrollment management” and how it affects an institution's admission and financial aid policies is not widely understood. Even on our own campuses, I suspect not everyone could clearly define what it is we do. So I thought I would take this opportunity, with the help of Bob Seger, to try and explain why managing enrollment is so important and what we as enrollment managers hope to accomplish.

The profession of enrollment management is a relatively new one, appearing on campuses in the mid to late 70’s, mostly in response to dramatic changes in demographics and a poor economy that put many colleges and universities in financial trouble (sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it?). Its history is often traced back to Boston College, and a mathematical physics professor named Jack Maguire. He was also the Dean of Admissions at the time and in order to help rescue BC from what was a financial crisis at the time, he and his colleagues began to apply concepts such as market research, predictive modeling, financial aid leveraging and many other activities that are still being used today. The basic idea was that colleges and universities needed to behave more like businesses – very special kinds of businesses – but they had a bottom line and needed to take in enough revenue (tuition) in order to fund the buildings, classrooms, faculty, and staff that it took to enroll and graduate its students. In order to do that it had to manage its enrollment – from how many students were interested in the school, to how many and who it was going to admit, to how much aid was required to make it possible for students to enroll, to how services across the campus worked together to ensure that students made it through to graduation. All of these things were being done already, but in very disparate and uncoordinated ways. Enrollment management sought to bring a level of intention to the way schools did business.

Since then, the world of higher education has changed, like most things, in some dramatic ways. But fundamentally, colleges are still struggling with that basic issue: how to manage its enrollment in such a way that it remains competitive in a consumer driven marketplace, that it enrolls enough students and generates enough revenue to provide the education and the outcomes that it intends. To some, that may seem like a very cynical approach to education, but the fact is that in order to keep the doors open, it is essential that enrollment is managed in an effective way. When done well, the decisions that drive the enrollment process – from recruitment through graduation – are rooted in the institution’s mission and academic values. But whether done well or not, all institutions – public and private – manage their enrollment by applying many of those same business practices used back at Boston College in the ‘70’s.

At the University of San Diego, we manage our enrollment by connecting our activities with the mission and strategic directions that have been formed by the campus and approved by the Board of Trustees, President, faculty, and other community members. You can see our strategic directions at http://www.sandiego.edu/strategicdirections/. Through our Mission, our core values, and vision statement, our community has defined who we are, what kind of education we are going to offer and what we want our students to become. The strategic directions provide us all with a set of priorities that support those definitions. From the enrollment management perspective, we formulate our goals, plans, marketing, financial aid and student service strategies with those objectives in mind. Enrollment management is where the institution’s mission meets the realities of the marketplace, and at that intersection, it can sometimes get a little messy.

Enrollment managers have to balance institutional aspiration with a whole set of market forces that often are working against those aspirations. Whatever an institution may think about itself, or the direction it is going, parents, students and counselors have a perception of the school that may not align with that vision. Attracting students with the qualities and characteristics that will ultimately support the mission and vision of the institution is challenging. Admitting students who will not only be successful in our classrooms, but who will help us achieve our institutional goals requires careful training and execution. Enrolling enough students to fill our classrooms and providing them with enough financial aid requires incredible amounts of data analysis, financial planning and modeling, as well as regulatory navigation. Ensuring that students receive the advising, support, and career counseling they need to persist and graduate requires careful coordination and planning. While not all enrollment managers are directly responsible for all of these things, we are all impacted by how well and consistently they are done. Balancing all of these competing priorities with the staffing and budget constraints found on most campuses can often feel like…well, running against the wind.

This is not meant to make anyone feel bad for the work that we do – I could not have a more challenging and satisfying job and I know that most of my colleagues feel the same way. Instead, I want to help people understand that all of these things – marketing, admissions, financial aid, and student services – don’t just happen. They are carefully balanced, managed, and coordinated activities and they have a great deal to do with how an admissions office recruits, who gets in and who doesn’t, and how financial aid is awarded. They involve tradeoffs and decisions about “what to leave in, what to leave out”.

Over the next several posts, I will look more closely at each of these areas: marketing, admissions, financial aid, and student services. In doing so, I hope I can help explain how these things influence prospective students and parents, and how counselors can better understand an institution’s policies by looking at them through this broader lens. Things have gotten much more complicated since I joined the profession 26 years ago. Like Seger sang, “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then… I am much older now, but still running against the wind…”

The Waiting is the Hardest Part: The Story of Early Action

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need..."

- The Rolling Stones

I turn to the British Invasion for my musical inspiration this week as I talk about our decision to eliminate our early action application deadline.  As most of you know, most colleges have several application options available.  The most common are early action, which allows you to apply early and get a decision earlier but does not commit you to attend and early decision, which does carry with it an obligation to enroll if you are accepted under that plan.  These multiple application options have complicated an already difficult process and, in the opinion of many - especially on the high school side - have further advanced the notion that there is a game to be played by the savvy consumer.  The belief is that taking advantage of these early options implies a greater chance of acceptance and therefore students and parents are applying to more and more places earlier and earlier.

How much of that is true may be up for debate, but what seems to be very clear is that these early programs have become so popular that most schools are seeing a significant portion of their applicant pools come in through the early option.  At the University of San Diego, our early action applications increased over 52% since 2010.  That year we received just over 28% of our total applications through early action.  In 2012, the 5280 early applications represented over 32% of our total.  These students tended to be stronger academically, more female, more white, and less geographically diverse than our overall application pool. 

Having more students who are academically stronger apply to your school would seem to be good news for the admissions office.  So why in the world would we consider ending such a program?  Well, here's where those lyrics from the Rolling Stones come in.  Building our class each year is a complex and difficult exercise and requires us - and all selective schools - to make tradeoffs.  It would be far easier if we knew with certainty how many applications we were going to get, what the quality and characteristics of that pool was going to be, and who was most interested.  We could make our decisions and have a reasonable idea about who was actually going to enroll.

We can't always get what we want, however.  As a relatively small school (5200 undergraduates) without the capacity to grow the size of our freshman class very much, we are very cautious about how many students we admit. In addition to wanting more academically strong students, we also want to enroll students with more diverse backgrounds - ethnically, geographically, gender and religious, socioeconomically, etc.  Our application pool, like many other private schools in the west, has grown tremendously over the past few years - 57% in the last five years including a 20% increase last year alone.  With so many families facing economic challenges, the uncertainty surrounding our public universities, and more and more schools using the Common Application, students are applying to more places.  With all of these factors fueling the application growth, it is more and more difficult for us to decide who to admit and how many to admit in order to arrive at the "right" number and mix of students that we would like.

As a result, what we found was that we admitted the strongest students who applied early, but because of this uncertainty about how the overall applicant pool was going to look, we ended up defering to the regular pool increasingly large numbers of students.  This meant making them wait until March when we made the rest of our decisions.  In addition, because we didn't know how large or how strong the pool was going to be, it became increasingly difficult to offer merit scholarships to the early action students (without exploding our budget) and so even if we offered them acceptance in December, they had to wait until March to find out whether they qualified or not.  With or without a merit award, many of these early action admits and their families needed to wait for our financial aid award in March before they could make a decision on whether to attend. 

The impact of what I have described above was becoming a real challenge for our office.  Starting in November, the admissions staff began reviewing the early action applications.  We tried our best to get as many admit decisions out to students before the Christmas holiday, although that became increasingly difficult given the numbers.  By mid-January, our early decisions were all made and the staff could finally begin reading the thousands of regular decision applications.  During this time, however, we planned campus events for the early admits, had students and alumni make congratulatory calls, sent mailings, and did our best to "convert" these admits into enrolling students.  This took precious time away from the reading of our regular students.  And finally, in the end, we found that the percentage of early action students who ended up accepting our offer of admission was about the same as those who were admitted through the regular decision option.

This summer, during our staff retreat, we reviewed all of this information and everyone shared their frustration with the early process.  We talked about how it was increasingly difficult for us to review these files in a timely way.  We expressed concern for how long we made students wait who were deferred.  We looked at lots of data on who our early applicants were, who ultimately came, and what we were truly looking for among our enrolled students.  The result was that while we may not be able to get what we want, we found a way to get what we need.

What our students need is a relatively easy way to apply for admission, present their academic credentials and convey their "fit" with our campus and programs.  What we need is a process that allows the staff to thoroughly review every file, understanding how that student's strengths and qualities compares them to everyone else who has applied.  What we all need is a clear expectation about when to apply and when decisions will be made. What we need, and we now have, is a single deadline, December 15.

There already has been a fair amount of feedback from this decision.  Mostly positive, but more than a few raised eyebrows from colleagues on and off campus.  There was a posting to our admissions list serve which solicited some very nice comments (thanks Dennis Eller at Canterbury School).  A wonderful writer from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Beckie Supiano, wrote about our decision in her Blog, Headcount  (http://chronicle.com/blogs/headcount/u-of-san-diego-ends-early-admissions-program/31508). But this wasn't about getting press or attention.  It was about an admissions office trying make choices - tradeoffs - in order to meet the enormous challenges we face each year in enrolling our class.  It was about trying to make things a bit easier for students, but it was also about trying to make things a little easier for us, too.  How will it turn out?  That remains to be seen, but I will certainly be posting about it as December gets closer.  In the end,  I hope we all at least get what we need.

P.S. - Today is the first day of classes here at USD.  Welcome to all our new freshman and transfer students.  The view from my window is much better with all our students back!

A Year Unlike Any Other....Again

"They say that these are not the best of times, but they're the only times I've ever known...."

- Billy Joel, Summer in Highland Falls

Looking out my office window, as I see the size of our summer tour groups dwindling and more and more faculty returning to campus, it is a sure reminder that the start of another school year is upon us.  For high school seniors, it marks the beginning of the end in some ways, as the reality of graduation and the pressure of post high school plans takes hold.  To be sure, the pressures facing this year's high school graduates are intense, as a quick glance of the daily headlines will attest:

• Unprecedented student debt
• Poor job market for graduates
• Tuition increases
• Reduction in State support for education

While all of these are realities that will affect higher education in the years to come, the fact is that going to college, and finding the right "fit" academically as well as financially, has never been more important.  Equally as true is that however much the headlines portray a system of higher education out of control and beyond the reach of so many, enrollment in higher education has never been higher.  Regardless of the challenges colleges, parents, students, high school counselors and others face, as Billy Joel so beautifully pointed out, this is the world we live in, and over the next several months we will all navigate these difficult challenges and find great opportunities. 

This is not the first time a graduating class has entered college in difficult times.  Those of us old enough to remember - and this is my 26th year working in admissions and enrollment so I qualify - there have been challenging economic times before.  There have been seismic demographic changes before.  And there have been legal decisions that have altered the landscape of higher education for better or worse.  Each new class of entering freshman begins their college search with the challenges of the day guiding their decisions.  And while this particular group of seniors may have more than their share - especially in the backdrop of a presidential election - the fact remains that there are many, many excellent opportunities available to them at many schools and colleges. 

That brings us to the purpose of my writing this blog - to help facilitate a conversation between those students, parents, and counselors who are navigating these stormy seas.  Over the next eight months, as we make our collective way toward May 1, I hope to shed some light on the issues of the day, perhaps help clarify processes and procedures that may seem random or confusing to those outside the academy.  I hope I can debunk some popular myths about the college search process and perhaps even make some of you feel a little less stressed about the times ahead.  Of course, I will weave in a few things about USD, but I hope this is more about the bigger picture.  That's a rather ambitious agenda, but I think we can make it happen.  As you have already noticed, I will reference some of the music of my day (which maybe only some parents and counselors will get) to help frame some discussions.  I will try and tackle head on some of the more challenging issues facing the admissions and financial aid offices across the country, helping you to understand things from the college's perspective.  And I will try and respond to your comments, questions, criticisms, and insights so that this can be more of an exchange of perspectives and ideas.

These are challenging times, but they are not the first or last challenging times we will face together.  But they are real, and they frame the decisions we will all make during this process.  In order to make the best decisions, all we can do is get the best information we can, be open to many perspectives, and focus on what's most important. 

It won't be easy, and this process can be, as Billy Joel goes on to sing, "either madness or euphoria".  But all we can do is try.  I hope you will all join in and let's enjoy the ride together.

Next time, I'll be writing about our decision to do away with our early action deadline, and along with that, the proliferation of early programs in general.

March Madness: College Admissions Style

Today is March 1, and we have now moved from the "Dog Days" of February (as I described in my last post) to our own version of March Madness.  In the next few weeks (next week for USD), schools will begin sending out their regular decision acceptance, deny and wait list letters.  This will be a difficult time as many students deal with disappointment while others will be thrilled to get good news from their top choice.  It's always a difficult period for the admission staff, too, as we have to turn away so many wonderful students.  We know, however, that there are other choices and whatever happens over the next few weeks, we hope everyone remembers what I talked about in an earlier post; that this will all work out OK and everyone will find a good place at the end.

Once those letters go out and families have their list of acceptances, the next challenge begins - how to pay for college. Tomorrow is March 2 and it is the priority deadline for completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).  This must be completed for any family hoping to be considered for need-based financial aid.  If you haven't yet done this, please visit http://www.fafsa.gov/  and complete this very important form.  You need to make sure you identify the schools that you want to get the results.  You don't need to have completed your taxes, but you will need last year's family financial information. 

If you're like most, this part of the college search process causes the most anxiety.  As a parent of a college freshman, I can still remember feeling overwhelmed as the reality of paying for tuition, room and board, and the many other costs associated with going to college came upon us.  However, there are resources that can help and like many other things in life that can cause stress, there are certain things you can do to prepare and manage your expectations about paying for college.  Unfortunately, many families come to this part of the process with unrealistic expectations about what their responsibilities are and what they can expect from the college.  This can cause additional stress for everyone involved and often leads to disappointment later on.

One of the first principles of financing a college education is that the primary responsibility for paying for college rests with the family.  The financial aid system has been built around the premise that each family will contribute what they can toward their child's education and additional help may be available for those that need it.  The FAFSA is intended to provide some way to measure what that contribution is and it is reflected in the Expected Family Contribution.  This figure is often the source of disbelief for many families.  They tell us that there is no way they can contribute what the federal government has said they should contribute.  This may be so - it is an imperfect system.  However, this is how colleges and universities are going to determine the amount of aid you are eligible for.  Each school has the flexibility to adjust that figure, using professional judgment for special circumstances, and some schools even require additional forms, such as the College Board's Profile, which enable it to collect additional information and perhaps reach a different conclusion about a family's ability to pay.

But it is the family's ability to pay that is at the heart of this process.  That is different from a family's willingness to pay, and it is around this distinction that we have many conversations with families.  When my wife and I were considering where our son would go to school, we always had the belief that his education was the most important thing we could invest in.  We knew that we might not qualify for very much aid (our FAFSA results confirmed that), but it had always been our intention that we would sacrifice and prioritize spending to invest in our kid's education.  It is important for everyone to keep in mind, that even if you may not feel the same way or place the same value on education, most colleges and universities will make that assumption and financial aid is typically administered around that principle. 

Once you have completed the FAFSA and the assumption about how much you as a family should contribute to your child's education is made, each school will then put together a financial aid award based on how much is left over.  The simple formula is the total cost of attendance (tuition, room and board, fees, other costs such as transportation, general living expenses, etc) minus the family's contribution (Expected Family Contribution) equals a student's need to attend that particular school.   While that seems like a simple formula, it is executed differently at each institution depending on the size and quality of the admitted student pool, the financial resources of the school, the availabilty of merit scholarships, federal and state aid, and many other factors.  This is why you will find that each school that your child has been admitted to may present you with very different financial aid awards.

You should carefully review and certainly compare those awards.  Be sure to know what the terms and conditions of each award are, understand the loans that you will be expected to take, and what the actual cost will end up being for you on a month to month basis (most schools have payment plan options - ask about them if they don't tell you).  Just like we have been talking all along about finding the right match for your student, this is another point of "matchmaking" - each family is going to have to find the right financial match after the careful review of these awards.

This is where each family's willingness to pay comes into play.  As you look at the educational opportunities of the schools you are considering, there will be a value proposition made with regard to each award.  Does attending a school that maybe offered you less money seem to be a better value than choosing the one that gave you more money?  Only your family can decide that, but once a school has provided you with its financial aid package, it is important to remember that this does not signal the beginning of a bargaining session.  Schools are not going to negotiate an award so that the bottom line becomes more favorable to you.  We make these awards, as I mentioned earlier, within the context of our enrollment goals, our financial resources, aid policies and strength of the admitted pool of students.  We do our best to help families afford the investment and we can consider changes in a family's situation or special circumstances, but our award reflects the help we can provide to each family within our means.

This is a very difficult time for many families and it can seem daunting to think about the cost of higher education.  But there is perhaps no greater investment we can make for our children and by considering all the possible ways we can gather resources - loans, private scholarships, work, etc - this investment can sometimes be more manageable than it might first appear.  Next time, we'll talk more about other ways to help finance an education and how you can assess the value of a school relative to those awards.  For now, good luck as our decisions begin to make their way to you. 

Let the madness begin...

The Dog Days of Admissions

Borrowing that phrase from my favorite sport, baseball, I refer to this time of year in our and many other admissions offices across the country, where we are spending everyday reading and reading applications.  In baseball, the phrase, "dog days" refers to the summer months of July and August, when the long season grinds on with games everyday in the hot summer weather.  For admission officers, it refers to the months of January and February, where every day seems the same - stacks of applications to read and make decisions on.  Not that I'm complaining - not at all.  Here at the University of San Diego we are blessed with over 13,650 applications, a 15% increase over last year's record total.  Once again, my staff and I are privileged to read these applications and we are so impressed with the academic accomplishments, extracurricular activities and overall excellence that you demonstrate.

These are challenging days, however.  Like many schools, USD is way up in the number and quality of applications it has received.  The size of our staff and the number of days we have to read hasn't changed, and so the math gets harder and harder to manage each year.  Last week, we sent out the last of our early action decisions and are now focused on the regular pool.  In my last posting I wrote about the process of making each of those applications complete - the work that goes into managing all those documents.  Today, I'd like to spend a bit of time on how my staff read all those applications - what we are looking for, how we make decisions, and the context in which those decisions are made. 

At USD, like at most schools, we start each admissions cycle with a set of goals.  The first goal, of course, is how many students we would like to enroll.  This is a function of our size and capacity and for us this year, we would like to enroll approximately 1100 new freshman.  Within that overall goal, however, are many other goals that reflect the composition of those 1100 students.  We expect the class to be academically excellent and therefore have some overall grade point average and test score goals.  It is important for us to have the class be a diverse mix of students - ethnically, geographically, socioeconomically and religiously.  Having a broadly defined diverse mix of students is one of the qualities that enhance the educational experience and provide our students with such a welcoming and inclusive community.  We would like to make sure that our 1100 students are reasonably distributed across our many outstanding academic programs.  In addition, we want to fill our Division I sport teams with student athletes and provide our performing arts programs with talented singers and dancers. 

As you can see, we have a lot of goals, not just a single number of students we want to enroll.  Similarly, most colleges and universities have many goals and they will differ based on each school's mission, values, and objectives.  These goals are important, because as my staff begins to review these 13,650 applications, these goals provide the framework for our decisions.  Let me try and illustrate this by taking you through the process my team takes with each application.


First, we are looking to enroll students who are academically strong.  We define that by the academic success and challenge a student has demonstrated in high school.  Therefore we spend the most time on the high school transcript.  With applications from thousands of high schools around the world, the first thing we do is try and understand the academic context of the high school.  Each school sends us valuable information about their academic environment - the grading scale, courses offered, how and if a rank is calculated, grade distributions - and these provide us with a local context in which to evaluate each student.  The staff may recalculate the grade point average, since many schools calculate this very differently.  We look at trends a student may have, how much they have challenged themselves, and overall academic performance.  This is the most important factor in our admissions decisions and, studies have shown, the best indicator of how successful a student will be in our competitive academic environment. 

The second factor we look at is the standardized test.  As the name implies, this provides us with a standard measure of how well students have done across the many different school environments we are looking at.  While there is no absolute score a student needs - no minimums or cutoffs - we know that students within a broad range of scores are likely to do well at USD.  There are reasons to not like standardized tests, but used properly, in conjunction with a student's grades, they do help predict student success in college.

The grades and the test scores provide us with an academic picture of each of our applicants, but like most highly selective schools, many of our students are academically qualified.  Here's where the institutional goals and objectives I mentioned earlier come into play.  Within the large group of academically qualified students, the staff now reads the application trying to identify the students who we feel make the best match - who has the mix of personal and extracurricular qualities that will help us enroll the best class.

These qualities are a little harder to identify than simply grades and test scores, and our staff spends a lot of time reading the applications to get this information.  We identify "match" by reading the essay, reviewing the list of activities and interests a student has, reading the letters of recommendation, and overlaying our goals for the class.  For USD, we place a high value on community service and it is an activity that the majority of our students participate in.  As we look at a student's application, we are going to look at how much community service has been a part of their life and to what degree they have shown a commitment to it.  Similarly, we value leadership experiences, international experiences, athletic accomplishments, and a record of employment. 

This doesn't mean that students that list lots of activities are going to get in over someone who may only be involved in one or two things.  There is no one activity that gets more favor over another.  Instead, the staff is looking for students who have shown a balance of academic success and extracurricular involvement.  We read the application to get a sense of personal situations and circumstances that may have affected a student's ability to get involved. And finally, we look to see how a student's interests and involvement might contribute to the community that we have on our campus.

Each college and university engages in some form of the above process based on their own goals and priorities.  My staff goes through a lot of training on how to measure these qualities, how to dig through the application to find the information, and ultimately, how to make decisions that allow us to meet our goals.  It is hard work, and each member of my team is reading 25 - 30 applications a day, every day, for the months of January and February.  It is exhausting and tiring work, but as I mentioned in the beginning of this post, it is incredibly rewarding.

The final thing I will say about our decisions is that as you can see, there are a lot of factors involved.  Shortly, we are going to be sending these decisions to students and some will be admitted, others offered a place on the wait list, and others denied admission.  There will be students who are incredibly excited and lots of disappointment.  One of things I emphasized to my own son, and to many parents, is that being denied admission to a school is not a reflection on the student (or the parent).  Because colleges - certainly selective colleges - are looking to enroll relatively small classes from very large applicant pools, not being selective simply means that at that point in time, a school felt that there were other students who were a better fit.  This is, after all, about finding the right match, and while USD might not end up the right match for you, there are schools out there that will.  As we get through these "dog days of admissions", I wish you all the best of luck in finding the right one for you.

Next time we will talk about affording college and how financial aid works.  In the meantime, please remember that a very important deadline is coming, and that is the date to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).   Our priority deadline is March 2, so if you haven't started yet, please do so.  You can access the form at http://www.fafsa.ed.gov/.

Until then, good luck.  I have files to read in the meantime!

The Waiting is the Hardest Part

Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a very restful and joyous holiday.  The start of the new year brings with it lots of hope and excitement, along with many resolutions (one of mine is to keep to a more regular schedule with this blog!). It also brings us back to the stress of applying to college and for many of you, the anxiety of waiting for your decision.

About 1500 of our 4000-plus Early Action applicants received their acceptance letter before the holidays and I heard from many of you about how excited and relieved you were to hear the good news before your break.  For the rest of you, the wait continues and it is hard to understand sometimes why some hear before and others not until after.  I have heard from some of you, too, and in this post I want to try and explain what's been happening on our side of the process and what "not hearing" really  means.

Like many schools across the country, USD is experiencing a large increase in the number of students who have applied early.  For us, we have 15% more early applications than we did last year.  That's good news - sort of - but it does create some logistical challenges for us.  Because our deadline is the same - November 15th - and the Christmas holiday is still in the same place on the calendar, there are fewer days to review a whole lot more applications.

When you hit submit on the Common Application (CA), that's when our processing of your file begins.  Each day, we go to the CA site and download all the applications that were submitted the day before.  There is a process that then loads all the data into our computer system, creating an application record for you, assigning an ID number, and records what we have received.  Some of the documents we need come to us from different sources - your high school transcript and test scores, for example.  Sometimes these come in electronically, other times through the mail and sometimes they actually arrive in our office before your application does.  Our staff pours through thousands of documents each day and tries to match up all those materials and record each record.  Once all the required documents are received and entered, the status of your application changes from "Incomplete" to "Complete".

This process can take a long time.  Our mail center brings the admissions office dozens of mail bins every day.  They contain those transcripts, letters of recommendations, and essays, but they also contain college transcripts for our transfer students, letters to the staff, and of course, junk mail.  All of it needs to open, sorted, date stamped and organized.  USD has an electronic filing process, meaning our documents are scanned and electronically filed.  Our scanners work constantly during the day (and nights, during the busiest times) and the staff takes those electronic images and matches them up to your "file".  If your school sends us a transcript on a Monday morning, for example, and it goes through the US Postal Service, it will take quite a journey to ultimately make it into your file.  Let's say it gets picked up from your high school on Monday afternoon and processed at the local mail center the next day.  It makes its way through the post office process and to our local center in San Diego.  If all goes well, it gets to our mail room by Wednesday or Thursday and is put in one of those huge mail bins with all the other mail.  On Friday, it finally is delivered to our office.  Depending on how much mail we receive that day, it will get opened, date stamped and alphabetized that day.  It probably will be a day or more until it is scanned into our imaging system, and then at least several more days - or even up to two weeks - before it is matched up to your particular record. 

Each day, several hundred applications become complete.  At the same time, each day, several hundred more applications are downloaded. This on-going process is repeated over and over again during December, January, and February until finally, all the documents have been matched up with all the applications.  It is slow and tedious work, but our staff does an amazing job of turning what often seems like chaos into an organized, efficient system of processing over 13,000 freshman applications.  A similar process is happening at every college to which you applied.  Even if you applied to several colleges at the same time and your high school sent all the transcripts at exactly the same time and the College Board or ACT sent your scores to each one at exactly the same time, the odds are that your application would become complete at different times at each school.  You will likely hear from some before others and it might actually turn out that one or more of your schools will say they never got all the material.  It does happen - fortunately not very often.

So let me come back to the point of why some of you heard before the holiday and some are still waiting.  From the time we began processing early action files in late October, we were able to go through the above process and make about 2000 of our 4000-plus applications complete in time to review them and make a decision (next time I will talk more about what that process is like - how we review each application and make a decision).  We did have several hundred applications that we decided to either not accept or defer to the regular pool, but I believe that we shouldn't send those decisions out before the holiday so we held on to those.  For the rest of you, your application is somewhere along that process and over the holidays, hundreds and hundreds of your applications have become complete and have been reviewed. 

We will be mailing more decisions - admit, deny and hold decisions - later this week and will have one more final early action mailing before the 15th of January.  For those applications that are still incomplete, you will be notified this week as to what we are still missing.  In any case, if you haven't heard yet it doesn't have anything to do with the strength of your application or how likely it is you are going to get in. It just means we are working on it, as fast as we can.

Waiting is hard, especially for something as important as your college decision.  If you are still waiting, I hope you can relax a little and this has helped you understand what it happening to your application.  If you still have questions, please let my staff and I know.

In the meantime, visit your MySanDiego portal and check your status.  Get back to your school work because senior grades still matter.  And keep checking the mail (and your email).

Next time - how we make decisions.

Steve

Early Application Plans: A Choice Not a Statement

When I last posted, I was on my way to St. Louis for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling conference. That seems like such a long time ago. Since then, I have been to Denver, Hawaii (recruiting, not vacationing, although I have a hard time convincing my staff), and Washington, D.C. My team has been travelling too, visiting schools and attending college fairs all across the US and the world. Hopefully you have had the chance to meet with them in New England, Florida, Louisiana, Illinois, Texas, Washington, Oregon, or Arizona, just to name a few of the places they’ve been. We have spent time in Hong Kong, the Middle East, and India, too. We have been meeting with students, counselors and parents, like you, helping them understand more about the University of San Diego and the application process in general.


Wherever we have travelled, students and parents share a common trait – they’re anxious about applying to college (and paying for it, which is a future post). The perception is that there is so much riding on this collection of forms and information and the anxiety is fueled by all sorts of wild stories about how the slightest misstep can ruin one’s chances of getting into the college of their dreams. The fact is that while it is important, there are some very basic things students can do to submit a strong application and most schools and colleges look at the substance of the information provided, and are not looking for ways to trip up applicants and find fault with how they completed the application.

So now that your student has taken ownership of the process – hopefully (see last post) – let’s look at one of the most common questions and areas of concern surrounding the completion of the college application.

Should I apply early or regular? There are a variety of different “Early” options that schools use. The most common are Early Decision and Early Action. Early Decision is a binding agreement between student and college that says that if a student applies and is accepted through such a plan, they will commit to that school. In fact, according to the NACAC guidelines I referenced last time, the student will be asked to withdraw their application to any other schools they applied to and the High School counselor will only send one mid year and final transcript. This is obviously a very limiting option and should be used only for students who are absolutely sure of where they want to go and who may not be as concerned about financial aid. Because of the early nature of this plan, families won’t know about financial aid at the time they commit.

Early Action is quite different and is the plan used by USD. This option allows a student to apply early (November 15th in our case) and they will find out earlier what the decision is (no later than January 15th in our case; many will hear before the Christmas holiday). However, the big difference with this option is that students still have until May 1 to make their final decision. The advantages of early action are that first of all, students get these applications out of the way and they can move on with their senior year and all the other things competing for their time and attention. Second, students will find out earlier whether they have been admitted or not, relieving some of the anxiety of waiting, and because they know where they stand, families can plan for campus visits well in advance.

From the college’s perspective, early action provides some benefits, too. It allows us to start reviewing applications earlier. This is important, especially when you consider the time it takes to process, read, and decide on over 12,000 applications. For USD, last year about 3400 – or 28% - of our applications were early. This allowed the staff and me an extra month or two of reading and decision making before our regular deadline of January 15th.

So, back to the original question, should a student apply regular or early? I would say it depends on a couple of factors. First, it depends on where a student is in their college search. If they have a set of schools picked out and are fairly comfortable with them as choices, applying early might be a good idea. If they still aren’t sure and haven’t really settled on a list yet, then maybe they should wait for the regular process. Also, students should feel pretty comfortable with the admissions criteria at the schools they are applying early to. At USD, it isn’t any easier or harder to be accepted early, but it is important to note that one of three decisions will be made. First, of course, a student may be admitted. In some cases, we will deny a student if we feel they are really not competitive. We think it’s important to let them know so they can move on to some other choices. Finally, we may defer a student to the regular applicant pool. This will happen if a student’s academic measures – grades and test scores – are a little lower than our general averages, or if a student has a steep upward trend in their grades. We may be unsure how many total applications we may get, so we may not be able to know where a particular student fits academically. By deferring the student, we will ask for the senior grades and review the student again with the regular pool. If a student feels like maybe their grades and scores are not as strong as the school may like, or they have that upward trend, perhaps applying during the regular pool would be better.

For many, the decision whether to apply early or not is a much more practical one. Fall sports, concerts, marching band and any number of other activities during this time of year often leave a student with absolutely no time left over to think about college applications. For these students, using the time over the Christmas holiday and winter break to focus on the application and essay will be the best use of their time and allow them to do the best job on them. Last year, when my son was going through this he was involved in marching band and he had tournaments and games every weekend. He also wasn’t ready to consider an early option, so he worked on his applications over Thanksgiving and Christmas (with just a little nudging from Dad).

Students should talk with their high school counselor or the admissions representatives at the schools they’re considering because there can be some other advantages or disadvantages of applying early action to that particular school. If this is an option you’d like to consider for USD, our early action deadline is November 15th.

Applying early or applying through the regular application deadline is an important decision and can have different implications at many schools. Whichever option your son or daughter chooses, I would offer this as this week’s takeaway. Don’t apply somewhere early because you think there is some sort of statement being made to the school about your child’s interest in that school (I’m talking about early action, not decision). No one should think that not applying early will in some way hurt their chances of getting in or say something about them as students. In fact, understanding your priorities, managing your time well, and careful planning are qualities that will serve students very well once they get into college and should be applauded, not viewed as a negative. Students should apply when they’re ready and when they can do the best job on the essay and personal statements. They should apply early action because it is the right decision for them – not for us. The process is stressful enough without reading too much into these application options. Finding the right set of schools, thoughtfully completing the applications and weighing all your options should be the focus right now. Of all the things that colleges look at when making our decision (a future blog topic), which application plan you chose is generally pretty far down the list (if it’s on the list at all).

At USD, we are getting ready to start reading those early applications – 1400 so far as of this morning – and next time, I will talk about what happens once you hit that submit button and how we get all those applications, test scores, essays, letters of recommendation and transcripts ready to be reviewed. It’s one of the mysteries surrounding this process and it is a remarkable set of activities. Stay tuned.

For now, it is good to be off the road, although I do miss Hawaii. Let the reading begin!