From the Director's View

A New Year, A New Title, the Same Amazing Place

2011-10-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

With the start of fall, even here in San Diego there are signs that things are changing. Of course, here it isn't so much the weather that gives us notice that summer is over (it's 80 degrees today!), but there are other ways to notice that change is in the air.

One way is to see all the new students on campus, still finding their way around and settling into the pace of college life. Our Torero football team (5-1 to start the year) taking on the Pioneer League is another sure sign that fall is here, as is the pending "midnight madness" that kicks off the men and women's basketball seasons. For those of us in the admissions and enrollment profession, the surest sign of fall is the start of the college recruitment season and that means lots of travel, campus visitors, and applications!

A lot has happened here at USD since we closed out the last admissions cycle on May 1 (or thereabouts). We enrolled the most academically talented group of new freshman in our history, raising the profile of the entering student's GPA and test scores considerably. The University has once again been recognized as one of the top 100 national universities in the country, and as one of the most beautiful campuses. Just recently, we were honored by being invited to the Ashoka Changemaker Campus Consortium, a select group of nine institutions from around the world. These campuses, through a combination of education, research and service opportunities, have established themselves as hubs of social innovation. I'll be writing more about what this means for our students - current and prospective - but it is a very special recognition for our campus.

This summer, there were some administrative changes that took place. After twelve years as Director of Admissions, I was humbled with the responsibility of being the Assistant Vice President for Enrollment, taking on a broader set of responsibilities. In addition, Minh Ha Hoang has been named the Director of Admissions, having served as the Associate Director for many years, a counselor before that, and as an undergraduate and graduate student before that. New staff, new responsibilities, new organizations - what does all that mean for prospective students and parents? Well, it means an even stronger commitment on our part to help families find the right fit and make the application and financial aid process as smooth as possible. It means that USD is coordinating its services and processes better with the intention of making this important transition to college easier. And it means that as you engage in this very stressful and very complicated process, there are people and offices that will offer assistance, guide you along the way, and attempt to make your experience with us the beginning of a long and special relationship.

Over the next few weeks and months, through this blog, Minh Ha, the admissions staff, and I will help explain how we can help, offering tips and advice on the process, explaining the issues of financial aid, early action, wait lists, and testing, as well as keeping you informed of important dates and deadlines. Along the way, we will also help convey what USD can offer you, ultimately helping you decide if this is the right place for you or not. After all, that is the ultimate bottom line for us and it should be for you, too.

While intended for parents, we hope students, counselors, and others will take advantage of what they find here. Please give us your ideas and feedback, and we welcome your comments. It's a new year, and we can't wait to see what changes it brings.

Steve

p.s. - look for our staff as they travel around the country. Check out this link to see where they are:

http://www.sandiego.edu/admissions/undergraduate/visit/usd_on_the_road.php

March Madness: College Admissions Style

2011-03-01T08:16:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

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!

Expectations: For Both of Us

2010-09-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

Next week, I head to St. Louis, MO for our professional association’s national conference. NACAC as it’s called, or the National Association for College Admissions Counseling is comprised of high school counselors, college admissions professionals and others involved in the transition from high school to college. Its members are “committed to maintaining high standards that foster ethical and social responsibility among those involved in the transition process”.

I mention that because many families don’t realize there are a set of professional guidelines that govern the work of colleges and universities in the recruitment, admissions, and financial aid processes. They provide rules and best practices for educators but also lay out expectations for students and parents, too. These guidelines are important and are intended to make sure the process is transparent, keeping the best interest of the student in mind.

As we start the admissions cycle together, I thought it would be helpful to go over a couple of these guidelines and help you understand what you can expect from our profession, but also from the University of San Diego. In addition, I’d like to offer a few suggestions about what you and your family can do to ensure that the next nine months or so are as productive, stress free, and successful as possible (including this week’s take-away!).

When you read most of the popular media and the stories surrounding the admissions process you can come away feeling as if it is shrouded in secrecy. I googled “college admissions advice” and got 561,000 results! Web sites named CollegeConfidential.com, howtogetin.com, and admissionschances.com, imply that somewhere, if you look hard enough, you’ll find all the secrets. (And by the way, I do not even remotely endorse any of those sites – I didn’t even open them up.) The fact is, there aren’t any secrets.

The practices outlined by NACAC and other organizations are in large part intended to demystify the process. For example, colleges and universities are bound to provide up-to-date information on our admissions requirements, costs, graduation rates, campus safety, programs offered, and a whole host of other statistics. These are found on our web sites and in our promotional material. The notion that some web site is going to have “all the inside scoop” is just plain wrong.

On the other side of that, however, is the student and family responsibility to know as much as possible about the schools they are considering. One of the reasons many families feel uncertainty is that they can become overwhelmed with all the information out there. That’s understandable – I just went through this process as a parent with my oldest son and even though I have done this for a living for the past 25 years, it was confusing keeping all the dates and deadlines straight. But like anything else, being organized and methodical in your college search will help. Keeping a notebook, or having a separate folder (electronic or paper) for each school will keep all that information organized.

Way beyond simply providing lots of information though, when your son or daughter begins making their list of schools, you should take advantage of the admissions professionals at those schools to provide assistance and answer all the questions you may have. Here at USD, every prospective student, whether they have applied yet or not, is assigned an admissions counselor. They are here to walk you through the process, provide details about admission requirements, scholarship opportunities and other information. If you haven’t yet been introduced to your counselor, you can visit our web site and find out who is your resource throughout the next several months. http://www.sandiego.edu/admissions/undergraduate/counselors/meet_counselor.php

The other resource you should absolutely draw upon is the expertise of your high school guidance counselor. They know from experience what many colleges are looking for, they can help identify a good “fit” for your son or daughter, and they can also help you understand their chances of being admitted based on other students from the school who may have applied and been accepted.

Your counselors and the admissions staff are here to help, but no matter where you seek advice, no admissions office or other professional should disparage any other school, or guarantee admissions or financial aid. The Statement of Principles and Good Practices also sets standards for deadlines, the most important of which is May 1 – the National Candidate Reply Date. This is in place so that colleges don’t apply undo pressure on families to pay their commitment deposit before they have had a chance to review all their admission and financial aid offers. The entire set of NACAC’s guidelines can be found at http://www.nacacnet.org/AboutNACAC/Policies/Pages/default.aspx.

On that same web site you will find the Student’s Rights and Responsibilities. These are intended to ensure that you and your student know what to expect and can be informed consumers of all this information. There are certain behaviors students are expected to follow as well, such as only depositing at one institution and of course, being truthful in completing the applications for admissions and financial aid.

This brings me to my last point and my take away for this week. Parents, before you go any further in this process, you should make it clear to your student – and to yourself – that THEY MUST OWN THIS PROCESS. You are there to help, as are the high school counselor, teachers and admissions officers. But in the end, it is the student who has to buy in to the final decision, and to do that – really, really, do that – they have to be the one to take responsibility for owning the process. That means THEY finalize the list of where to apply, THEY complete the application, THEY write the essay and decide which teachers to write their recommendations, and THEY keep track of the deadlines and requirements. Of course you can help, and should help, but part of this process is to begin – or continue – the transition from high school senior to young adult. That transition requires a certain amount of independence and responsibility.

My son and I had this conversation early on, and we made it clear that he needed to come up with a plan. I was going to help him in any way I could – provide information, help him research, arrange visits, be there to talk things through – but at the end of the day, he was the one going off to college and he had to live with the decision for the next four years. It had to be right for him.

It took awhile for him to get going on this ownership thing. I put a lot of sticky note reminders on his computer screen and sent more than a couple of texts reminding him of things that were coming up, but he eventually did take ownership. I helped him with his application, listened as he kicked around ideas about his essay, and of course paid for the application fees, but as the months passed, he took on the responsibility. Ultimately, we talked through his choices and the places he was admitted and one day, he confidently announced where he was going (which took both his Mom and me a bit by surprise). He never looked back and is very happy.

As I said in my last posting, this will all work out. It will work out a lot better when everyone involved understands both their rights and their responsibilities in the process.

In addition to using the comments feature, feel free to let me know your thoughts at spultz@sandiego.edu.

Overlapping Cycles: The End and the Beginning

2010-09-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

For me, this is the most exciting time in admissions. Here at USD, classes began yesterday and all the new students have arrived and we get to actually see the faces behind all those numbers and statistics we've been looking at for months and months. We know many of them - and their families - through our efforts over the past year or more and to see them on campus happy, excited and ready to go is a very rewarding feeling.

Our job in admissions, of course, is to bring in a new class every year. At USD, that means about 1140 new freshman and about 450 new transfer students this year. We are always proud of the young men and women we enroll, and this year's class is no exception. They are among the brightest class we have ever enrolled (as measured by SAT and GPA), the most ethnically diverse group in our history, and come from 42 states, 3 U.S. Territories and 22 countries. These students were selected from the largest applicant pool we have ever had - over 12,100 students applied for freshman admission this year. All in all, they are a wonderful group and our campus is excited to welcome them and help them achieve all of their goals and dreams.

All of our returning students are back, too, and it is equally rewarding to see them getting ready to resume their journey on campus. Many of them are getting ready to study abroad, take on an internship, declare their major, partner with a faculty member on a research project, or assume a leadership role in one of our campus organizations. They are taking full advantage of the opportunities that we talked about as they were looking at colleges, and to know that my staff and I played some small role in that is, well, priceless as the commercial says.

Along with those feelings of satisfaction and closure associated with our new and returning students is the excitement of starting the process all over again. While the rest of the campus is busy helping the new students settle in, the admission staff and I have been preparing to recruit the entering class of 2011. We have met with hundreds of rising seniors and their families all summer, planned our fall travel schedules and are ready to start visiting high schools and attending college fairs all across the country. We will start mailing information to your homes and it won't be long until we actually start reading applications! All of these activities, including this blog, are intended to build a relationship with each of you as you move through this journey of exploration and decision.

It is the overlapping of these cycles - one ending and one beginning - that is one of the main reasons I love my job so much.

Building relationships is at the core of what we do in admissions, and we want that relationship to be an interactive, engaging, and open one - regardless of where you or your son or daughter ends up. Through this blog, and the many interactions you will have with me and my staff, I hope we will be able to clarify some of the myths, misperceptions, and just plain wrong information that surround this process. Over the next nine months I will be posting thoughts every two or three weeks and addressing many of the most common sources of anxiety you are facing: how to select an appropriate set of schools, how to prepare the application, what happens once you submit the application and how decisions are made, paying for college and the process of scholarship and need-based aid, and ultimately, how to make that final decision. Each posting I hope to leave you with at least one takeaway that I think will help you and your family as you move toward that magical day of May 1 - the National Candidate Reply Date - when the decision gets made.

I will be writing from two perspectives - my role as Director of Admissions at USD and with my 25 years of experience at three different institutions and also as a dad who in 11 days (not that I'm counting) will bring his oldest son to college for the first time. Having just gone through this process and now faced with the reality of the whole thing, I can appreciate what you are all going through and will experience over the next several months. While primarily intended for parents, I hope this will be helpful to students and to high school counselors alike and I welcome your comments and questions.

So, as we start this new cycle together, and as I bring to a close my 25th admissions cycle I leave you with my first piece of advice, shaped more by my recent experience as a parent at the end of his family's own journey:

As stressful as things may seem now, things will all work out well in the end. There is not just one good match out there for everyone, but many good matches. Be open to the possibilities.

The cycle is beginning anew. Enjoy the ride!

Steve
spultz@sandiego.edu

The Aftermath and the Prelude

2010-04-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is a month since my last posting (this is harder to maintain than I thought!) and so much has happened. All our decisions - and those from most other schools - are out and now students and families are weighing their options, pouring over those financial aid awards, and in many cases dealing with the disappointment of the decision received.

Colleges, too, are dealing with the Aftermath. Here at USD, as I have mentioned before, we had over 12,100 applications and we read each and every one very carefully. My staff and I reviewed transcripts and read essays, poured over letters of recommendations, and ultimately, made a lot of very hard decisions. We know - and we know this going into the process - that we will disappoint a lot of people, but we also know that for the vast majority of students, things will work out. My colleague at the University of Southern California, Jerry Lucido, wrote a wonderful article talking about dealing with the rejection. It appeared in the Washington Post column, The Answer Sheet -
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/college-admissions/college-rejection-its-not-abou.html

Of course, the Aftermath applies to students who did get in, but may not have received a merit scholarship, or feel they deserve a higher one. These, too, are difficult decisions, as most schools - USD included - don't have enough resources to adequately recognize everyone we would like. We get letters everyday asking us to "take another look", and urging us to consider all sorts of factors. Believe me when I say, we did. Sometimes, there is new information that can really be helpful, but most of the time we are looking once again at a student's application that we have looked at several times before. Merit decisions often come down to very small nuances in an overall academic record. We realize the difficult financial situation families are in and wish we could do more but unfortunately, the reality is we will not likely be able to do much. We get so many of these letters, in fact, that we are getting ready to post some guidelines on our web site to help manage the expectations of families regarding appeals.

The Aftermath is tough on an admissions staff. In many cases we have been working with families for over a year, having met them at a college fair when the student was a junior. We may have met you on campus, or corresponded with you over a period of time. There is a lot of angst on our side of the desk too.

But the Aftermath slowly turns into the Prelude, and once the shock and disappointment subside, we all look with anticipation toward May 1. We just held our big campus event for admitted students, College Visiting Day, and were so excited and overwhelmed with our turnout! Thank you to those who attended - over 800 of you! Many of you have been attending similar events at other colleges, taking those tours, and looking at the schools a little differently than you did before. I know you are all weighing your options, trying to read your teenagers mind (at least I am!), hoping that it will all turn out well (which it almost always does).

The Prelude - this time between decisions and May 1 - for admissions officers is filled more with anxiety than anything. Questions such as, Did we admit enough or too many?, Will we end up over our goal or will we be going to the wait list? What about our quality, diversity, and other measures the campus expects will be represented in the class? I try to keep a low profile around campus these last couple of weeks, mostly to avoid the ever-present question - So how are the numbers? The answer for now is - we just don't know yet.

We will soon, and over the next three weeks we will continue to communicate with students and parents, host families on campus visits, review those appeals and, believe it or not, start preparing for the high school juniors starting their college search. I pay particular attention to our campus mail service, waiting everyday for the business reply envelopes to come in, signifying deposit commitments. Perhaps this is where the process comes full cycle - not long ago you and your son or daughter were waiting anxiously for the mail to bring the big envelope or small. Now, Directors everywhere are waiting for our mail and hoping it will bring the right kind of news.

I'll have one more post before May 1 and I will keep you posted on two fronts - how we are doing at USD and how my son's decision is coming along. I think we have a final choice, at least we did a few days ago, but I'll let you know. In the meantime, good luck and thanks for reading!

Steve
spultz@sandiego.edu

Financial Aid - Part II

2010-03-12T10:16:00.000-08:00

Well, once again, I am posting a little later than I expected, but we continue to be overwhelmed with making decisions on our applicant pool. To date, we have 12,085 applications - more than 1,000 more than last year! We have mailed our merit scholarships to the Early Action students, and have started to mail our regular decision admits and merit awards. This process will continue until next week (the week of March 15th) and then we will be mailing our deny and wait list letters. Hang in there if you haven't heard yet, we are working as fast as we can to complete our decisions.

I hope everyone completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by March 2, our priority deadline. As I mentioned in the last posting, this is the tool that determines your financial aid eligibility. Once admission notices go out, colleges begin using this information to put together a financial aid package and let you know what type - and how much - assistance is available. That's the subject of today's post - how colleges plan for helping families with the cost of attendance and what you should consider as you get these awards.

There has been a lot written about how the national economic situation affected colleges and universities last year. In fact, it was right about this time last year that the worst of the economic crisis was taking hold. In order to enroll our classes, many schools offered additional financial aid to help families and in addition, many more families were applying for and qualifying for need based aid (based on the FAFSA). For many colleges, additional aid was spent not only on the new entering students, but on returning students as well. The economic downturn affected everyone, and we remain committed to our current students in helping them stay enrolled. On top of all that, colleges were seeing their own investments - in endowments - decline tremendously and many rely on those investments for financial aid and other operational expenses.

The result of all that was many colleges far exceeding their anticipated financial aid expenditures. It is important to remember that when a school makes a financial aid offer, it is making a four year offer, as long as the family's income remains fairly constant. When we plan our budget here at USD, we make it for four years, so having a large overage in aid means carrying that throughout the four years a student is with us.

Some schools made out better than others and at USD, while we did experience a large financial aid deficit, we were able to overcome it through careful planning, cost cutting measures (not in student services) and a steady overall enrollment. As we begin to award for the new cycle, we - and most other colleges - do so against the backdrop of this recent history.

There's an interesting history of financial aid in this country (interesting may not be the word you would choose). Public and private schools have approached the topic differently at times, but there is no question that financial assistance has become one of the single largest expenditures that colleges have. There was a time when financial aid was mostly need based - that is, aid was available for families who did not have the resources to afford a college education. There was an underlying assumption that going to college was not only a private benefit but a public good. An educated workforce was better for the country and provided more job opportunities, upward mobility, etc. Going to college benefitted everyone.

By the early 1980's, the idea of merit aid - scholarships and programs that recognized academic performance and potential regardless of financial need - became more and more popular. Schools used these merit awards to offer a discount on their published tuition in order to lure the best students. This quickly became an expectation in the marketplace for high achieving students and was fueled by the rankings of colleges based in large part by the academic measures of GPA and test scores of the entering class. More aid was put into merit often resulting in less aid being available for need.

This - and many other factors - led to a shift from higher education seen as a public good to a private benefit. There was less and less public support for state and federal aid and the result has been higher tuition, more discounting based on merit, and an "arms race" of sorts among the more selective institutions (public and private). All of this brings us to today, with you wondering how you and your family are going to afford the acceptances that are arriving in the mail.

At the University of San Diego, we have offered a balance of merit aid and need based aid for many years. Trying to keep those in balance has been difficult. Here in California, with such a world class public education system, we compete for the best students with a system that costs much less. In addition, there are some of the finest private colleges in the world in our state and we are proud to say that we compete with all of them for students too. So we try to not only set our financial aid budget with an eye toward helping families, but toward being competitive in the market place, and we do that by looking at our cost and the value of our education.

First, as I have talked about earlier, there is a lot of demand for a USD education. We have room for about 1140 new freshman and we have over 12,000 applications. Our cost of tuition is in line with the other private schools that our students look at and we have kept our tuition increases moderate, in fact tuition for the 2010 school year will increase by only 3%. At the same time, we direct more and more of our budget toward both need based and merit based aid.

It is important to state that we also feel that the primary source of funding a student's education should rest with the family. Our aid program is meant to complement that funding. First, we do offer merit scholarships to about the top 35% of the entering class. There are varying amounts of merit scholarships and we try to look at factors such as the quality of coursework a student has taken, and of course, how well they have done. On top of that, we expect to spend over $7 million in need based aid on the entering class. For those families that qualify, there may also be federal and state money that is available.

In looking at your financial aid award, we encourage you to think about a couple of things. First, consider this as an investment, which it is. The education a student will receive, the experiences they will have, the preparation for their career they will get are part of that investment. Being able to graduate in four years, working with professors every day in the classroom, tapping into an alumni network are factors that you should consider as you think of your options. You also need to look at the realities of borrowing - the student and the parent. Students at USD borrow, on average, less than the cost of one year's tuition over their four years here.

By all means, compare the financial aid awards you recieve and consider the above factors as you weigh your options. Of course, in the end, each family has to make the choice that is in their best interests. But please do consider the investment and think about what adds value to the schools you are looking at. Over the next few weeks, you will be getting lots of mail from us, focusing on the value of a USD education. There will be emails, phone calls, and events on campus as well. By May 1, we hope it will be clear, to at least 1140 of you, that the value of the experience your son or daughter will have here is well worth the investment.

Till next time,

Peace and good luck.

Financial Aid - Part I

2010-02-16T07:44:00.000-08:00

In baseball, the "dog days of summer" refers to the portion of the season that seems to go on forever - late July and August where teams play every day during a long season and the daily grind and heat of summer takes its toll on players. In college admissions, these are the "dog days", when counselors are reading hundreds and thousands of applications day after day. They just keep coming, and at USD our total is close to 12,000 (11,930 as of today). My staff is making great progress and these are wonderful applicants. We are delighted to be the choice of so many excellent students, and we are on target to start mailing our regular decisions and merit scholarship awards in early March. I know you are all waiting - it won't be long now!

This is also a very important time in terms of your planning for the next four years. We are fast approaching the deadline for submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, otherwise known as the FAFSA. For USD, our deadline is March 2, and it is a priority deadline if you are hoping to be considered for any type of need based financial assistance. Financial aid is a critical component of the college choice process for many families, and there has been much written about the availability - or lack thereof - of aid and the corresponding rising cost of higher education. These stories, in addition to the financial realities facing so many families, make this one of the most stressful and confusing parts of the whole process, and is the topic of today's blog. Hopefully, you'll have a better understanding of the critical role aid plays in a college's ability to enroll its class.

Soon, families will receive the important decision from their college choices. Once the "big envelope" arrives, students can expect to receive lots of follow up from colleges - emails, phone calls, mailings, invitations to college events - all intended to help move a student toward enrollment. Perhaps the biggest tool available to colleges and universities in getting the right mix and number of students to enroll is the use of scholarships and financial aid.

There are many types of financial assistance. Schools like USD that have competitive Division I athletic programs offer athletic scholarships to fill the spots on our teams. These are not based on family income, but talent and usually are administered directly by the coaches and the athletic department. These can be full scholarships or partial awards, and may also be combined with other types of aid.

Many schools, USD included, also offer what are called merit scholarships, or academic awards. These are also typically not based on a family's income but instead on a student's academic performance in high school. Grades, quality of classes taken and standardized test scores are the basis of these awards and they are usually awarded by the admissions office. This is the case at USD. We look at the strength of our applicants, identify a portion of our total aid budget and award merit scholarships to a number or percentage of our incoming class (more on how we identify how much later). For us, these awards will start to be mailed during the first week of March.

For many schools, the largest type of assistance provided is through the need-based financial aid process, and that is determined by the results of the FAFSA form mentioned earlier. Hopefully, you have or are starting to complete this form (http://www.fafsa.gov/) and will submit it by the appropriate deadline. For the University of San Diego, our priority deadline is March 2. There is a series of questions that ask for family income, assets, household expenses and other items, and these questions become the inputs for a federal formula that calculates an Expected Family Contribution (EFC). This EFC, as the name implies, determines how much each family is expected to contribute to their son's or daughter's education. If you're like most families, you will neither like, nor agree with the results, but never the less, this EFC is what is sent to the colleges that you are considering.

This contribution is then used by the colleges to determine your financial need. It is really important to remember that your need is determined not only by the results of the FAFSA, but also by the cost of attendance at the school's you are considering. For example, if your family contribution is $10,000, you will be expected to contribute that much each year for tuition and college expenses. This works out to approximately $833 per month, or $192 per week (sometimes, it helps to break it down in smaller numbers). Let's use some examples to show how much need can change based on different types of institutions.

For example, one of the schools you're considering is an in-state public school and the tuition is $9,000. According to the results of the FAFSA, your contribution is $10,000, so you would not likely be eligible for any need based aid (I'm not including room and board costs for this example, but those need to be figured in and are generally similar at public and private schools). Another school you are considering is a private school, like USD (otherwise you probably wouldn't be reading this!) where tuition is likely to be approximately $36,000. Your expected contribution is still $10,000, so your need to attend USD is $26,000.

Here's where institutional policies - and enrollment management (see previous posts) - come into play. Institutions direct lots of money - several million dollars each year - on helping to meet financial need and on merit scholarships. In most cases, they are used in combination, along with federal and state money, outside scholarships and other sources, to create a financial aid package. This package may or may not close the entire need amount, but it will provide you with a detailed listing of how much aid you will qualify for and what will be your final cost to attend. Some students, if they are a strong fit academically and otherwise for an institution (remember when I wrote about institutional priorities in a previous post?), may get a package completely covering their demonstrated need, others, maybe only a portion. In any event, by meeting that priority deadline for completing the FAFSA, you will be ensured of getting the maximum amount of aid available.

Financial aid awards generally are sent after the decision letters are mailed. We try and ensure that long before the May 1 commitment date, you have all your acceptances and all your financial aid awards so that you can make the best decision you can.

That's a lot of information! In the next post, I will go into a bit more detail about financial aid and scholarships from the university's perspective - how we arrive at how much to spend, the mix of merit vs. need aid, and also some of the current news surrounding the impact the economy has had on the whole process. Of all the information in here, I hope you all remember that MARCH 2 is the priority deadline for completing the FAFSA, so good luck. If it's any consolation (and I know it probably isn't), I will be completing the FAFSA this weekend, as my oldest son is a senior in high school and anxiously awaiting his decisions, too.

Good luck and until next time,

Peace

It's Not Just Who Gets In, But How Many...Part II

2010-01-25T17:36:00.000-08:00

Since the last time I posted, things have really exploded here at the University of San Diego - application-wise. While we were expecting to be ahead in applications by about 5 - 7%, in reality we are currently 12% ahead of where we were last year at this time, and well on our way to reaching 12,000 applications! With our goal of enrolling 1140 new freshman, we have some difficult decisions to make (and lots of them!).

In my last posting I talked about the art and science behind how many students an institution must take in order to enroll their class. With the increase in applications that we - and many others - are seeing in this admissions cycle, this decision about how many to take becomes an even more difficult task. Clearly, students are applying to lots of schools, not sure of where they might get in, what the public colleges may do with regard to enrollment, or how finances might affect their final choice. All very legitimate concerns. What these increased application numbers do is actually make the process harder for everyone to predict.

As my staff reviews these applications- and as I mentioned in an earlier post, they take great care to consider all the material a student submits - they are of course looking for academic achievement in the classroom first and foremost. Some of our decisions are relatively easy, in that there are many students with exceptional academic records applying to USD. Some of our decisions, unfortunately, are relatively easy for the opposite reason. We have some students who apply who are academically not prepared to handle the rigors of our curriculum. But as we make our way through this mountainous pile of applications, there are many, many applications that are not so obvious. Here's where the "admission's math" of how many to take meets the individual stories and accomplishments of our applicants.

Our staff and many across the country are truly impressed with so many of our young people who are applying to college. They balance strong academic programs with impressive extracurricular activities, are committed to making a difference in the world through service, and are involved in their schools and communities. Many of them do this while dealing with incredible personal issues - family, illness, and death - any number of things that have a huge impact on their lives. As we read these files, we can't help but be impressed and in many cases inspired.

I mentioned last week our institutional priorities that we seek to consider in our admission decisions. Enrolling a diverse class, filling or restricting certain majors, or having more out-of-state students, for example, are among the priorities that many colleges bring to the admissions process. As we read applications, we look to find students who will not only contribute to these priorities, but who will also most likely benefit from our programs and faculty.

So our admitted student pool begins to be filled with those who have the strongest academic credentials, those who most match our institutional priorities, those who we think will bring unique talents and gifts to our campus, and those we think will most benefit from what we have to offer. There are also those incredibly inspiring stories that we want to find room for, and students the staff have worked with for months and months during the recruitment process. As you can perhaps begin to imagine, the pool starts to fill up awfully quickly.

So how do we know when to stop admitting? I mentioned last time we try and estimate how many of our admitted students will take us up on our offer. This math depends on the type of students we have in our respective "pools". Stronger academic students may "yield" at a lower rate - they have the most options and often receive the most financial incentive through merit scholarships. At some institutions, distance may play a factor in yield - the further away from campus, the less likely they are to enroll. At others, certain majors yield higher or lower, etc. We take our applicant pool and measure its relative strength, its composition, the historic yields of all those groups, and arrive at a number, or more likely a range. This represents how many we can take.

Then the really hard decisions get made. Depending on how that math works out, we may not be able to find a place for all of those inspiring stories. Students we have come to know through the process and feel would be a great fit may end up on the wait list. In the end, ideally, we end up with a group of young men and women who are a blend of all these, but what we also end up with is another group of equally impressive young men and women who are left out (or on the wait list, which results in much the same feeling).

Some of our early action students have already experienced this "math" in action, unfortunately. I hope I have conveyed that while enrollment managers talk about this in terms of numbers, it is in fact a highly personal - and sometimes painful - process of making choices. The more selective the school, the more difficult those choices become.

My next topic will be to talk about some of the issues surrounding financial aid and the extent that universities help families with the cost of attendance. This will be timely as the deadline for completing the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) is coming up for many of us (March 2 in our case). Again, feel free to let me know if you have questions or comments, or even suggestions for additional blogs. Good luck to you all and now it's back to reading - and deciding.

Peace,

Steve

It's Not Just Who Gets In, But How Many...Part I

2010-01-08T10:07:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year and I hope 2010 is getting off to a great start. We enjoyed a nice break over the holiday but are back at the task of selecting the class for the fall. In my last posting, I talked about the mechanics of our application review - how we assemble all those applications and get them to our readers, as well as how they get reviewed. That process is still going on, not only for some remaining early action candidates, but for our very large and growing regular pool of applicants. In fact, we ended up about 13% ahead of last year's record number of early action applications (3461) and are currently 5% ahead in terms of regular decision applications. While these numbers are good news for us, indicating that USD is becoming a more popular and desirable place for more and more students, it also creates a number of challenges for us as we consider our admissions decisions. As the title of this week's entry indicates, figuring out how many students to take is a complex issue that enrollment officers across the country are trying their best to predict.

We hear all the time about hard it is to get into college, but the reality is that most colleges admit the majority of students who apply. According to recent data from the US Department of Education, the average acceptance rate at four-year colleges is 66.8 percent. Obviously, this varies greatly from the most selective schools to other, much less selective institutions, but is still an important factor for families to consider. Another recent trend is that students are, on average, applying to many more schools than before. Our professional association, the National Association of College Admission Counseling reports that in 2009, approximately three-quarters of four-year colleges and universities reported an increase in the number of applications from the previous year. The convergence of these and other data points surrounding applications, acceptances and enrollment create a dilemma for enrollment managers at many institutions - how many students should you accept in the spring in order to end up with the number of enrolled students you need in September?

For many of us, especially residential communities, we have a finite number of spaces that we can accommodate in the freshman class. As we plan for the admissions cycle, we start with that number, but we also would like that number to include a mix of students that match our institutional priorities and missions. For example, many schools look to have an ethnically diverse student body, a mix of international students, or a blend of students from different parts of the country. There may be certain majors that are impacted or, conversely, that need more enrollment. Gender, athletics, religion, academic quality (grade point average and test scores) are all factors that schools use to "shape" their respective classes.

Why that's important is because in order to end up with the right number and mix of students, we have to predict how many of our admitted students will take us up on our offer of admission (often referred to as the yield), and therefore have to predict how many students with those characteristics to accept. Since more students are applying to more colleges, it is increasingly difficult for enrollment managers to predict how many might enroll. That number, the yield, also varies greatly from school to school and is affected by a school's location, the amount of financial aid awarded, and dozens of other factors.

For example, at USD we are looking to enroll a class of about 1140 new freshman. In order to end up with that number, we have to predict how many to admit. Historically, we enroll approximately 20% of those we admit. If that number seems low, it is important to know that on average, our students apply to 11 schools and are admitted to nine of them. They have amazing choices, including some of the finest public universities in the country here in California (UCLA, Berkeley, UC-San Diego), as well as other outstanding private schools (Stanford, USC). Knowing that, we anticipate having to admit about 5700 students. Let's say we have a higher than expected yield, say 22%. If we admit those same 5700 students, we would have a class of 1250. That would be a huge problem for our residence halls and classrooms, not to mention parking! On the other end, if we have 2% fewer students that enroll, our class would only be 1026. I don't even want to think about what would happen then.

Next week, I will talk more about this idea of how many students to take and relate it to our admissions decisions. That's all for this week's enrollment management 101 lesson, but I hope that gave you some things to think about. Feel free to email me if you have questions or comments. We will be wrapping up our Early Action decisions this week and mailing them early next so hang in there if you haven't heard yet. For those of you regular applicants, our staff is ready to read your files next.

Peace,
Steve

The Other Side of the Submit Button

2009-12-11T14:41:00.000-08:00

This was an exciting week at USD. We just mailed the first 1200 early action admit letters and hopefully these students will get the good news before the holiday. We still have over 2300 early action decisions to still make and send out, but we are off to a great start. For many families, especially the students, one of the most stressful times of the whole process is the waiting. From the time they hit that submit button from home until the time a decision arrives in the mail (or by email, depending on the school) seems like an eternity. An awful lot happens on the other end during that time and depending on the size of the institution, it is an amazing process that to outsider might look like chaos.

At the University of San Diego, we receive over 11,000 applications for the freshman class. When an application arrives at our office, usually electronically, it goes through an assembly-line like process that ensures that the information is recorded in our computer system, documents such as transcripts and letters of recommendation that might have come in separately are matched up, and a complete application is made available to the readers as soon as possible. Sounds pretty simple, but think about 11,000 applications and add to that at least 11,000 transcripts and test scores. Most students send at least two letters of recommendation and an essay. Many students use the Common Application and we have a one page supplement that goes with that. Add all that up and it means that almost 100,000 pieces of paper will pass through our office in approximately four months. While much of it is handled electronically, and at the University of San Diego we use scanning technology which creates an electronic image of all that paper, it still requires a lot of organization and time, not to mention an army of student workers to make it all happen. Imagine what that looks like at schools that get even more applications!

The reason I share that with you is to help you understand the realities behind the scenes and why it seems to take so long to make a decision. Sometimes we can't always tell you whether the application is complete or not, and while we know that is frustrating, it is a very fluid process and a single piece of paper may take awhile to get where it belongs. Our staff and those of universities across the country, eventually get it all matched up and then we can start reviewing your student's credentials.

The evaluation process works differently at each school, but at USD, this is a very personal process. Each of our counselors has a specific territory and they read the applications from that area. If you want to find your counselor, visit http://www.sandiego.edu/admissions/undergraduate/counselor/staff.php.

Because we are selective, the first thing we do is review the academic record by carefully evaluating the high school transcript. Because so many schools calculate grades differently, it is often necessary to recalculate a grade point average. We look at the type of classes the student took and whether they were able to take advantage of honors or advanced placement courses. Each high school also provides us with information about what courses are offered, the percentage of students that attend four-year colleges, and other background information that helps our staff provide a local context to the grade point average. Again, this is helpful because students come from such different high school environments.

In addition to the high school transcript, we are looking at the standardized test scores, the letters of recommendation and the writing sample, or essay the student submitted. At USD, we are also looking at the application and trying to determine what other personal qualities a student may be contributing to our campus. We try and measure those qualities by focusing on a students' involvement in activities, community service, leadership, and special talents. These are gleaned from the questions asked on the application, information provided by the student, and through comments made on the letters of recommendation. This is a thorough review that every applicant goes through and the counselors are spending many of their waking hours on this process. In order to get through the large number of applications we have, it is a common practice that our counselors often read at home during these peak months and are not in the office for three or four days a week. We began to review our early action applications in November and the staff will continue to review files until we are done - hopefully by the middle of March. It is a long process, but we try and ensure that everyone gets a fair and thorough evaluation.

Once that evaluation is complete, files are typically passed on for a final decision. Some students are what we would consider "clearly admissible" based on their academic record and the counselor review and are admitted. Others we find are not prepared to handle the work they can expect at USD and are denied admission. For the majority of our applicants, they fall somewhere in the middle, and applications are then reviewed by at least one other person and I am personally involved in many of these decisions.

Once all of that is done, and we are ready to send out our decisions, we have to manually enter those into our student data base and generate the letters. We choose not to send these electronically but to convey this very important decision through the mail, and we take great care to make sure the correct letter ends up in the right envelope (admissions nightmare!). This week, I personally hand-signed those 1200 Early Action letters and they are carefully brought to the mail room where they make their way to students all across the world.

So, as you anxiously wait for the mail each day, please know that at USD, and admission offices across the country, hard working staffs are busy pouring through documents, thoroughly reading all those pieces of paper you sent, and doing our best to make sure you get your decision in as timely a way as possible.

More on the decisions we make next time. Until then, I hope the mail arrives with good news, and I wish all of you a very happy holiday.

Peace,
Steve

'Tis The Season...

2009-12-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

Now that Thanksgiving is past and many are focused on the holiday season ahead, college admission offices are gearing up for a very different holiday experience, one that will last well into the new year. It's the application reading season and it is a process that affects millions of young people across the country (and the world). It also has a huge impact on college administrators, high school counselors, parents and many others associated with the college selection process. The annual ritual can be largely misunderstood, even by those who are close to the process, and while I have no illusions about making sense of it all, I hope this written exchange helps answer at least some questions about how it all works.

When I entered the admissions profession 23 years ago, I could never have imagined the concept of blogging. Even within the last two or three years, as I began reading blogs on ESPN.com and Baseball America.com, it never occurred to me that I might soon be writing one myself. But here I am, entering this new age of communications and with the help of my staff in the Admissions office, blogging.

My hope is that I can communicate with parents, counselors, students and others who are in the midst of this experience and perhaps shed some light on what is often a process cloaked in mystery. The reality is that the process - at least at most private colleges and universities - is not that mysterious at all. It is complicated by the fact that many schools do things differently and most are not very forthcoming about what they actually do. The work done by admission offices across the country is hard work and done by very dedicated, caring individuals who are trying to balance their own sense of fairness with the realities of the institutions they work for. It is complicated, tedious, stressful and often emotional.

Over the next six months I hope to engage folks in a conversation about selecting a college - applying, being admitted or denied, and finally choosing. In addition to coming at this wearing my professional admissions hat, I am also experiencing this as a parent of a high school senior (it's much easier as a Director of Admissions). I have many topics in mind - testing, how applications are processed and readied for reading, the deliberations, identifying institutional priorities, paying for college - I also hope to talk a lot about finding the right fit and not worrying about all the wrong reasons to choose a college. I also want to respond to questions and address concerns/topics that you might have as well.

If you're a parent and have never followed a blog before (join the club!), just check back every week and see where the conversation takes us. Feel free to post a comment or email me with your questions. Together we can make our way through file review season and come out the other side with a better understanding of what happened. My holiday wish, as always this time of year, is that all our students find a good fit.

Next week, I'll take you inside our admissions processing area and let you know what happens when students hit that "submit" button.

Until then, enjoy the season.

Steve