With 2024 fast approaching, it’s time to take a look back at forces and factors that continue disrupting the college admissions process. Later this week, stay tuned for our predictions for the new year and reflections on this past year at Top Tier Admissions.
2023: LOOKING BACK
Supreme Court overturns legality of race-conscious admissions
Last June, the Supreme Court overturned more than 40 years of case law that has consistently confirmed the legality of race-conscious admissions. In their 6-3 vote on both Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v University of North Carolina, they restricted the ability of colleges and universities to consider a student’s race or ethnicity in their review of applicants for admission.
Admissions leaders across the country had been preparing for this inevitability for years. Despite the reversal of decades of case law that allowed for the consideration of race in a holistic admissions process, top colleges and universities had no plans to lessen their commitment to recruiting and admitting talented students from a diverse array of backgrounds and experiences.
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Will legacy preferences end?
Just a few days after the Supreme Court overturned the use of race in admissions, the Boston-based group Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to challenge Harvard’s admissions practices yet again. This time, for favoring children of alumni.
Growing calls to end this decades-old practice picked up steam but only a few colleges and universities publicly announced the end of legacy preferences in their admissions practices: Wesleyan, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Pittsburgh, joining schools like Pomona, Johns Hopkins, and Amherst, as well as large public flagships like University of California, University of Texas, and University of Georgia, and Colorado public colleges and universities.
The most highly selective colleges and universities who will face the most pressure to do so will likely step back from the process quietly and gradually, while others will remain more tight-lipped about their legacy and donor preferences.
Redoubled efforts on building a diverse applicant pool
Admitting a talented and diverse class is only possible if you attract a talented and diverse applicant pool. In light of the Supreme Court’s decisions, colleges have strengthened their partnerships with national community organizations like QuestBridge, Posse, and College Horizons and an array of local grassroots organizations to reach talented students from underrepresented backgrounds and communities.
This month, we saw just how top schools are leveraging QuestBridge matches to front-load their classes with under-represented students. QuestBridge’s 50 college partners matched with 2,242 Finalists, who are recognized as Match Scholarship Recipients. This is a 28% increase over last year, the highest number of Match Scholarship Recipients to date for QuestBridge.
Expanding Aid: Money Talks
UVA and Duke are examples of two universities who have poured additional resources into need-based aid in order to attract and support students from low and middle-income families and help bolster efforts to enroll a more diverse student body.
Last June, Duke University announced that it was expanding its efforts to make higher education accessible to more families by providing free tuition to students from North Carolina and South Carolina whose families earn less than $150,000 per year. The new grants took effect in the fall 2023 semester and benefited all eligible current students and first-year enrollees. Duke, which saw its Class of 2028 ED applications soar nearly 30 percent over last year, points to the impact of this new initiative as one key to its rising application numbers.
Just this month, UVA announced that the university will now cover the full cost of tuition and fees for in-state undergraduate students with a family income of less than $100,000, up from $80,000. And UVA will now cover the full cost of tuition, fees, room and board for Virginians from families with incomes of less than $50,000. The previous level for covering the full cost of attendance was for Virginia families with income of less than $30,000.
Merit aid – scholarships awarded to students based on academic and extracurricular achievements – has surged in the last decade. According to a recent U.S. News survey, the average merit award to full-time undergraduates among the 1,032 ranked colleges that provided this information to the publication in its annual survey was $12,088 in the 2022-2023 academic year.
Some forms of merit aid – more accurately competitive pricing strategies – are powerful tools used by enrollment leaders at non-competitive schools to incentivize students to accept an offer of admission. As Jerome Lucido, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice, notes, “The scholarships are not based on merit, really; they’re based on an economic algorithm to determine what families that can pay some big slice of tuition will be willing to pay.”
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New supplemental essay prompts: reflections on lived experience
Personal essays and school-specific supplements have always given students plenty of opportunity to share details of their background. Remember this excerpt from the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts? He wrote, “At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” In response, colleges and universities overhauled their required supplemental essay prompts, with more schools now encouraging students to discuss aspects of their lived experiences and how it has impacted their perspectives and shaped the way they see themselves contributing on campus.
EARLY INSIGHTS ON CLASS OF 2028 EARLY ADMISSIONS RESULTS
Despite the frustrating lack of transparency around the early admissions process at many top colleges, some key data has been shared. Among the interesting tidbits we’ve learned:
- Harvard sees its early applications drop by nearly 20%. Did turmoil on campus this fall in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack in Israel impact prospective students’ interest in Harvard?
- As noted earlier, Duke saw its early pool surge 30%, in part because of a new financial aid program for students from the Carolinas.
- Columbia University, seems to have rebounded from the fallout of last year’s US News and World Report rankings scandal, received 6,009 early decision applicants for the class of 2028. This pool marks the third largest early decision applicant pool in Columbia’s history and an almost 5 percent increase from last year’s 5,738 early decision applicants.
- Records continue to be shattered at Dartmouth, where this year’s ED applicant pool hit 3,550, an 18% increase over last year’s record volume. The acceptance rate of 17% is a historic degree of selectivity for early decision. Also of note – 75% of those admitted submitted SAT or ACT scores.
Our key takeaway? Buckle up because another volatile admissions cycle is in store.
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In addition, Maria is proud of her long-term volunteer work with Opera North (Lebanon, NH) in fundraising, marketing and audience engagement. She is an avid masters rower with the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation (Hanover, NH) and also serves as a member of its board of directors.
- Class of 2028 Admissions: A Cycle Marked by New Challenges - May 13, 2024
- Global Campuses, Dual Degree and Joint Degree Programs: What You Need to Know - April 29, 2024
- College Admissions: The Year in Review - December 27, 2023
