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As we welcome in the New Year, we are also closing out a decade—one that has seen many shifts in college admission. While news stories in the past ten years have often focused on rising application numbers and shrinking acceptance rates, the reality is that this is only part of the story. We have seen unsustainable growth in tuition and debt, colleges shuttering their gates, lawsuits, scandals, and investigations, but also increased numbers of test-optional schools, strong professional leadership and a focus on character in admission. It would be difficult to identify all the changes in the process of applying to college, but to be sure, a student applying in 2020 is having a vastly different experience than those from 2010 or even 2015. In an earlier piece, I explored the greatest changes in the last year in the admission profession. As we now consider the entire decade, two main themes of progress emerge: access and technology.
Access to College
When considering her last ten years in admission, Whitney Soule, dean of admission and student aid at Bowdoin College says, “more and more colleges and universities are working collaboratively to leverage knowledge and insight around supporting underrepresented students into and through the admission process.” She adds, “it’s so inspiring to have a mission that is shared—regardless of schools’ selectivity level or resources—and to make change faster by working together.” Todd Rinehart, the vice chancellor for enrollment at the University of Denver agrees, saying, “I think the greatest development has been the individual and collective efforts of many organizations and leaders in our profession to elevate the conversations on how college admission can be different in future years. How can we bring greater transparency and equity to the college admission process? How can we provide college access to more students?” He explains that these are not new questions or challenges, but especially in the past few years, he has “observed more intentional focus and efforts to take conversations and problem-solving to new levels.” Gregory Roberts, dean of undergraduate admission at the University of Virginia, adds that in addition to the great discussions and work happening in high schools and colleges, there is a positive “emergence of more local, regional, and national Community-Based Organizations (CBO) that help schools identify and recruit high achieving, low-income, first-generation, and underserved students.”
From the secondary school perspective, Diane Campbell, director of college counseling at Liberty Common High School says “we are discussing difficult and much-needed issues that have been avoided or skirted for many years: affordability, transparency, access and barriers that exist in admissions that are not fair or equitable for students.” Grassroots movements like Admissions Community Cultivating Equity & Peace Today (ACCEPT) and Hack the Gates, and more established initiatives like the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have rallied to seek a more just and level playing field for admission to college.
Jody Glassman, director of university admission at Florida International University describes how access to higher education is shifting based on demographics and the types of students who are coming to campuses looking for education. She says, “We are seeing truly innovative colleges and universities implementing micro-credentials, offering certificates and badges in the 21st Century skills needed in a high-tech job market, and shaking up the more traditional education system to reflect the changing learner.” In response to this trend, she highlights the need “to have college admission offices with staff to work with adult learners, lifelong learners, traditional students, non-traditional students, students who want to enroll for a certificate program, and so on.”
In reflecting on this past decade, Jonathan Burdick, vice provost for enrollment at Cornell University looks at a wider view of access. He says, “I’ll champion the quiet advance of efforts to broaden our definitions of student achievement to include concepts like grit, mindset, and character, each of which has been a research focus of able scholars during the last decade.” He adds that “the full promise of these multi-pronged efforts is still waiting to emerge in the decade ahead, but the framework and dialogues have already proven enduring, and—wedded with increasing data collection and analytics—is likely to support a true shift away from pseudo-industrial methods of measuring achievement into many broader and more useful dimensions.” As a result, Burdick argues that “this shift will allow higher education to ease off of the last 35 years of competing through marketing tactics and ease back into a focus on core—and variable—missions.” Inherent in these shifts and mission-aligned admission is increased access to higher education.
Technology
There was unanimous agreement that advances in technology have changed the admission profession in significant ways this decade. Bill Conley, the vice president for enrollment management at Bucknell University sums up these changes in one phrase, “Slate—the ubiquitous CRM!” Ken Anselment, vice president for enrollment & communications at Lawrence University agrees, praising “the rise of Slate, the tool used by more than 1000 admissions offices to manage recruitment relationships with prospective students.” Anselment also notes that this tool has “created a whole new line of admissions professionals who live in the space between counseling and technology.” Picture the college tour guide that aspires to be Bill Gates. University of Virginia’s Roberts says that Slate’s “all-in-one system that serves as a communication, data collection, and application review platform, has revolutionized the industry, especially from the college-side.” Gil J. Villanueva, associate vice president and dean of admission at the University of Richmond takes it one step further, predicting that “the utilization of artificial intelligence and all-in-one student recruitment systems is only the beginning.” From the high school perspective, Matthew DeGreeff, dean of college counseling and student enrichment at Middlesex School says that “Slate opening up its portals for counselors means the dawn for a more interactive and instantaneous connection between schools and colleges is near.”
DeGreeff, expands on this decade’s technological advancements, praising the “electronic submission of application and school support materials.” He says, “the ability to apply electronically has removed barriers for students throughout the world to apply to colleges and universities, “ adding “this also includes the ability to apply for financial aid online and the ability to match the IRS and FAFSA databases is important. We easily forget where we were 10 years ago.“ Moira McKinnon, director of college counseling at Berwick Academy points out another way technology is removing barriers with “virtual tours making colleges more accessible to low-income students who can’t visit everywhere.”
Charles Murphy, director of freshman and international admission at the University of Florida says that “the technology change has been massive. He gives the example that “more and more schools, and even application services (Common App and Coalition for College), are having students self-report transcripts and test scores.” Murphy explains that “it has changed the ways students apply, the amount of data that is mined and analyzed from applications, and likely the communication between all parties involved.” He says, “a student can more easily apply to a college without a counselor from the school even knowing and that was impossible when I was applying to college with a mailed application and transcript request from the counseling office.”
Debra Johns, associate director of admission at Yale University, highlights “the use of social media to recruit students” as another way that technology has changed admission. She adds that “social media has provided access to information about institutions that was unavailable,” while using technology to make “admission decisions based on data and outcomes has become the most sought out skills set of many admissions leaders.” And a whole industry has emerged to support these efforts. Bob Massa, vice president emeritus of enrollment & college relations at Dickinson College and an adjunct professor of higher education at the University of Southern California describes this development saying that “over the last decade, the most impressive change had been the meteoric rise of technology vendors or partners to ‘help’ colleges secure their enrollments and net revenue.” He argues that “new apps, predictive modeling tools—such as machine learning, social media ‘gimmicks,’ web crawling to track prospect usage—all have increased the complexity of student recruitment.” At the same time, Massa explains that these changes “have decreased transparency and have put higher education in the same category as retailers serving up ads based on your last web move.” He warns that “all of this, in turn, has increased the public’s distrust of Higher Education.” He laments that “admission deans spend a lot of time warding off new vendors and as much time figuring out how to get a competitive advantage using the tools they bought.” The unfortunate side effect, Massa says, is that “somehow, individual students and their needs get lost in the process,” adding, “this is certainly not how most of us envisioned college admission when we began our careers decades ago.” So, as often is the case with technology, it can be a blessing and a curse, simplifying our lives and processes while complicating our interactions and realities.
A Decade of Growth
On the eve of a new decade, we can feel hopeful. The admission profession has a long way to go to increase access to higher education, but encouragingly these conversations are happening with gaining frequency. Ideally, advances in technology will help us do this while allowing educators to focus on what is most important, serving students and building campus communities that are mission-aligned. This past decade has brought great change and the next promises to do so as well. As we usher in this change we can model the responsible use of innovation and be lead by this quote from an R.A. Salvatore novel: “Change is not always growth, but growth is often rooted in change.” Here’s to the decade of growth ahead.
