A cruel time for college applicants
ON THE surface, the college admissions process seems like a meritocracy. Students are evaluated on a set of objective components (i.e. grades and test scores) that are interspersed with some subjective ones (i.e. essays, interviews, and letters of recommendation). Those who make the cut are accepted; those who do not are rejected; those who fall somewhere in between are offered the purgatory-like status of wait-list. There is no way to predict, with certainty, how a given applicant will fare at a particular college in a given year.
Any visit to a college admissions office in August bears this out. You can often hear admissions officers sounding bubbly in their declarations: "We are looking for much more than just strong test takers." "There are many factors that go into a decision." "We have no cut-offs." And my least favorite: "You'll never know unless you apply."
Standing in stark relief to those cheerful assurances are the rather glum reports, punctuated as they are by sighs and explanations of unforeseen increases in applications, that I receive in March during phone conversations with representatives from admissions offices. Rarely do colleges seem as optimistic or encouraging then. A student who asked in the summer about her SAT scores that put her clearly in the bottom half of accepted students was assured, "Those are just a range of scores." In March, that student's "scores were just not competitive in the pool."
Another family, concerned about the fact that their son earned a few C's as a freshman on his way toward becoming a steady B+ student, asked in the summer if the college considered trends in grades. In the summer, they were assured, "Yes, absolutely, a student's progress is very important to us." In March the refrain was a bit different: "He just didn't have the GPA to be competitive in our pool." And so on.
That leaves me trying to reconcile the encouraging whinnies and neighs straight from the college admissions horse's mouth with the more sobering noises from that same beast a mere seven months later. I didn't take my job because I like to stomp on the hopes of youngsters, and yet that is often the way in which my messages are interpreted.
My colleagues in college admissions have it tough, too, as marketing has become the cornerstone of selective college admissions. Many on the college side find themselves more occupied with the statistics that define their applicant pool and their admitted class than with the individuals who make up those numbers. Paradoxically, this golden age of selective college admissions seems to have created more rather than less pressure upon deans and vice presidents of enrollment management. (Of course, some would argue that the advent of the term "enrollment manager" signified the beginning of the end.)
When the applicant pool shrinks, when incoming classes are small, when an institution sinks in national rankings -- rankings that happen to come out in August -- college presidents are mortified. Even one year of such disappointing results might put an enrollment manager on the hot seat. Feeling the pressure, they turn to their staffs, those very same admissions representatives who conduct the summer informational sessions, and remind them that they are in the business of encouraging prospective applicants to apply. And the cycle continues.
Straight from a summer info session where they picked up on the heartening signs to go ahead and have Johnny send in the 50 bucks to apply, parents seek me out to ascertain why I am less confident in their child's chances than they are, why I don't believe in their prodigy. I try to convince them that I do believe in their child. But it is a struggle finding the right words, to bridge the gap between what is advertised as the truth and what I know to be reality.
Webster T. Trenchard is director of college guidance at the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn. 
