How Do High School Graduates Increase Their Chances in the College Admission Game?
College student applicants are applying to more and more colleges nowadays than the previous years. For instance, a seventeen year old female senior student of Wilson High School has applied to eleven (11) colleges and universities. Her list included UCLA, Santa Clara University, University of Chicago and Stanford. For this graduating high school student, applying to many colleges is the safest thing to do since it will assure her admission to a college that she prefers. This high school senior is just one of thousands of student applicants who are waiting around in their computers and mail this month for admission notices or regretfully, rejection letters.
On average, the number of high school graduates in most of the U.S. states decreased in 2010. However, due to the tougher competition in the college admission process and the increasing level of uncertainty, graduating high school students continued the trend of applying to more colleges and universities on average. Various prestigious universities experienced an increase of 7% or more in the applications for incoming freshmen.
This trend that has been continuing already for more than a decade has been evident as well in many competitive universities like Stanford (7% application increase), University of Washington (7%), Boston College (10%), University of Pennsylvania (18%) and Loyola Marymount University (12%). Based on the data of the online Common Application, the applications to University of Michigan increased dramatically to 20%. Common Application is a non-profit membership organization that provides online service to promote integrity and equity in the college admission process. In at least one campus of University of California, 106,000 high school seniors applied for the incoming freshman class which is an increase of 5.7% from the previous year.
Despite the increase in the number of college applications, the acceptance rates of colleges and universities had dropped for the past several years including this year 2011. Based on the findings of a recent study by the National Association for College Admission Counselling (NACAC), the median acceptance rates of the private non-profit four-year universities had decreased by 10% while the median acceptance rates in public colleges decreased by 7%. These lower levels of acceptance rates among colleges and universities have created more stressful pressures to both the student applicants and their respective parents.
Thus, there is a growing debate in the U.S. about the ethics of college recruitment. Various support groups of the college student applicants are advocating colleges and universities to increase their freshman enrolment and class size to accommodate more prospective candidates. Aside from the state legislature, such calls for increase in acceptance rates have even reached the U.S. Congress.