As this year’s college admissions season is coming down the home stretch—a season rife with new rules, uncertainty, misinformation, and angst—two salient facts have emerged. And by salient, I mean sticking out like two huge sore thumbs.
- Lots more students submitted applications to colleges across the board and across the nation than ever before (see, for example, Columbia Sees Record-High Applications for Class of 2025)
- Fueled by so many colleges waiving requirements for at least this year and next, far fewer students submitted standardized tests scores with their applications. (See CommonApp Data Show Most Applicants Are Not Submitting Test Scores
Taken together, these two facts mean that even as college admissions is becoming substantially more competitive (that’s a simple math fact: many more applicants vying for roughly the same number of freshmen beds), committees have one fewer measure of high school achievement to assist them with decisions. Love them or hate them, test scores are still considered ONE valuable way to assess or corroborate perceived college readiness.
With bigger herds of applicants but one fewer arrow in their quivers, committees will necessarily give more weight to other application materials than in prior years. Successful applicants will be those who can tell compelling stories about their high school careers and their plans for college within the confines of the CommonApp, Universal App, and individual college apps.
Learning how to do this — how to showcase your college potential in your application — will give you the biggest bang for your college prep buck.
P.S. When the final admissions data become available later this year, we’ll have a third salient fact (though likely still just two red thumbs): the percentage of accepted students to test-optional schools (that’s most of them this year and next) who chose to submit scores versus the percentage of accepted students who chose not to. In recent years, those numbers are typically reported at approximately 85-90% versus 10-15%. I predict those numbers to remain equally lopsided, if not more so. That gives a big advantage to students willing to gut out the substantial work and stress test prep often entails, but I suggest to you it’s worth it in 2021 if you have a dream school or schools, but that’s a subject for another post.