This week, core staff member Jack Williamson decided to track down SLUH’s Head of College Counseling for a one-on-one conversation regarding developments in the complex web that is the college admissions landscape at SLUH.

 

Jack Williamson: Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with me, Mr. Crimmins. I was hoping to talk to you today about college admissions at SLUH, specifically how the application and acceptance landscape of our students has evolved and how we got here. So to begin, can you paint a picture for us about what exactly the application process looked like when you first started working here?

 

Kevin Crimmins: So the application process was actually largely the same. The major change with the admissions landscape started in the early 2000s, and we reached what we have today in around 2010. What's really changed is that the number of families that are applying to each of the colleges has really shot up, reducing admissions rates and making the whole process a lot more competitive.

 

JW: Have you seen any sort of a change in where most students were applying and where they ended up going?

 

KC: Since we've built the college counseling program and started working with students to provide more support there, students have begun applying to a wider array of schools. In 2015 we probably had students go 60 percent in-state, and now we have close to 60 percent of our students going out-of-state, increasing the number of unique colleges that students are going to. So I think our guys are becoming aware of the selection and opportunities that exist for them, and this is also coinciding with the rising cost of college. A lot of our families are willing to go a little bit further away in order to find the best value college that would be available to them.

 

JW: What about base requirements for tests or other items colleges require you to submit, like an essay? Have those things shifted recently?

 

KC: Common App has always had an essay with the included prompt being the topic of your choice, so that hasn’t changed much, but it's become increasingly more important as competition has risen. Letters of recommendation over time have waxed and waned in terms of importance. Right now we're in the realm where they're pretty important for students, so we're putting a large focus on that. 

The standardized testing, more than anything, has probably changed the most. When I started at SLUH in 2015, I would say around 80 percent of colleges required standardized testing, and that was trickling down as more colleges were adopting test optional policies. But then Covid happened, and almost overnight, 100 percent of colleges were forced to go test optional in some way, shape, or form. In the five or six years since 2020 when Covid came around, we're finding that the pendulum is swinging the other way, and standardized testing is becoming increasingly more important in the college landscape. Because of that, students are returning to putting a lot more time, energy, and attention into that side of the application. It's good for our average SLUH student because our guys are prepared rigorously and academically, so our standardized test scores are comparatively quite high at a lot of these colleges.

 

JW: So, what were the most common concerns you have heard from students and families about where they wanted to go to college, and have you seen those shift at all?

 

KC: Yes and no. I think a lot of the concerns have always been there, but they have just gotten more prevalent. So, when I started here about 11 years ago, many of the most selective colleges in the country were down to 9-10 percent. Harvard was probably at an 8-9 percent admit rate in 2010, but Harvard's now at a four percent admit rate. So for students who are aspirational to go to some of the “best” colleges or the most competitive colleges in the country, the process has just become increasingly competitive, and that's just accelerated from when I was in college. When I was in college, they were at 15 percent, and when I started here, they were at 10 percent, and now they're at 5 percent. So there's always been the competitive piece, which has just gotten increasingly more, for lack of a better word, competitive. 

But then there's the other half of the equation that many of our students face, and that's the affordability piece, because the cost of colleges has far exceeded the rate of inflation. Students are no longer able to work a job to be able to pay for college while they're in. Some families who have the ability to pay or are qualified for lobby-based financial assistance can really compete in any college they want, but many of our middle class families are having to look for what I call the best value college — colleges that are going to offer a great education but balance that out with a really robust scholarship so that the family’s budgets can remain intact in the long run. 

 

JW: Why do you think there has been such a dramatic change in the acceptance rate? Is it just simply more applicants?

 

KC: Yes, I would say that it’s literally a case of supply and demand, right? More people in the US, or the world, for many cases, want to go to a specific college, and the more people who ask for it, thus the more applications. Colleges aren't increasing their size. It's not like I can open a new dorm and have 1000 new students and hire the faculty to teach them overnight. Colleges are landlocked and stuck in their size at these highly-selective schools, so as demand increases, admission rates go down. There's not a whole lot more to it other than that, and that's just the world we're living in. People are really looking for any opportunity to stand out or to prepare themselves, or, in the case of parents, their children, for the future, and they see some of the best colleges in the country as a really great way to do that.

 

JW: Okay, so now I'd like to move to June of 2023, when, as I’m sure you know, the Supreme Court made their rulings in the cases Students for Fair Admissions  (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, which declared affirmative action was unconstitutional. And I was curious, how has that affected your approach as a college counselor to advising students, and how has it affected application and acceptance?

 

KC: So my approach hasn't really ever changed. Our goals are always to make sure that SLUH families, as they go through this process, that they're going to have a number of choices at the end of their senior year where they can make an informed decision about where they want to enroll. So, that always means we have to apply to more schools than we think we're going to get into so that we can earn enough offers of admission to have choices. 

So that basic equation hasn't really changed, but what has changed is the likelihood for some of our families in terms of admissibility to any individual given college. But it's not like schools that were 80 percent suddenly went to 40 percent. What happened was that, for some families, some of these schools were 10 percent likely, and now they're 5 percent likely. It's a big change; it's half as likely, but it wasn't very likely to begin with, so it doesn't feel all that different. 

But it's also caused us to shift some of our strategies and how we help students to write their essays, as well as the fact that it has changed some of the supplemental essay types that colleges have been asking for. So, we've had to help students write these new subset of identity or experience essays, and while it's had little impact on SLUH overall, for some of our families, it's caused them to need to apply a little bit more broadly to try to mitigate some risk in terms of the admissibility and increase the likelihood of acceptance.

 

JW: Yeah, that makes sense. So, I want to move on to my last question regarding the fact that, over the course of the last year, the Trump administration has cut or threatened to cut a lot of monetary assistance to several high profile colleges. And I wanted to know, has this shaped any element of which colleges our students chose to attend last year or which colleges they applied to this year?

 

KC: Not yet. What we are seeing is that when we talk to our colleagues who are at colleges, they are telling us that what this has done is really impacted many schools’ operating budgets. So, we look at colleges like WashU as an example. WashU, in terms of the cut of their research funding, probably lost $180 million of operating funding for all of the medical research that is going on at a school like that. What that has done in turn is cost WashU to go through many rounds of layoffs, and they've had to lose a lot of support and administrative structures. Many colleges, not just WashU but any college that is facing this, have begun to have to close smaller departments or consolidate them. 

It’s like somebody took a snowball and started rolling it down a big hill, right? It's begun, so we can see the path it's taking, but the size of the impact is unclear because the snowball is not at its full size yet, and we're still waiting to see what the ultimate implications of this are. Some of the biggest schools can weather the storm because they have massive endowments, and they're going to be able to do that. Some of the schools have been more effective than others, but what is also happening is students going to college has just demographically decreased. And because of that, we've been seeing a chain of smaller colleges closing, just as they've no longer been able to make budgets and fund their institutions. At some point, that trend of college budgets shrinking and being hurt, and these changes, which will take five or so years to really be felt at the undergraduate student experience level, are all going to come to a head, and we just don't quite know what that's going to look like. 

Right now, the average SLUH student is going to a large public institution, or well-financed medium-sized institution, or a really, really good smaller liberal arts school, and those are going to be the ones to probably weather the storm. A lot of small colleges that were rocky on enrollment have had to close in recent years, and we expect to see those processes accelerating. But through those closures, we expect that the schools that students at SLUH are tending to go to are going to gain the benefits of those students needing to go elsewhere. So at some point it's going to equalize again. But I think we're going to have a very messy next five or six years as colleges navigate their way through the funding crisis before we actually know how it’s going to end up.