Columbia - College Admission Counseling

The Ups and Downs of Ivy League Admissions

Jared Hobson — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:46:59 +0000

A recent post on the New York Times blog graphically showed the winners and losers among the Ivy League schools in this past admissions cycle. The University of Pennsylvania was the big winner, with an increase of applications of just over 14%. Dartmouth, my alma mater, was the big loser, with a decrease of just over 14%.
Columbia and Harvard saw small decreases in applications, too, while the others (Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and Brown) had modest gains in their application numbers.
Why does this happen from year to year? Hard to know. UPenn credits its partnership with KIPP charter schools for at least part of the increase: more applicants applied for application fee waivers than ever before.
Dartmouth’s precipitous drop may be due to a lot of factors, including ending the practice of accepting AP (Advanced Placement) courses for credit, its lousy publicity in recent months, and the continued dominance of the fraternity system in campus social life. The director of admission, Maria Laskaris, is leading an analysis of the reasons for the decline.
Whether winners or loser, we can expect that overall it will continue to be more and more difficult to get into the Ivy League in coming years.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant for Students Bound for the Ivy League

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Class of 2017 Early Application Results from Highly Selective Colleges: What Do They Indicate?

Andrea Aronson — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:00:03 +0000

In the last few weeks, early acceptances have come out from many of the most selective schools in the country, leaving many students thrilled and relieved that they have been admitted to the school of their choice, others distressed that the school that they wanted didn’t want them, and still others in a state of limbo having been deferred to the regular applicant pool. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: more and more students are choosing to apply early to the most competitive schools and this is changing the dynamics of the admissions process.
With the exception of Dartmouth, which saw a decrease in its applications of ~12.5% (which we hypothesize is due to the relatively recent bad press that the school received about its Greek life), and Cornell, who has not reported final numbers, yet, the balance of the Ivy League schools saw an increase in early applications over last year. Harvard, for example, reported a whopping 15% more applications for the Class of 2017 than for the Class of 2016. Other highly selective schools such as MIT (up 9%) and Northwestern (up 7%) also saw a significant increase in their early application numbers year over year.
While many schools haven’t reported their early results, here is a chart that we pulled together to give you a flavor of what’s been happening out there. It details selected highly competitive schools and their early admissions acceptance rates. If you follow overall admissions rates at these types of schools, you’ll see that the Early Admit Rates noted below are significantly higher than each school’s historic overall admit rates.

School	Early Plan	Early Applicants	Accepted Early	Early Admit Rate
Brown	ED	3,010	558	18.5%
Dartmouth	ED	1,574	464	29.5%
Duke	ED	2,540	753	29.6%
Harvard	SCEA	4,856	895	18.4%
Johns Hopkins	ED	1,450	530	36.6%
MIT	EA	6,541	650	9.9%
Northwestern	ED	2,625	885	33.7%
Princeton	SCEA	3,810	697	18.3%
Stanford	SCEA	6,103	725	11.9%
U Pennsylvania	ED	4,812	1,196	24.9%
Williams	ED	584	248	42.5%
Yale	SCEA	4,514	649	14.4%

In doing my research, I also noted that a number of the schools deferred a significant portion of their early applicants to the Regular Decision pool. Yale, for example, deferred over 55% of its early applicants, Brown seems to have deferred around 70% and Dartmouth 35%. Anecdotally, it seems that MIT has also deferred a tremendous number of its applicants, but we don’t have any firm numbers.
These deferral numbers indicate that the schools are getting early applications from large numbers of qualified candidates, and the schools are not prepared to say “no” until they see what the Regular Decision pool brings. Still, the schools are also not prepared to say “yes” to these applicants, either, and historically, the number of deferred applicants who ultimately get admitted are few.
The schools that offer an Early Decision plan seem to be filling an unbelievable 40%+ of their freshman class from their early applications. This means that students who apply Regular Decision to these very selective schools will have an even tougher go of it simply because there are fewer slots to fill. A while ago, I wrote a blog post trying to answer the question: Is it easier to get in if you apply early? Many of the points in that post are relevant here. Essentially, early applicants most definitely benefit from indicating that a school is their top pick and applying early, but only if the candidate meets the admissions standards of the school in the first place.
The sad part about this current situation is that because qualified students appear to have an advantage if they apply early to these highly competitive institutions, candidates are using early application plans as a strategy to gain admission, even if they are not sure that a given school is actually where they want or ought to go. Especially if they apply as part of a binding ED program, then whether they are sure or not, if they get in, that’s where they will have to go. These dynamics are forcing students to make their decisions about college several months earlier in their high schools careers when, perhaps, they haven’t had time to fully explore their options and figure out what is best for them.
The lesson is that if students believe that they might be interested in applying to highly selective schools, they should start their research early. Applying early can be advantageous, but don’t apply early to a school simply because it is a name brand. In doing so, other options might be shut out that would ultimately be more suitable.
Andrea Aronson
College Admissions Consultant
Westfield, NJ

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Are College and Universities Bankrupting Themselves?

Jared Hobson — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:06:59 +0000

An opinion piece in today’s New York Times from a professor at Columbia University raises some excellent points about the skyrocketing costs of higher education in the US.
He criticizes huge expansion efforts at Columbia and New York University at a time when endowments are down, debt levels are up, and ambitions may be bigger than these institutions’ ability to shoulder new debt obligations.
This question comes at a time when the US government has reported that 149 colleges have failed its “financial responsibility test” (see the article here from the Chronicle of Higher Education–registration required). While the colleges on this list may or may not be able to bounce back from their clear financial difficulties, it seems reasonable to predict that more colleges will start to show up on this list in the coming years. Like so many businesses and individuals who spent the last decade or two living beyond their means, colleges and universities gorged on debt. And some, like Birmingham Southern College, have been in the news recently for making huge mistakes in managing their money. Some colleges are actually closing or merging. Does it really make sense for Columbia and NYU to continue feeding voraciously at the debt trough? Sure, Columbia and NYU are financially stronger than, say, Guilford and Ripon Colleges. Are these big boys “too big to fail?” Is Columbia like AIG, or like Lehman Brothers?
While I’m not ready to run around like Chicken Little quite yet, I do know that the rapidly rising prices in higher education are unsustainable. And I do think that parents–and their kids–need to take a step back and ask themselves whether they want to go into debt to a place like NYU in order to finance NYU’s debt. Like derivatives, higher education services are not anything tangible. If the investment goes south (i.e., if a child’s debt burden ends up being larger than what her future salary can bear), parents and kids will have nothing to show for it than a pile of student loans that cannot be discharged even in bankruptcy. At least if NYU’s or Columbia’s investments turn out not to be so great, they can sell off the buildings they are constructing and at least recoup something. What assets will you sell when your debts come due?
Food for thought.
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

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Columbia Joins the Bandwagon and Changes Financial Aid Policies

Jared Hobson — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:50:04 +0000

Columbia University announced today that it was joining its Ivy League sister institutions in revamping its financial aid policies to make the University more affordable for the middle class. Families with incomes of less than $60,000 will pay nothing. Families with incomes of less than $100,000 will see a significant increase in the amount of aid awarded. And all institutional loans will be replaced by grants.
Since Harvard announced changes in its financial aid policies (see my post here), other well-heeled institutions (e.g., Dartmouth, Yale, Bowdoin, Stanford) have followed suit. Expect others to join in.
Stay tuned.
Mark Montgomery
Independent College Counselor

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