The Real March Madness at Colleges

☘️ Good St. Patrick's Day afternoon. Here are excerpts from my bi-weekly newsletter, Next. Sign up here.

March Madness is, of course, synonymous with college basketball, but there is another college tradition it might also describe these days: admissions. 

The admissions process is now one that essentially runs year-round. Still, this month is when colleges typically send out their final batch of decisions. And this year is a particularly maddening one for applicants and the big-name colleges that, yes occupy a small subset of the higher education ecosystem, but also drive a lot of the narrative about admissions.

This year’s seniors submitted more applications to colleges than any group before them—at least in applying to the thousand colleges that are part of the Common App (which is a good proxy for the overall national numbers).

That huge surge in applications has resulted in an unusually large number of deferrals from early action. Here was a group of students who had applied early action (in November) for the purpose of getting a decision early (in January) but were told to wait until now to find out if they’re in or out. 

The number of deferrals at many top-ranked colleges way outstrips the number of potential spots in the freshman class. As I wrote in the opinion pages of The New York Times yesterday:

The problem is that as applications have skyrocketed—they are up 32 percent at selective institutions over the past three years—the campuses have encouraged early action to spread out their workload and have more time to yield the accepted applicants they really want.

USC and Clemson did that this year by adding early action for the first time. Admissions officials at both institutions told me that as a result they were unsure how the applicant pool would shake out.

“We didn't know if the early-action deadline would skew the high-quality apps to the front, so we were extra cautious,” said David Kuskowski, associate vice president for enrollment management at Clemson.

In other words, if they said Yes to the early academic rock stars, then they’d have to hand out more No’s in the regular-decision process to avoid over-admitting, but could still risk losing the early admits to other top-ranked colleges. Ah, the intricacies of enrollment management.

Kuskowski said he was “not in love with the way we had to manage the process this year.” He hopes that Clemson can apply what they learned about this year's application trends and yield rates to next year’s cycle. “I believe that next year we will have more denials,” he said.

My piece in yesterday’s New York Times was the result of a phone call I got from Frank Bruni in December, when he told me that he’d be taking a few weeks off from his weekly newsletter and was asking others to fill in. Frank has long had an interest in higher ed and college admissions—he is now a professor at Duke—so he assumed there would be something to say about admissions in March.

I accepted the generous offer without knowing what I’d write about. But then I started hearing from parents and counselors about the wave of deferrals coming in from colleges. And I was also hearing the same names again and again: Clemson, USC, UVA, Wisconsin, Richmond, Villanova, among others.

As I started calling admissions deans about all the deferrals, however, they didn’t really want to talk about it or share numbers. To many of them, it wasn’t a big deal: the admissions process wasn’t over and they were simply telling students to wait. But the reason students applied early I told them was precisely to get an answer early. A deferral wasn’t an answer.

What’s more, if you’re a senior sitting on multiple deferrals they don’t necessarily mean the same thing from every campus. For some colleges, they might mean what they did at Clemson: we want to wait to see how the early pool compares with the regular pool. For others, it means they want to see more information—mostly senior year grades. And yet for others, a deferral is much like the wait list in the spring: deferred students fill gaps in the class when a school might need more humanities majors or boost enrollment of underrepresented students or need more students from a particular region. 

Once again, I was reminded that colleges admissions is about the institution and not the student. That’s fine, we all get colleges are a business. But the secrecy surrounding these numbers also means that students and their counselors can’t figure out what to do next because they lack the context of the applicant pool. Here's what I wrote about one university I called:

This lack of transparency extends to so many things in admissions these days—from who is and isn’t getting accepted without submitting test scores to the race and ethnicity of who applies early action and early decision. Colleges owe students clarity on the numbers and the honesty to deny more students. You can't tell me that out of the 28,000 or so students USC deferred there weren't 10,000 or so that they know in December they're never going to admit in March.

🗞 Keep reading: the full New York Times op-ed here (gift link)

The Covid Generation and College

When the Covid-19 pandemic swept around the world three years ago this month, one of the most high-profile disruptions that it caused—and one we’ll likely talk about for generations—was to education. I was reminded of this yesterday while talking to the fifth grader in my house, who was in second grade on March 13, 2020, when the world seemed to shut down.

• My youngest will graduate from high school in 2030, which means the impact of the pandemic and its social and academic learning loss will be felt on college campuses well into next decade.

The big picture: Even before the pandemic, campuses had scaled up their mental-health services to accommodate a 30 percent increase in the number of visitors to their counseling centers in the first half of last decade, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health.

• Then during the pandemic, college presidents felt the pressure to do more. In a survey from the American Council on Education, student mental health ranked as the top concern of presidents.
• But keeping up with student demands is proving impossible for most campuses, which can’t hire enough counselors or provide enough space for appointments.

A mismatch: “The definition of mental health that circulates in the culture doesn't match very well with the definition that we use as psychologists,” Lisa Damour, PhD , a clinical psychologist told me and Michael Horn on the latest episode of the Future U. podcast.

• Damour, author of the new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents, said the wellness industry has equated mental health with happiness.
• But mental health is about having feelings that “make sense in the context," Damour said. College, she added, is a stressful time. So the question should be: Are students handling those feelings effectively—getting enough exercise, protecting their sleep—rather than getting drunk or not getting out of bed, which is “when we become concerned.”

In her words: “What we want to do is to recognize that distress comes with being a person and certainly being a growing and developing person. And what really, really matters is how it gets handled.”

What’s up with the boys: A lot has been written about male disengagement in education and the workforce recently, and Damour’s previous books were largely about girls, so we asked her if colleges should have different student success strategies for boys.

• One thing she suggested is “uncoupling” college admissions from college readiness. “Lots of kids can get themselves into college who are not really ready for college,” she said, suggesting maybe more boys need to take a gap year before college.

The other side of the lens: Recently I binged on the Hulu series “Fleishman Is in Trouble," and without ruining it, I was interested in how the same story can be seen so differently by the people in it. Seeing “another side” is difficult for all of us, but particularly teens who have limited experience.

• One of my favorite exchanges in this podcast episode was when Damour was describing the two life transitions happening for teenagers and young adults right now—admission to college and college graduation. As she told us, no matter what, this moment is “going to be a chapter that closes pretty fast, and then there's going to be a whole lot more chapters.”

And here's her specific advice for the college Class of 2023, which I love: Damour said she has “become increasingly convinced that mid-career thriving is almost always on the back of 10 to 20 years of early career grunt work.”

• College graduation for some kids is a moment of celebration about what’s next; but for some it’s like, “this is it?”
• At a time when colleges are putting more effort and resources into career centers, and we’re all worried about the ROI of a degree, Damour said colleges should spend more time talking about how life after college “is going to get a lot more pedestrian and probably a lot more boring,” she told us. “You're going to be doing a lot of grunt work for a while, and that is okay because that's how you get where you want to go."

🎧 Listen to full episode here.

🛫 Going to ASU+GSV? Milken Global Institute? If you'll be in San Diego next month for GSV or Beverly Hills in May for Milken, let me know and we can try to meet up or check out my sessions at both conferences. Click here to send me a message.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff 

If you got this from a friend, see past issues and subscribe to get your own copy.

To get in touch, find me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Post, and LinkedIn.