With the new calendar year, we thought it would be a good time to highlight some of the emerging trends impacting admissions and some trends that we expect will be factors for families going forward. While we would expect the college admissions process to continue to be competitive with the Common App reporting applications +5% y/y as of January 1st after increasing 7% last year, there are newer trends that applicants should account for when applying to schools.
We have written fairly extensively on the growing impact of AI on the college admissions process, highlighting the pressure of increasing applications and decreasing yield rates. The reality is that AI powered systems are increasingly being used to help institutions determine applicant interest and how to manage yield as well as the best applicants to actively recruit. Deloitte’s Candidate 360’, Element 451 and Liaison’s Othot are just a few of the vendors and products helping universities. By tracking email engagement, website visits, admissions officer interactions, the time between stages of the admissions process as well as other actions these solutions help institutions find the applicants who are most likely to attend if admitted. At most schools these applicants are more likely to be accepted. Understanding how institutions use technology and the vendors they use will be an increasing advantage to applicants as they will know the actions individual universities value most.
With the elimination of Affirmative Action, the number of universities requiring new and additional supplemental essays has grown. However, while essays are more important at some schools the increasing usage of Chat GPT by applicants has schools like Duke moving away from scoring essays in their application process. Of interest is what seems to be an emerging admissions component that seeks to make up for the shortcoming of essays… video introductions. Brown, Bowdoin, The University of Chicago ,Washington University of Saint Louis and Wake Forest are all schools with a video component to their applications currently, we expect others to follow. The ability of applicants to perform well on the video component of their applications is a specific skill and one that will be of increasing importance in the admissions process.
Being a legacy applicant remains an advantage in the admissions process at many schools. That said, we expect to see further erosion of its importance in the year ahead. While a number of schools and states have ended their legacy admissions policies, we expect more to follow in 2025. We believe California’s recent banning of legacy admissions advantages at private schools will be followed by other states with New York standing out as a state that could be following near term. With Columbia, Cornell and NYU reporting drops in their proportions of underrepresented minorities in their 2028 classes and the sponsor of last year’s state bill against affirmative action calling legacy admissions “Affirmative Action for privileged students” we expect things to heat up in New York again . In brief, we believe legacy admissions advantages will continue decline with or without an official ban.
Finally, with SUNY announcing “guaranteed admissions” for top New York state students in October, the list of states where OOS students are likely to have a harder time gaining admissions will continue to grow. In addition to New York, California, Florida and Texas all have popular schools where guaranteed admissions for in-state applicants adds pressure to their OOS admissions pool. Our conversations with consultants lead us to believe that more states will be looking closely at “guaranteed admissions” this year and understanding how these changes can impact OOS odds is increasingly important to understand. It is also worth noting that the growth of applications to lower cost public colleges have significantly outpaced private colleges this year, pointing to pricing potentially making public school options more competitive as well.
While lacking the drama and press coverage of the elimination of Affirmative Action, we expect that change and how applicants respond to it will continue to be a factor in the college admissions process in 2025-26.
Comments