Your senior has probably seen the Glimpse option in a college portal by now. Most students decide it is either a waste of time or a production. It is neither, and with early deadlines coming up, it is worth an afternoon to get right.

What Glimpse actually is

Glimpse is run by InitialView. Your student records a 60 to 90 second video in the Chrome browser or the InitialView app on an iPhone or iPad, and that one video goes to every participating college. There is no editing, and only the last take is saved. It costs $22 for unlimited colleges, with fee waivers for students who qualify.

Two rules matter more than the rest. Once the video is sent to a college, it is locked for that college for the whole cycle. And a student who sends a Glimpse in Early Decision or Early Action gets one chance, starting December 15, to record a new video, but only for colleges that never received the first one.

Colleges accepting Glimpse this cycle include Brown, Duke, Vanderbilt, Rice, Barnard, Swarthmore, WashU, Middlebury and Colgate, and several limit it to students at U.S. high schools. UChicago, Bowdoin and Wake Forest run their own video options with different formats, so your student should read each college’s own page.

Should your student submit one?

My default is yes at every college that offers a video. Most college pages call it optional, and students are admitted without one. But as with every optional part of the application, the student who submits gives the reader one more way to know them. I would skip it only when the video would be weaker than the rest of the file, or would take time from a required essay that matters more.

A caution on the evidence: most of what is said publicly about how these videos are read comes from InitialView and its co-founders, Gloria and Terry Crawford, whose interest is for every student to submit. None of the college pages I read says how much weight the video carries.

What admissions readers say they want

Gloria Crawford has described admissions officers listening to a Glimpse in the background while they work through the rest of a file. If that is right, your student’s voice and words matter more than the picture. Her test is whether the 90 seconds tells the reader something that is not anywhere else in the application. A Holy Cross admissions officer, in a testimonial InitialView published, asks for “just a little bit about you, not everything.”

That leads to three rules. Your student should not repeat the essays or recite accomplishments. They should not name a college or wear its sweatshirt, because the same video goes to every school. And they should not read from a script, which InitialView’s own FAQ says in so many words.

How to prepare without over-preparing

Start by listing what the application already says, then pick one thing the reader has not met yet: a part-time job, a daily ritual, an object with a story behind it, or the reason behind an activity rather than its résumé line. An object can anchor the video, but the reason behind it is the content.

Your student should write two to four bullet points, say them out loud as if talking to a friend, and then put the notes away. A phone is fine. College Essay Guy’s production advice holds up: face a window, keep the camera at eye level, find a quiet room, and remember that good audio matters more than perfect lighting. Expect three to five takes, and leave out music, ring lights and text overlays.

Glimpse lets a student add a counselor to review the video before sending it. That review should check for reading, repetition, school names and audio, and should not rewrite anything. Gloria Crawford says admissions officers tell her applications often sound like “very polished adults.” The video is the one place your student can sound like a 17-year-old.

Timing

InitialView recommends sending the video within about a week of submitting the application. Video deadlines can differ from application deadlines; Duke and WashU, for example, list November 9 for their early rounds. If your student is applying early, record carefully now, because that video is the one most colleges will see.

If you want help deciding which videos are worth your student’s time and what one should be about, that is the conversation we have in a free 30-minute strategy session. Families who book one get our College Application Rules guide.

The Numbers Are Small, and They Vary by College

Transfer admission depends on how many seats open up, and every college reports its own figures in Section D of its Common Data Set. For fall 2025, Northwestern admitted 498 of 4,562 transfer applicants. The University of Chicago admitted 380 of 3,231. MIT admitted 35 of 1,713, and Harvard admitted 13 of 2,042. The spread is wide, so look up the figure for every college on your student’s list.

The Essay Is About Need, Not Escape

Most selective transfer applications ask some version of why. Northwestern’s 2026-27 supplement asks students to share why they would like to transfer to Northwestern. Harvard asks for reasons for transferring and objectives, and says it looks for “a clearly defined academic need to transfer.” UChicago asks why the student is leaving and how UChicago will provide the kind of learning, community and future they want. Brown is an exception: its transfer applicants answer the same essays as first-year applicants.

The strongest answers we see name a specific academic need, show what the student has already done to meet it at their current college, and point to the courses, programs and people at the new school that meet it. They say nothing against the current school. A reader can admit a plan; a reader cannot admit a complaint.

The College Transcript Carries the File

Once a student has a college record, that record is the main evidence, and published expectations are high. Duke says most successful transfer applicants have at least a 3.7 college GPA. MIT looks for 3.5 or above, with mostly A’s in math and science. The high school transcript does not disappear: Northwestern, for example, still requires it.

Course choices matter as well. A schedule that builds toward the intended major shows direction, and it gives the new college’s credit evaluation something to work with.

Letters Come From College Instructors

Harvard asks for two evaluations from college instructors. Northwestern asks for one academic evaluation. Columbia says its transfer decisions rest heavily on professor recommendations. For a first-year student applying in the spring, the relationship with that instructor has to start this semester.

Eligibility, Credit and Testing

Every college defines who may apply. Cornell does not accept students in their first semester. Georgetown considers students with no more than four semesters, and Harvard no more than two academic years.

Credit is the other surprise. Many selective colleges, Northwestern among them, evaluate transfer credit only after admission, while Princeton includes a preliminary evaluation in its admission packet. MIT notes that its transfer students typically lose at least one semester. Save every syllabus; it is the evidence a registrar uses to decide what counts.

Testing varies too. Harvard, Yale and MIT require the SAT or ACT from transfer applicants. Northwestern is test-optional for the 2026-27 cycle.

Money and Binding Decisions

A few colleges offer a binding transfer Early Decision round. Northwestern’s is due March 1, 2027, and its application says it expects a higher acceptance rate for Early Decision applicants. UChicago also offers binding transfer Early Decision with a March 1 deadline.

Aid policies can differ for transfers. Brown’s transfer admission is need-aware, and WashU’s need-blind policy does not extend to transfer students. Princeton is need-blind for all applicants, including transfers. Run each college’s Net Price Calculator before committing to a binding round.

What Your Student Can Do This Semester

Write down the specific academic reason for transferring, and check whether the current college can meet it first.
Choose next term’s courses with both colleges in mind, so the year counts either way.
Get to know at least one instructor well enough to ask for a letter.
Stay involved on campus. Vanderbilt, for one, looks for campus involvement in its transfer applicants.
Check each college’s eligibility window, deadlines and testing policy for the current cycle.

If your student is weighing a transfer, our Transfer Admissions Support page explains how we help.

The Trend Line and the Exception

Using federal data, Murphy found that nearly half of four-year colleges considered legacy status in 2015. By 2024, fewer than a quarter did. Johns Hopkins, Amherst, Wesleyan, and Pomona have all dropped it. Illinois banned it at its public universities, and California banned it at private colleges that accept state grant aid.

Now the exception. Among colleges that admit fewer than 25 percent of applicants, the report finds that 57 percent still give legacies a boost. The practice is disappearing from the schools where it barely mattered and holding on at the schools where it matters most.

What the Colleges Say Themselves

You don’t need an advocacy group’s framing to see this. The colleges’ own numbers make the point.

Princeton’s trustee committee reported in 2024 that about 30 percent of legacy applicants are admitted, when the overall admit rate was under 6 percent. The committee called the preference a tie-breaker that decides fewer than 30 admissions a year, and kept it.

At Georgetown, the interim provost told the faculty senate in 2025 that children of alumni were admitted at nearly three times the non-legacy rate and made up roughly a quarter of admitted students. By her own account, about a third of admitted legacies got in only after a second review and a legacy “tip.”

Stanford went further. When California’s law took effect, Stanford walked away from Cal Grants, at a cost it put at about $4 million a year, rather than stop considering legacy status.

What This Means If Your Student Is Not a Legacy

The published acceptance rate at a school that uses legacy preference is not your student’s acceptance rate. At Princeton, a slice of the admitted class comes from a pool admitted at roughly five times the overall rate. Take that slice out and the odds for everyone else drop further.

It also shows up in who gets in. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports, a Nature Portfolio journal, analyzed roughly 686,000 applications to 11 highly selective colleges. South Asian American applicants had 49 percent lower odds of attending than white applicants with similar grades, scores, and activities. The authors identified legacy preference as one of two main drivers, because white applicants were far more likely to have it.

None of this means your student shouldn’t apply. It means the list has to be built on the real numbers, not the brochure numbers.

What This Means If Your Student Is a Legacy

Legacy status is not a strategy. Princeton’s own report says roughly 70 percent of legacy applicants are denied, and that the overwhelming majority of admitted legacies would have been admitted without the preference. Where the preference exists, it operates at the margin between applications that are already strong. It cannot rescue an application that gives the reader no reason to say yes.

What Your Student Can Control

Every college reports how it weighs alumni relationships in Section C7 of its Common Data Set, rated from Very Important to Not Considered. Have your student look it up for every school on the list. It takes ten minutes, and it tells you which admissions offices are playing on a tilted board.

Then put the energy where it belongs. Stats are the floor. When your student and a legacy are competing for the same handful of seats, the tie does not go to the applicant who reads like everyone else. It goes to the one who gave the reader a story worth fighting for in committee.

What the Paper Found

The researchers ranked majors by how much of the work they lead to can be done by AI, then compared graduates before and after ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, and found the outcomes began to split almost immediately. For the most exposed tenth of majors:

Likelihood of employment in the first quarter after graduation fell five percentage points.
Earnings in that first full quarter fell 13 percent.
About half of the earnings drop came from graduates landing in lower-paying sectors like restaurants and retail. The other half came from lower pay inside the sectors that still hired them.

The authors say that earnings hit is comparable to graduating into a major recession. Warren told The Chronicle of Higher Education it is “in the same ballpark as the earnings effect of a Great Recession.” Unlike a recession, though, which hits every graduate at once, this shock is falling on new graduates in specific fields.

The gap narrows as graduates move further into their careers, but the paper says it stays substantial for the most exposed majors. The Chronicle reports that two years out, those graduates were still earning about 5 percent less than the comparison group.

This lines up with an earlier Census paper by Tucker, which found that early-career hiring in the most AI-exposed industries dropped right after ChatGPT, and employment for 22-to-24-year-olds in those industries fell 12 percent over the following ten quarters.

Which Majors Are Most Exposed

The paper says the most exposed tenth of majors, the group behind the five-point and 13 percent numbers, is dominated by computer science, information systems, and other majors tied to software development. If your student is heading toward CS, this data is about them.

The authors are also clear that above-average exposure reaches well beyond software. Inside Higher Ed’s summary of the paper lists accounting, journalism, and engineering among the most exposed majors, with nursing and education among the least exposed. So a student choosing accounting because it looks like a stable, practical alternative to CS is not stepping outside this trend. They are moving to a different part of it.

The exposure score is built from the work a major’s graduates typically go on to do, not from the subject itself. A field ranks high when a large share of the tasks in its entry-level jobs are ones AI can already perform. Exposure is also not the same as being replaced. A high score tells you the entry-level work is changing fastest there, which is why the effects in this paper are concentrated in the first job.

What This Does and Does Not Mean

The damage in this paper is concentrated at the start of a career. Fewer employers are hiring new graduates from these majors into entry-level roles, and the ones who do are paying them less. The paper does not show that the careers themselves are disappearing, and the authors say it is too early to know whether these graduates will carry the gap for five to ten years the way recession graduates often do.

It also does not tell your student to abandon a field. Chasing whatever major looks safest this year is how a lot of students ended up in the most exposed programs in the first place. For a decade, CS was the default answer for a student without a plan, so the degree said the same thing as thousands of others, and the entry-level tasks that used to justify hiring those graduates are the tasks AI now does. The students most at risk are the ones who chose the major because it looked safe rather than because they had something they wanted to do with it.

What Your Student Should Do With This

First, choose the major for what you want to do with it, not for the label. A student who wants to build medical devices and studies CS to get there is in a different position than a student who picked CS because it was supposed to pay. The same applies to accounting, journalism, and engineering: the student with a specific reason for the field has something to build on when entry-level hiring tightens.

Second, look at outcomes by program, not national averages. The data behind this paper comes from the Census Bureau’s Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes (PSEO) program, which publishes graduate earnings by major for participating colleges. Your student can see what graduates of a specific program at a specific school actually earn.

Third, plan to have the first job lined up before graduation. When entry-level hiring thins out, an internship, co-op, or research position that converts to an offer is worth more than it used to be, because the degree by itself carries less weight with employers than it did.

What This Means for the Application

Admissions readers follow this data too. Answering “why this major” with “because it’s in demand” already reads as empty, and it will read emptier by the time this year’s applicants graduate.

The student who can name the problem they want to work on, explain why this field is the way in, and show something they have already done about it is writing a different application. That has always been true, and it matters more now that the major itself signals less. Grades and scores get an application read, but a clear account of what the student wants to do and why is what gives the reader a reason to admit them.

What Selingo reports

After two recessions cut state funding, flagship universities needed revenue. Raising in-state tuition too far angers legislators. Out-of-state students can be charged roughly double, so that is who the universities went after.

The shift he documents is large. Citing federal data, he reports that the University of Alabama went from 23% out-of-state among new undergraduates in 2002 to 65% in 2022. South Carolina, Oregon, Oklahoma and Wisconsin moved the same direction. At the average flagship, he writes, nearly four in ten undergraduates now come from another state. Researchers call it the Great Student Swap: Illinois students go to Missouri, New Jersey students go to Penn State, and each pays the nonresident price.

He also describes where Alabama recruits: prosperous suburbs where the in-state flagship is hard to get into, and metro areas where its price looks reasonable next to private colleges. He names Chicago. By 2022, Illinois was among Alabama’s top sources of out-of-state students.

His verdict on the typical full-pay student is blunt. They are paying twice as much, he writes, “for a similar product.”

The scholarship is a price, not a prize

This is where families misread the letter. Selingo reports that Alabama spent $185.4 million on merit aid in 2023-24, more than twice what it spent on need-based aid. That money exists because out-of-state tuition funds it. A merit award from an out-of-state flagship is a discount on a price that was set high in the first place.

Alabama’s published 2026-27 cost of attendance is $35,392 for residents and $60,400 for nonresidents living on campus. A $15,000 scholarship to a nonresident still leaves a bill about $10,000 a year above what an Alabama resident pays with no award at all. The award is real money. It is also a pricing decision, and the comparison that matters is the net price against your own state flagship and every other offer on the table.

When it is a good deal

I do not tell students to avoid these schools. Selingo tells the story of a Pennsylvania student with near-perfect stats who was rejected early by the University of Chicago, applied to the University of Mississippi mostly to satisfy her mother, and ended up with a full ride, an honors college, and funding for research and study abroad. Rice and Vanderbilt admitted her later with weaker packages. She chose Mississippi. When she listed the reasons to pick Rice, the only one she could find was what the name would signal to other people.

That is the version of this trade that works. Universities spend their biggest awards on the students at the top of their applicant pool. If your student is that applicant, an honors college with a full ride can beat a famous name at full price. If your student is in the middle of the pool, your family is the one funding those awards.

The leverage is moving toward families

The last part of the article matters most for students applying now. Selingo reports that this fall’s freshman class may be the last large one for years, because of falling birth rates and fewer graduates choosing college. Only the South will see growth in high school graduates. International enrollment is projected to drop sharply as well.

Universities that built budgets on nonresident tuition will be competing for fewer students. That means better offers for the students they want, and more room to ask for one.

What I tell students

Run the net price calculator at every public university on the list before applying, including your own flagship. Apply early enough to be considered for the top scholarships, because those interviews start before most admissions decisions arrive. When the offers come in, put the four-year net cost of each on one page, along with what the student would do there. Then decide.

An out-of-state flagship should be on the list because of what the student will do there and what it will cost. The size of the scholarship in the letter is not a reason.

What travels with the transcript

Every application arrives with a school profile. It lists the courses the school offers, how grades are distributed, and where the student falls in the class. The counselor letter fills in the rest. A student who took the five AP courses a school offers has maxed out the curriculum. A student who took five at a school that offers twenty-eight has not. Same transcript, different reading.

The reader is asking one thing: what did this student do with what was in front of them?

California: the numbers by high school

The University of California publishes applicants, admits and average GPAs for every high school in the state. I pulled UC Berkeley’s fall 2025 numbers for public high schools.

Mission High in San Francisco: 34 admits from 76 applicants, 45%.
Santa Monica High: 67 from 259, 26%.
Lowell, San Francisco’s selective public school: 42 from 363, 12%.
Monta Vista in Cupertino: 33 from 321, 10%.
Dougherty Valley in San Ramon: 44 from 542, 8%.
Amador Valley in Pleasanton: 21 from 302, 7%.

The applicants at these schools look alike on paper. Average applicant GPA on UC’s weighted, capped scale was 3.93 at Mission, 3.95 at Lowell, 3.92 at Dougherty Valley. Across all 344 public high schools with at least 50 Berkeley applicants, I found almost no relationship between how strong a school’s applicants were and how many got in.

What differs is the crowd. UC caps the GPA it calculates, so at a school like Dougherty Valley hundreds of students sit at nearly the same number and Berkeley takes 44 of them. UC also flags the top 9% of each participating high school and counts that status among its 13 review factors. At Mission, a student near the top of the class stands alone. At Dougherty Valley, the same student is one of many.

Texas: the rule is written into law

Texas is blunter. Starting with fall 2026, UT Austin automatically admits Texas students in the top 5% of their high school class, and 75% of the Texas residents in each freshman class get in that way. Rank is measured inside each school. The top 5% at a small rural high school and the top 5% at the most competitive suburban school in Dallas get the same guarantee. The student at the 8% mark of the suburban school, who may have stronger scores than either, goes into the pool competing for what is left.

Families noticed. Economists who studied the original top 10% rule found that among students with the motive and the opportunity, at least 5% enrolled in a lower-achieving high school to improve their rank.

Where the top dog argument stops

I take this seriously, and I also see families push it too far.

The Mission High students were not coasting. Those admitted to Berkeley averaged a 4.08 on UC’s scale. The average admit across the state was about 4.2, and that bar barely moves from school to school. Being first in an easier room still requires being first.

Admit rates by school are also school totals, not individual odds. At a school where 542 seniors apply to Berkeley, plenty are applying on hope.

Rank guarantees less than it appears to. Automatic admission to UT Austin does not include the major. Business, engineering and computer science are still decided by a full review.

And the easier school has real costs: fewer advanced courses, fewer classmates who push, thinner counseling. Research on Ivy-Plus admissions shows the private school edge sits in non-academic ratings, not academic ones. A student at a school without that support has to build it independently.

What I tell families

Do not pick the most competitive school your student can get into on the assumption that the name does the work. It does not, and being one of 500 strong applicants from the same building has a measurable cost.

Do not trade down to game a ranking either. Choose the school where your student can realistically reach the top of the class, still has hard courses left to take in senior year, and will be known well by the teachers who write the letters.

The one case where I would switch: a student who has run out of courses and has no one to work with. That student has outgrown the school. Everyone else is better served by the question the reader asks. What is the student going to do with what is in front of them?

What the data shows about high school admissions impact

The most detailed public attempt to measure this is the Elite College Placement Index from Chicardgo School. It estimates what share of each high school’s graduates enroll at a top 25 national university. Across 30 metro areas the gaps are large, and they are not consistent.

Chicago: the median private school sends 12% of graduates to a top 25 university. The median public school sends 3%.
Washington, DC: 25% private, 3% public. The widest gap in the dataset.
Bay Area: 15% private, 8% public.
Phoenix and Atlanta: 4% private, 4% public. No gap.
Milwaukee: 1% private, 5% public. The gap runs the other way.

Inside the public system the spread is just as wide. In Nashville the median magnet school places 8%, against 1% for public schools overall. In Chicago, the index puts Payton at 24%, IMSA at 23% and Northside at 20%, level with the strongest private schools in the city.

One caution before you act on any of it. Chicardgo states that its matriculation figures are modeled estimates built from school profiles and state data, not official counts from the schools. I use them for direction, not decimals. For real numbers on a specific school, ask its counseling office for the school profile and the matriculation list.

The gap is mostly who walks in the door

A school that sends 24% of its class to top 25 universities admitted that class by test score. The question that matters for your student is different. Would the same student do better there than at the alternative?

Economists have tested this directly by comparing students who scored just above an exam school’s admission cutoff with students who scored just below it. These are near-identical students who ended up in different buildings.

In Boston and New York, researchers at MIT and Duke found that attending an exam school, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science included, had little effect on test scores or on the quality of college students later attended. They titled the paper The Elite Illusion.

Chicago has its own version. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the UChicago Consortium on School Research studied students entering CPS selective enrollment high schools from 2010 to 2013. They found no effect on test scores. Students did report better experiences, including stronger relationships and feeling safer. But for students from the lowest-income neighborhoods, admission lowered grades and lowered the probability of attending a selective college. The authors point to class rank as the likely cause. The same student ranks lower in a stronger room.

Where the school does change the outcome

It is not nothing. Raj Chetty, David Deming and John Friedman linked admissions records from several Ivy-Plus colleges to test scores and tax data. Among applicants with comparable SAT or ACT scores, students from private high schools received much higher non-academic ratings and no higher academic ratings.

The private school edge at the most selective colleges does not show up in the academic rating. It shows up in everything else: activities, recommendations, how the student comes across on paper. My reading is that this reflects counselors with small caseloads, teachers who write detailed letters, and families with the resources to support real pursuits. The same study found no such advantage at flagship public universities.

What I tell families

So I would not pay tuition or move houses for a feeder rate. Colleges read every applicant against what their own school offers, which is why the school profile travels with every transcript. A student near the top of a solid school, taking the hardest courses available and doing real work outside class, is not at a disadvantage against a student in the middle of a famous one. Often it is the reverse.

Pick the school where your student will be challenged, known by teachers, and have room to build something. Then ask what the student is going to do with four years there.

What the interview actually risks

Admissions officers on a panel I listened to this spring put the number plainly: an interview hurts an applicant somewhere around 2 to 3% of the time. That is the rate at which a report comes back with a concern serious enough to move a decision. A quiet student, a nervous student, a student who took a beat before every answer does not land in that 2 to 3%. Colleges are building a class of 1,600 personalities, not 1,600 debate captains. An interviewer might note that a student was reserved. A note is not a verdict.

The people doing these interviews, alumni and admissions staff alike, are practiced at making a seventeen-year-old comfortable and steering the conversation somewhere useful. Your student is not carrying the interview alone.

What skipping it risks

This is the side families underweight. When a college marks the interview optional, it still knows who took it and who didn’t. Schools have gotten sophisticated about predicting yield, and participation in the optional things, the interview, the visit, the information session, is one of the inputs. A student who declines the interview at a school that tracks demonstrated interest has handed the reader a small piece of evidence that they may not enroll.

So the math is lopsided. Take the interview and the likely outcomes are neutral or positive. Skip it and the likely outcomes are neutral or negative. If your student can reasonably do it, they do it.

The same logic applies to the visit, with one wrinkle: being on campus is not the same as being recorded on campus. Sign in at admissions. If the office is closed, most campuses now have QR codes on self-guided tour stops for exactly this reason. Use them. I covered the visit itself in an earlier post.

Why the fuller application wins

One panelist described the difference between a bare application and a full one as the difference between a presentation in black and white and the same one in color. Every optional component, the interview, the additional essay, the extra recommendation, gives the reader another angle on the same student. None of it is about manufacturing a persona. It’s about giving the person deciding your student’s file enough real context to advocate for them in committee. I’ve written before about why optional means required. The interview is the most human version of that rule.

How to prepare without over-preparing

Three things, none of them a script.

First, know the school well enough to ask a question that can’t be answered in thirty seconds on the website. “What’s the engineering program like?” is a search query. “I read that the engineering school moved to a common first year in 2023. How has that changed which students end up in which majors?” is a conversation. The panelists were clear that one strong question can lift an otherwise ordinary interview.

Second, give the student permission to buy time. If a question is confusing, ask the interviewer to rephrase it. If it’s a big one, say so and ask to come back to it. Both read as composure, not weakness. A seventeen-year-old who can say “let me think about that for a second” is doing something most adults can’t.

Third, don’t be afraid of the honest question. Start from something the student already knows about the school, then ask about the part that isn’t in the brochure: what students there complain about, what the school is trying to fix, what the interviewer would change. Interviewers remember the conversation that felt like a conversation.

The actual message

Prepare. Show up. Ask one real question. Then stop worrying about being perfect, because perfect isn’t what the interviewer is grading. They’re trying to answer one question for the committee: is this the person the application says it is? For a student whose application is real, that’s an easy interview to pass.

The southern college migration is real

Common App reports the Southwest as its fastest-growing region, with Texas overtaking New York and California as the top state by applicant count. Clemson took nearly 65,000 applications last fall, and more than four in five came from outside South Carolina. Alabama had three and a half times as many out-of-state applicants as in-state ones.

The reasons are the ones my two students named. What’s new is that the whole country noticed at once.

What it does to the schools everyone already wanted

Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory, Georgia Tech, UNC, UVA. Already hard. Now they’re getting the California and Northeast applicants who used to stay home, on top of the Texas and Georgia applicants who were always there.

Every national university manages geography. It wants all fifty states and won’t fill a class from one region no matter how strong the files are. When the pool from your suburb doubles, the seats for your suburb don’t. Amanda Edelhart of College MatchPoint said it plainly on a Guidewell webinar this spring: these offices are turning down students they would have taken in a heartbeat five years ago, because far more applications are arriving from the same places.

If your student is applying from outside the South, the southern private that was a target three years ago is a reach now. The flagship that was a safety is a reach for anyone out of state. I covered those numbers in the last post.

The arbitrage runs the other way too

If everyone is applying south, northern and western schools are watching their pools thin out from the places they used to draw from. A strong file from Texas to a New England school is prized now, because that school is buried in New York and Massachusetts and short on Houston.

The same logic works from anywhere. Ask what the student actually likes about the southern school. If it’s the honors college and the merit money, those exist at schools where a file from your state is scarce. If it’s the engineering program, there are strong ones in states that rarely see applicants from your area. Find the version of the experience where geography helps instead of hurts.

What the two students got right

They didn’t chase prestige and they didn’t chase the crowd. They wrote down what they wanted, ranked it honestly, and applied where that list was satisfied. Both schools wanted them, and said so with money.

I’m not telling you to send your student south. The students who do best in this market can say, specifically, what they want from college, then find it in a place that wants them back. Sometimes that’s Tuscaloosa. Sometimes it’s a state where nobody from your high school has applied in years. What it almost never is anymore is the school everyone in your zip code is applying to for the same reasons.

Stats get the file read. The college list is where the strategy lives.

What actually happened

Public flagships have a legal obligation to their own residents. UNC must fill at least 82% of each class with North Carolinians. UVA keeps roughly two-thirds of enrollment in-state. Texas law reserves 90% of UT Austin’s first-year class for Texans.

What’s new is the volume. Common App applications to public universities grew 13% in a single year, against 3% for privates. UT Austin took in 90,562 applications for fall 2025, up 24%, with out-of-state applications alone up 48%. Georgia Tech went from 50,610 applications to 67,985 in five years. UVA received 82,118 this cycle, a 27% jump, after dropping supplemental essays for every school except nursing. Michigan crossed 109,000.

The seats didn’t move. Georgia Tech admitted between 8,400 and 8,900 students every one of those five years. When applications climb and seats stay flat, the math goes one direction, and it goes there hardest for the students the school isn’t obligated to serve.

The out-of-state rates

The overall rate is the number in the headlines. The out-of-state rate is the one that matters for a Chicago family.

Georgia Tech, Class of 2030: 12.8% overall. 28% for Georgia residents. 9% for everyone else.
UVA, Class of 2030: 12.5% overall. 22% in-state. 10% out-of-state, and 7% in the regular decision round.
UNC Chapel Hill: 16.7% overall for the Class of 2029. Roughly 8% out-of-state per the most recent Common Data Set.
UCLA, fall 2025: 9.4% overall. 9.1% out-of-state, and the nonresident pool is materially stronger than the resident pool, so that number understates the bar.
UT Austin, Class of 2029: 22% overall. About 10% out-of-state, measured before the 48% surge in out-of-state applications. The current rate is almost certainly lower.
Michigan, Class of 2029: 16.4% overall. The last Common Data Set that broke out residency showed out-of-state in the high teens, and the trend is down. Michigan also added a binding early decision round this year.

Now compare that to 2016

In spring 2016, Harvard admitted 5.2% of applicants. Columbia admitted 6.0%. Dartmouth admitted 10.5%. Cornell admitted 14.0%.

A non-Georgian applying to Georgia Tech today faces worse odds than a student applying to Dartmouth ten years ago. An Illinois student applying to UVA is at Dartmouth 2016. UCLA out-of-state sits between Columbia and Dartmouth. Even Michigan, the most generous of the group, is where Cornell sat a decade ago.

It isn’t only publics. Northeastern admitted 6.2% this year, Boston College 12.7%, USC 11.7%. Each was a comfortable target in 2016, when Northeastern’s rate was 27%. Parents who remember their own applications, or an older child’s, are carrying a map that is ten years out of date.

What this means for the list

I am not telling you to pull the flagships off the list. I am telling you to stop calling them safeties, and to build the list so it still works if every one of them says no.

First, the in-state advantage belongs to your own state. For an Illinois student, UIUC is where residency helps. Every other flagship is where it hurts. If Illinois isn’t the answer, the honest safeties are publics with lower volume and no cap pressure: Indiana, Iowa, Purdue outside of engineering and CS, Wisconsin for some majors. The list needs at least two schools your student would attend where the admit rate for your state runs above 50%.

Second, the major matters as much as the state. UT Austin and Georgia Tech admit by major. Michigan’s engineering and Ross rates run well below the university rate. A 9% out-of-state figure at Georgia Tech is the ceiling for a computer science applicant, not the floor.

Third, the flagship application has to be a real application. A student who treats Michigan as a safety and sends a generic “Why Michigan” essay is competing at Dartmouth 2016 odds with an application they never would have sent to Dartmouth. The schools can tell.

Stats get a student into the pool that gets read. What the reader learns from there decides the rest. That’s true at Yale, and it’s now true at Charlottesville.

What the supplement is actually testing

Peter Johnson, then Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Columbia, gave a useful example in an interview. One of Columbia’s supplements asks what books a student has read in the past year, by their own choosing, outside anything assigned. If the answer is the seven Harry Potter novels, that says one thing. If the answer includes a few challenging, unexpected, self-directed choices, that says something else entirely.

The question is not testing whether the student has good taste. It is testing for independent intellectual curiosity. What does the student do when no one assigns the work? That is the quality selective colleges are buying, and the supplement is where they look for it.

A student who treats the supplement as a box to check answers the books question with whatever is on the nightstand. A student who understands what is being asked uses it to show a mind that runs on its own.

Why the generic “why us” essay fails

Johnson was blunt about families who choose schools by ranking. A ranking had recently put Columbia second in the country for food. If food is the deciding factor, he said, you should probably go to a culinary institute. The Ivy League, he pointed out, is an athletic conference, not a reason to apply anywhere.

A supplement built on prestige, ranking, or the words “Ivy League” tells the college the student has not looked past the brand. It is the opposite of a demonstrated-interest signal. It signals that the student is applying to a logo, not a place. The work is choosing schools for fit, not prestige, and the supplement is where that choice becomes visible or exposes its absence.

This is why the find-and-replace test matters so much for interest as well as fit. An essay that could be sent to any school proves the student is interested in no school in particular. An essay that could only have been written for one school proves the opposite.

What this means for your student

The supplement does two jobs at once. It demonstrates fit, and it demonstrates interest. The personal statement does neither, because every school receives the same one.

So the time your student spends on supplements is not just about writing a better essay. It is about sending the clearest possible signal that they understand the school and want to be there. For a college managing its yield, that signal is worth a great deal.

For each school on the list, that means real research done by the student: the curriculum, the named programs, the specific way that college teaches. At Columbia it means understanding the Core Curriculum and being honest about whether a shared, prescribed intellectual foundation excites the student. At another school it means something else. The point is that the work is different every time.

If you want help figuring out whether your student’s supplements are sending the right signal to each school on the list, that is the conversation we have in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

The part of the application built to evaluate you

Peter Johnson, then Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Columbia, made this point directly in an interview. The Common Application is common by design. Every school receives the same answers to the same questions. So highly selective colleges build their own supplemental questions, and those questions are written to get at what the college values. The admissions staff wrote them specifically to test whether a student is a genuine intellectual and social fit.

That interview is more than a decade old, and the point has only hardened since. The supplement is not a formality. It is the instrument the college built to evaluate your student. It is also one of the parts of the application most families skip, which is exactly why it is where the advantage hides.

The golden rule for college supplements

Here is the test I give every student I work with.

If you can change the name of the university in your supplement and the essay still works, you have not written the supplement. You have written a template.

“I am drawn to [School]’s rigorous academics, vibrant community, and beautiful campus” works for any school in the country, which means it works for none of them. An admissions officer has read that sentence ten thousand times. It tells them the student did not do the work.

A real supplement could only have been written for that one school. It names the specific course, the specific requirement, the specific program, the specific way that college educates its students, and connects that to something true about the student.

Where your student’s theme meets the school

The strongest version of this goes further than research. A strong applicant has a thread running through the whole application, one genuine intellectual focus that the activities, the essays, and the recommendations all reinforce. The supplement is where that thread meets a specific institution.

I am working with a bioengineering student right now whose focus is detecting early motor irregularities using wearable motion sensors. That is his thread. When he writes a supplement for a given university, the assignment is not to praise the school. It is to find the two or three professors doing work adjacent to his, name the lab, name the method, and explain why that specific environment moves his specific work forward.

When he does that, the supplement becomes impossible to fake and impossible to transfer. No other applicant could have written it, because it grows out of his actual research. The school’s name cannot be swapped out, because the faculty he names exist only there. That is a unique argument for that university, built from work he is already doing.

What this means for your student

The personal statement matters, and it should be good. But once it is done, it is done. The supplements are where the marginal hour returns the most, and the work is the student’s: read the curriculum, find the named programs, find the faculty doing relevant work.

Your job as a parent is not to write this. It is to make sure your student is doing the research rather than reaching for the template. If your student is writing supplements that would survive a find-and-replace of the college’s name, they are not yet doing what the assignment asks.

If you want help figuring out what each school on your student’s list is actually asking for, that is the conversation we have in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

How colleges use AI to read applications

The dominant CRM in selective admissions is already running AI. Slate, made by Technolutions, is the back-end admissions system used by more than 2,100 colleges, universities, and secondary schools. In 2024, Slate launched Reader AI, a tool that pre-reads application documents and summarizes them for human reviewers. Per Slate’s own marketing, the tool “can quickly analyze and identify pertinent details in letters of recommendation, college essays, or any other document you provide.” Schools that use Slate can enable Reader AI for any document type, including essays, recommendations, transcripts, and research uploads.

UNC has been auto-scoring essays since 2019. Per Daily Tar Heel reporting, UNC’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions uses an automated essay-scoring system that evaluates writing quality including vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar, and length. The auto-generated score appears on the Slate Reader Dashboard alongside the application. Human readers see it before they make their evaluation.

Virginia Tech debuted an AI essay reader for the current cycle. Per Virginia Tech News, the AI is being used “to confirm the human reader essay scores, not make any admissions decisions.” The university stated purpose is to deliver decisions one month earlier than the previous schedule.

Caltech ran a new AI-powered interview system this past cycle. Per Caltech admissions dean Ashley Pallie, the tool, called VIVA and developed by a company called InitialView, was used to screen roughly 10 percent of early applicants who submitted research projects. Students upload their research and an AI voice interviews them on video, asking questions about the work, akin to a brief dissertation defense. Faculty and admissions officers then review the video. Pallie has stated that Caltech plans to expand its AI use for 2026.

Per an Inside Higher Ed survey, roughly half of US admissions offices already use AI in some part of the application review process. The most common uses are transcript review and recommendation-letter summarization. Essay reading is less common but growing.

What the policies actually say

The official institutional language is consistent. Every school using AI tells the same story: AI assists human reviewers but does not make final decisions. Slate’s documentation explicitly states that Reader AI evaluates a single application at a time and does not compare or rank applications. UNC, Virginia Tech, and Caltech all stress that human readers are still the decision-makers.

This is true. It is also incomplete. The AI does not decide who is admitted. It does decide what the human reader sees first, how the file is summarized, and how quickly the file moves through the queue.

In a process where the average human reading time is approximately eight minutes per application, the AI summary is increasingly what the eight minutes is spent on. The human reader is not starting from your student’s essay. They are starting from the AI’s pre-read of the essay.

What this means for your student

Three practical implications.

First, applications now need to be readable by both AI summarizers and human readers. AI summarizers favor clear structure, named projects, specific facts, and identifiable claims. They struggle to summarize narrative essays that depend on subtext or implication. The student whose application includes a clear specific story, a named focus, and concrete accomplishments is more likely to come through the AI pre-read with the right summary attached. The student whose application is vague or full of generic accomplishments is more likely to come through with a flat or inaccurate summary.

Second, research projects and other student-generated work now face authenticity verification. Caltech’s VIVA is the first published example, but it will not be the last. Students who submit research should expect that the depth of their understanding can be tested, either by AI interview or by human follow-up. Submitting work the student cannot intellectually claim is now actively risky in a way it was not three years ago.

Third, the “eight minutes” of human review has not gotten longer. It has gotten more curated. The human reader still spends the same amount of time on your student’s file, but the AI is shaping which parts of the file get those minutes. Clarity is no longer just helpful. It is structural.

The conversation about AI in admissions has been pointed in the wrong direction. The question your student should be asking is not whether to use AI on the essay. It is whether the essay, the activity list, and the research uploads will read well to the AI that gets to them first.

For more on how this fits into a broader admissions strategy, see our other guides.

Recruited athlete status is the single largest admissions advantage available to an unhooked applicant. It is also the one with the shortest decision window, the earliest deadlines, and the lowest tolerance for waiting around.

Most families learn what they would have needed to do two years after the window closed.

What “recruited athlete” actually means

At selective colleges, a recruited athlete is not a strong high school athlete who mentions sports on the application. A recruited athlete is one whose name the coach has submitted to admissions with the request that this student be admitted. That request carries weight nothing else in an application carries.

There is a precondition. The coach has to be willing to fight for your student in admissions. Coaches do not advocate for athletes who will not measurably improve the team’s competitive position. The bar is not “good high school athlete.” The bar is “this student is at or above the level of the recruits I am currently competing for, and I want them in my program enough to spend one of my limited admissions slots on them.”

The athletic recruiting timeline starts in 10th grade

For most sports at most selective programs:

9th and 10th grade is when the athletic resume gets built. Times, marks, film, camp attendance.

June 15 after sophomore year is when NCAA D1 coaches can initiate direct contact in most sports. Some sports use September 1 of junior year instead, and a handful, including football, basketball, and men’s ice hockey, run their own calendars. Check your sport’s specific dates. D2, D3, and NAIA coaches can communicate far earlier.

August 1 before junior year is when official visits open at most D1 programs.

Junior year is when verbal offers land and most top D1 commitments are made.

Senior fall brings Likely Letters at Ivies and the last commitments at remaining programs.

Senior winter and spring is the signing window.

If your student is a junior right now and has not been in contact with coaches at their target programs, the window for top D1 is mostly closed. There is still room at lower D1, at strong D3, and at Ivy League and NESCAC programs, which run a slightly later timeline because of their academic process. But the strategic move shifts from “build a recruiting list” to “find programs where the timing still works.”

What coaches actually look at, in order

Numerical performance first. Times, marks, batting average, rebounds per game. Coaches need to know within ten seconds whether your student can contribute. The roster of their current team is public. If your student’s numbers do not put them in the top half of that roster, the email will not get answered.

Video second. Coaches at the recruiting stage have not seen your student play. The video has to be good enough that they do not have to. Highlight reels are fine for initial interest. Full-game film is required before a real decision.

Character signals third. Ideally from a club coach with relationships to college programs. A club coach emailing a college coach saying “this kid will show up for you” carries more weight than the family making the same claim.

Academic profile fourth, except at the schools where it matters first. Ivy League and NESCAC programs use academic floors the coach cannot override. An athletically qualified student who does not clear the academic floor will not be recruited at those programs, regardless of how much the coach wants them.

The three biggest mistakes

The first is waiting for the coach to reach out. Coaches do not find athletes. Athletes find coaches. Outreach has to come from the student, in their own voice, with specific reasons they are interested in that program, with current numbers, and with film.

The second is treating the verbal offer as the end of the process. A verbal is non-binding on both sides. Athletes lose slots between verbal and signing because they stopped training, their grades dropped, or the coach found a stronger recruit. The work continues until the paperwork is signed.

The third is ignoring D3. Many families assume D3 means no advantage because there are no athletic scholarships. The advantage at D3 is admissions, not money. A coach at Williams or Amherst can flag a file in admissions, and the academic-plus-athletic profile of a recruited NESCAC athlete consistently produces admit outcomes an unhooked applicant with the same academic profile cannot match.

What to do this month

If your student is in 10th grade: build the numerical baseline, post video, attend camps where coaches at target programs will be present, and identify three or four club coaches who can advocate. This is the same depth-and-output work that drives the rest of the application, applied to sport.

If your student is in 11th grade: outreach is urgent. Direct emails to college coaches with current numbers and film. Schedule official visits in the fall. Begin the pre-read conversation at Ivies and NESCAC.

If your student is in 12th grade and not yet recruited: the window is narrow but not closed at some D3 programs. Focus on programs where the coach has not locked in their final slots.

If you want help mapping out what a credible recruiting timeline looks like for your specific student in your specific sport, that is the conversation we have in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Amit Khemka, Founder, Elite College Advising

On May 27, Yale announced that it is reinstating its full SAT or ACT requirement starting with the next admissions cycle. The 2024 “test-flexible” policy, which allowed AP or IB scores as substitutes, is gone. Yale is now the seventh Ivy League school to require testing.

Two days earlier, on May 25, more than 800 University of California faculty members released an open letter demanding that the UC system reinstate SAT or ACT testing for STEM applicants beginning in Fall 2027. Seven of the nine UC mathematics department chairs signed it, along with 43 other STEM department chairs.

These two announcements landed within 48 hours of each other. They are not unrelated, and they are not the start of the trend. They are the moment the institutional consensus became visible.

Where selective colleges SAT requirements stand now

For the 2026-2027 admissions cycle, the testing-required list at selective American universities includes Harvard, Yale, Princeton (starting 2027-2028), MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and the University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin among publics. Columbia remains the only Ivy League school with a permanent test-optional policy.

The schools still test-optional in the top tier include Duke, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, Rice, and Notre Dame. The University of California system is test-blind by policy but, per the UC faculty letter, that is the policy now under pressure.

Six years ago, the test-optional list was much longer. Two-thirds of the most selective American universities have now moved away from it.

Why they reversed

Two reasons, and the institutions have been clear about both.

First, the schools studied their own admissions data and found that scores predicted academic performance better than grades alone. Yale’s announcement quotes Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis: “SAT and ACT scores are strong predictors of a student’s future Yale academic performance, and… can help identify well-prepared candidates, especially those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.” When Johns Hopkins announced its return to required testing in August 2024, the university’s published explanation cited “a comprehensive review of the relevant academic research on testing and analyzed the university’s three years of test-optional admissions experience and related data.” The review found that test scores “serve as an important predictive metric to assess the likelihood of a student’s academic success.”

Second, and the bigger story, the transcript stopped doing the job grades alone used to do. The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions issued a report in November 2025 documenting that the number of UC San Diego first-year students whose math skills tested below high school level had increased roughly thirtyfold between 2020 and 2025. Seventy percent of those students were below middle school level. One in twelve incoming UC San Diego freshmen could not do middle-school math.

The most striking finding in the report is what those students’ high school transcripts looked like. Forty-two percent of them had taken precalculus or calculus. Another 44 percent had taken statistics. The transcripts said “advanced math student.” The actual math skill was below middle school.

This is the finding that broke the test-optional consensus. Without scores to anchor what a grade meant, admissions offices were reading transcripts that no longer described the students they used to describe.

What “test-optional” actually means now

The schools still using the test-optional label are not test-blind, and the label is misleading at this point. Per Common Application data, roughly 80 to 85 percent of applicants to selective test-optional schools now submit scores. At Yale during the test-flexible period that ended this week, 90 percent of enrolled first-year students submitted SAT or ACT scores anyway.

For an unhooked applicant at a selective school, the practical meaning of “optional” has shifted. It used to mean “we will look at your application without scores and not hold it against you.” It now means “you can submit, but almost everyone else is, and you will need a specific reason if you don’t.” Choosing not to submit is no longer a neutral choice. It is a choice that requires explanation.

What this means for your student

Plan to test. The schools that have already restored the requirement (most of the Ivies, the top STEM schools, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and the top public flagships in Florida and Texas) require it outright. The schools that still say optional are now operating in an environment where the overwhelming majority of admitted applicants submitted scores. There is no longer a credible path through the highest tier of selective admissions that does not include a score.

When to start testing

Start earlier than feels necessary. A PSAT in sophomore year and a diagnostic SAT or ACT in the spring of 10th grade leave room for two clean sittings in junior year, which is usually enough to reach a target score without testing into senior fall. Families who wait until the fall of senior year often learn too late that a score sits below a school’s median, with no time left to improve it.

A strong score is still worth sending to a test-optional school. Optional does not mean ignored, and a score at or above the school’s middle range adds evidence to the file.

The right target is not perfection. It is to score at or above the 50th percentile of the school’s published mid-50% range. That score puts the application past the first-round filter that test-required schools now use and removes the asymmetric risk at test-optional schools where most applicants are submitting.

The test-optional era was an experiment. The institutions ran it, looked at the data, and concluded that grades alone were not enough to predict who was actually prepared. The reversal is not driven by lobbying or politics. It is driven by the colleges’ own internal findings, published in their own announcements. The conversation that should be happening in families is not whether to test. It is how to test well.

What published acceptance rates actually measure

The published acceptance rate is a simple ratio. Total admits divided by total applicants. The numerator and denominator both include groups of students who are evaluated on entirely different terms than the typical applicant.

The numerator includes recruited athletes, legacies, dean’s interest list applicants (often relatives or children of major donors), and children of faculty and staff. The admissions field shorthand for these four categories is ALDC.

ALDC admit rates are dramatically higher than the headline number. Per court-disclosed evidence in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, covering Harvard’s admissions cycles for the classes of 2014 through 2019, the rates were:

Recruited athletes: 86 percent admitted
Children of faculty and staff: 47 percent admitted
Dean’s interest list: 42 percent admitted
Legacies: 33 percent admitted

Harvard’s overall admit rate during the same period was about 6 percent.

What this means in actual seats

The compositional effect is striking. Per a peer-reviewed analysis published in the Journal of Labor Economics by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono using Harvard’s own admissions data, 43 percent of white admits to Harvard were ALDC. For African American, Asian American, and Hispanic admits, the share was less than 16 percent. The model further estimated that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had not been ALDC.

The Class of 2019 dean’s interest list alone contained 192 admitted students, more than 10 percent of the class. The list is described in court documents as containing applicants whose families have donated to Harvard or are positioned to do so.

These categories do not float. They take seats from a predetermined pool every year, regardless of how strong the rest of the applicant pool is. If you are not in one of these categories, you are competing for a smaller pool of seats than the headline number suggests.

Early Decision rounds compound the effect

Most selective schools admit a large share of their class through binding Early Decision. Brown admitted 907 students through Early Decision for the Class of 2029, or 18 percent of the 5,055 ED applicants. The Regular Decision admit rate for the same class was about 4 percent. The ED round looks easier from the outside.

Inside that ED admit number, the composition shifts further toward institutional priorities. Brown admitted 90 students through its QuestBridge partnership for low-income students in ED for the Class of 2029. The university does not publish a breakdown of ED admits by ALDC category, but selective schools tend to concentrate athletic recruits and legacies in the early round because both groups make commitment decisions earlier than the general applicant pool.

For Class of 2030, Brown’s ED admit rate dropped to 16.5 percent and Questbridge admits dropped to 52. The headline percentage moves. The underlying composition stays close to stable.

The number that matters for your student

The published acceptance rate is the rate for everyone. Your student’s actual rate is the rate for unhooked applicants competing for the seats that remain after institutional priorities are filled. That rate is not published anywhere. It can be estimated from Common Data Set disclosures and court records, but selective schools do not break it out, and they have institutional reasons not to.

For Harvard during the period the SFFA case covered, the math suggests the unhooked admit rate sat below 5 percent against a published 6 percent. At the most selective schools today, the gap is likely larger because ALDC seats have remained roughly constant while the unhooked applicant pool has grown by tens of thousands.

The number your student should plan around is lower than the headline. Probably meaningfully lower. The right way to use the published rate is as a ceiling, not a benchmark.

What to do with this

Three implications.

First, the headline acceptance rate should not anchor your sense of whether your student is competitive. A 4 percent published rate at a top-five school is closer to 3 percent for an unhooked applicant. A 6 percent rate is closer to 4 percent. Adjust accordingly.

Second, the ALDC categories are real institutional priorities, not flexible targets. A school that admitted 192 dean’s list applicants last year will admit a similar number this year. Build your strategy around the seats your student is actually competing for, which is the unhooked share.

Third, the lower the school’s overall acceptance rate, the larger the ALDC share tends to be. The schools that look hardest from the headline number are exactly the schools where the unhooked rate diverges most from that number. The math works against the assumption that “if my student is strong enough for the top ten, the top five are similar.” They are not.

The acceptance rate is a real number. It is just not your student’s number. Plan accordingly.

Your admissions theme is what the AO is actually trying to find

The framing matters. Selective schools are not looking for well-rounded students. They are looking for a well-rounded class, which is a different thing entirely.

Peter Johnson, former Director of Admission at Columbia University, has talked publicly about a category he calls “niche applicants”: students who have developed deep independent expertise in a specific area, whether science, humanities, athletics, or something more unusual. Selective admissions offices want a class that, in aggregate, has expertise across many fields. They build that class by admitting students who are deep in one thing, not students who are shallow in many.

The implication is that “do a little of everything to look well-rounded” is now actively counterproductive. It produces the kind of resume that gets read in eight minutes and forgotten in eight seconds, because there is nothing to remember.

What “angular” actually means

The word that has stuck in admissions circles is “angular.” An angular student has developed a clear specialty. The specialty might be academic (machine learning, microbiology, classical philosophy), creative (theater, classical music, fiction), service-based (a multi-year commitment to one specific community organization), or some combination. What matters is that the activities, the essays, and the recommendations all point in the same direction.

Angular does not mean narrow. A student deeply interested in computational biology can run a school club, do summer research at a university lab, win competitions in the field, write essays about a moment of intellectual discovery, and ask a science teacher and a research mentor to write recommendations. The resume can have ten lines and still tell one story. Each line reinforces the others.

The opposite is the well-rounded student who is the president of DECA, the founder of a small nonprofit, the captain of the tennis team, and an Eagle Scout. Each of those is impressive. None of them connects to the others. The admissions officer walks away unable to describe this student except as “a strong kid who did a lot of things.” That is the kiss of death in a competitive pool.

The DECA problem

DECA has more than 3,500 high school chapters and over 200,000 members. There are thousands of investment club founders, thousands of small-nonprofit founders, and thousands of tutoring program organizers applying every cycle. These activities are not bad, they are just no longer differentiators. Putting one of them in the top three slots without a clear connection to a deeper theme tells an admissions officer that your student did what students who want to look good for admissions do.

The question is not whether your student is in DECA. The question is whether DECA connects to something distinctive about your student. If it does, it strengthens the angle. If it does not, it is taking up a slot that should be doing more work.

What this means for your student

Three implications.

First, the resume is a story, not a list. Every line should reinforce the theme. The lines that do not should be considered for cutting, even if the activity itself was good work.

Second, depth in one direction beats breadth in five. A student who has spent four years going deep in one area, with one significant project to show for it, is more memorable than a student with eight clubs and no clear focus.

Third, the theme should be visible to a stranger in two minutes. Hand the activities section and the essay topics to someone who does not know your student. Can they describe what your student is about in one sentence? If yes, the theme is working. If no, it needs sharpening.

Fourth, stats clear the threshold but do not differentiate. Once your student is at or above a school’s published medians on grades and test scores, additional points produce essentially zero marginal benefit. The work that differentiates a strong applicant happens elsewhere, and theme is most of that work.

Admissions officers spend about eight minutes per application. They are not reading for completeness. They are reading for memorability. The students who are remembered are the ones who built one strong angle, not the ones who tried to cover every base.

Sort the list by who needs whom

The safety-target-reach framework treats every school as the same kind of question with different selectivity. The current market makes that framework misleading. The better sort is by who needs whom.

The most selective schools at the top of the market do not need any particular student. They have more qualified applicants than seats. Your student competes for them. This is the small number of schools where the traditional framework still applies.

Most other selective schools need your student more than your student needs them. They have yield anxiety. They want students who will deposit and show up in August. This is where families have leverage they did not have a decade ago. The right way to use it is to identify these schools deliberately and engage with them on terms that reflect the actual dynamic, not the implied one.

A useful test: does the school’s published yield rate exceed 50 percent? If yes, the school is closer to the buyer end of the spectrum. If no, the school is closer to the seller end and likely to court students it admits. Yield rates are in every school’s Common Data Set.

Treat Early Decision as a yield signal, not just a strategy

Early Decision is now the primary tool selective schools use to manage yield. Schools adding ED for the first time (Michigan for 2026-27, USC for 2027-28) are signaling that they need to lock more of the class before May 1 than they used to.

This changes the ED calculation. Applying ED to a school that needs the yield is a stronger signal than applying ED to a school that does not. The student is telling the school “I will come if you admit me,” which is exactly what a yield-anxious school wants to hear. The bump in admit rates families chase with ED is real, and it is larger at schools with yield anxiety.

The constraint is the same one ED has always had. ED forecloses financial aid comparison. If your family needs to compare financial offers across schools to make the choice work, ED is the wrong tool. The decision needs to be made with the financial implications fully in view, not after the offer arrives.

Build for the after-May-1 cycle

The cycle no longer closes on May 1. Plan for that.

If your student is admitted to multiple schools, the standard advice is to deposit at the best fit by May 1 and withdraw the rest. That advice still applies. But it is now also reasonable to stay attentive through the summer for two things. First, late waitlist movement at schools where your student was waitlisted. Per Duke’s 2025 pattern, this can extend into August. Second, late merit aid offers from schools that need yield. These are not common but they happen, and they can change the financial picture meaningfully.

The practical version: keep your student’s personal email on file with every school where they were admitted or waitlisted, not their high school email which they will lose access to after graduation. Check it through July at least.

Evaluate institutional financial health on every private school

This is new. Five years ago, families could assume that any selective private college on the list would still be operating four years later. That assumption is no longer safe at the lower end of the selectivity spectrum.

For every private school on the list, look at three things. Endowment size, which is public on the school’s website. Recent enrollment trends, which are public through the federal IPEDS database. And any news of program cuts, faculty layoffs, or merger discussions, which are in local higher-education news coverage.

A school with a small endowment, declining enrollment, and recent program cuts is a school that could close mid-degree. That is a worse outcome for your student than a school that does not make the final list. The screening does not need to be exhaustive. It needs to catch the schools that are visibly in trouble.

Hold the strategic question separate from the emotional one

The most consequential cognitive trap in college list-building is conflating “where would my student be happy” with “what is realistic for my student to get into.” These are two different questions. They get answered together because the answers feel connected, but the connection is illusory.

The right process is to answer them separately. First: what kind of school would my student actually thrive at? Size, location, academic environment, social environment, cost. Build a list of those criteria first, without thinking about admit rates.

Then: given the schools that match those criteria, which ones is my student a competitive applicant for? This question has a different answer in a K-shaped market than it did five years ago, because the schools in the middle of the selectivity range are now more willing to admit a wider range of students than their published numbers suggest.

A list built this way looks different from a list built by starting with brand names and working down. It also produces better outcomes.

The most important reframe is the simplest. Families and schools are increasingly competing for each other, not just families competing for schools. Once you see that, the rest of the strategy follows.

The summer of 2025

The cleanest evidence is what happened last August. Duke reopened its Class of 2029 waitlist on July 29, 2025, two weeks before move-in. Per the Duke Chronicle, the admissions office contacted approximately 50 students who had previously been waitlisted, gave them 24 hours to reconfirm interest, and admitted them on an accelerated timeline.

Per a Chronicle of Higher Education piece in August 2025, Duke was not alone. Harvard, Stanford, and Rice also admitted students from waitlists late in the summer. Per Rice’s spokesman to the Chronicle, Rice entered fall 2025 with the largest class in the university’s history. Per higher-education journalist Jeff Selingo, quoted in the same Chronicle piece, the late-summer offers required an “incredibly powerful” brand because the school is “pulling people who not only moved on from you, but are integrated into another university.”

When the most selective US universities are courting students who have already deposited elsewhere two weeks before move-in, the cycle has fundamentally changed.

What is driving it

The proximate cause is federal funding pressure. Per Inside Higher Ed and the Duke Chronicle, Duke lost approximately $108 million in frozen federal grants and identified $299 million in savings through buyouts and building closures. Five hundred ninety-nine Duke employees accepted voluntary buyouts in summer 2025. Northwestern eliminated 425 positions after the Trump administration froze $790 million in research funding. Stanford planned 363 layoffs. Columbia fired nearly 180 researchers. Johns Hopkins reduced its workforce by more than 2,000 employees. Harvard allocated $250 million to backfill research funding cuts.

These are the wealthiest universities in the country. Multi-billion-dollar endowments. The kind of institutions families have always assumed were immune to financial stress. They are not.

Tuition revenue from the entering class matters more than it used to. When research funding is frozen and operating budgets are tightening, every empty seat in the freshman class is lost revenue that cannot be recovered for four years. That math is what produced the August waitlist activity.

What is being added on the front end

The same anxiety is reshaping the application calendar. The University of Michigan added a binding Early Decision program for the 2026-27 cycle, the first in the school’s history. Per a Michigan regent quoted in The Michigan Daily, the rationale was direct: Michigan has been “losing some of the best students to other schools and colleges that offer Early Decision,” and ED would make Michigan “more competitive.”

USC announced in February 2026 that it would expand Early Decision from a Marshall School of Business pilot to nearly all undergraduate programs starting with the Class of 2031. Per the College Kickstart writeup, USC will run three application rounds going forward: ED, EA, and RD.

These are not regional colleges scrambling for students. Michigan and USC are top-tier institutions with strong applicant pools. They added ED for the same reason a dozen other selective schools have leaned harder on it: binding commitment in November locks yield months before May 1 and reduces the uncertainty that May through August now produces.

The deposit problem

The May 1 deposit deadline used to mark the close of the admissions cycle. It no longer does in practice. Per a Chronicle of Higher Education piece in May 2026, about a dozen institutions started publicizing their fall 2026 deposit numbers within days of May 1, framing the early count as evidence the class was already filled. The University of New Haven called its Class of 2030 “record breaking” before the seniors who would join it had even graduated.

The complication, per an EAB survey cited in the same Chronicle piece, is that approximately 14 percent of admitted students deposit at multiple schools. The deposit at one school does not actually commit the student. Summer melt persists. Schools can technically poach students who have already committed elsewhere by offering last-minute incentives, most often merit-aid sweeteners offered after May 1 to families who had committed to a different school.

The cycle no longer closes on May 1. It extends into June, July, and increasingly August.

The K-shaped market

What is happening underneath all of this is a structural shift the higher education sector has been bracing for. Per Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projections, the number of US 18-year-olds peaks with this year’s high school graduating class and then declines for the next 15 years. Per Huron Consulting Group, 442 of the country’s 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closing or merging within the next decade. Per BestColleges tracking, at least 16 nonprofit colleges closed in 2025, on top of 16 the prior year.

The selectivity bifurcation is real. At the top, application volumes keep rising, acceptance rates keep falling, and yield remains high because students still want to attend. The pressure is concentrated at the next tier down and below. Schools that families have always treated as solid targets are now operating with much narrower margins for error on yield. Some are scrambling. Some are courting admitted students with merit money they would not have offered before. Some are using their waitlists more aggressively than their historical numbers suggest.

This is the K-shaped admissions market. At the top, selectivity hardens. Everywhere else, schools are getting more anxious about filling their classes, even when their published acceptance rates look healthy.

What this means for your student

The implications run deeper than any single year of the cycle. The traditional safety-target-reach framework was built for a market where families competed for seats at fixed institutions. The current market is more two-sided. Families compete for seats. Schools compete for families. Your student is being evaluated, and your student is also being recruited.

The next post in this series looks at what to actually do with this picture when building a college list.

Read what “conditional” actually means

Every pathway has academic and conduct requirements the student must meet to enroll. Vanderbilt-Verto requires completing the Verto year on Verto’s academic terms. Cornell’s Guaranteed Transfer Option requires a 3.0 GPA at another accredited college with a full course load and no disciplinary action. USC’s Trojan Transfer Plan requires 30+ transferable units with primarily As and Bs. U-M’s MAES Winter Cohort forbids enrolling anywhere else during the gap semester, on penalty of losing first-year status.

The specifics matter. A 3.0 threshold is materially easier to hit than a 3.5. A program that forbids fall enrollment elsewhere closes off options a program with no such rule keeps open. Email the admissions office if any condition is unclear before responding.

Ask for a decision extension

The decision windows are often unreasonably short. Two days, in the Vanderbilt-Verto case. Most admissions offices will grant a reasonable extension if you ask directly:

> Dear [admissions officer], > > Thank you for the offer of admission to [program]. We received it on [date] with a current deadline of [date]. This decision involves evaluating the program, the financial implications, and comparing against other admissions our student is holding. We would appreciate an extension to [specific later date] to make it carefully.

Schools grant extensions more often than families assume because they want students who choose deliberately. A program that refuses any extension is telling you something about how the school sees the offer.

Understand who issues the credit

For delayed-start programs at the destination school (Tulane Spring Scholars, U-M MAES, Miami First-Year Spring), the credit is from the destination school. For Northeastern’s N.U.in and NU Bound, the credit is Northeastern credit even though the student is abroad. For year-elsewhere pathways (Cornell, USC, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt-Verto), the credit is from another institution. For Vanderbilt-Verto specifically, it is University of New Haven credit.

The institution issuing the credit shapes the academic experience that first year and shows up on the transcript graduate schools eventually see.

Get a written credit evaluation before saying yes

This is the question almost no family asks before accepting a pathway offer, and it is often the most expensive mistake. For any pathway where the first year’s credit is from another institution, ask the destination school in writing how many of those credits will actually count toward your student’s degree at the destination school.

The headline numbers are bad. Per analysis of National Center for Education Statistics and Government Accountability Office data, the average transfer student loses more than 40 percent of their credits. The average community college student transferring to a public four-year institution loses around 20 percent, equivalent to almost a full semester of work. A school that says it “accepts up to 60 credits” often assigns many of those credits to general electives rather than to your student’s major requirements, which forces them to retake required courses they have already paid for once.

For a year-elsewhere pathway, the cost of credit loss is concrete. Twelve to fifteen credits lost means an extra semester at the destination school’s tuition rate, plus another semester of housing, plus a delayed graduation date. At Vanderbilt’s published tuition, that is roughly an additional $50,000 plus living expenses. The math on the four-year total changes substantially if your student ends up paying for nine semesters instead of eight.

The protection is straightforward. Before accepting the pathway, email the destination school’s transfer office and ask for a written evaluation of how the courses your student plans to take that first year will count. Ask specifically: how many credits will transfer, how many will count toward major requirements rather than general electives, and what the minimum grade is for each course to count. Get the answer in writing. If the destination school is unable or unwilling to provide one, that is information about how the pathway actually works in practice.

Price the four years honestly

A pathway is not “four years of the destination school.” If the credit transfer goes badly, it is one year of the pathway plus three and a half or four years of the destination school. Run both scenarios against the four-year cost of the alternative your student already holds.

Ask the question that is actually being asked

The pathway offer is not asking “do you want to go to Vanderbilt.” Your student already answered that when they applied. It is asking a different question: do you want to spend your first year of college in this specific way? Traveling with a vendor for Verto. Gap semester at home for U-M MAES. Full year at another college for Cornell GTO.

Ask your student honestly: would you choose this specific first year on its own merits, without the destination school’s name attached? A student who would have loved a year traveling with a vendor regardless of where it led has a clear yes. A student who would have hated that year except for the Vanderbilt name is likely to hate it once they are in it.

The next post in this series looks at the bigger pattern these pathway programs are part of.

Nine conditional admissions programs you probably haven’t heard of

Northeastern N.U.in (since 2007). Fall semester at a Northeastern campus in one of nine countries, then Boston in January as a full Northeastern student.

Northeastern NU Bound. Full year abroad in London or Oakland, then Boston as a sophomore.

Tulane Spring Scholars. January start instead of August. Fall at home or study abroad through Tulane partners in Rome, Paris, London, Barcelona, Sydney, or Tokyo. Per Tulane’s admissions blog, the program exists because “we have more academically strong, interesting, and engaged applicants than we have room for.”

Cornell Guaranteed Transfer Option. Decades-old. Select denied applicants get a guaranteed seat the following year if they complete a full year at another accredited college with a 3.0 GPA, a full course load, and no disciplinary action.

USC Trojan Transfer Plan. Invitation-only. Complete 30+ transferable units with primarily As and Bs at another accredited school, transfer in as a sophomore.

University of Michigan MAES Winter Cohort. Run by the School of Kinesiology. Up to 50 waitlisted students take a gap semester at home (no enrolling elsewhere), start in January, complete a mandatory summer including a Michigan Athletics partnership, and become sophomores in September.

University of Michigan SMI Program. Same model for Sport Management majors. Per the U-M Kinesiology magazine, the school created these programs to “enable more undergraduate students to enroll.”

Georgia Tech’s five pathway programs. Arts and Sciences, Conditional, Talent Initiative, Atlanta Public Schools, and Atlanta Bridge. Denied first-year applicants who meet criteria get guaranteed transfer after 30+ semester hours elsewhere with required GPA. Georgia Tech enrolls roughly 1,400 transfer students annually, about 20 percent of undergraduate enrollment.

Vanderbilt-Verto pathway (new for Class of 2030). First year traveling with Verto Education, a private third-party vendor with 40+ college partners. Credit issued by Verto’s accredited provider, the University of New Haven. Sophomore year at Vanderbilt if transfer requirements are met.

What they have in common

The honest story is consistent across the schools that have explained themselves publicly. They have more qualified applicants than seats. Dorms hold a fixed number of beds. Classroom sections fill at a fixed number of seats. A sophomore transfer in 2027 does not need a 2026 dorm bed. A winter admit does not need a fall orientation slot. The pathway lets schools admit more students than the headline acceptance rate suggests.

Three structural flavors

Delayed start at the same school. Tulane Spring Scholars, U-M MAES and SMI, Miami First-Year Spring. The student is fully admitted from day one and graduates on time. The fall is theirs to fill.

Year abroad through the school. Northeastern N.U.in and NU Bound. The student is a Northeastern student from day one. The credit is Northeastern credit.

Year elsewhere, transfer in. Cornell GTO, USC TTP, Georgia Tech’s pathways, and Vanderbilt-Verto. The student attends another institution and transfers. The first-year credit is from the other institution, not the destination school.

Vanderbilt-Verto is news because it is the first major US private to use a commercial third-party vendor as the routing mechanism. Cornell uses other accredited universities. Georgia Tech uses specific partners. USC lets students choose any accredited school. Vanderbilt outsourced the side door.If your student receives one of these offers, the next post in this series walks through what to do.

What this means for your student

These programs operate quietly. A student who gets one of these offers in March often had no idea the program existed. If a pathway offer arrives, the decision needs more time and more careful thinking than the short window most schools provide. The next post walks through how to evaluate one.

How universities and AI are actually being built together

There are four distinct categories of new program, and they’re often described in identical marketing language even though they are very different products.

The first category is the genuinely new academic discipline. MIT’s “AI and decision-making” major sits inside the EECS department and combines computer science, probability, statistics, and decision theory into a coherent four-year curriculum. Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate AI major does similar work. These programs were designed from scratch by faculty who had to argue internally for the new track, hire for it, and accept that some students who would otherwise have done CS will choose this instead. The curriculum is structurally different from a CS degree. The faculty are different. The career outcomes will be different.

The second category is the cross-disciplinary college or institute. The University at Buffalo’s new AI and Society department, the University of South Florida’s AI and cybersecurity college that enrolled three thousand students in its first semester, USC’s AI school. These are organizational creations that pull faculty from existing departments (engineering, computer science, philosophy, business, sometimes the humanities) and recombine them under a new name. The educational substance varies enormously. Some are real. Some are administrative repackaging.

The third category is the existing degree with a new name. A “Data Science and AI” major that is, on inspection, the same data science curriculum the school has offered since 2018 with two new electives. A “Machine Learning Engineering” track that is the existing CS major plus a required ML course. These programs exist because admissions offices have noticed that students will pay tuition for the right name on the diploma. There is nothing wrong with these programs intrinsically. The substance is real. But they are not new programs.

The fourth category is the marketing announcement that is not yet a program. The university press release says the AI major will launch in fall 2027. The faculty have not been hired. The curriculum is in committee. The first cohort will be enrolled before anyone has taught the upper-division courses. Students who apply to these programs are buying a promise, not a track record.

How to tell which is which

Three questions worth asking, before letting your student fall in love with a program because of the name on the page.

One. How many faculty are listed in the program’s directory, and where did they come from? A real new AI program has ten to thirty faculty members whose research is listed on the program’s site. Their names, their papers, their courses. If the directory is a bulleted list of “affiliated faculty” linking out to other departments, the program is administrative repackaging. That’s not necessarily bad, but it tells you what the student will actually be enrolled in.

Two. What is the required curriculum? A real AI program has a four-year sequence with required courses that build on each other: linear algebra, probability, machine learning, deep learning, a capstone. If the curriculum is “any four of these twelve electives,” the student is getting CS with a different name. Look at the actual course catalog, not the program description.

Three. What happens to graduates? If the program is two or three years old and has graduates, where did they go? If the program is brand new, what’s the school’s track record placing students in adjacent fields? Carnegie Mellon’s undergraduate AI students go to graduate school and to AI labs. A program at a school whose CS placement is weak will not produce different placement just because the major has a different name.

What this means for application strategy

The strategic move is to separate the program from the school’s overall reputation. Most parents work backwards from school name to major. The students who do best in 2026 work the other direction. They figure out what the student wants to study, evaluate which programs can actually deliver that, and then make peace with the school list that follows.

For a student who genuinely wants to study AI, that probably means a top CS program with a strong ML faculty (Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, Michigan, Georgia Tech, Toronto) and an honest read on whether the new AI-branded programs at less-resourced schools will deliver something equivalent. Often they will. Sometimes they won’t.

For a student who is interested in AI as a path to interesting work but doesn’t necessarily want to do the math, the answer is often a strong applied math, statistics, or cognitive science program at a university with active AI research, rather than the AI major at a school with a less developed research base.

For a student who is interested in the social and policy dimensions of AI (how it shapes work, regulation, access, equity), the new AI and Society programs at Buffalo and elsewhere are doing real work. These are interesting destinations and they admit at higher rates than CS or AI engineering majors at the same schools.

The substance, not the slogan

The schools building real AI programs are doing important work, and the students who get into them will benefit. The schools rebranding existing programs are not doing anything wrong, but the rebrand should not be read as a curricular signal. The schools announcing programs that do not yet exist are taking a real risk with the first few cohorts of students who enroll.

The right question for a junior right now is not “which schools have an AI program?” Most do, or will. The right question is “which AI programs have substance behind them, and does the substance match what my student actually wants to learn?”

Those answers are not in the press release. They’re in the faculty directory, the course catalog, and the placement data. Anyone helping you evaluate a program should be looking at all three.

If you’re putting together a college list for a junior with a real interest in AI or an adjacent field, that’s a conversation worth having with the substance in front of you. Press releases are easy to find. The harder questions take a real read.

For more on how this fits into a broader admissions strategy, see our other guides.

For the last fifteen years, the safe answer to “what should my kid major in?” was computer science. Strong job market. High starting salaries. Translatable to almost any industry. Parents pushed students toward it. Students applied in record numbers. By the Class of 2026, eleven percent of all college students were majoring in CS, up from seven percent a decade earlier.

That run is over. And the families who are paying attention are now making the next mistake.

What just happened to CS

Three things broke at once.

First, the entry-level job market for CS graduates collapsed. According to Handshake’s analysis of Class of 2026 hiring, software engineering roles fell from a top five most-posted entry-level job every year between 2018 and 2023 to ninth place in the 2024-25 cycle. Tech companies cut more than 260,000 jobs in 2023 alone. New CS graduates are taking six-plus months to land a first role.

Second, generative AI came for exactly the work that junior software engineers used to do. Boilerplate code, basic debugging, documentation, the stuff a new graduate gets paid eighty thousand dollars to learn on the job, is now done faster and more accurately by an AI model. Seventy percent of Class of 2026 CS majors describe themselves as pessimistic about their careers. Among those, two-thirds explicitly cite AI as a reason. This is the demographic actually doing the work, telling you the work is changing.

Third, students started voting with their feet. The University of California system, a leading indicator for the rest of the country, reported a six percent drop in CS enrollment in the 2025-26 cycle, on top of a three percent decline the year before. It is the first sustained decline since the dot-com crash. The Computing Research Association’s most recent survey found sixty-two percent of universities reporting falling CS enrollment.

The decade-long surge has reversed. That is not a small story. And it has been on the front page of TechCrunch and the Washington Post in the last few weeks.

Where the money is moving

Here is where it gets interesting for a junior parent right now. Students are not leaving technology. They are moving sideways into majors that look more durable.

USC, Columbia, Pace University, New Mexico State, and the University of South Florida all launched dedicated AI majors this year. MIT’s “AI and decision-making” track is now its second-largest major. Buffalo opened seven new AI-focused undergraduate programs and got two hundred applications before the doors opened. Cybersecurity programs are absorbing thousands of students. Data science is everywhere. Mechanical and electrical engineering, the parts of engineering that build things AI cannot yet replace, are growing.

This migration is rational. A student in 2026 looking at a CS program that is mostly about writing code, when AI now writes that code competently, is right to ask whether the major is still the right vehicle. So the strategic move looks obvious. Skip CS. Apply to AI, or data science, or cybersecurity. Same career outcome, more durable framing.

That is where The AI major trap is.

The trap

Every wave of “the new safe major” creates the next bubble. CS in 2010 was a smart pick because few students were doing it and the demand was structural. CS in 2024 was the most-applied-to major at every selective school in America and admit rates at top programs cratered to three to six percent. The major did not change. What changed was that everyone showed up at once.

AI is now in the position CS was in around 2015. Demand looks structural. The story is plausible. Programs are launching faster than they can be staffed. And every parent and student who reads the same TechCrunch article you read this morning is reaching the same conclusion: switch from CS to AI.

By the 2027 application cycle, AI will be the most over-applied intended major at any school that offers it. By 2028, admit rates to AI programs at selective schools will look like CS admit rates today, three to six percent, with applicants who all have research experience, hackathon wins, and personal projects deployed on GitHub. The strategic move that made sense for the Class of 2018 will be the wrong move for the Class of 2030.

This is not a prediction that requires unusual foresight. It is the same dynamic that produced the CS bubble in the first place, running one cycle later, on a different bucket.

What this means for a junior right now

Three things to think about, if you are applying in the 2027 cycle.

One. The intended major box on the Common App is a strategy question, not a paperwork question. Selective schools that admit by program, including Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and Michigan, have admit rate gaps of two to three times across colleges within the same university. Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences admits at nearly double the rate of its College of Engineering, and that gap has widened in 2026, not narrowed. Berkeley’s L&S Computer Science path admits at thirteen to fifteen percent. Berkeley’s EECS program admits under five percent. Same university. Same CS degree. Different application odds.

Two. Applying to CS now might actually be the contrarian move. The pool is thinning. The seats are not shrinking yet. A junior who genuinely loves the discipline, not the salary, the discipline, has better admit odds in 2027 than the previous five years. That window will close. It is open right now.

Three. If your student is genuinely AI-curious, the strategic move is not to apply as an AI major. It is to apply as math, applied math, statistics, cognitive science, or, at schools without an AI track, CS with research experience that signals AI-relevant work. These paths route to the same graduate school options, the same job market, and dramatically better admit rates than whatever the hot bucket happens to be in 2027.

The actual question

The question worth asking your junior is not “what is the safe major now?” The question is “what does this student actually want to be doing at twenty-six years old, regardless of what the application strategy is?” Because every other variable, the major, the school, the application angle, flows from that. Every other approach is just chasing the last bubble’s headline one cycle late.

If you are rethinking your junior’s college list and want to talk through what their actual options look like given their interests and the current cycle data, that is a conversation worth having early. The decisions that matter most happen between May and September of junior year. We are in May.

For more on how this fits into a broader admissions strategy, see our other guides.

Most college lists are built on brand instinct. The family has heard of eight or ten schools, the counselor adds a few more, someone suggests a safety, and the list is done. Then April arrives and every school on the list says no.

The problem is rarely the student. It is the list. A list built around reputation rather than fit, around the hierarchy that existed ten years ago rather than the cycle your student is actually entering, is a list designed to produce disappointment.

The old framework is broken

For decades, families have used a simple model: reaches, targets, and safeties. A few dream schools at the top, a few realistic schools in the middle, and one or two schools at the bottom where admission is guaranteed.

In the 2026 cycle, that framework is unreliable. Schools that families have always considered targets are now operating at single-digit acceptance rates. Vanderbilt’s regular decision rate this spring was 2.8%. Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and Duke are all in the same territory. A student who built their list with these schools as targets found out in April that their targets were statistically harder to get into than some Ivies.

The reach/target/safety model still has value, but only if the tiers are built on current data rather than parental memory.

Start with the Common Data Set

Every college publishes a Common Data Set. It is free and public. Google the school name plus “common data set” and the PDF is in the first few results.

Four numbers matter. The admit rate tells you the overall selectivity. The yield rate tells you how often admitted students choose to enroll. The 25th-75th percentile test score range tells you where your student falls relative to admitted students. The percentage of students receiving non-need merit aid tells you whether the school uses discounting to attract enrollment.

Your student should be at or above the 50th percentile for test scores at every school on the list. Below that, the odds are structurally against you regardless of how strong the rest of the application is.

Build the list around institutional priorities, not rankings

Different schools reward different things. A school that is building its engineering program values a different profile than a school that is trying to strengthen its humanities reputation. A school with a strong pre-professional culture evaluates applications differently than a school that prizes intellectual exploration.

The college list should match what your student actually offers to what each school actually wants. A genuinely well-rounded student applying almost exclusively to schools that reward deep spikes will come away empty from every one. A student with a strong creative portfolio applying only to schools whose institutional priorities are narrowly pre-professional is making the same mistake in reverse.

This is where the research happens. Look at what each school is investing in. Read the president’s strategic plan. Look at which departments are hiring. Look at which programs are expanding. The schools that are growing in the direction of your student’s strengths are the schools where your student’s application will resonate.

How many schools

There is no universal right number. But there are principles.

A list of 20 schools is almost always too many. Your student cannot write 20 genuine, deeply researched supplements. The quality of each application degrades as the list grows. A mediocre supplement sent to 20 schools will produce worse outcomes than an excellent supplement sent to 10.

A list of 6 schools is almost always too few. In a cycle this unpredictable, you need enough breadth to absorb the randomness.

For most strong students applying to selective schools, 10-14 is the working range. Within that range, the distribution matters more than the count. A list with 10 reaches and no targets is a list that produces zero admits. A list with 10 safeties and no reaches is a list that produces regret.

A reasonable distribution: 3-4 schools where your student is a strong fit and admission is highly likely, 4-5 schools where your student is competitive and the outcome could go either way, and 2-3 schools where your student is reaching but has a genuine case for admission.

The financial lens

Every school on the list should pass a financial test before the application goes in. Run the Net Price Calculator for each school. If the estimated net cost is beyond what your family can afford, either remove the school or have a clear plan for how to close the gap through merit aid or financial aid appeals.

A list that includes three schools your family cannot afford without significant aid is a list that may produce three admits your family cannot accept. That is a worse outcome than a smaller list of schools you can actually attend.

The demonstrated interest filter

Check the Common Data Set for each school. If “level of applicant’s interest” is rated as important or considered, that school rewards demonstrated interest. Your student should be actively engaging with these schools: campus visits, email list signups, regional rep contacts, virtual events. Schools that track demonstrated interest should get more of your student’s pre-application time and attention.

Schools that explicitly say they do not consider demonstrated interest, and several top schools do, should not consume energy on engagement tactics. Focus the application quality on those instead.

The bottom line

A college list is not a wish list. It is a strategic document that should be built on current data, institutional fit, financial reality, and an honest assessment of where your student’s profile is strongest relative to the applicant pool. The families who build lists this way end up with choices in April. The families who build lists on brand instinct end up with surprises.

If you want help building or pressure-testing your student’s college list against current data and institutional priorities, that is exactly the kind of work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Why optional college application sections are never truly optional

When a school marks something as optional, they are giving your student an opportunity to show more of who they are. Every other applicant in the pool is getting the same opportunity. The students who take it are adding material to their file. The students who skip it are not.

An admissions officer reading a file with a thoughtful additional essay, a well-chosen portfolio piece, or a brief video introduction has more to work with when building a case in committee. An admissions officer reading a file that skipped every optional section has less. When two applicants are otherwise comparable, the one who gave the committee more material to advocate with has an edge.

Choosing not to submit an optional component is choosing to leave an advantage on the table.

The Additional Information section

This is the most underused and most misused part of the application. Most families either skip it entirely or use it to repeat what is already elsewhere in the application. Both are wrong.

The Additional Information section exists for context. Use it when something in your student’s application might raise a question that the rest of the file does not answer: a dip in grades during a specific semester, a family circumstance that affected performance, a gap in the activity list, a school change, or any other context that an admissions officer would need to evaluate the file fairly.

Keep it brief. Keep it factual. Do not use it as a second personal statement. Do not repeat accomplishments listed elsewhere. The purpose is to give the reader information they need, not to add more selling.

If there is nothing that needs explaining, it is fine to leave it blank. But if there is context that would help a reader understand your student’s story more completely, this is the only place in the application designed for that purpose.

Video introductions

A growing number of schools offer optional video submissions. These are typically one to two minutes long. Most applicants skip them. The ones who submit a genuine, well-prepared video give the committee something no other part of the application can provide: a sense of who the student actually is as a person.

A good video introduction is not a performance. It is a brief, authentic window into the student’s personality and interests. The bar is not production quality. It is genuineness.

Research papers and portfolios

If your student has produced original research, creative work, or a portfolio of any kind, and the school offers an upload option, submit it. This is direct evidence of the spike and output that committees are looking for. A research paper with real findings, a portfolio of visual or written work, a link to a project the student built, these are the kinds of artifacts that give a committee member something concrete to point to when advocating for the file.

The bottom line

Every optional component is a chance to strengthen the case. The students who treat “optional” as “required” are not gaming the system. They are giving admissions officers more reasons to say yes.

If you want help deciding which optional components matter most for your student’s specific applications and how to approach them, that is the kind of work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

The early decision strategy: why early rounds matter

Most selective schools fill 40-60% of their incoming class through early rounds. The admit rate in early rounds is typically 2-3x the regular decision rate at the same school. This is not because early applicants are stronger. It is because applying early signals commitment, and schools reward that signal because it protects their yield.

That statistical advantage is real. But it is not evenly distributed. The advantage is largest at schools that care most about yield, and smallest at schools that fill their class regardless of round.

Where the early advantage is largest

The schools where ED gives your student the biggest marginal boost are the ones in the middle of the selectivity range, schools with admit rates between 10% and 30%, where yield management is an active concern. These schools are competing for strong students. An ED application from a well-matched student is exactly what their enrollment model needs: a guaranteed enrollment from a strong admit.

At the very top, the ED advantage is smaller than families think. A school with a 4% overall rate might have an 8% early rate, but that early pool is also the most competitive pool in the country. The statistical bump is partly offset by the strength of the competition.

At schools below the top 50, ED is often unnecessary because the regular decision rate is already high enough that the early advantage is marginal.

The sweet spot is the school where your student is a strong but not certain admit, where the school actively manages yield, and where the ED signal tips the balance.

The financial question most families forget

Early Decision is binding. If your student is admitted ED, you are committing to attend and withdrawing all other applications. The school will provide a financial aid package, but you will not have competing offers to use as leverage.

For families who need to compare financial aid offers across schools, ED removes that ability. This is not a minor consideration. It can cost tens of thousands of dollars over four years.

If financial aid comparison is important to your family, Early Action or Restrictive Early Action may be better strategic choices. Both provide an early read without a binding commitment. Your student still gets the signal benefit of applying early without losing the ability to negotiate.

The fit question that actually matters

The right ED school is not the school with the most prestigious name. It is the school where three things are true simultaneously.

First, your student’s profile is a genuine match for the school’s institutional priorities. If the school is building a class heavy on STEM and your student is a humanities applicant, the ED advantage may not overcome the structural mismatch.

Second, your student is in the competitive range but not a certain admit. If your student would likely get in regular decision anyway, ED spends a strategic asset without gaining much. If your student is far below the school’s profile, ED will not rescue the application.

Third, your student can genuinely say this is their first choice. The “Why Us” essay for an ED school needs to be the strongest, most specific, most deeply researched piece of writing in the entire application. An admissions reader evaluating an ED application is asking: does this student actually want to be here, or are they gaming the system? The answer needs to be obvious.

The mistake families make with REA

Restrictive Early Action, offered by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and a few others, is not the same as ED. It is non-binding. But it is restrictive: your student cannot apply early to most other private schools.

The mistake is applying REA to a dream school with a 3-4% admit rate and then having no early application at a school where the odds are meaningfully better. If your student applies REA to Stanford and gets deferred, they have used their early round on a longshot and now enter the regular round everywhere else with no early advantage anywhere.

For students who are genuinely competitive at REA schools, it can be the right call. For students who are reaching, it is often a waste of the early round.

How to make the decision

Start with the college list. Identify the 2-3 schools where your student has the strongest relative fit, where the ED admit rate advantage is meaningful, and where your family can commit financially without needing to compare offers. That short list is where the ED conversation should focus.

Then ask: which of these schools can your student write the most specific, genuine, deeply researched “Why Us” essay for? That is usually the answer.

If you want help working through this decision for your student’s specific list and profile, that is exactly the kind of strategic work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

The three questions

For an admissions officer to make a case for your student in committee, the application needs to clearly answer three questions:

Has this student demonstrated a capacity for success that will allow them to accomplish great things? This is not about grades alone. It is about evidence that the student can take on hard things and produce results. Research output, competition advancement, leadership that built something tangible.

Has this student taken full advantage of their environment? Admissions officers have a profile of every high school. They know how many APs the school offers, the size of the graduating class, and the school’s history with their university. They evaluate the transcript against what was available. A student who took 6 of 6 available APs tells a different story than a student who took 6 of 20.

Will this student take advantage of our resources and contribute to campus? This is where the “Why Us” essay, demonstrated interest, and the overall narrative come together. The committee wants to see evidence that your student will be an active, contributing member of their community, not just a consumer of the degree.

What the admissions officer review actually looks like in eight minutes

The first two minutes are mechanical. The reader scans the transcript, the test scores, and the school profile. They check course rigor against what was available. They note the pre-rating from the school’s internal scale. This is the threshold check. If the academics clear, the file moves forward. If they don’t, the discussion is short.

Minutes two through five are where the file lives or dies. The reader is looking for the narrative. What is this student about? What thread runs through the application? If the answer is unclear, the file is in trouble before the committee discussion goes any further.

Minutes five through eight are comparison. How does this student stack up against others with similar profiles from similar schools? This is where the phrases “standard strong” and “like others” surface. And this is where the advocacy question gets answered: does anyone in the room want to fight for this student? Without an advocate, the application drifts toward deny. Not because anyone disliked it. Because nothing in it gave someone a reason to fight.

What this means for your student

The application is not a resume. It is the material an admissions officer uses to build a case. Your student’s job is to give them everything they need: a clear narrative, evidence of depth, and specific connections to the school.

Eight minutes is not a lot of time. An admissions officer reading thousands of files cannot spend twenty minutes discovering what makes your student interesting. The story needs to be obvious, coherent, and compelling from the first page. If it takes work to find the thread, the reader will move on to the next file where the thread is clear.

The bottom line

Your student is not being evaluated in isolation. They are being compared to every other strong applicant from a similar background, at a similar school, with similar interests. The question the committee is quietly asking about every file is: who in this room is going to argue for this student? Everything in the application should be built to answer that question.

If you want to understand how a committee would read your student’s application today and what needs to change before it gets submitted, that is the conversation we have in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Is your SAT score good enough? The threshold is lower than you think: the threshold is lower than you think

At selective colleges, having excellent stats puts your student at the table. It does not get them a seat. Every year, roughly 25,000 valedictorians graduate from American high schools. Thousands more have SAT scores above 1500. In a recent Harvard cycle, about 4,000 applicants were valedictorians and 18,000 had SAT reading scores above 700. Harvard rejected 96.8% of its applicants.

The stats get the file read. Everything that decides the outcome happens after the file is open.

Where families waste time

The family spending six more months of tutoring to move a 1530 to a 1580 is almost always making a bad trade. That time and money could go toward building the thing that actually differentiates their student in committee: depth in an area of genuine interest, output that a stranger can verify, a narrative that gives a committee member something to advocate for.

Test prep has a ceiling. The difference between a 1530 and a 1580 is invisible to an admissions committee. The difference between a student who has a clear spike with real output and a student who has strong stats and a generic activity list is the difference between an admit and a deny.

What actually differentiates above the line

Once your student is above the academic threshold, committees are evaluating something different. They are asking whether this student has a coherent identity. Whether the application tells a story or just presents a collection of impressive things. Whether someone in the room will advocate for this student over the next equally qualified applicant.

The five qualities that consistently move the needle: intellectual curiosity that goes beyond what is required, meaningful service to communities the student actually belongs to, leadership or initiative that created something real, the ability to collaborate and elevate others, and sustained commitment over time rather than drive-by involvement.

None of these are measured by test scores. All of them are visible in an application that has been built deliberately.

The math that matters

Your student’s SAT score determines which schools are realistic to apply to. Use it as a filter when building the college list: be at or above the 50th percentile of a school’s score range. Below that, your student is swimming upstream. Above it, the score has done its job. Every hour spent chasing points above the 50th percentile is an hour not spent on the work that actually decides outcomes.

The bottom line

If your student has strong grades and strong scores, congratulations. They have cleared the threshold. Now the real work begins: building the narrative, the spike, and the story that makes a committee member want to fight for them. That work is harder than test prep. It is also worth more.

If you want help figuring out where your student stands relative to the threshold and what the real work should be from here, that is exactly the kind of conversation we have in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Amit Khemka, Founder, Elite College Advising

How to choose recommenders: who to ask

The instinct is to pick the teacher who gave your student the highest grade. That is usually wrong. Pick the teacher who knows your student best as a thinker, not just as a performer. The teacher who saw your student wrestle with a hard problem. The teacher who watched them lead a discussion, push back on an idea, or go beyond the assignment because something genuinely interested them.

Choose teachers from different disciplines so they paint different facets of who your student is. A humanities teacher and a STEM teacher, for example, can together show range and depth in ways a single subject cannot.

If your student has a clear narrative or spike, at least one recommender should teach in a subject that connects to it. A student whose application is built around computational biology should have a science teacher who can speak to that interest with specificity.

You also want at least one recommendation from someone outside school who knows your student as a person: a research mentor, an internship supervisor, a community organization leader. Colleges use outside recommendations as a verification layer. If the application says your student led a community health initiative, a letter from the organization’s director confirming that carries real weight.

When to ask

Before school ends. Not September. Not August. Before the last day of junior year.

Teachers write letters for dozens of students. The earlier you ask, the more time and attention your student’s letter gets. A teacher asked in May has the summer to think about what to write. A teacher asked in October is writing a rushed letter between grading papers and parent conferences.

Lock all recommendations by September of senior year at the latest. But the ask should happen now.

The brag sheet changes everything

This is the part almost nobody does, and it is the single biggest difference between a generic letter and a great one.

Whether the teacher asks for a brag sheet or not, create one. A brag sheet gives your recommender specific material to work with: your student’s activities, accomplishments, goals, and specific moments where they went beyond expectations in that teacher’s class or in general.

A good brag sheet includes the student’s application narrative (the one-sentence story the application is telling), two or three specific anecdotes from that teacher’s class that illustrate who the student is as a thinker, key extracurricular commitments with enough detail that the teacher can reference them naturally, and the student’s goals and intended major.

Why this matters: colleges use recommendations as a verification technique. If the recommender describes activities and qualities that align with the rest of the application, the file feels cohesive and trustworthy. If the letter describes a different student than the one in the essays and activity list, that is a red flag.

The brag sheet is how you make sure your recommender is telling the same story the rest of your application tells.

Brief them on what matters

When your student gives the brag sheet to the teacher, they should also say something like: “These are the schools that matter most to me, and this is the story my application is trying to tell. If any of this connects to what you’ve seen from me in your class, I’d love for you to include it.”

That is not manipulative. It is giving a busy teacher the context they need to write a letter that actually helps. Most teachers want to write strong letters. They just don’t have enough material to work with. The brag sheet and the brief are how you solve that problem.

The bottom line

Recommendations are not a checkbox. They are one of the few parts of the application where someone else advocates for your student in their own words. A strong letter from a teacher who knows your student well and has been given the right context can be the thing that tips a committee vote. A generic letter from a teacher who gave your student an A but barely remembers them is a missed opportunity.

If your student is a junior and hasn’t started thinking about recommenders yet, this is the week to start. The window between now and the end of the school year is when this decision gets made well.

If you want help identifying the right recommenders for your student’s specific narrative and building a brag sheet that sets them up to write a strong letter, that is the kind of work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

How merit aid actually works

Colleges below the top 5% of selectivity are competing for students. They need to fill seats and hit revenue targets. Merit aid is how they do it. A school that offers your student $25,000 per year in merit money has made a calculation: this student is above our median, they will raise our academic profile, and if we discount the price enough, they will choose us over a competitor.

That is not generosity. It is enrollment management. And once you see it that way, the leverage shifts.

The four numbers that tell you everything

Every college publishes a Common Data Set. Four numbers in that document tell you whether a school is likely to offer your student merit money and how much:

The admit rate tells you how selective the school is. The yield rate tells you how often admitted students choose to enroll. The percentage of students receiving non-need merit aid tells you how aggressively the school uses discounting. The average merit award per recipient tells you the typical size.

A school with a 40% admit rate, a 25% yield rate, and 60% of students receiving merit aid averaging $22,000 is a school that is actively buying enrollment. Your student is in a strong negotiating position there. A school with a 6% admit rate, a 70% yield rate, and 5% of students receiving merit aid is a school that does not need to discount. Your student has no leverage there, regardless of how strong their profile is.

Your college list should reflect this reality. Schools where your student is above the median profile and where merit discounting is common deserve more weight than schools where neither is true.

When and how to negotiate merit offers

First: never call it negotiation. Call it a reconsideration or a request for the financial aid office to take another look. The framing matters.

Second: a competing offer from a peer institution is the strongest tool you have. If School A offered $20,000 in merit aid and School B offered $8,000, and the schools are genuinely comparable in your student’s mind, School B wants to know. They have already decided they want your student. The question is whether they want your student enough to close the gap.

Third: timing matters. Do not deposit before requesting a reconsideration. Once you deposit, the school knows you are coming and your leverage disappears. And file early. Merit budgets are finite. The family that asks in the first week of April draws from a fuller pool than the family that asks the day before the deadline.

Fourth: be specific. “Can you do better?” is a weak ask. “School A has offered us a package that brings our net cost to $32,000 per year. We would prefer to attend your institution. Can the financial aid office reconsider our merit award with the goal of closing that gap?” is a strong ask.

Merit aid vs need-based aid: different levers

Need-based aid is determined by a formula applied to your family’s financial data. Appealing it requires documenting changed circumstances or information the formula missed.

Merit aid is determined by how much the school wants your student relative to their applicant pool. Improving it requires demonstrating that your student has better options elsewhere and that the school risks losing an enrollment they want.

Both can be appealed. The strategy is different for each. Most families conflate them and end up making the wrong argument to the wrong office.

Where this matters most for your list

The schools in the middle of your student’s list, where your student is above the school’s median, are where merit strategy has the highest return. These are the schools competing hardest for your student’s enrollment. They have the budget and the motivation to increase an offer.

The schools at the top of your list, where your student is at or below the median, are unlikely to offer meaningful merit aid regardless of how you ask. They do not need to discount to fill their class.

Building a list with this dynamic in mind is one of the most financially impactful decisions in the entire admissions process. A well-constructed list with three or four schools that are likely to compete for your student with merit dollars can save $50,000-$100,000 over four years compared to a list built purely around prestige.

The bottom line

Merit aid is not a reward. It is a price. The school is setting a price they think will get your student to enroll. Like any price, it can be discussed. The families who understand this and approach it strategically save tens of thousands of dollars. The families who accept the first number leave money on the table.

If you want help identifying which schools on your student’s list are likely to offer merit aid and how to position your student to maximize it, that is the kind of work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Amit Khemka, Founder, Elite College Advising

What demonstrated interest college admissions offices track and why they care

Demonstrated interest is how a school measures whether you will actually enroll if admitted. Yield, the percentage of admitted students who choose to attend, is one of the metrics that drives college rankings. Schools care about it deeply. A student who has visited campus, opened emails, connected with their regional admissions officer, and written a specific “Why Us” essay is a much safer bet than a student who applied cold.

Not every school tracks it. Check the Common Data Set for each school on your list. If “level of applicant’s interest” is rated as important or considered, everything below applies.

The 12 things you should be doing, ranked

1. Get on the school’s email list. Fill out an information request form. Takes two minutes. Use the same email address you will use for your application so they can connect your activity to your file.

2. Open their emails and click on links. Some schools track open rates and click-throughs. Read what they send. Click on something relevant.

3. Spend time on their website. Explore specific departments, programs, labs, and courses. This also prepares you for your “Why Us” essay.

4. Follow the school on social media. Find their accounts, follow them, and occasionally engage with their content.

5. Attend a college fair. Virtual or in person. Submit your inquiry card. Have a real conversation with the rep.

6. Contact your regional admissions representative. Introduce yourself. Ask a genuine question. Build a relationship over time. Do not be annoying. Be authentic.

7. Visit campus. If you live within a few hours, not visiting is a signal. Sign up for an official tour so they have a record of your visit. Use the same email.

8. Interview. If offered, take it. An alumni interview is good. An interview with your regional rep is better. Prepare seriously.

9. Apply early. Early Decision or Early Action is the strongest signal of demonstrated interest. But understand the financial and strategic implications before committing.

10. Write a strong “Why Us” essay. Show deep, specific knowledge of the school and how it connects to your narrative. If they are genuinely your top choice, say so.

11. Submit before the deadline. Especially for schools that read applications on a rolling basis. Better to be the first strong application a reader sees than the sixth.

12. Send thank-you notes. After interviews, college fair meetings, or campus visits. Brief, genuine, human.

The one rule that ties it all together

Use the same email address for everything. Your information request, campus visit registration, emails from the school, and your application. Schools need to connect your demonstrated interest signals to your file. If you use three different email addresses, you have three disconnected profiles instead of one strong one.

Which schools care the most

Schools in the middle of the selectivity range care the most. The top five schools have more demand than they need and can ignore demonstrated interest. Schools below the top 50 are actively managing enrollment and yield, and a student who has shown sustained, genuine engagement stands out.

The schools on your list where demonstrated interest matters most are often the same schools where it can make the biggest difference in your outcome. These are your target schools, the ones where you are a competitive applicant and where showing genuine interest can tip the balance.

The bottom line

Demonstrated interest is not a trick. It is a signal that you have done your homework, that you know what the school offers, and that you will enroll if admitted. Schools reward that signal because it reduces their risk.

If your student has a college list but has not started engaging with those schools yet, that work should begin now. Not senior fall. Now.

If you want help building a demonstrated interest strategy tailored to your student’s specific list, that is exactly the kind of work we do in a 30-minute strategy session. No pitch. No contract.

Amit Khemka, Founder, Elite College Advising

How to appeal financial aid: the word you should never use

Never say “negotiate.” Say “reconsider” or “request a professional judgment review.” Financial aid officers are professionals. When a family says “I want to negotiate,” the officer hears a customer haggling. When a family says “I’d like to request a reconsideration based on circumstances that may not have been reflected in our application,” the officer hears someone with new information worth reviewing. The second framing gets a better response every time.

What to include

A letter alone isn’t enough. Attach documentation: tax returns showing a change in income, medical bills, a termination letter, a sibling enrolling in college the same year, or a competing financial aid offer from a peer institution. That last one matters. If your student has been admitted to two comparable schools and one offered significantly more, the other school wants to know. They’ve already decided they want your student. The question is whether they’ll close the gap. Whatever you include, state a specific number. Not “we need more help.” A specific dollar figure: “Our family can afford $35,000 per year. The current package puts us at $52,000. We’re asking the office to close that $17,000 gap.” Specific requests get specific answers.

The two timing rules that matter most

First: never deposit before appealing. Once you deposit, the school knows you’re coming and your leverage disappears. Before you deposit, you’re a yield number they’re trying to secure. That difference is worth real money. Second: appeal early. Financial aid budgets are finite and the money gets allocated as appeals come in. The family that appeals in the first week of April draws from a fuller pool than the family that appeals the day before the deadline.

Which schools are most likely to say yes

The schools most likely to reconsider are the ones actively competing for enrollment. A handful at the very top can fill their class without budging. Below that, most selective schools are working hard to hit enrollment targets every spring. A well-documented appeal from a strong student they’ve already admitted is an easy yes for a financial aid officer trying to protect yield. The schools in the middle of your student’s list, where your student is above the median profile, are often the most responsive. They admitted your student because they want your student. They’ll stretch to keep them.

One thing most families don’t know

The appeal doesn’t have to go through the financial aid office alone. If your student has a relationship with their regional admissions officer, that person can advocate internally. The admissions office admitted your student because they wanted them in the class. A short, professional email letting the admissions counselor know you’ve filed an appeal and that this school remains your first choice can move things in ways the financial aid letter alone cannot.

After you file

Most schools respond within one to three weeks. If you don’t hear back in two weeks, one polite follow-up is appropriate. If they improve the offer, evaluate it against your other options before accepting. If they say no, you’ve lost nothing. The admission stands and the relationship is intact. And if circumstances change next year, file again. Financial aid is reassessed annually. The appeal process isn’t a one-time event. It’s an annual conversation.

The bottom line

Every financial aid offer can be appealed. The families who do it well save thousands per year. Over four years, that’s real money. The families who don’t aren’t saving themselves trouble. They’re leaving money on the table because nobody told them the table was set. If you’re holding a financial aid offer right now and wondering whether it’s worth appealing, it is. The question is how to frame it for your specific situation. That’s the kind of conversation we have in a free 30-minute strategy session.

Amit Khemka, Founder, Elite College Advising

Why summer matters in admissions

Colleges read summer as unstructured time. During the school year, most of a student’s schedule is assigned. Over the summer, students choose how they spend their time, and that choice is exactly what admissions readers notice. A summer answers questions a transcript cannot:

What does this student pursue when no one is assigning the work?
How do their interests show up outside the classroom?
Are they exploring a direction, deepening one, or testing whether it fits?

There is no single right way to spend a summer, but there is a right strategy for each student.

Why matters more than where

One of the most common misconceptions is that a strong summer requires a selective or expensive program. Colleges care far more about continuity of interest, initiative and ownership, evidence of learning, and engagement that holds up over time. A student who commits to a local opportunity, designs an independent project, or builds a real skill often presents a stronger story than one who collects disconnected experiences.

Good summer plans start with why, not where. Most strong plans serve one or two clear goals:

Exploration: testing an interest before committing to an academic direction
Depth: building on an existing interest through sustained work
Skill development: strengthening writing, research, technical or creative ability
Personal growth: gaining independence, responsibility or perspective

Not every summer needs to do everything. Focus creates clarity.

Colleges do not rank summer experiences. They read them in context. They notice initiative and follow-through, reflection and learning, and whether the summer fits the rest of the student’s profile. They do not expect perfect outcomes, name-brand programs, or a single defining experience.

The summer before senior year: five things to finish

By early spring of junior year, the strongest students know how their summer fits into their application. That does not mean a rigid plan. It means the summer supports senior-year course choices, essay development, and the themes that already run through the student’s activities. Here is what we ask rising seniors to finish before school starts.

1. Lock in a working college list

By the end of summer, your student should have a working list of 8 to 12 schools sorted into reach, target and likely tiers. Visit campuses where you can, since demonstrated interest matters at schools that track it. If travel is not practical, attend virtual information sessions and take notes. Admissions officers notice when an essay refers to specific programs.

2. Draft the Common App personal statement

Do not wait for school to start. Draft at least two different essay angles and get feedback from someone who knows your student well, such as a teacher, counselor or advisor. The personal statement is the most important piece of writing in the application, and it needs several rounds of revision to land.

3. Go deep on one activity instead of adding five

Admissions readers recognize résumé padding quickly. Rather than joining three new clubs, go deeper on one thing that genuinely matters: launch a project, lead a research effort, or volunteer consistently with the same organization. Depth beats breadth.

4. Prepare for standardized tests, if they are part of the plan

If target schools require scores, or if a score would help at a test-optional school, summer is the time to prepare seriously. Take a full-length diagnostic, find the weak areas, and build a study plan. Two focused months of preparation are worth more than six months of scattered practice.

5. Reflect on the story

Colleges want to understand who your student is beyond the transcript. Use some of the summer to think about the themes that connect their activities, interests and experiences. What drives them? What would they bring to a campus? That reflection feeds every essay in the fall.

A calmer approach

The best summer plans reduce stress rather than add to it. They let students engage with something real, reflect on it, and return to school with clarity. Students who use the summer before senior year with intention start the fall with momentum. Students who do not often spend September catching up.

What “meets full need” actually promises

A school that meets full need commits to closing the gap between its published cost of attendance and its own calculation of what your family can afford to pay. The important words are “its own calculation.” Two schools that both meet full need can produce offers for the same family that differ by tens of thousands of dollars a year, because they are not running the same calculation.

Most of these schools require the CSS Profile in addition to the FAFSA. Somewhere between 200 and 400 colleges use the Profile, and it asks for the value of your home and what you still owe on it. Each school then decides how much of that equity counts as a parental asset. The standard assessment rate is about 5 percent a year, so every $100,000 of equity a school chooses to count adds roughly $5,000 a year to your expected contribution, or about $20,000 over four years.

The meets full need meaning most families miss: the home equity gap

Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and USC count zero home equity in their need calculations. Yale counts 100% at the standard 5% assessment rate. For a family with $150,000 in home equity, the difference is roughly $7,500 in expected contribution per year, or $30,000 over four years. Same family, same house, two different aid offers from schools both claiming to meet full need.

Caps in between

Other schools apply caps based on parent income. Swarthmore caps countable home equity at 150% of parent income, and Emory at 240%. Each formula produces a different number for the same family, and none of these caps appears in places most families would think to look before applying.

Second homes are different

Both FAFSA and the CSS Profile count vacation or second-home equity at 100%, with no caps anywhere. A family with a partially sheltered primary residence and a fully assessed second home can find that the second home alone adds tens of thousands to expected contribution over four years. This is standard treatment under both federal and institutional methodology, and it is one of the most common surprises in aid offers from CSS Profile schools.

The first number is rarely the final number

Money magazine reported the case of a family whose student was admitted to both Brown and USC. USC, which stopped counting home equity in 2021, calculated the family’s contribution one way. Brown counted the family’s home equity at four times their annual income. The family appealed, and Brown lowered its assessment to two times annual income. Same school, same family, same house. The first number was the school’s opening position. The second was what the school accepted once the family showed it would push back.

That is the part to remember. Meets full need is not a measurement of what your family can objectively afford. It is a school’s methodology applied to its reading of your finances, and that methodology has room in it.

What this means for families building a list

Before your senior commits, ask each school’s financial aid office how they treat primary residence equity. Get the answer in writing. Factor second-home equity into planning before offers arrive, not after. And treat every initial aid offer as a starting point, not a final answer. The schools count on most families not pushing back.

Policies change from year to year, so confirm each school’s current approach directly with its financial aid office rather than relying on any published list, including this one. If an offer comes in higher than your own math, here is how to appeal it.

Before you can compare offers or appeal one, you have to read each offer accurately. Most offer letters are built to make the gift part of the package look larger than it is: loans are folded into the total at the top, and scholarships carry names that disguise what the dollar amount represents. The first job is to decode each letter into its parts and find the one number that matters.

Five kinds of money in an offer

An offer typically contains five categories. Grants are gift aid based on need and do not need to be repaid. Scholarships are gift aid based on merit, athletics, talent or other criteria, and also do not need to be repaid. Federal loans are debt your family repays with interest; subsidized federal loans do not accrue interest while your student is enrolled. Private or institutional loans are debt repaid with interest, often unsubsidized. Work-study is an offer of a part-time campus job, which your student still has to find and hold.

Only grants and scholarships are aid in the sense most families mean. Loans are debt your family takes on to pay the school, and work-study is income your student has to earn. Many letters show a single “total aid” figure that combines all five, which makes the package look larger than the gift inside it.

The actual net price

Net price is the published cost of attendance minus grants and scholarships only. Write the cost of attendance at the top, subtract grants, subtract scholarships, and look at what is left. That is what your family will pay each year before borrowing. Do this for every school on the list. Two offers with similar “total aid” figures can produce very different net prices once the loans come out, and families who skip this step tend to choose the school with the more impressive scholarship name rather than the lower price.

Scholarship names are wrappers

The New York Times has documented cases of single students receiving several differently named scholarships from the same school: a Distinguished Scholar Award, a Chancellor’s Award, a Personal Distinction Award. All of them came from one institution and reflected one underlying decision: the school wanted to discount tuition by a specific dollar amount to enroll that student. The names are marketing. The dollar amount is the price.

A $25,000 “Distinguished Scholar Award” at a school with a $75,000 sticker price is a 33 percent discount, not a recognition of distinction. Read the dollar amount and ignore the name.

Cross-check against the school’s average

The Common Data Set, which most American colleges publish each year, reports the school’s average non-need-based aid award. Compare your student’s offer to that average. If it is in the same range, your student is being treated as a typical merit recipient and the offer is unlikely to move. If it is materially below, there is room for an appeal. If it is materially above, the school is signaling unusual interest. Search the school’s name and “Common Data Set”; the merit aid figures are in section H.

Before you respond to any offer

Decode every letter before you respond to any of them, because the decoded numbers are the basis for any appeal. Do not pay a deposit anywhere until your appeals are settled. If the deposit deadline approaches while an appeal is still under review, ask the admissions office in writing for a short extension; most schools will grant one if the request is polite and in writing. Here is how to appeal a financial aid offer.

The cleanest single rule

Net price equals sticker price minus grants and scholarships only. Every other figure on the letter is either a wrapper for that number or a separate financial obligation being presented as if it were aid. Once you have the actual net prices for every school, the comparison becomes possible, and the question of whether to appeal becomes answerable.

Most families build a college list around fit, rankings, and gut feeling, then discover the financial implications in April of senior year. There is a framework that prevents this, and a free public dataset that lets any family apply it in twenty minutes.

The Selingo framework

Jeff Selingo, who spent a year embedded in the admissions offices at Emory, Davidson and the University of Washington for his book Who Gets In and Why, divides four-year colleges into two groups. Sellers are overwhelmed with applications, many from top students, and do not need to discount tuition to fill their classes. Buyers have to work to recruit students and use merit aid as a discount to fill their seats.

The crucial number is scale. Sellers are fewer than 5% of four-year colleges. The other 95% are buyers. The schools families talk about are mostly sellers. The schools that will fight to enroll your student are mostly buyers.

How to tell them apart

Selingo publishes rules of thumb that are worth remembering:

Admit rate: sellers admit fewer than 20% of applicants; buyers admit more than 70%. The average across all colleges is around 67%, much closer to the buyer end because buyers are most of the market.
Yield: roughly 45% of students admitted to a seller enroll; at a buyer it is closer to 25%.
Merit share: sellers give less than 10% of their aid as merit, often less than 7%. Buyers give up to a third of their aid as merit, because that merit money is the discount that fills their seats.

Buyers are not lower-quality schools. Many provide an excellent undergraduate education. They simply have a weaker position in the competition for applications, and that is a different thing.

The four numbers

The Common Data Set, which almost every American college publishes each year, contains the four numbers that tell you which category a school is in: admit rate, yield rate, the percentage of students receiving non-need merit aid, and the average merit award per recipient. Search the school’s name and “common data set” and the PDF is usually in the first few results. The school’s branding and reputation are noise. The four numbers are the signal.

Selingo also maintains a published Buyers and Sellers list on his website covering more than 1,000 colleges. It is a useful first cut, and you can then confirm individual schools from their own Common Data Sets.

Two situations, two different lists

Full-pay families, those who will not qualify for need-based aid, get better net prices at buyer schools, where merit aid is genuinely available. A seller has no reason to discount; a buyer does.

Need-based families face a subtler picture. Many sellers are also the most generous need-based aid providers in the country, because they have the endowment to be. A family that qualifies for substantial need-based aid may get a better net price at a seller than at a buyer, because the seller’s need-based package outweighs the buyer’s merit discount. The same college list can be right for one situation and wrong for the other, so the first move is deciding which situation your family is actually in.

The most common avoidable mistake

Building a list weighted entirely toward sellers, then discovering in April that your family is full-pay at every school with no merit money to fall back on. Or building a list weighted toward buyers when need-based aid at a seller would have produced a better outcome.

What this means for families building a list

Pull the Common Data Set for every school on the draft list. Run a Net Price Calculator at two or three schools to confirm which financial situation your family is actually in. Re-weight the list based on what the numbers say, not on rankings or familiarity. The four numbers are public, the framework is free, and the work takes an afternoon. The financial difference over four years can run into six figures.

Vanderbilt admitted 2.8% of regular decision applicants to the Class of 2030. Harvard’s most recently reported overall rate was 3.65% for the Class of 2029, with this year’s estimated to land around 3.2%.

Read that again. Vanderbilt’s regular decision acceptance rate is now in the same neighborhood as Harvard’s overall rate.

This isn’t an anomaly. Vanderbilt received 48,720 regular decision applications this year, the largest pool in its history, on top of a record 7,727 early decision applicants. The combined ED acceptance rate fell to 11.9%, also a record low. Total applicants crossed 56,000. Five years ago, Vanderbilt’s overall acceptance rate was around 10%. Today, the overall rate for the Class of 2030 will likely land somewhere near 4% when official numbers are published this fall.

What’s Driving This

Three things are converging.

First, Vanderbilt has been a direct beneficiary of the backlash against campus controversies at several Ivy League schools over the past two years. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has been outspoken and visible, and families who might have defaulted to an Ivy are seriously considering Nashville. The school’s combination of strong academics, Division I athletics, warm weather, and a thriving city has always been attractive. What’s new is the sheer volume of families acting on that attraction.

Second, Vanderbilt runs two binding Early Decision rounds, which means roughly half the incoming class is committed before regular decision even begins. The remaining spots for RD applicants are genuinely scarce. When 48,000 students compete for approximately 1,400 RD spots, the math is brutal.

Third, this is part of a broader pattern. Schools that families have traditionally categorized as “targets” or “upper targets” are posting acceptance rates that would have qualified as “reach” territory just a few years ago. Vanderbilt is the most dramatic example, but it’s not the only one. Northeastern, Tulane, NYU, and several other schools have seen similar compression. The old reach/target/safety framework is under genuine strain.

The Verto Pathway: A New Kind of Admission

One development worth watching: Vanderbilt introduced a partnership with Verto Education this year. Selected applicants who weren’t admitted directly were offered a pathway to study abroad for one academic year and then transfer to Vanderbilt with guaranteed admission.

This isn’t unique to Vanderbilt. NYU has operated satellite campuses (Abu Dhabi, Shanghai) for years and regularly admits students to those campuses who applied to New York. Other schools are exploring similar models. The pattern is the same: universities are finding creative ways to manage demand that far exceeds their campus capacity.

For families, this means the definition of “admitted” is getting more complex. A student might receive an offer that technically says yes but comes with conditions: start at a different campus, study abroad first, enter in the spring instead of the fall. Whether that’s a genuine opportunity or a soft redirect depends on the student and the family’s priorities. It’s worth understanding before the decision deadline arrives.

What This Means for Families Building a College List

If you’re a parent looking at this data and thinking “we need to recalibrate,” you’re right. Here’s what I’m telling the families I work with.

Stop using five-year-old assumptions about which schools are reaches and which are targets. Acceptance rates at competitive schools are moving faster than most families’ mental models. A school your older child got into with a 15% acceptance rate may now be at 6%. The data changes every cycle, and your college list should reflect the current reality, not the one you remember from an older sibling’s or neighbor’s experience.

Understand that fit is more than stats. Most families build their college list by comparing their student’s GPA and test scores against published averages and calling anything above the median a “target.” That’s a mistake. A student can be above the 75th percentile on every metric and still be a weak applicant at a school whose committee is looking for something their application doesn’t demonstrate. Fit is about whether your student’s story, strengths, and intended direction align with what that institution specifically values. That’s not something a spreadsheet can tell you.

Take the early round seriously. Vanderbilt’s ED acceptance rate (11.9%) is roughly four times higher than its RD rate (2.8%). This pattern holds across nearly every selective school that offers a binding early round. The decision of where to apply early, whether to go ED or EA, and whether to use ED I or ED II, is one of the most consequential choices in the entire admissions process. It deserves strategic analysis, not a gut feeling.

Build the list around fit, not just selectivity. The schools where your student has the best chance of admission are the ones where their profile aligns with what that school’s committee is specifically looking for. That’s a function of academic strengths, intended field of study, geographic diversity, extracurricular profile, and narrative coherence. Two students with identical GPAs and test scores can have very different outcomes at the same school because fit is multidimensional, not just statistical.

Don’t panic, but do act.

A 2.8% acceptance rate sounds terrifying. And it is, if you’re applying to Vanderbilt RD without a strategy. But the families who navigate this landscape well aren’t the ones with the highest stats. They’re the ones who understand how the process actually works, build a list calibrated to their student’s real profile, and make deliberate strategic choices about timing, narrative, and school selection.

That’s the work. And it’s most effective when it starts before senior fall, not during it.

If you want to talk through what these numbers mean for your student’s specific situation, I do a free 30-minute strategy call. No pitch, no contract. Just an honest read on where your student stands.

Schedule a call

Each admissions cycle leaves a trail of patterns, and the Class of 2030, the students who applied this year, has produced some of the clearest signals in recent memory. Here is what we are seeing.

Targets became reaches

The clearest single number of the cycle: Vanderbilt’s regular decision admit rate for the Class of 2030 was 2.8%, lower than Harvard’s overall rate of about 3.6% in its most recently published data. Vanderbilt is not an outlier. Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and Tufts have all moved into the same single-digit territory over the last few years.

The schools families once thought of as “the level below” the Ivies no longer are. A list built on that older picture has too few true targets, and that is why so many strong students this spring saw their targets come back with the same answer as their reaches.

Yield protection is back

Several mid-tier and high-tier universities defended their yield rates more aggressively this year, deferring or denying strong applicants who appeared unlikely to enroll. Demonstrated interest matters again. Campus visits, thoughtful supplements, and genuine engagement with a school’s identity now carry measurable weight at institutions that once claimed they did not track it.

Early Decision pools grew sharper, not just larger

ED applications were up across the board, but acceptance rates fell at almost every selective school. The takeaway is not that ED is “harder.” It is that the ED pool is now self-selected for students who have done the strategic work. A weak ED application no longer benefits from the historical bump.

The published ED rate also overstates the odds for most applicants. A large share of early seats goes to recruited athletes, legacies, QuestBridge matches and other institutional priorities before unhooked applications are read. At Columbia, industry estimates suggest roughly 450 of about 800 ED seats are filled that way, which puts the unhooked ED rate closer to 5 or 6 percent than the published 12 to 13 percent. ED still helps, but by less than the headline suggests.

STEM remains the most competitive lane

Computer science, applied math, and bioengineering admit rates at top programs hit new lows. Students applying to a CS major at a top-15 university now face acceptance rates roughly half of the school’s overall rate. Major selection has become a strategic decision, not an afterthought.

Essays did the heavy lifting

In a cycle where test scores returned but GPAs continued to compress at the top, essays were often the deciding factor. Students who told a clear, specific, personally rooted story, and avoided the generic “I love learning” template, outperformed students with stronger numbers but weaker narratives.

What it means for the Class of 2031

Start earlier. Visit schools before senior year. Pick a major that reflects your genuine interests, then build a coherent academic and extracurricular story around it. The students who succeeded this year were not the ones with the longest activity lists. They were the ones whose applications read as a single, intentional argument.

Three practical adjustments follow from this cycle:

Rebuild the middle of the list. Treat any school admitting under 10 percent as a reach, whatever its reputation, and add genuine targets using each school’s own numbers. The four numbers in the Common Data Set are the fastest way to do it.
Make interest visible. Visit where you can, register for official tours, use the same email address for every contact with a school, and write “Why Us” supplements with real specifics.
Use the early round on purpose. Apply early where the student would genuinely enroll, and only once the application is ready, not because early rates look higher.

While most admissions coverage focuses on the top 25 universities, a quieter shift is changing the application process for everyone else: direct admission. Through programs like Common App Direct Admissions, Niche Direct Admissions, and Sage Scholars, a growing number of colleges and universities now offer admission to qualifying students before they even apply.

How direct admission works

A student creates a profile, usually including GPA, courses, and sometimes test scores, and participating colleges proactively offer admission based on those credentials. There is no application essay, no fee, and often no formal application at all. The offer arrives first; the student decides whether to accept.

Why it matters

For students with strong but not stratospheric profiles, direct admission solves the most stressful part of building a balanced college list: the safety school. Instead of crossing fingers and hoping a likely school comes through, families can have an admission in hand before the senior-year application stretch even begins. That frees up time and emotional bandwidth for the reach and target applications that actually require strategic effort.

Who benefits most

Direct admission has been especially powerful for first-generation students, students from rural high schools, and families navigating college admissions without strong institutional support. Many participating schools also bundle direct admission with merit aid offers, which means a student can know not just where they are admitted but roughly what it will cost, months earlier than the traditional timeline allows.

The catch

Most direct admission programs are concentrated among regional public universities and smaller private colleges. The most selective schools are not participating, and they likely never will. Direct admission is not a shortcut into a top-20 university. It is something more useful: a way to lock in a strong, affordable, well-fit option early, so the rest of the college list can be built from a place of confidence rather than anxiety.

Questions to ask before you count an offer

A direct admission offer is only as good as its details. Before treating one as a real option, get clear answers to a few questions:

Is the offer to the college or to a major? Some programs admit students to the institution but not to competitive majors such as nursing, engineering or computer science, which may still require a separate review.
Is there money attached, and does it last? If merit aid comes with the offer, find out whether it renews for all four years and what GPA or credit load keeps it in place.
What does it actually cost? Run the school’s Net Price Calculator and read any aid figure as net price, not as a scholarship name.
What are the deadlines? Note when the student must confirm and when a deposit is due, so the offer does not lapse while other applications are still out.

How to use it well

Treat a direct admission offer the same way you would treat any other admissions offer: with research. Visit the school if you can, talk to current students, and make sure the academic program actually fits. A guaranteed admission is only valuable if the school is one your student would genuinely be happy to attend.

If it passes that test, it can anchor the bottom of the list, and the student can spend the fall on the applications that need the most work. If it does not, keep building the likely tier the usual way. An admission your student would not accept is not a safety school; it is just another letter.

In a rankings-driven culture, it is easy to believe that college success is defined by selectivity alone. In reality, the outcomes that matter most are shaped by fit.

Admissions committees understand this, and experienced families learn it quickly.

What “fit” really means

Fit is not about settling. It is about alignment. Strong fit considers:

Academic environment and teaching style
Campus culture and community
Size, structure, and support systems
Opportunities for growth beyond the classroom

A college that challenges and supports a student at the same time is far more likely to foster confidence, leadership, and long-term success.

Why prestige can be misleading

Highly selective colleges reject the majority of qualified applicants. Admission decisions are often shaped by institutional priorities, not simply by merit.

The published admit rate at a selective school is not your student’s admit rate. It blends recruited athletes, legacies, donor and faculty children, matched scholarship programs and unhooked applicants into a single number. For planning, that number tells you very little. There are roughly 20,000 high schools in the country, which means roughly 20,000 valedictorians apply to college each year, and only a small fraction of them land at a top-10 school. Excellent statistics put a student at the table. They do not guarantee a seat.

Students who chase prestige alone may find themselves in environments where they struggle to engage, lead, or thrive.

How admissions officers evaluate applications

Colleges are not asking, “Is this student impressive?” They are asking, “Is this student right for our community?”

The strongest applications answer that question clearly and authentically, without forcing a narrative that does not fit. That is far easier to do for a school the student has actually chosen for reasons of their own.

How to judge fit in practice

Fit becomes concrete when you compare schools on the details that shape a student’s daily life:

Class size and access to faculty. Public flagships often have introductory classes several times larger than those at small private colleges.
Housing. Some schools guarantee housing for all four years; at others, many students move off campus because space is limited.
Credit policies. Some private colleges give no credit for AP or IB scores, while many public universities are generous with it. That changes how quickly a student can reach advanced work.
Cost. The most generous need-based aid is often at private colleges with large endowments, while merit aid is more common elsewhere. Run each school’s Net Price Calculator before deciding what is affordable.
Your school’s history. Admissions offices know how many students from your high school applied, were admitted and enrolled in past years. Your counselor, or Naviance if your school uses it, can show where recent applicants landed.

Redefining success

Success in college admissions means options. It means choice. It means enrolling at a school where a student feels challenged, supported, and excited to grow.

Build a list your student is genuinely excited about at every tier, including safeties they would be happy to attend rather than backups they would resent. When families shift their mindset from “Where can my student get in?” to “Where can my student thrive?” the entire process becomes healthier, and far more effective.

Early Action and Early Decision results arrive with a wide range of emotions: excitement, disappointment, relief, uncertainty. For many families, these early outcomes feel final. In reality, they are simply the first signals in a much longer admissions process.

Understanding what these decisions actually mean, and how to respond thoughtfully, can make all the difference in the months ahead.

What Early Decisions Really Represent

At selective colleges, early applicant pools are exceptionally strong. Many institutions now admit a small percentage of Early Action and Early Decision candidates, while deferring a significant number for further review.

A deferral does not mean a student was “not good enough.” More often, it means the admissions committee wants additional context: senior-year grades, a broader comparison pool, or alignment with evolving institutional priorities.

Similarly, a denial is not a verdict on a student’s potential. Colleges are building classes, not ranking individuals.

If the Result Is an Acceptance

An early acceptance is worth celebrating, but it also deserves careful consideration.

Students admitted Early Decision should take time to fully understand the commitment they’ve made. Early Action admits still need to evaluate academic fit, financial considerations, and long-term goals before making a final choice.

An early “yes” is not the end of the process for everyone. It’s an opportunity to make a confident, informed decision.

If the Result Is a Deferral

Deferrals are among the most misunderstood outcomes in admissions. A deferred applicant is still under active consideration, but only if the next steps are handled strategically.

Effective responses typically include:

A concise, well-crafted Letter of Continued Interest
Meaningful updates, such as improved grades, leadership growth, or new achievements
A recalibrated Regular Decision strategy that strengthens the overall college list

What does not help: generic emails, excessive communication, or assuming the outcome is fixed.

If the Result Is a Denial

Rejection is painful, and it’s important not to minimize that experience. But it should never be interpreted as a reflection of a student’s ability or future success.

Each year, outstanding students are denied early and go on to thrive at colleges that prove to be stronger academic and personal fits.

The healthiest response is to regroup, reassess, and move forward with perspective.

The Bigger Picture

Early results provide information, not conclusions. Families who navigate this season best are those who pause, seek clarity, and focus on strategy rather than emotion.

College admissions is not about one moment or one outcome. It’s about creating options, and choosing the environment where a student can truly thrive.

Junior year is often described as the most important year of high school, but not for the reasons many families assume.

While grades and test scores matter, the true significance of junior year lies in something deeper: this is when colleges begin to understand who a student is becoming.

Academic trajectory matters more than perfection

Junior-year coursework carries weight because it reflects readiness for college-level academics, and it is the transcript year admissions readers look at most closely. They are not looking for flawless transcripts; they are looking for thoughtful challenge and growth over time, measured against what the student’s own school offers.

A student who pursues rigor appropriately, and shows resilience when it gets hard, often presents a stronger profile than one who plays it safe.

Depth over breadth in activities

By junior year, colleges expect to see focus. Students who attempt to do everything may appear scattered, while those who deepen a few interests show commitment, curiosity, and maturity. The goal is depth with something to show for it: output and recognition that someone outside the school could verify.

Leadership, initiative, and sustained involvement matter far more than last-minute additions.

The beginning of an application narrative

Junior year is when an application story begins to take shape organically. Academic interests start to align with extracurricular engagement. Choices become more intentional. Summer plans gain purpose.

This is not about manufacturing a résumé. It is about recognizing patterns and leaning into them strategically.

Testing is only one piece

Standardized testing plays a role, but it should never dictate the entire year. The strongest planning ensures testing fits into a broader strategy rather than becoming the sole focus. Much of good testing strategy is about timing: settling the test dates early enough that there is room for a second sitting without crowding out everything else.

When testing is contextualized properly, students maintain momentum without unnecessary pressure.

A junior-year checklist

These are the decisions we focus on with juniors, roughly in the order they come up:

Take the highest rigor that fits. This is the transcript the committee will read most carefully.
Lock in the SAT or ACT plan. Choose the test, the dates and a target score early in the year.
Invest in the one or two interests with real depth. Set clear goals for what the student will produce or achieve by the end of the year.
Identify recommenders before spring. Approach the right teachers early, and give them a résumé or brag sheet so their letters have real context.
Build a college list that fits the actual profile. Start from your student’s numbers and interests, not from brand names.
Choose senior-year courses deliberately. Senior schedules are visible to colleges, and a lighter year can read as stepping back.
Plan the summer before senior year. Use it to finish one concrete thing the application can lead with, and to draft the personal statement.

Why early planning reduces stress

There is a particular worry that shows up in junior year: the feeling that the window is closing. It is not. Starting earlier helps, but it is not decisive. What a student does this year is.

The most confident seniors are rarely the most overwhelmed juniors. They are the ones who approached junior year with intention, reflection, and a clear sense of direction. Junior year is not about doing more. It is about doing what matters, thoughtfully and strategically.

For many families, the college admissions process feels opaque and overwhelming. Advice is everywhere, opinions are loud, and pressure builds quickly, often long before students are ready.

In reality, admissions is not a single moment or metric. It is a multi-year process shaped by academic choices, personal growth, and strategic planning. Understanding what truly matters, and letting go of common misconceptions, can bring both clarity and calm.

Myth #1: A Strong GPA or Test Score Is Enough

Grades and test scores matter. They establish academic readiness and help colleges assess whether a student can succeed in their classrooms.

But at selective colleges, most applicants are academically qualified. High scores rarely differentiate a student on their own.

What distinguishes applicants is context: course rigor, academic trajectory, intellectual curiosity, and how a student’s interests show up beyond the transcript. Admissions committees are not searching for perfect profiles. They are evaluating students within the opportunities available to them.

Strong academics open the door. They do not, by themselves, guarantee admission.

Myth #2: More Activities Are Better

Another common misconception is that students need long lists of extracurriculars to appear impressive.

In practice, colleges value depth far more than breadth. Sustained involvement, leadership, and growth in a few meaningful areas tells a clearer story than scattered participation across many activities.

Admissions officers are looking for evidence of commitment, curiosity, and initiative, not résumé padding.

Myth #3: There Is One “Right” College List

A successful admissions process begins with a thoughtful college list. Yet many families approach list-building as a ranking exercise rather than a strategic one.

A strong list is balanced and intentional. It considers academic fit, campus culture, size, location, and long-term outcomes, not just selectivity.

Most importantly, a good list creates options. When students have multiple schools where they can thrive, the process feels less stressful and far more empowering.

Myth #4: Everything Happens Senior Year

While applications are submitted in senior year, the foundation is built much earlier.

Junior year academic choices, extracurricular focus, summer experiences, and early reflection all shape the strength of an application. Waiting until senior fall to “start” often leads to unnecessary stress and rushed decisions.

Early planning doesn’t mean pressure. It means clarity.

Managing Stress in a High-Stakes Process

College admissions has become increasingly competitive, and stress is a natural response. The most successful families are not those who eliminate stress entirely, but those who manage it thoughtfully.

Clear timelines, realistic expectations, and a focus on fit over prestige help students stay grounded. So does remembering that admissions outcomes do not define a student’s potential or future success.

What the Process Is Really About

At its core, college admissions is about match. Colleges are asking whether a student is academically prepared, intellectually engaged, and likely to contribute to their campus community.

When students present themselves honestly, with intention and strategy, the process becomes less about chasing outcomes and more about finding the right environment for growth.

Understanding how admissions actually works allows families to approach the journey with confidence, perspective, and purpose.

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