Elite Colleges Reach Deeper Into Wait Lists - WSJ May 21, 2008

Elite Colleges Reach Deeper Into Wait Lists
Changing Applications Process
Added Uncertainty This Year;
Enjoying a Domino Effect
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
May 21, 2008; Page D1

Here's a bright spot in an otherwise brutal college-admissions season: More students are being accepted from wait lists at elite schools this year because colleges found it harder to predict how many graduating seniors would join the freshman class.

Boston College says it will admit about 250 students from its wait list, up from last year's 117. Harvard University says it will take at least 200 students, compared with 50 last year. Princeton University expects to take at least 90 students this year, up from 47. The University of Pennsylvania has admitted 90 students from the wait list this year, up from 65 last year. And Georgetown University is admitting 80, up from 29 last year.

WAITING GAME


Some factors that made the college-admissions process unpredictable:
• Large class of high-school seniors applying to college.
• Elimination of early-admissions programs by Harvard and Princeton.
• Greater availability of financial aid to middle- and upper-class students.Some state colleges and smaller liberal-arts schools are also drawing more from their wait lists. The University of Wisconsin-Madison expects to take 800 from the wait list this year, compared with six students last year. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is admitting 300 students from the wait list, up from 226 last year. Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., has so far taken 36 students off the wait list this year, up from 24 last year.

The wait-list bonanza isn't because colleges have more slots available for students -- in fact, overall enrollment levels at many schools remained the same as last year.

Instead, colleges this year faced more uncertainty in the applications process. For one thing, there's a growing population of high-school seniors -- many of whom submit applications to multiple schools. But for highly selective schools, what really affected the process was the move by two Ivy League schools to end their early-admissions programs. Also at play were policy changes that made more financial aid available to middle- and upper-class students.

"It was certainly a year in which there was more uncertainty than I've experienced in over 30 years in admissions," says Bill Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid.

Wait-list activity at one school can affect competitors, who may lose students as a result. But such moves also trickle down and open up spots for other hopeful students. "It's like a domino effect," says Marybeth Kravets, a counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois.

Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., for instance, has lost four students because they were accepted from wait lists at Princeton, Harvard and Columbia universities. In turn, the school has taken 16 students from its own wait list.

College officials say they expect wait-list activity to be drawn out longer this year. So some students have already accepted one college's offer only to be accepted from the wait list of the college they prefer. If they switch to their preferred college, they automatically lose the enrollment deposit -- often amounting to hundreds of dollars -- they paid to the first school.

Holding Out

Alex Jefferson, 18, illustrates the uncertainty of the wait-list game. Mr. Jefferson, a senior at Bellaire High School in Houston, Texas, applied to 12 schools. He was accepted at eight and wait-listed at two: the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis. He was holding out for both but sent an enrollment deposit to Northwestern University expecting that he wouldn't get off either wait list.


To his surprise, he was accepted to both. He has decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania, but there's a catch: Mr. Jefferson has decided to defer for a year to go to Israel. Still, getting into a top choice this late in the year is thrilling.

"I was in shock," Mr. Jefferson says. When an admission representative from the University of Pennsylvania called, he accepted immediately. "It's so unheard of to get off the wait list."

The unpredictable nature of college admissions began in the fall of 2006, when Harvard and Princeton announced they would eliminate early-admissions programs, leading this year's applicants who would have otherwise committed to those schools to send multiple applications to other top schools. Harvard and Princeton expected to lose a portion of their admitted students to competitors. And other highly selective schools thought that some applicants would hold out for Harvard and Princeton.

Second, as Congress pressured schools to spend more of their endowments on students, Stanford, Yale and Harvard universities altered their financial-aid eligibility requirements to include more middle- and upper-class students. And other schools in the past year have said they would cap or eliminate need-based loans in financial-aid packages and replace them with grants.

'Limited Number of Beds'

Such uncertainties led many schools to be conservative in their initial round of acceptances. Colleges say the worst-case scenario is to have more students enroll than can be accommodated with on-campus housing. "We had a limited number of beds on campus," says Janet Lavin Rapelye, Princeton's dean of admission. "We had intended to come in below our target and then use the wait list."

Also at stake for elite schools is yield -- the percentage of students accepted who decide to attend. That figure is closely monitored by competing schools, potential donors and applicants as an indication of a college's appeal.

By accepting fewer students than what they need initially and pulling from the wait list later, colleges can try to minimize the number of students who receive offers and say "no." "They can actually boost their yield," says Jon Reider, who was an admissions officer at Stanford for 15 years and is now director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School.

Students who have been wait listed and are willing to hold out for their top choices generally let the schools know. Additionally, "a lot of colleges will call the students on the wait list to see if they are interested," says John Blackburn, dean of admission at the University of Virginia. "So I think a lot of times, colleges are able to be pretty accurate in predicting which wait-list people will come."

The University of Virginia, like Harvard and Princeton, ended its early-admissions programs this year after concluding that policies put low-income and underrepresented students at a disadvantage. Critics of early-admission programs say that they don't enable low-income students to compare financial aid packages.

Impact on Yields

All three schools saw their yields decline this year, as admissions officials expected. Princeton's was about 60%, while in previous years, when the school still offered early admission, that figure was 67% or 68%. Harvard's Mr. Fitzsimmons expects the yield to be about 76% this year, down from 78%. At the University of Virginia, the yield declined to 48.8% this year from 50.8% last year -- but the drop wasn't as large as anticipated, so the school has not yet taken any students from the wait list this year, Mr. Blackburn says.

To be sure, not all schools are seeing increases in their numbers of wait-list offers. Stanford University, for instance has taken zero students from the wait list so far this year, the same as last year. "We are keeping a small number on the wait list just to respond to other wait list activity around the nation," says Rick Shaw, dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com1

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Colleges Reject Record Numbers WSJ April 3, 2008

Bad News U: Colleges Reject Record Numbers
Policies at Harvard, Princeton
Create Uncertainty at Elites;
Financial-Aid Picture Improves
By ANJALI ATHAVALEY
April 3, 2008; Page B11

(See Correction & Amplification item below.)

The college-admissions season set records this year -- both in the number of students who applied, as well as the number of students who were rejected.

Harvard University has a record applicant pool of 27,462 and an admissions rate of 7.1%, meaning that 1,948 students were accepted -- the lowest number in the school's history and a drop from last year's 8.9%. Yale University received 22,813 applications and accepted only 8.2%, down from 9.6% last year. And at Princeton University, of the 21,369 applications, 9.3% were accepted, down from 9.5% last year.
State schools, too, are reporting a tough admissions season, with acceptance rates down at the University of Texas and the University of North Carolina, among others.

On the positive side for some students this season, schools are having a hard time predicting their all-important "yields" -- the percentage of students admitted who will actually attend. And high-school counselors are hoping that ambiguity will result in more acceptances for students who are on waiting lists -- a strategy schools use to reach enrollment targets.

"On the counseling side, this is our most promising and realistic hope for wait-list activity," says Bari Norman, director of Expert Admissions LLC in Miami. For the past couple of years, many elite schools have anticipated drawing from their waiting lists but ended up taking few or no applicants because of higher-than-expected yields.

Two factors are driving the unpredictability in this year's college-admissions process. First, both Harvard and Princeton universities eliminated their early-applicant programs this year. That means students who otherwise would have secured a spot at one of these schools in the fall also applied to other schools. Second, moves by highly selective schools to increase financial aid for middle- to upper-income students put the high tuition bills within reach of more families.

"With the change at Harvard and Princeton and all the moves made on the financial aid side, we just feel completely unable to predict what the yield will be," says Jeff Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University. "We're guessing the yield will fall some because more top students have applied to top schools." For the past couple of years, Yale's overall yield has ranged from 70% to 71%.

Yields are important to colleges because they are closely monitored by competing schools, potential donors and applicants as an indication of the college's appeal. In recent years, they have become tougher to forecast because of the growing population of high-school students and a rise in applications per student. College counselors say many students today apply at 10 to 12 schools, with some applying to as many as 20.

Some colleges changed their strategies as a result of the Harvard and Princeton decisions on early admissions. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admitted 522 students early this year compared with last year's 390 because it saw a stronger early-applicant pool. Students who normally would have applied early to Harvard and Princeton applied to MIT's early-admissions program, which is nonbinding, meaning that even if they're accepted, students aren't obliged to attend, says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions at MIT.

Swarthmore College accepted more students this year -- 929 compared with 890 at this time last year. Yet its admissions rate of 15% was lower than last year's 16% because of a rise in applications. "We took a few more because I think our yield might go down a bit," says Jim Bock, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Pennsylvania school.

17 Applications

Michael Zucker, 18, a senior at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Ill., illustrates how the applicant pools at elite schools can overlap. Mr. Zucker, who ranks within the top five students in his class, applied to Yale's single-choice early-action program -- which is nonbinding but doesn't permit him to apply to any other schools early. He also applied to 16 other schools with the goal of getting into six. "I refused to exclude schools before applying," he says. "I've heard enough horror stories to know that something can go wrong."

The results turned out in his favor. Mr. Zucker was accepted at 13 schools, including Yale. He was wait-listed at Columbia, Princeton and Stanford, and rejected by Harvard.

Mr. Zucker says he is likely to choose Yale but hasn't decided. The University of Chicago has offered him a $40,000 scholarship. Students have to let colleges know yes or no by May 1.

For many, the decision may hinge on financial assistance. At a time when schools face congressional pressure to spend more of their endowments to help students, many schools have said they are capping or eliminating the amount of need-based loans in financial-aid packages and replacing them with grants. Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities have revamped their financial-aid policies to include more middle- to upper-class students.


Financial aid will determine where Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons decides to go. Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons, 18, a senior at Bellaire High School in Houston, applied to eight schools. He was accepted to five: Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.; Tufts University near Boston; American University in Washington, D.C.; Willamette University in Salem, Ore.; and the University of Texas at Austin.

Claremont McKenna and Tufts are his top choices. But he is waiting to see what kind of financial-aid packages he receives. Last month, Claremont McKenna -- with estimated tuition and fees for next year of $18,530 per semester -- announced it would eliminate student loans from financial-aid packages and give grants instead. Tufts has a similar policy for students at households with incomes below $40,000, but Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons doesn't fall into that category.

Classmates 'Freaking Out'

"My top priority is to weigh whether the college is right for me, but also what my debt might be," says Mr. Graves-Fitzsimmons, who has a 4.6 grade-point average on a 5.0 scale. His parents have encouraged him not to rule out the University of Texas -- where in-state tuition and fees are about $4,266 per semester -- because of its affordability.

He says that he is happy with his options, but that his fellow classmates are "generally freaking out." "A lot of people are not getting in where they want to get in," he says.

Indeed, the year is shaping up to be a brutal admissions season, with state schools also reporting declining admission rates. The University of Texas received 29,288 applications, up 9%. It admitted 44%, down from 51% last year. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, applications rose 6.6% to 21,496. It accepted 32%, compared with 34.1% last year.

"This was really the ugliest year I've seen," says Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor at Deerfield High School in Illinois. More students were rejected or wait-listed this year. "Some of these larger universities just did not take very many kids."

For those who didn't make it in the fall, there's hope next spring. As colleges become more adept at enrollment management, they use spring admissions to fill the slots left by students who study abroad or graduated in the fall semester.

Schools like Middlebury College in Vermont, Colby College in Maine, and Wheaton College in Massachusetts offer spring admission to a handful of students.

Some students have found the idea appealing. Last week, Angelica Rubin, 17, a senior at Hillel Community Day School in Miami, Fla., was excited to receive a large envelope from Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

It turned out that the package contained an acceptance letter for the spring semester. "It was kind of a reach school, so I was really honored, I guess," she says.

Write to Anjali Athavaley at anjali.athavaley@wsj.com3

Correction & Amplification:

Claremont McKenna College in California last month announced its policy to eliminate student loans from financial-aid packages and give grants instead. A previous version of this Personal Journal article about college admissions incorrectly said the policy change was made last fall.

‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students - NYT article

Report Takes Aim at ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype of Asian-American Students
By TAMAR LEWIN
June 10, 2008

The image of Asian-Americans as a homogeneous group of high achievers taking over the campuses of the nation’s most selective colleges came under assault in a report issued Monday.

The report, by New York University, the College Board and a commission of mostly Asian-American educators and community leaders, largely avoids the debates over both affirmative action and the heavy representation of Asian-Americans at the most selective colleges.

But it pokes holes in stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, including the perception that they cluster in science, technology, engineering and math. And it points out that the term “Asian-American” is extraordinarily broad, embracing members of many ethnic groups.

“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”

“Our goal,” Professor Teranishi added, “is to have people understand that the population is very diverse.”

The report, based on federal education, immigration and census data, as well as statistics from the College Board, noted that the federally defined categories of Asian-American and Pacific Islander included dozens of groups, each with its own language and culture, as varied as the Hmong, Samoans, Bengalis and Sri Lankans.

Their educational backgrounds, the report said, vary widely: while most of the nation’s Hmong and Cambodian adults have never finished high school, most Pakistanis and Indians have at least a bachelor’s degree.

The SAT scores of Asian-Americans, it said, like those of other Americans, tend to correlate with the income and educational level of their parents.

“The notion of lumping all people into a single category and assuming they have no needs is wrong,” said Alma R. Clayton-Pederson, vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, who was a member of the commission the College Board financed to produce the report.

“Our backgrounds are very different,” added Dr. Clayton-Pederson, who is black, “but it’s almost like the reverse of what happened to African-Americans.”

The report found that contrary to stereotype, most of the bachelor’s degrees that Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders received in 2003 were in business, management, social sciences or humanities, not in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering or math. And while Asians earned 32 percent of the nation’s STEM doctorates that year, within that 32 percent more than four of five degree recipients were international students from Asia, not Asian-Americans.

The report also said that more Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders were enrolled in community colleges than in either public or private four-year colleges. But the idea that Asian-American “model minority” students are edging out all others is so ubiquitous that quips like “U.C.L.A. really stands for United Caucasians Lost Among Asians” or “M.I.T. means Made in Taiwan” have become common, the report said.

Asian-Americans make up about 5 percent of the nation’s population but 10 percent or more — considerably more in California — of the undergraduates at many of the most selective colleges, according to data reported by colleges. But the new report suggested that some such statistics combined campus populations of Asian-Americans with those of international students from Asian countries.

The report quotes the opening to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1903 classic “The Souls of Black Folk” — “How does it feel to be a problem?” — and says that for Asian-Americans, seen as the “good minority that seeks advancement through quiet diligence in study and work and by not making waves,” the question is, “How does it feel to be a solution?”

That question, too, is problematic, the report said, because it diverts attention from systemic failings of K-to-12 schools, shifting responsibility for educational success to individual students. In addition, it said, lumping together all Asian groups masks the poverty and academic difficulties of some subgroups.

The report said the model-minority perception pitted Asian-Americans against African-Americans. With the drop in black and Latino enrollment at selective public universities that are not allowed to consider race in admissions, Asian-Americans have been turned into buffers, the report said, “middlemen in the cost-benefit analysis of wins and losses.”

Some have suggested that Asian-Americans are held to higher admissions standards at the most selective colleges. In 2006, Jian Li, the New Jersey-born son of Chinese immigrants, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights at the Education Department, saying he had been rejected by Princeton because he is Asian. Princeton’s admission policies are under review, the department says.

The report also notes the underrepresentation of Asian-Americans in administrative jobs at colleges. Only 33 of the nation’s college presidents, fewer than 1 percent, are Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.