On the first day of May I sent my children a text message, “May Day!!! May Day!!!” My daughter responded, “Such a dad joke.” And indeed it was.
For some in the college admissions world May 1 can be May Day, a day for celebration, for dancing around the Maypole to celebrate the fertility of the admissions cycle or holding a Soviet-bloc military parade to show off institutional enrollment strength. (Where does one rent parade missiles and tanks these days?)
For other institutions that haven’t “made” their class, the proper response to May Day might be to issue a “May Day!!!” distress call, as May 1 becomes a day not for celebration but rather a day of reckoning or even panic. We know that the idea of May 1 as an “end” to the admissions cycle has always been a convention, a useful fiction, and with COVID having knocked the admissions process off its moorings, even the most optimistic of us expected that the “process” will extend longer in 2021 than in previous years.
There has been a lot of speculation that colleges would keep longer wait lists this spring and make more frequent use of them. A recent article in Inside Higher Ed reported on a survey of high school seniors conducted by Art & Science Group that indicated that 20 percent were on at least one wait list, and I have heard of a major state university with a wait list numbering 15,000, or twice the size of its entering class a year ago. I have also seen more colleges adopt some sort of guaranteed transfer option at a specific institution or a program like Verto.
For all the talk about wait lists, I have seen or heard very little actual wait list movement thus far this spring. There are the usual suspects for whom the wait list is an intentional part of their enrollment management strategy, who might admit 10-20% of the freshman class annually using the wait list as a kind of “Early Decision 3,” but otherwise, very little wait list action for being in the second full week of May.
It is certainly possible that I’ve just missed it—it wouldn’t be the first time. But I also wonder if we are seeing a subtle shift in the admissions landscape with regard to wait lists. Will one of the fault lines between rich and poor institutions become the ability to even have a wait list?
The assumption has always been that once colleges at the top of the food chain begin going to their wait lists, there will be a ripple effect, perhaps even an enrollment pandemic, with colleges infected with “May melt” as students leave to upgrade to reach schools accepting them off wait lists. That assumption is grounded in the belief that college choice is first and foremost about prestige and brand.
I wouldn’t bet against that proposition, even as I don’t want to accept it, but recently saw an interesting trend with my own students. Right after May 1 my local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, did a front-page story on the fact that the most competitive public universities in Virginia have significantly larger wait lists this year. The reporter asked if I could connect him with a couple of wait-listed students.
Three responded that they would prefer not to be interviewed. All of them said that they are happy with their choice, and that while they might consider a wait list offer, they wouldn’t leap to change. One talked about feeling exhausted after a trying school year and wanting to be settled with the decision. Perhaps the prevailing wisdom about students jumping at wait list offers will hold up, but this year has affected all of us in ways we don’t fully understand, and we shouldn’t assume that the old norms will hold in a world that is different.
My students’ responses have perhaps more significance for colleges that don’t have the luxury of going to a wait list now that May 1 is past. Before we had a pandemic to worry about, the raging issue in the admissions world was whether we would see a dramatic increase in post-May 1 poaching in the wake of the demise of NACAC’s mandatory ethical standards after the DOJ investigation. I was about to say I haven’t seen that, but just now a senior stopped by to ask if it was normal to be offered an extra $10,000 in scholarship money.
I wonder if my students’ hesitancy to talking with the reporter about wait lists, and particularly the reflection on feeling exhausted, serves as a cautionary tale for colleges who hope to induce second thoughts or buyers’ remorse among students who have already deposited at another college. How many students and parents can be bought by additional scholarship dollars or perks like guaranteed parking places or preference in course registration? Can incentives change the mind of someone who has decided and is ready to move on?
The other issue is how to let the public know that a college is still open, perhaps even very open, for business. The most common means of spreading the word that applications are welcome is what used to be called the NACAC Space Availability Survey. Like a number of other NACAC services and programs, it has been rebranded, and is now the College Openings Update: Options for Qualified Students. It is only a matter of time until that becomes an acronym, COUOQS.
NACAC produced that survey earlier than normal this year, and as of this morning there are nearly 400 colleges on the list. I can imagine that adding your institution’s name to that list is a strategic dilemma for many enrollment managers. Do you look desperate, and given the principle of transparency, is there anything wrong with looking desperate when you are in fact desperate? In the interest of fairness, I would also point out that what most of us really need is a list of options for unqualified students.
Over the past few weeks I have received several communications from colleges announcing that they are extending their application deadlines. Those announcements raise some interesting questions. Who is the target audience? Are there students just getting around to applying for the fall now? And why set deadlines at all? Setting an application deadline is generally a good idea unless the deadline passes and you haven’t reached your goal. There are plenty of students and parents who take deadlines seriously and won’t apply even if they have interest, assuming it’s too late. Once a deadline comes and goes, the one who is dead could very well be the one who created the deadline.
Is there an etiquette to extending deadlines? I’ve noticed several guiding principles.
The first is “It’s not me, it’s you.” You never admit that you are extending your deadline because you need applications. Perhaps that doesn’t need to be said, because students and parents are relatively savvy, or at least suspicious that you are not extending out of the goodness of your heart. Nevertheless, deadline extensions are always positioned as done out of concern for students rather than the institution.
The second principle is tying the deadline extension to some item in the news. If you need to extend your deadline, hope for a volcano eruption in Iceland, a typhoon in Bora Bora, or panic over gasoline shortages caused by pipeline cyberattacks. Even if students live thousands of miles away or have no geographical knowledge of where those places are, you can justify the extension based on the fact that the event impacts students in some way. Of course COVID provides a legitimate cover for any change, even a change of deadline, both this year and probably for the next couple.
Stepping back from my feeble attempts at humor (“Such a dad joke”), I hope all of us feel empathy for our admissions colleagues for whom May is in no way an end to the admissions cycle. May all of us survive COVID--and the admission challenges posed by COVID.