College Admissions Counseling Blog

Every year the National Association of College and University Business Officers, NACUBO, releases an endowment study listing the endowment of over 700 colleges throughout the country. The 2007 report on endowments is now out and the biggest news is the amount of growth in the endowments, particularly the largest endowments. The average listed endowment rose 18.4% over last year. Notre Dame went up 34.7% and Duke was up 31.4% for two of the largest percentage increases. Harvard was up 19.8% but given the size of its endowment that meant an increase of almost 6 billion dollars over last year.

There are now 141 colleges with endowments exceeding $500 million and 76 of those have endowments exceeding 1 billion dollars. Given those kinds of numbers, the increasing financial aid packages being announced by some of the wealthiest colleges loses some of its splendor. Hopefully more of the colleges on the high side of this list who have yet to act will also revise their financial aid policies to increase aid to lower and middle income students.

Colby College is the latest college to announce that they will be replacing loans with grants for all students. Colby is a small liberal arts college in Maine that is highly selective. Colby's new policy goes into effect for the 2008-2009 school year and eliminates loans for all student aid packages for both new and continuing students.

Although Colby has a significant endowment of almost $600,000,000 it is still substantially less than many of the other colleges that have announced similar policies in the past few months. The more this type of policy can trickle down the better off student who are looking at selective colleges will be.

Dartmouth College has announced that effective with the 2008-2009 school year they will have a revised financial aid policy that will include, among other items, the replacement of loans with grants for incoming freshman.

Dartmouth's new policy has 4 key elements. The first is the elimination of tuition for families earning less than $75,000 per year. This policy is different than that of most of the other colleges that have recently announced new aid policies in that it applies only to tuition. Students will still have responsibility for room, board, books and other costs although as the college points out, many of these students will receive aid to cover much of these costs as well.

The second element of their new policy is replacing loans with grants. As noted above, this will take place for new students only. Current students will have their loan obligations cut by 50% starting with the next school year and continuing for each of their remaining years at the college.

The third element of Dartmouth's new aid policy is that they are going need blind for international students. This means that when students are evaluated for admission their ability to pay will not be considered for any student, even though from foreign countries. This is unusual as few colleges in the United States provide need blind admissions for foreign students.

The fourth, and final, new policy is that students in their junior year will be allowed a leave term with no earning expectation. In the past, when students were on leave they were expected to earn a certain amount of money that would be contributed toward their education. Wealthy students, who did not need to worry about such contributions, would often engage in non wage earnings pursuits such as research or volunteer activities during this time . The college will now be giving junior students an additional scholarship of $2,950 to allow students receiving financial aid the same research and volunteer opportunities as wealthier students.

It is good to see Dartmouth joining the ranks of wealthy colleges who are making an effort to make college more affordable for those with lower incomes.

Bowdoin college has announced that they are joining the ranks of the colleges that are eliminating all loans for its students. Beginning with the 2008-2009 school year Bowdoin will replace loans with grants for all of its students both new and returning.

Congratulations, Bowdoin.

To qualify for Federal financial aid a student and their family needs to complete a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, aka the FAFSA. The priority deadline to complete the FAFSA varies from college to college but is often between February 1 and March 15 of the student's senior year so many people are currently working on, or thinking about working on, their FAFSA.

At the end of the FAFSA you are asked to list the colleges to which the FAFSA should be sent. Every year some people ask if the order of the colleges listed makes any difference. In other words, if you put College A before College B does that somehow indicate a greater interest in College A for admissions. For most colleges the answer is no, it does not make any difference in which order the colleges are listed. However, there are some colleges where it might make a difference in admissions or in the financial aid package the college gives the student. If the college looks at your list of colleges and determines that they are a likely choice for you if admitted and if you are the type of student they want, they may put together a financial aid package that is more attractive than they might otherwise do. On the other hand, if they perceive that they are less likely to have you enroll they may save their better financial aid packages for another student.

So what to you do? You have two basic options. One is to put the colleges in your order of preference and don't worry about the effect that may have. The second option is to put your colleges in alphabetical order thus sending the message to the colleges that the order of the list has no importance.

The executive director of the Common Application, Rob Killion, has released the numbers of applications through January 15. According to him the Common Application had 1,281,196 applications this year (a 40% increase) from 367,994 unique applicants. This means the average applicant this year submitted about 3.5 applications through the Common Application. This number is consistent with the number of applications submitted per student in the past several years. This means that the increase in application numbers is due to more students using the Common Application which is consistent with the increasing number of colleges using the Common Application and the fact that the majority of the most selective colleges use this form for their applications.

These facts seem to confirm that the stories of students submitting 15, 20 or more applications is not the norm among students submitting college applications.

The Common Application also announced that 23 new colleges which will begin using the Common Application next year.

Many of the most selective colleges are starting to release their application numbers and as expected the number of applications at many of these colleges again set records. Here is the bad news:

Harvard applications are up 18% to more than 27,000
Princeton applications are up 6% to 20,188
Stanford applications are up 2.5% to 24,564
Brown applications are up 7.5% to 20,505
Duke applications are up 5.4% to 20,250
University of Virginia applications are up 3.8% to 18,776
University of Chicago applications are up 18% to 12,267
Northwestern applications are up 12% to more than 25,000
Amherst applications are up 17%
Dartmouth applications are up 10%

But enough of the bad news because there is some good news also. According to a survey of 386 colleges by the National Association for College Admission Counseling the average college acceptance rate is still 69%. In other words, as long as you are willing to consider a school outside the most selective colleges, there is still a reasonable acceptance rate with most colleges. As always, don't get hung up on the name of the college. Find the best college for your needs and if it one of the most selective, have a good safety.

It is that time of year again. Some applicants to colleges are submitting more than the requested applications. The Boston Globe discusses some of the items sent to admissions offices in the hope that they would improve the applicants chance at admissions.

Let's keep this simple. DON'T do this. The message you are sending along with the gimmick is that your application is not strong enough on its own to allow you to gain admission. Instead, work on your grades, prepare for standardized tests, spend time at your favorite extracurricular activity and if you really have some extra time, spend it on polishing the application and essay. Doing these things will help your chances of admissions. Submitting something to make you the joke of the admissions office will not help your chances.

With all of the news of the wealthy colleges restructuring their financial aid programs, Blackburn College in Illinois is trying another approach. Unlike many of the colleges in the news recently, Blackburn has a very limited endowment on which to draw for financial aid packages. Their approach is to reduce their tuition and adopt a "no haggle" approach to financial aid. In other words, the stated price is what it costs and they will not negotiate based on a student's receipt of an aid offer from another college.

Whether this is a good approach remains to be seen but I congratulate Blackburn on trying something different in their approach to helping students pay for college. It would be wonderful if all colleges had the resources of Harvard and Yale but unfortunately that is not the case. Many colleges are much closer to Blackburn than the wealthy colleges in the news of late and they need to also come up with improved financial aid options for new students.

As expected, Yale has announced that they have a new financial aid policy that is very similar to the one adopted by Harvard several weeks ago. Those families making less than $60,000 a year will not need to contribute to the cost of education at all. For those families earning between $60,000 and $120,000, there will be a sliding scale from 1 to 10% of total family income for a typical contribution. For those families with income between $120,000 and $200,000 they will average a contribution of 10% of total income. Other aspects of the new aid policy can be found on their web site.

The New York Times recently published an article discussing the need for counselors to work with students in finding the best college for their needs. While the article simply restated the fact that most high school students have inadequate college counseling, I was struck when actually considering the numbers.

The article addressed some of the numbers from the State of College Admission 2007 which is published by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The average public high school counselor spends only 23% of their time advising 311 students on colleges. When this is broken down it turns out that the typical public high school counselor spends 64 minutes during the entire year advising students on issues related to colleges. Even more disturbing, only 10% of public high schools provide a college counselor specialist for their students.

Surprisingly, the typical private school counselor doesn't fair that much better. Private school counselors spend 56% of their time advising students on colleges and have 234 students to advise. This breaks down to 3 hours and 26 minutes that the private school counselor has for each student in their college advising.

In preparing for college students need to consider the courses they are taking, what courses to take, what tests to take and when, what extracurricular involvement they should have, what colleges to consider, factors to consider in deciding how to pay for college, the application process and when to apply, factors considering the college visit, who and when to ask for recommendations and the list keeps going. It is unfortunate that this country continues to inadequately fund schools so that there are not enough qualified counselors. But it is a national disgrace to think that students are only provided with one hour of advice on all of the issues surrounding the search for the right college.

High school seniors and their families need to be working on completion of the FAFSA for next year's financial aid. The FAFSA is required by all colleges to qualify for federal financial aid and should be filed as soon as possible. Most colleges have a priority filing deadline which can be as early as January 15. The FAFSA needs to be filed by the priority deadline to make sure that the student will be eligible for all possible federal financial aid. You should check with each of the colleges in which you have an interest to learn what their priority filing deadline is.

The FAFSA requires information similar to that required on the tax returns. However, if students and their parents don't have their tax returns completed by the priority date for filing at the colleges in which you have an interest, file the FAFSA using estimated information. It is understood that some people will not have all of their information available in time to file the FAFSA and estimated information is perfectly acceptable. You can revise the FAFSA once you have acquired all of the necessary information.

With the new year comes the time for high school juniors to begin the college admissions process if they haven't already started. College may still seem a long way away but there is much that needs to be done to make sure that the student finds the right college for their needs. Students should be taking at least one and ideally two standardized tests before the end of the school year so that testing is not required in the senior year. The process of visiting colleges should also be started in the next few months.

For more detailed information about what needs to be done to find the right college check out our articles on the college admissions process. Here we have articles on Finding the Right College as well as What Colleges Want in choosing a freshman class. We also have articles on Financial Aid and Common Mistakes in Choosing a College. Here is also a detailed 4 year college admissions time line.

What ever you do, don't wait to get started. Putting off the investigation of the best college for you only makes for a more difficult senior year and often leads to a poor result in the college chosen.