Admission growing tougher?

By Barney Breen-Portnoy

Published: May 17, 2008

Earlier this year, Lauren Bicknell and Sarah Culver, both high-achieving seniors at Monticello High School, received small letters from their respective dream schools — Georgetown and Cornell. Each had been put on the waitlist.

“I had wanted to go to Cornell forever,” said Culver, whose family has attended the Ivy League school in Ithaca, N.Y., for several generations. “Getting waitlisted was a blow. Going to Cornell was the plan and that’s what I had worked so hard for during high school. I was very disappointed.”

But Bicknell and Culver soon moved past that disappointment and weighed their options. This fall, Bicknell will attend the College of William & Mary and Culver will go to the University of Virginia.

“William & Mary had been my dream school until I visited Georgetown my junior year, so it’s kind of fate or destiny that I ended up there,” Bicknell said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

It was a historically tough year for students applying to the nation’s elite universities. For example, only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied to Harvard were offered admission and Yale accepted a mere 8.3 percent of its applicants. A decade ago, Yale had an 18 percent acceptance rate.

Kristen Campbell, the director of pre-college programs for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, said that students are applying to more schools than in the past, meaning that there are more applications for the same number of admission slots.

“There are many capable students who are being waitlisted or rejected because there are not enough spots,” Campbell said.

Exacerbating the problem is that the population of 18-year-olds in the country is at an all-time high — around 3.2 million — because of the echo of the baby boom generation. The population of 18-year-olds is expected to peak next year, Campbell said.

Guidance counselors at local high schools have noticed the trend of students applying to an increasing number of schools.

“It seems like students used to apply to three to six schools and now they apply to between five and 10,” said Thea Bertola at Monticello.

Culver applied to seven schools and Bicknell applied to six. Fellow Monticello senior Scott Webster applied to four schools and was waitlisted at William & Mary and accepted to UVa, where he will attend this fall.

Bicknell, Culver and Webster said that among the people they know at MHS, the highest number of applications submitted was 12 or 13.

For local students, the most popular college destinations are UVa, James Madison and Virginia Tech, guidance counselors say.

According to John A. Blackburn, UVa’s dean of admissions, UVa received 18,637 applications this year, a 4 percent increase from last year.

Blackburn said that UVa usually received between 15,000 and 16,000 applications before last year, when there was a 12 percent spike.

Blackburn believes that it has become harder for students to determine whether they will be able to get into a given school, leading them to apply to more schools to have an array of choices in April.

“I don’t see an end to this changing,” Blackburn said. “I think it will continue into the near future.”

UVa sent out 6,620 letters of admission this year, a 35.5 percent acceptance rate. Around 400 more admission letters were sent out this year compared with last, due to uncertainly surrounding how the yield rate would be affected by the elimination of the binding early-decision process.

Bicknell remains on the waitlist at Georgetown as Culver does at Cornell. But neither is sure that she would accept an offer from what she considered her dream school.

Bicknell said she would be tempted by an acceptance letter from Georgetown but that she has also become comfortable with William & Mary.

Culver expressed a similar sentiment.

“Once they tell you maybe, and you start to consider what the future will be like somewhere else, you get used to the idea of going somewhere else,” she said. “So even if they come back to me now and say, ‘Please come to our school, we made a mistake,’ I’m not sure that I’d want to derail my life again and go back to the original plan.”