Before you know it, the school year will be over. The month of May marks graduation season. Across the country, millions of students will graduate from school. And as high school and college graduates march across those stages and receive their diplomas, millions more students—high school sophomores and juniors—begin their college admissions journeys at this time, too.
Throughout my career as an educator and advisor to students, I have supported many students who are baffled by the college admissions process. It still surprises me how students who have earned 4.5 weighted GPAs and 5s on multiple AP test can be so flummoxed by college applications. But every spring and summer, without fail, students dip their toes into the college application pool and recoil in terror.
Too often, the water’s cold!
Now, I can totally relate to students’ states of mind as they approach this process. My awareness of the applications process has been honed not only through my own applications—to colleges, law schools, grad schools, and PhD programs—but through the individual experiences of the hundreds of students I have supported throughout my career. In my advising and teaching, I try to help students overcome their paralyses by helping them to “hack” the college application process to suit their needs instead of falling prey to the “higher education industrial complex.”
All of the students I have worked with had also been counseled by their high schools’ college advisors, but I state and reiterate that my approach is totally counter-intuitive to the one they have been coached toward their entire lives. To start, I advise my students to avoid applying to colleges that they’ve already heard of. I am always met with consternation at this statement; “You mean I shouldn’t apply to Harvard or NYU or UCLA?” students quip. “That’s exactly right” I always reply.
“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.” —Susan Sontag
Here’s my logic: most high schools’ College Guidance offices proudly display the pennants of universities to which these schools’ alumni matriculate. Some schools’ pennant displays show dozens of colleges; other schools’ displays boast hundreds of colleges. But whether an office displays 20 or 200 pennants, both are barely representative of the total number of available options students could pursue.
The US Department of Education’s latest data on accreditation indicate that more than 16,000 US institutions are regionally-accredited colleges and universities. So even if a student’s college advisor knows of 200 different schools, that leaves out 99% of a student’s options!
I advise my students to apply to unknown colleges because their goals should not be to earn admission to a prestigious school or to compete with their classmates for the most acceptance letters. Students entering college in 2018 need to do so with their eyes “wide open”; they need to know the data about student attrition rates, loan default numbers, and recent graduate employment statistics. Armed with this data, the students I coach are told to set college graduation as their goal, not simply college admission. Reprioritizing their focus from “getting in” to “getting out…preferably with employment” changes students’ entire mindsets. Seeing students grapple with this is like that moment in The Matrix when Neo sees the walls as 0s and 1s. Their eyes are open to a whole new understanding of life, the universe, and everything.
“I know Kung Fu” —Neo (The Matrix)
By focusing on lesser-known schools, students and leap the hurdles of trying to outshine tens of thousands of competing peers. While the well-known and prestigious colleges—like Harvard--are sifting over 30,000 applications and offering admission to fewer than 6% per year, smaller liberal arts colleges are admitting nearly 75% of applicants. Shifting one’s application paradigm can make the difference between getting in and getting ahead.
I have found that just getting students to see the potential of this shift in mindset takes time. They’ve been so acculturated to the notion of competition and brand names that introducing this novel approach sounds like a foreign language.
But once students accept this counter-intuitive approach, the heavy lifting is finished. Though no applications have been completed and no awe-inspiring personal narrative essays have been drafted, students are already seeing the college application process through a different lens.
That’s when the fun begins.
...and that’s how you should feel!