You could apply to the same school four years in a row, and get four different answers.”

Zack Harlan

More students are applying to more U.S. colleges and universities than ever before, according to reporting from The Common App, an organization that has dramatically altered the college application process in the past decade.

The Common App is now the dominant tool for high school seniors applying to colleges. Using one platform, students and their families can apply to more than 1,000 institutions, with much of the work, including essays, completed once and then shared quickly with up to 20 colleges or universities.

Applicants love the ease of managing all their applications in one consistent platform, but there have been a range of unintended consequences. Two experts in the field shared insights on some of the troubling trends they are seeing — a dramatic rise in students being waitlisted, disappearance of the traditional “safety school” concept, and admissions decisions based on factors other than a student’s actual abilities or merit.

Here are a few of the recent developments in the world of college admissions …

Waitlists on the rise

Zack Harlan, a Post-Secondary Access Counselor at campuses of the Met High School in Newport and Providence, said several forces have been fueling each other, exacerbating a vicious cycle that may be creating extra stress for both applicants and admissions offices.

“The system is feeding into itself, and there’s been kind of a snowball effect these past couple of years because it’s gotten so competitive and everyone’s trying to beat each other through the system. It all comes down to schools being businesses at the end of the day,” Harlan said.

Harlan created a visual to further describe the way the cycle works. Because more students are applying to more schools than ever before, admissions offices are waitlisting more students than they ever would have previously. This is causing students to apply to more schools, because they want to guarantee acceptance somewhere — and the cycle repeats itself over and over again.

Each year, there’s a bit of a gamble in terms of how that cycle will look. Harlan said, “I tell students all the time, ‘you could apply to the same school four years in a row, and get four different answers. An acceptance, a rejection, a deferral, and a waitlist, whatever the case may be.’ One year, they might need a certain major, or more students from a certain county, or more students in a certain tax bracket. Sometimes the only word you can use to describe it is ‘random.’ That’s why you’ll never hear me use the term ‘safety school.’ I’ll call it a likely school, but you can never lean on what you think is a guarantee.”

Melissa Bellotti-Stien, a counselor at Portsmouth High School, recalled first seeing the surprising growth in students being waitlisted.

“Back in the early days of the Common App, Quinnipiac was a really popular school for our students, and they had rolling admissions. Then all of a sudden, one of my top students, who would’ve easily been in their honors program if she was accepted, was waitlisted. I called, because I was just absolutely shocked and beside myself, and they were already over-enrolled before the school year even started.”

The power of marketing

Marketing and public relations are having enormous impact on admissions offices as well. In publications and databases, colleges are organized in tiers as well as subcategories. Their acceptance rates and the average test scores of their admitted students are widely known and publicized. The tremendous influx of applications threatens to change those rankings and tiers — which is not always in a school’s best interest.

Harlan said, “When a school is, say, in the top ten of a given thing, they know that’s what students and families are looking at, so they put a lot of effort into maintaining that ranking. That’s what makes selectivity such a big deal. If they admit so many overqualified students, it drives up the averages, so now what was the number one mid-tier school is at the bottom of a higher tier.” 

Bellotti-Stien talked about this same dynamic with regards to SAT averages. “With so many schools becoming test optional, the majority of students were only sending in their scores if they were really strong,” she said. “So that drove the average SAT scores of students at a given school way up. There’s some schools who would typically look for like a 1080 test score that were now averaging a 1200. I’ve noticed some schools posting their average score, but also the scores that they’re looking for, pulling back to that realistic number.”

A matter of intent

Another unintended consequence of the new admissions process is that schools have more doubt than ever before whether an applicant really wants to go to their school. Because of the ease of the Common App, schools receiving applications above their standards are keenly aware that they may be chosen as a “safety school” by more and more students every year.

Harlan said, “Instead of saying ‘these students are applying because they really really like us or care about our school,’ now schools are like, ‘well we don’t even know if they really like us, they might have just been sending us an application because we’re on Common App and they can do it for free,’ so now we have students getting waitlisted who are beyond solid applicants for the school. In my opinion, and based on my research, that’s happening because the schools know this student is much more likely to go to another school, or a more competitive school. So these middle-tier schools, or even lower-end elite schools, are wondering if students are really that serious or if they’re just applying because they can.”

Since the implementation of the Common App, “applying because you can” has seemingly become a common occurrence. Bellotti-Stien reflected on the start of this curve, saying “I’ll never forget the start of the Common App. All of a sudden, you could apply to 20 schools with a click. Obviously it’s advanced greatly over time, this was just the preliminary stage. But schools didn’t know what to do because they never anticipated it getting this easy to just apply. Back in the day, there was so much more being put into finding the right fit for you all around — not just finances, but getting on campus and really getting the vibe. Then it became so easy, and the colleges really just didn’t know what to do with that.”

The waitlist has become one of the leading responses to the enormous growth in applications. Harlan said, “The waitlist is colleges’ way of having their cake and eating it, too. They get to make sure they have a full class, which, at the end of the day, is what’s most important to them and is their institutional priority.”

He went on to explain: “There’s so much less guesswork now on the schools’ end if they keep a solid waitlist. They have a better idea of whether or not they’ll have a full class, and instead of rejecting people, they keep them in a sort of holding pod and will pull them if need be. And that can be for any reason, whether it’s diversity in major, background, whatever the case may be.” Waitlists are also being viewed as a “soft rejection,” which Harlan described as “a way for schools to say ‘hey, we think you would’ve done really well here, there’s just more qualified students than there are seats at the school.’ ” 

Have a plan

While the ability to apply to so many schools at once makes the process so much easier, it also feeds into that cycle of over-applications. In his work with students, Harlan stresses the importance of loving every school they apply to — even the ones they aren’t necessarily prioritizing. “If you’re going to apply to 15 schools, I want you to be able to look at me and tell me why you’re excited about every one of them and have good reasons. If all you have is that they came to a college fair and the person was nice, it’s probably a good idea to think that one through some more,” he said with a laugh. 

In a more practical sense, Harlan went on to explain that, “Even if you’re admitted to a ton of the schools you applied to, if you apply just to apply, now you have close to 20 acceptance letters and financial aid packages to go through, on top of the way you yourself feel about each school. It can just make everything more complicated when you apply just because it’s easy.”

But how to avoid the dreaded waitlist? While there is no one way to go about this, nor is avoidance ever guaranteed, there are some steps that can be taken in order to better the chances. The trick here is demonstrated interest; making your interest known to the school. This can be achieved through an official campus tour, meeting with admissions, and more. Additionally, applying early is a very strong way to demonstrate interest, and can be done in two ways — early action and early decision.

The benefits of early apps

Early action is simply applying in an earlier window, which moves the process along faster and shows the college that an applicant is eager to apply. With early decision, however, the stakes are raised. By applying early decision, the applicant is telling the school that, if they’re accepted, they will withdraw all other applications and commit to attending immediately upon acceptance. 

Here the two counselors disagreed slightly. Bellotti-Stien said, “if you apply early decision, it’s essentially giving you an extra leg up.” Harlan, however, is skeptical of the true benefits: “I feel the same way about waitlists as I do about early decision. There’s really no benefit for the student there. It’s just a question of timing; early decision is at the beginning, and waitlist is at the back-end of the process. When it comes to early decision, yes, it’s the highest form of demonstrated interest, but you’ve also eliminated your ability to negotiate. A school’s way of negotiating and convincing you to come there is through scholarships, but if you go early decision you’ve already said, ‘if you accept me here, I’ll immediately withdraw all my other applications,’ so there is no financial negotiation at that point. If they don’t need to incentivize you with a scholarship, then they’re not going to.”

Harlan made it clear that he truly believes in the benefit of early action, and understands that while it’s not always the make or break variable, it’s a very high display of interest. He also brought up the theory that the pool of early applicants may have a higher concentration of desirable students. He said, “My very humble opinion is that those type-A students who are getting all As, are in all AP classes, who got the best SAT scores, are typically the first ones ready to send their applications out, so because of that, there’s a stronger cohort of students applying early decision than regular decision. Regular decision might be, say, you needed to get a grade up, you needed to retake the SATs, or maybe you just didn’t know about the school until the regular decision window. So there’s a question there; are schools admitting students at a higher rate through early decision because they applied early decision, or because there’s just more qualified students in that group?”