The market of college admissions is an unpredictable one, and you’re playing right into it.
As the November 1st deadline for early decision applications approaches, it seems the college question is discussed more and more amongst Graded high school students. The promise of “what if” hangs thick in the air as future dreams linger in the balance between every summative grade and application essay.
The big names like Harvard and Yale, despite the daunting 4% acceptance rates, ring as relevant and loud as ever. Everyone seems to know that getting into competitive colleges is hard, and yet no one knows how hard it really is. There are simply too many factors that play out of our control.
So we bring our attention—and hopes— back to the numbers. According to SparkAdmissions, a blog that works alongside the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), acceptance rates are dropping. The number of applications from students worldwide has increased exponentially for colleges all over the United States, at all levels of selectivity. But coming from the international pool of candidates has always provided students with some feeling of relief. The U.S. News and World Report reported that from the 117 ranked National Universities in the US with at least 500 international applicants, “the average acceptance rate for international students was 43.8%” in the fall of 2020.
I, for one, after living in Palo Alto, California for a semester, consider myself exceptionally lucky to be part of a school as privileged (and far away from the US continental border) as Graded. Living so close to Stanford meant the students I was interacting with were completely focused on getting into college, and the competition was brutal. There was no advantage in having an American passport then. But applying from Graded means there is the hope that we will be viewed differently considering our various nationalities and the “Brazilianness” that comes with applying from a school in São Paulo.
In fact, the idea of race and international diversity has always been considered an essential aspect of the admissions process for colleges in the United States. Or it was, until June 29.
That month the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. declared a new federal ruling calling for the end of race-conscious admissions in higher education schools like Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Both programs were deemed unconstitutional for their practice of factoring race in the admissions process.
Lenore Stern, professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University, said that “at these very selective colleges, like UNC and Harvard, among the pool of highly accomplished young people, (race) can be something that kind of tips someone into the admit pile.”
In other words, universities strive to include people from a variety of backgrounds in order to promote racial diversity. This means there are certain considerations for people depending on their race.
The argument was that these policies were used to discriminate against Asian American and white students by enforcing race-based preferences.
It seems funny to me that such an argument can even be made, considering that in the fall of 2022, 42% of the total undergraduate population was considered white. Hispanic and Latino/a students made up the second largest group, with a total of 17.5%. The difference in population is more than double.
Moreover, studies found that with the implementation of the new affirmative action policies, the number of admitted black students at Harvard University would fall by ⅔, should the rest of the admissions process remain unchanged. This number would also fall for Hispanic students to 7% from the current 13% overall representation.
This data is particularly shocking because, despite the controversy surrounding race-conscious admissions, affirmative action helps increase diversity in more competitive schools.
Changing the system of preferences in these universities could have a heavy impact on legacy admissions, too. Both practices challenge the meritocracy of the college process by taking into consideration the unfair advantages that some individuals pose when applying. Except that in the case of affirmative action, those advantages stem from the belief that not everyone has had the same access to quality education because of years of racism and segregation.
Is giving minority groups special consideration ever wrong? And most importantly, what does this ruling mean for Graded students?
Jeff Neill of the college counseling office at Graded brings to attention a second ruling that was made alongside the ban on affirmative action policies that states that students can write about race in their application essays.
“Colleges value diversity for data-driven reasons. The more diverse the classroom is, the more everyone learns. Colleges are trying to find every way to diversify the student body. The question becomes whether or not students should write about race in their [college] essay,” Neill says.
That diversity can encompass a wide range of areas that are not limited to race. For example, passport diversity, LGBTQ+ representation, being a third-culture kid, speaking various languages, etc. There are many Graded students who fall under those cultural divides.
Neill says, “In what ways does your identity and the diversity it represents contribute to a college campus? There are plenty of students who don’t see it that way. [We] are having to talk about it to students in a way we never had to before.”
From a visual lens, what this means is that when students apply in the next college admissions cycle, there will no longer be boxes that students can fill out expressing what race they identify as. But is this necessarily a disadvantage? Perhaps it suggests a change in perspective when tackling the college application.
“So much of the college process is highlighting your strengths,” Neill says. “When there are no boxes to check, is there an essential component of you that should be emphasized?”
Ultimately, the college application is a reflection of you. It summarizes your identity into characters and checkboxes, hoping universities catch a glimpse of the individual you truly are. Finding the differences that make you stand out can be hard, and reflecting on them in the college admissions process can be scary. But I would argue that is exactly when we must let those differences shine through, especially when race is no longer being evaluated. Affirmative action or not, maybe that just means we have to search a little deeper within ourselves to tell the right story.
A competitive market, indeed.
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/us/affirmative-action-college-admissions-harvard.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html
