This year, Harvard turned down more than 200 high-school seniors who had perfect SAT scores. Penn rejected 400 valedictorians salutatorians. And it’s not just the Ivy League and other top universities that are besieged by well-qualified seniors. At Washington University in St. Louis, the number of applicants has doubled in the last five years. St. John’s University, a commuter college in the New York City borough of Queens, now has so many out-of-town applicants that it is building the first dorm in its 129-year history.
Just your luck: you face the stiffest competition in the history college admissions. Your competitors are more numerous than eve about two thirds of all high-school graduates will go on to some form higher education next fall, compared with just over half in the late 1960s. And by most yardsticks, your fellow applicants have the best qualifications ever. The class of 2004 will start freshman year with twice as many college credits-earned from advanced-placement courses and other special high-school work--as their counterparts had a decade before. Their SAT and ACT scores will be the highest in 15 years. "When we receive phone calls from students in April asking why they were not admitted, we sometimes have difficulty finding a reason," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania.
But the tough competition isn’t just your problem. It’s also a huge challenge for the colleges. They are swamped with applicants, many of whom are applying to a dozen or more institutions--partly as a kind of failsafe, and partly because the students can’t decide what they want. Admissions offices have to separate the serious prospects from the window shoppers and the multiple hookers. For you, the good news is that there’s a place somewhere for just about everyone. The question is, how will you and your ideal college find each other
There are lots of choices out there. When Bob Kinnally, Stanford’s director of admissions and financial aid, gets complaints from parents whose kids were rejected, he asks them where their offspring did get in. "They rattle off this amazing list of choices," he says. "I tell them Congratulations, school so-and-so is an excellent match for your child. It’s all about a good match." Which is NOT the reason for the stiff competition