Nearly all classes are 25 or less, with many classes of 10-15 students. Smaller private colleges with approximately 2,000 students, sometimes called liberal arts colleges or teaching universities (Trinity TX, Amherst, Williams, Pomona), typically offer nearly all courses in discussion-based settings, with a small number of lecture courses. Public research universities with 25,000-65,000 undergraduate students (UT-Austin, A&M, UCLA, U of Alabama, etc.) offer large (200 or more students), mostly lecture oriented classes, with discussion-based courses available only to upper division students, if at all. Different schools have different missions, different size/scale, varying availability of professor interaction, and varied pedagogical methods. Not Understanding Different Types of Colleges and the Traits That Distinguish ThemĬollege education is not a widget that is exactly the same at every college or university, even when comparing the same major at two or more schools. If you don’t have good essays, your prospects are vastly reduced. High quality essays are authentic, personal, detailed, and interesting to admissions readers. These kinds of essays bore readers and fail to give a taste of the student’s real voice, experience, and identity. Student won contest and felt proud or student lost contest and found merit and value in the process. Student faced minor challenge and overcame challenge by strength of character. Most students and families mistakenly believe the college essay must sell the school on the student by pointing out the student’s good traits.Īdmissions staff read tens of thousands of essays and nearly all are the same. The primary reason students in our community do not achieve the results at acceptance time that are equal to their strong high school achievements is that the quality of their essays is below par. One colleague at UT-Austin commented thus about the quality of applications and essays, “nearly 90% are terrible, with another 5% in the poor range.” Yes, admissions rates are plunging because of increased competition, but good applications still stand out like diamonds. Our colleagues in admissions departments at competitive colleges like Emory University, Vanderbilt, Macalester, Bowdoin, The University of California system, and The University of Texas At Austin report the same problem. Yet, each year, the in-boxes were filled with low quality essays, resumes, and recommendations. One would expect such universities to receive top-notch essays, resumes, and applications from their applicants. Shumsky, was an admission committee member at Northwestern University and the University of Virginia, elite universities where nearly every applicant is in the top 10% of their high school class. Sending in Poor Quality Essays and Applications To help your family avoid disappointment at college acceptance time, we offer you the top 10 college admissions mistakes. More information about the major factors in college admissions and how your child’s application will be evaluated can be found in this post. This information helps us to give your family the best advice possible. We have ongoing relationships with college admissions staffs and professors, hiring managers and graduate school admissions staffs, and research curricula, employment patterns, and student outcomes 365 days per year. This acknowledgment is difficult because it is a challenge to our basic ideas about how the world works.Īs the important elements in college admissions are changing all of the time, we must pay very close attention to the reality of what is happening now and not rely on outdated ideas. We must acknowledge that college admissions is a subjective process where success is not entirely related to academic achievement, grades, and test scores, nor the size of one’s resume.
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College admissions mistakes occur because families, and many high schools and counselors, lack a full understanding of how the process works and which factors are crucial.Īdditionally, the colleges themselves have a way of dancing around the important information as they market and sell their offerings. Much of the college admissions process seems unclear and overwhelming. In our community, parents and students often wonder why they don’t gain acceptance to the colleges that they are most attracted to. When talking with families in our community and reading what is written and said on the Internet and in forums like college confidential, we see that much of the conventional wisdom about college admissions is misguided.
Top 10 College Admissions Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Chances