The prestigious University of California system begins to inform hundreds of thousands of applicants this month whether they’ve been admitted for the fall semester. Many other colleges have already done so. Some students’ dreams of college admission will be fulfilled, others shattered ... and most students will find a campus to enroll in.
Yet this time of year is also the time when applicants and their families question the transparency of the college application process.
“I think [with] CSUs it’s pretty clear on the requirements: You meet a certain criteria and you should be able to get in,” said Geronimo, a 17-year-old senior at a Los Angeles high school. His mother asked that only his first name be used for fear that his applications may be affected.
He’s applied to eight campuses in both the UC and CSU systems. He’s worried about his UC applications. He took calculus last year and this year, and wants to major in mechanical engineering in college.
He wishes UC would have made it clear what activities and interests to include and whether writing about his math classes would have increased his chances of getting into the competitive major.
“I would say you do have a fair shot at getting in, it’s just that the vagueness is the scariest part,” he said.
At its most basic the college application process involves filling out a form online in which the applicant lists classes and grades. A college takes that information along with letters of recommendation, a list of activities the applicant has been a part of on campus and off, along with one or several essays describing their academic and personal interests. Some schools require standardized test scores but many others don’t, while some say it’s OK to submit them if a student thinks it will help their case. (That last group is what’s called “test optional.”)
While many colleges and universities list minimum grade requirements and classes that needed to be taken, admission is far from automatic because there are often way more applications than the number of open seats.
The importance or weight that admissions officers give each of those pieces of information and how they judge the information overall has earned the moniker of “the black box.” In other words, the application and its info goes in — out of sight of the applicant and most other people — and out comes a yes or no to admission.
“I think at this moment in time, it would be helpful for [colleges and universities] to be more transparent about what they are looking for above and beyond academic qualifications. That's a big black box right now,” said Julie Posselt, executive director of USC’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice.
The center’s yearly conference in February attracted college admissions officials and scholars from different parts of the country, and included discussion of transparency.
“So much of the work that we do is sort of behind closed curtains,” said Maricela Martinez, vice president of enrollment at Occidental College, in L.A., during one panel discussion.
“I think that that is part of the problem and that is why we are where we are, which is that people don’t understand the complexity of the work we do,” she said.
Many people do not feel the way college applications are evaluated provides a fair shot.
“I almost get into tears thinking about [the college application] process for our older son, when it was happening to him, and how [disheartening] it was,” said Sherri Bradford, who helped her son last year apply to colleges and universities hoping to major in aerospace engineering.
So much of the work that we do is sort of behind closed curtains. I think that that is part of the problem and that is why we are where we are, which is that people don’t understand the complexity of the work we do.
Her son’s top choices were MIT and Caltech. She said the family believed he had more than a shot because he had a 4.3 grade point average, was student body president, was captain of the track team, and was part of the robotics club.
Bradford is a counselor at Santa Monica College and reviewed his application essays.
“He was denied admission to MIT, to Caltech, to UCLA, to Vanderbilt, to USC. It was getting to the point of being quite discouraging and scary for him,” she said.
Bradford and her family had many questions: What impact did the standardized test scores he submitted have at schools that didn’t require those scores? Does not having a hardship story hurt the application? And most important: Why was he turned down while others were admitted?
There are many other people who say the college application process is far from transparent and should be changed, including college admissions officials themselves.
Colleges tell applicants what their criteria for admission is but remain vague on what weight they’ll give the criteria and other information to admit an applicant.
“The complexity of the process involves a lot of moving parts,” said Kedra Ishop, vice president of enrollment at USC.
It involves several different factors, including:
Ishop said what’s difficult about the transparency conversation is that it usually starts with the applicant asking why they didn’t get in.
“There are a multitude of reasons, many of which may have nothing to do with your academic record, because many of the students that apply to us are highly qualified applicants. But we can only accept so many out of a very big applicant pool,” she said. Only about 9% of applicants to USC are admitted.
Hers and other universities do not reveal to each applicant the comments or other evaluations made on the applications.
“I don't know that that answers the question of transparency that the families are looking for,” Ishop said.
Besides, she said, calls for transparency only involve the most selective colleges and universities — and that’s a small subset of higher education, albeit one that gets a lot of media attention. Yes, think Harvard, Caltech, UCLA, and the other usual suspects.
Something important to remember: Applicants to these selective schools usually end up at good colleges. And here’s an even lesser known data point, one that undermines the idea that higher education is slowly closing its doors to qualified applicants: This Pew study found that most colleges and universities end up admitting “most of the people who apply to them.”
Even if there’s no formula for a college application to be accepted, how to craft an application that will increase the odds of admission has become a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. The foundation of that industry is analyzing what colleges say they evaluate and the kinds of applicants they’ve admitted.
The University of California and California State University have different admissions criteria, corresponding to their different roles in the state's public education system.
The University of California lists the following as some factors it may consider, and each campus has the right to "apply these factors differently":
California State University lists the following as admissions criteria:
Families with children of different ages are in the position to do that too, for better and for worse.
“It would be helpful to know maybe some of those things that they do look for in terms of choosing students over another student. What is it that made them click the button? Yes, on a student, versus another student, saying no?” said Sherri Bradford, whose youngest son, a Los Angeles high school senior, is waiting to hear from colleges in the coming weeks.
She would like colleges to share evaluation comments on applications. It would have helped her family understand why her oldest son was turned down from his dream schools and would help her youngest, she said, prepare his application.
There is a silver lining to the grief her family went through last year. Her son was accepted to — and is now thriving — in his aerospace engineering major at UC Berkeley.
“And so now here we are, again, with me worrying about whether or not my child who has done so much in high school just like his brother, whether or not all of his hard work is going to pay off to get him into the top school that he wants to attend,” Bradford said.
But she has a message for families of applicants and their families: They will end up in a college that fits. And they should be proud of all the work the young adult did in high school.
