College Good and Bad News

There is both good news and bad news on the college front.

Let's start with the good - over the past several months there has been a major push among the highly competitive colleges to re-structure their student financial aid packages. For most of the schools who have announced new financial aid structures, this has meant that they are eliminating loans from student financial aid offers. This is really something you will only find at the top, private, selective schools because they have large endowments that they can use to replace the loans. Schools I have read about with new plans for their financial aid include Baldoin, Cal Tech, Dartmouth, Davidson, Duke, Harvard, Haverford, Pomona, Swathmore, Tufts, U Penn, Wesleyan, Williams, and Yale.

The bad news is that the colleges are also reporting a record high number of college applications. The Common Application had a 40% increase in applications this year (with the average student submitting 3.5 applications through the Common App.) There are a large number of schools that are reporting significant increases in the number of applications. For example Harvard is up 19%, Chicago 18% (with an increase of 46% for early applications), Amherst 17%, Northwestern 14%, and Dartmouth 10%. Other schools like Stanford, Princeton, Brown, Duke, and UVA also reported increases (3-9% over previous years) in number of applications. Sadly, for this year’s Juniors, I don’t think we have seen the end of record breaking applications. According to the New York Times, “Officials said the trend was a result of demographics, aggressive recruiting, the ease of online applications and more students applying to ever more colleges as a safety net. The swelling population of 18-year-olds is not supposed to peak until 2009, when the largest group of high school seniors in the nation’s history, 3.2 million, are to graduate.” The good news among the bad is that you should not get discouraged because the overall college acceptance rates are holding steady at 69%. Also, some of the highly selective schools have started discussing the possibility of increasing the number of students that they accept each year. No official word on decisions that they are going to make that transition, but I will keep you posted if any schools make that change.