Calm Down, Think Ahead, and Other Advice on Getting Into College

Macalester Today

Back in the late ’60s, when Lee Nystrom ’73 was a promising football player from Minnesota farm country, he dismissed Dartmouth as “too far away” and Gustavus Adolphus as “too familiar” and decided on Macalester. “Beyond that, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” he says.

His daughter Ali Nystrom ’10 had much more on her mind when she toured the campus in 2006. Her visit was part of a cross-country college scouting trip from Maine to Washington state spent poring over the Princeton Review, while headlines warned of record levels of rejection letters for even the most hopeful high school seniors.

“When it came to applying to colleges these days,” Lee says. “I was pretty clueless.’

As for Ali, “I was really stressed.”

This study in contrasts may be familiar to Macalester grads on the far side of 40, who are now returning to the college admissions process with their own sons and daughters. “Back when we were doing this, our parents barely paid attention,” says Donna Kelly, a former director of Macalester’s High Winds Fund and now a partner with College Connectors, a Minneapolis consulting firm for collegebound students. Though services like hers were once reserved for East Coast elites aiming for the most prestigious schools, Kelly says her clients are now “just normal people” struggling to navigate an increasingly complex process and growing anxiety about actually getting in.

“There is more competition for top colleges,” admits Macalester Assistant Dean of Admissions Nancy Mackenzie ’69. “But there’s also a lot more hype,” she says, which distracts parents and prospective students from a goal that has remained unchanged from one generation to the next—“finding the school that feels like it will be the right fit for the next four years.” Here, some lessons from Macalester about how to find the right college fit for the young person in your life.

Understanding the Numbers

Twenty years ago, Macalester’s admission staff read about 2,000 applications annually. By 2008, applications topped out at 5,000—all for roughly the same number of spots in the freshman class. With trends like this at colleges across the country, it’s no wonder so many admissions websites now contain helpful advice to applicants about how to “breathe deeply.”

“One reason we’re seeing these numbers is there’s a sense now that everyone needs a college degree, and so more people are applying to college than would have a generation ago,” explains Lorne Robinson, dean of admissions and financial aid. At the same time, the so-called “Baby Boom Echo” created its own demographic wave, cresting in 2009 with 3.2 million graduating seniors—the most in American history.

Still another reason for the surge is that applying to college has never been simpler: With little more than a credit card and the click of a button, students can send an electronic Common Application form across the country in seconds. With the rise in “fast-track” applications, hundreds of colleges now send admission forms to select students, with offers to waive everything from personal essays to application fees and a promise of a quick response. (Macalester does not do this.) While this approach can be a boon to overburdened seniors, fast-track applications also allow colleges to capture more applications which, in turn, boosts the “selectivity rates” that figure into the ranking books that colleges love to hate.

Ellen Merlin ’83, a college counselor at St. Paul’s Central High School, has watched application numbers creep up over the last decade. “When I started, we used to recommend applying to three or four schools, and now we recommend four to six,” she says, noting that she’s seen students applying to as many as “ten to fifteen” highly competitive colleges.

This results in more work for admissions staffs and may have diminishing returns for students. “It has become a kind of circular logic,” says Robinson. “Because people are concerned about the competition, they apply to more colleges, so there are more applications out there, so the application numbers go up, and the admission rate goes down, which feeds the anxiety that you need to apply to more schools,” he says. “I just read an application from a student who had applied to 19 schools.”

It’s a family affair

No discussion about the admissions process would be complete without a nod to the nation’s ranks of so-called “helicopter parents,” who pore over U.S. News & World Report college rankings and pepper campus tour guides with questions that leave them wondering who will actually be coming to campus in the fall—the parents or the kids?

“It’s what we in the admissions world affectionately call ‘pronoun confusion,’” explains Robinson. “We are not applying to college. We are not moving into the dorms in September—but this generation of parents has a really hard time separating themselves from their kids.” He adds that when his department declines an application, “We almost always hear from the parents, rarely the students. And they take it very personally.”

While helicopter parents have become an easy target, Kelly says blaming them for all that’s changed in the college admissions process misses the mark. “This is a generation that’s really involved with their kids. Our kids are closer to us, and in many cases, they’re turning to us for help,” she says. Now factor in soaring comprehensive college costs, which at some schools have moved past $50,000 a year, and it’s easy to understand how applying to college has become a family affair. As Kelly points out, “What other $120,000 investment decision are you going to trust entirely to your 17-year-old?”

Sticker shock

Understanding the Sticker Price Concerns about affordability have only intensified since the recent economic downturn. “When need-based financial aid developed in the 1960s and ’70s, it was a program for people of lesser means, but now the costs are such that most families will need help with college expenses,” says Brian Lindeman ’89, director of financial aid. “We have families now who never thought they’d enter the financial aid process, whose assets have just evaporated.”

In a climate like this, it’s tempting for families to cross colleges off a student’s wish list based on sticker price alone. “But that’s a mistake,” he says, “because they should really be exploring a school’s financial aid program before assuming they would pay that much.” For instance, two-thirds of Macalester’s students receive financial aid, with an average first-year need-based award of $31,838. Subtract that from $46,942—the cost of tuition and fees, room and board for 2009–2010 year—and the needle drops down to $15,104 for the average financial aid recipient.

While tuition at public universities is generally less than that of private colleges, experts say that’s not the only cost to consider. A recent report from the Institute for College Access & Success in Berkeley found that 2008 graduates from all Minnesota colleges (both public and private) graduated with an average student debt of $25,558—the fourth highest in the nation. Coming in at the bottom of the state’s student debt were Macalester grads, who left campus with an average debt load of $17,304 in 2008. “Sticker shock is one of our biggest problems,” says Lindeman, noting that some students don’t explore Mac further once they see the sticker price. “But when they learn more about our financial aid program, it’s clear that families of all kinds of income backgrounds can come to Macalester.”

Although Lindeman advises families to prepare themselves for the financial picture of college by visiting the College Board website (collegeboard.com) for an estimate of what they might be expected to pay for college, Kelly advises families to consider another number that may have even more impact on the bottom line. “We really encourage families to take a hard look at retention and graduation rates, because about a quarter of kids nationwide don’t return to the school they started in, and only about half graduate within six years,” says Kelly. Because a fifth or sixth year of college can easily wipe out whatever a family “saved” by picking a less expensive school, “you need to think about finding a college that you can graduate from in four years,” says Kelly. “Not just one that you can get into.”

Finding the one

Finding “the one” With college websites, online rankings, and the rise of social media, finding statistics and other comparisons of campus life has never been easier. “Unfortunately, with so much information at their fingertips, one of the biggest mistakes I see is that families are not using it,” says Jill Apple, codirector of college counseling at St. Paul Academy and Summit School, a private K–12 school near Macalester. Though offices like hers can provide demographic reports and sophisticated “scattergrams” to show how a student fits a school’s academic profile, or doesn’t fit at all, “You still hear parents say, ‘Well, let’s apply anyway—it’s all just a crapshoot.’”

“I don’t know any admissions officer who has a roulette wheel on their desk,” Apple says, noting that admissions staff members are very clear on both the character of their institutions and the criteria they expect prospective students to meet. For that reason, a successful college search doesn’t start with status ranking lists—it starts with the student. “It starts with being self-reflective and knowing what your interests are,” says Apple.

Central High School’s Merlin says that while many parents focus on possible careers, they would do better to support the interests and talents most likely to lead their offspring to their own version of success. “If you know what your passions are, that’s what sets you apart in a college application,” she says.

The best way to help themselves, says admissions dean Robinson, “is to make sure that their story comes through in an authentic way. The academic piece has to be there, because that’s a deal breaker. But we’re looking for good students and interesting people, and there are lots of applicants who will fit that definition. The best applications are the ones that you finish and say, ‘I know what this person is all about. I know what makes him tick. I know what makes her eyes light up.’”

Passion. Light in the eyes. The perfect match. With so much emotion involved in college matchmaking, it’s no wonder that admissions counselors often sound as if they’re dealing in dating advice. Kelly says that many high school students she meets start the college process hoping “to go out with the cutest guy in high school”—i.e. the tallest, handsomest, highest ranked, hardest-to-get-into college they can find. But she urges them to look beyond the usual quarterbacks and class presidents to find the quieter types that don’t grab all the attention. In other words: when you learn everything you can about the less traveled campuses, one of them may become the best match.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be some broken hearts when admission letters start coming back to high school seniors. “Two of the colleges I applied to turned me down,” says Ali Nystrom ’10, whom we introduced at the beginning of this story. “At the time, it was devastating, but looking back I think it was a really great decision on the part of their admissions offices to say, ‘Hey, you don’t fit here.’ They were right. I’ve loved everything about Macalester and my experience here—I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

Collin Calvert ’13, a Nebraska native who came to Macalester after applying to nine different schools, may be just finishing his first year, but already feels this “is where I was meant to be.” His advice to prospective parents and students: “Don’t start at the last minute. Take it one day at a time. And trust that it’s all going to work out in the end.”

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Laura Billings, a St. Paul writer, is a frequent contributor to Macalester Today.