By Brett Billings ’12

Photo courtesy of Office of Admissions

The last time Lafayette College received a record number of applications was 2007.  Since then, the country has endured an economic recession from which higher education has finally begun to bounce back.  Now, a record-breaking 6,654 students have thrown their names into the hat to be members of Lafayette’s class of 2016.

But this record, and what it means for higher education in general, begins a narrative difficult to deconstruct.

Applications to selective colleges have risen.  These past two years, Pomona College, Macalester College, Dickinson College and Williams College have all received record numbers of applications.  Bucknell too has seen an uptick in applications, Bucknell Dean of Admissions Rob Springall writes The Lafayette.

Approximately three-quarters of colleges have reported increases each year for the past decade with few exceptions, according to a National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) press release from October.

This past week President Daniel H. Weiss listed a distressed economic model, public skepticism, changing demographics and advancing technology as the largest drivers of change in higher education during The Future of the Liberal Arts College in America conference held at Lafayette.  Each factor can provide a starting point in deconstructing the complex narrative of college admissions.

Economics of getting in

Acceptance letters were mailed Monday, March 26.  As of last Monday, 2,285 high school seniors received the prized maroon and white folder.  The rest received the infamously thin, white envelope.  These admitted students comprise the second-most selective admitted applicant pool in Lafayette’s history at 34.4 percent.

From this highly selective pool, the Office of Admissions projects a class size of 620 students.  Selectivity accounts for 15 percent of U.S. News and World Report’s college ranking criteria.   Director of Admissions Matthew Hyde feels this is inappropriate, when selectivity proxies for prestige.

Institutions across the country, on average, are enrolling smaller proportions of their admitted students, according to the NACAC.  The rise in applications submitted by individual students has made it difficult for colleges to predict yield — the number of admitted students who actually enroll.  Filling a class with students who fit the institution is harder for officials as yield declines across the country.  For all private colleges, the 2010 average yield was 40.4 percent, according to the NACAC.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Gregory V. MacDonald credited the hard work of his co-workers with the record-breaking applicant pool.  “We visited about 350 more high schools, conducted many more admission interviews, and engaged our alumni in new recruiting efforts,” he wrote The Lafayette.  International applicants also increased encouraged by an increasing admissions staff.

But as the Office of Admissions expands, which students get in, and why, remains murky.

Public skepticism

There is no silver-bullet approach to college admissions, Hyde said, and when people learn this, they can find it frustrating.

Suzanne Young has been a guidance counselor for 15 years for Easton Area High School.  Her students oftentimes research a college online, find they match the school’s specified class profile but then are not admitted anyway.  The students often do not understand why they were turned away.  “They’re still denied because of how many applicants there are, regardless if they meet the criteria is what we’re told,” she said in a phone interview.

Young said she is beginning to see an increased interest in more expensive schools.  She thinks this is because of the somewhat bettering economy.  While most of her students will attend community colleges and state schools, “This year, I think it’s been harder than ever for our top kids to get some of the top schools,” she said.

Students who were turned away “didn’t emerge as powerfully” from the applicant pool, Hyde said.  He described the top three qualities that Lafayette uses in its “high-touch approach” focus on the energy, excitement and willingness to be engaged and inspired by the school.  While academic merit plays a role in the decision, institutional fit comes first at Lafayette.

“There is a great deal of inconsistency across institutions, potentially creating the illusion that student selection is arbitrary,” Rachel Rubin told Inside Higher Ed.  She is a doctoral student in education at Harvard and will present her work on how highly selective colleges (predominantly private) make their admissions decisions.

“Contrary to public opinion, selective institutions are highly systematic with regard to their admissions processes and practices within individual institutions,” Rubin told Inside Higher Ed.

Changing demographics

Lafayette looks first at a student’s institutional fit when creating its incoming class, and this can mean many different things — diversity being more than meets the eye.  Colleges are businesses too, causing them to occasionally look at students’ ability to pay.

Hyde calls the clash between practicality and idealism a frustrating challenge.  While idealism can lead most of the admissions process, “For two weeks of the year, practicality works its way into the equation and needs to be embraced as we take the final steps in shaping the admitted class,” he said.

International students sometimes play a role in this clash.  Numbering 23, Chinese students who enrolled at Lafayette in 2009 comprised little less than half of all incoming international students.  MacDonald did not offer an explanation for the large increase when contacted for this article.

“Struggling with stagnant or shrinking state and federal support,” Beth McMurtrie reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “American colleges scrambled to attract more international students to make up for cuts elsewhere.”

In 2009-2010, China overtook India as the largest source of international students, according to The Chronicle.  Since 2006, Chinese students have been the largest number of international students at Lafayette.

Regarding gender, Lafayette breaks the norm for liberal arts colleges, which often receive more female applicants than male.

With rare exceptions, more male students than female have applied to Lafayette over the past 30 years.  Hyde thinks this may have to do with the college’s traditionally strong engineering program.

Between 1998-2008, the number of women engineers in the U.S. was not only less, but lessening.  And the number of male engineers was not only significantly larger, but growing steadily, according to the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Workforce Commission.

Though the number of applications to colleges is increasing, so too is the number of college-aged students in the U.S.  But high school graduates are declining.

Despite a U.S. Census Bureau-reported increase in the number of 15 to 19-year-olds over the past decade — from 20.2 million in 2010 to 22 million in 2010 — the NACAC reports the number of high school graduates has and will decline through 2014-2015.  That number will remain below 3.33 million until at least 2020-2021.

In such an environment, reaching these students has become a never-before-imagined challenge for higher education.

Advancing technology

Colleges rely more on their online presence to win over prospective students.  “With social media and the way 17- and 18-year-olds communicate,” Hyde said, “they’re more willing to communicate in cyberspace and wed themselves to a college earlier.”

The accessibility of college websites and social media pages, allow students to learn about a college without ever having to interact with the school.  “In the past, we needed to know about them,” Hyde said.  Though the college may prefer to know each student, they often do not.  “They know about us.”

Helping admissions gain momentum, MacDonald credited Communications Division, “With a new website in 2010, improved admissions publications and outstanding leadership in social media opportunities.”

Many students can explore colleges on their own time and on their own terms, Hyde said.  Subsequently, about 25 percent of applicants are through stealth, “using alternative methods to go through channels that we don’t normally use,” Manager of Social Media Brooke McDermott said.

Telling a story

More is being done to educate the campus community what they can do to help sell the image of the college.  TargetX, a marketing firm based in Philadelphia, was employed by the Office of Admissions to help better market Lafayette to prospective students.

Because there are less college students every year than the year before, Jeff Kallay of TargetX told audiences at two campus sessions last Wednesday, “The success you’ve [Lafayette’s] been having right now is somewhat the exception, not the norm.”

Over the past year, tour guides have been receiving additional training as well.  For example, policies for tours has changed.  “Say, at one tour time, we have five tour guides and five families come in.  Each guide would have one family.  Not one guide for five families,” Student Ambassador Lara Lash ‘13 said.

During his campus sessions, Kallay outlined what Lafayette can do to reach out to prospective students.  “They’re very demanding consumers,” Kallay said of college-aged students.  “They want what they want, when they want it.”

Stacey Goldberg ’12 and Julie Depenbrock ’13 contributed reporting to this article.