College admissions changed — parents must keep up
Since a young age, I've felt a significant pressure to excel academically, driven by the goal to secure a spot in a reputable college and ensure my future in the process. I've spent endless hours stressing over schoolwork and grades while selecting the perfect extracurriculars to eventually impress college admissions officers.
This reality is one my parents didn't experience to nearly the same extent, as the college admissions landscape appeared drastically different when they applied versus when my older brother did last year.
Similarly, for many parents of students at Larkspur's Redwood High School, their search for the right college was vastly different from what their teenage children face today. Not only was Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1980) one of the smallest generations in recent history, but the process of applying to colleges was much simpler in the 1980s and early 1990s.
As Redwood students engage in the search for the right college, it's important for their parents to educate themselves on the hypercompetitive environment it has become.
According to a March 2023 commentary in the The New York Times by college admissions expert Jeffrey Selingo, “When I applied to college in 1990, I recall petering out after filling out four applications on my family's Smith Corona electric typewriter. Last year, more than one in five applicants applied to 10 or more colleges, mostly by pressing a button on the Common App. That's about double the proportion of seniors who applied to the same number of colleges just eight years ago.”
With the higher quantity of schools teens are applying to today, top choices are flooded with thousands of applications, driving their acceptance rates down further. According to The Hill news website, “University of California flagships in Los Angeles and Berkeley admitted 9% and 11% of applicants, respectively, to the 2022 fall class. UCLA fielded 149,813 applications, enough students to populate Jackson, Mississippi.”
This is in comparison to just 29,000 applications in 1997.
Parents may make the argument that teenagers now have online access to a huge amount of information about colleges they are considering — everything from virtual tours to statistics and forums focused on strategies for getting in. No longer is a hard copy of the Princeton Review teens' best resource for researching colleges.
Yet, the flipside of this is that the application process itself has been digitized. Navigating the Common App nonprofit membership organization website can be a confusing and complicated process, something that many teenagers don't feel equipped to do on their own given the high stakes. This leads to private college counselors commonly being hired to assist in the process, especially for students aiming for top universities. These counselors are a significant financial investment, however, they were barely even a factor in college admissions 30 years ago.
Additionally, some parents have a hard time wrapping their heads around the evolving competitiveness of former “safe bets.” A great example of this is the University of Southern California. The USC Today news website states, “The chances of any USC applicant being admitted has plummeted from 69% in 1980 to less than 17% in 2016.” For the fall of 2023, only 9.9% of applicants were accepted, and the volume of applications has skyrocketed from less than 10,000 to 80,790. The dramatic decrease in many schools' acceptance rates should be emphasized to parents who may still hold an outdated perspective.
Overall, it is crucial for both students and their parents to spend time considering what would truly be the best fit for the child in question. Students should be free to spend a good chunk of their high school years trying new things and discovering what really interests them, rather than worrying about what may look good on a college application.
Perhaps it's not college at all, but rather trade school or military service. In a competitive region like the San Francisco Bay Area, it can be easy for both students and their parents to forget that it's not just about getting into the most prestigious college possible. It's about finding the best fit for the path forward, even if it's not one parents would have chosen 30 years ago.