During the holidays, I wrote a post about a teenager, who has been applying to inappropriate universities. (At least in my opinion.) If you didn’t get a chance to read the post, here it is:

Applying to the Wrong Universities

I wanted to revisit this issue because I believe this is arguably the No. 1 college admission mistake that teenagers make. Teenagers routinely put together college lists that are dreadful. I recently tackled this problem in the second edition of my book, The College Solution. (I hope the second edition, which will contain about 85% new content, will be out in April!) Here is an example that I mention in the revised edition about another teenager who applied to the wrong schools:

A teenager named Matt  had spent his high school years at the top of his class. The Seattle teenager had experienced one academic success after another, which made him assume that getting into an Ivy League university should be doable if he applied to enough of them.

The teenager completed applications for several Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Dartmouth and Brown. He was surprised and hurt when he received rejections from all of them. (I remain mystified why top teenagers are surprised when Ivy League schools reject them!) Matt did get into his three non-Ivy picks:  the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and Chapman University in Orange County, CA.

Matt discovered, however, that the UC schools were prohibitively expensive for a nonresident. The UC’s are aggressively pursuing smart out-of-state students because the price of admission for these outsiders is about $53,000 a year and rising. This financial reality left Matt with only one school left standing – Chapman.  I’m not in a position to say whether Chapman was a suitable pick for the brilliant teenager, but what was unfortunate was that he had boxed himself into a corner and was left with just one realistic choice.

A Lesson Learned

There is a lesson to be learned from Matt’s travails and here it is:  teenagers should develop list of schools that represent good academic and financial fits. Teenagers who do this will increase their chances of ending up with a fistful of acceptance letters from schools that are willing to cut the price for them.

Other Examples?

Can anybody else provide examples of teenagers who stuffed their college lists with poor choices? I think everybody can learn from other students’ mistakes. I’d love to hear from you. Just add your comment in the box below.

Tomorrow I will be writing one more post about another teenager’s dubious college list.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller,  and a financial aid workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree, which is only available on her website.

I’ve often wondered why colleges and universities are so fixated on admitting students with extremely high SAT or ACT scores.

Some of these teenagers only excel at taking tests and earning top grades, which can lead to awfully uninspiring young adults. I’ve heard admission folks privately lament that kids with high test scores can be duds.  If I was an admission officer, I wouldn’t be interested in some of the “brilliant” kids that I’ve met.

That’s why I wanted to share a wonderful op-ed piece from the Washington Post that Robert J.  Sternberg, a former Yale professor and a past dean at Tufts, wrote. Sternberg, who is now the provost at Oklahoma State University, was involved with Tufts’ innovative (and admirable) approach to measuring students beyond test scores and GPA’s.

Looking Beyond Test Scores and Grade Point Averages

Here’s an excerpt of what Sternberg wrote:

By and large, our best schools don’t always pick the best people in the first place. Many students who appear to have tremendous potential at age 17, based on their SAT scores and GPAs, don’t look so wonderful 20 years later.

An executive at a major investment bank told me awhile ago, looking back on his 25 years on Wall Street, that he had found that SAT scores predicted quite well who would be good analysts at his bank – that is, they predicted the technical skills needed to evaluate investments.

What they did not signal, he said, is who would be able to take the next step, who would have the capacity to envision where various markets are going, to see larger trends and to make decisions that go beyond individual stock or bond picks.

We can do a much better job of college admissions if we start thinking about student abilities differently than we have for the past century. We should assess and value analytical, creative and practical skills and wisdom, not just the ability to memorize or do well on tests. And we should admit people on the basis of their potential for leadership and active citizenship – people who will make a positive, meaningful and enduring difference to the world.

Three cheers for Tufts for attempting to shake things up with its admission process. Here is the link to the entire op-ed: To Get the Real Star Students, College Admissions Should Look Beyond SATs.

And if you want to learn more, read Sternberg’s book, College Admissions for the 21st Century.

Read more on The College Solution:

Do You Know the Difference Between a College and a University?

What Is a Research University?

What Is a Small College?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

2. Plan Ahead.

3. Be helpful.

4. Simplify the Process. 

5. Consider Your Future Major.

I received an email from a high school junior in San Diego recently that prompted me to write this post.

The teenager attended one of my talks and heard me mention that one in five colleges say that an applicant’s demonstrated interest is very important in their admission decisions.

So what does demonstrated interest mean? Basically I told the teenager and the others in attendance that these colleges want you to show them how much you love them — even if you don’t. The schools who care about this are typically going to be private.

You can express interest in a school through a variety of ways including these:

• Request materials via the college’s website.
• Stop by a college’s booth at a college fair or when a rep visits your high school.
• Visit a college’s virtual open house on College Week Live.
• Chat live with a student online via the school’s admission website.
• Visit a school’s Facebook pages and other social media outlets such as Foursquare and YouTube.
• Follow the school on Twitter.
• Arrange a college tour.

I realize that this last suggestion can be an expensive proposition for many students and if you fit into that category, check out my previous post on how you can research schools from afar: 9 Alternatives to a College Visit

Don’t Overlook This Step

My final suggestion is the one that I could tell really caught the teenager’s attention. Here it is:

A teenager should look on a school’s admission website and find out if there is a regional admission rep for his or her state or area. Then contact this admission officer by email and explain that you are interested in the school. Only do this after you’ve done some research on the college and can ask intelligent questions. Also inquire when the rep will be in your area so you can meet in person.

Lots of schools send admission officers on the road every year to meet prospective students. Fall is the biggest time for this travel.

I got a follow-up email from the San Diego teenager telling me that she had taken my advice. She had emailed the correct admission counselor at her No. 1 school and she quickly “received an avid response” from the staffer.

Isn’t it nice to know that not everything about the college admission process is complicated.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

What are the latest college admission trends?

Every year, the National Association for College Admission Counseling releases a survey that attempts to answer that question. Here are some of the trends that jumped out at me when I was reading the 2011 State of College Admission:

College Applications on the Rise

Most schools (73%) experienced an increase in applications. Not surprisingly, students are completing more college applications. Twenty five percent of freshmen from the class of 2010 submitted seven or more applications, according to surveyed schools, which was up from 23% last year.

Growing Use of Wait Lists

One of the consequences of more students completing higher numbers of applications is the growing reliance of private schools, in particular, to use wait lists. With so many students applying to a large number of schools, colleges create wait lists as an insurance policy if they come up short of freshmen

Of the schools surveyed, 48% of institutions used a wait list in 2010 compared with just 39% in the prior year. Getting off a wait list was harder. Schools accepted 28% of applicants on wait lists compared with 34% a year earlier.

Here, by the way, is my opinion of college wait lists:  College Wait List Run Amuck

Declining Acceptance Rate?

The acceptance rate for colleges that completed the survey was 65.5%. I’d like to interject here that this acceptance rate has got to be artificially low since 70% of the schools participating in the survey were private institutions, which tend to reject more students.

In contrast, when UCLA surveyed freshmen across the country during the 2010-11 school year, 79% of them said they had been accepted into their first choice school. I think that’s a far more realistic figure. Here is a post that I wrote about the UCLA survey earlier in the year: 25 Facts About Today’s College Freshmen.

Early Decision Advantage Shrinks

The admission advantage that students enjoy by applying early decision dropped this year. During the 2010 admission season, 57% of early decision applicants received acceptances versus 50% for those who applied regular decision. In contrast, during the 2009 admission season, the gap between ED and regular decision was 15 percentage points.

College’s Growing Popularity

The number of high school graduates peaked in 2008, but the number of students heading to college continues to grow. The number of college-bound freshmen isn’t expected to begin shrinking until at least 2020. So where are all these extra students coming from? Largely from minority groups.

Women continue to outnumber the men on college campuses. Women represent 56% of undergrads.

 The Cost of Wooing Teenagers

For all the teenagers and parents who think applying to colleges is too expensive, consider this: colleges spent about $585 to recruit each applicant for the 2010 admission season.

More from The College Solution:

Do All Admission Reps Know What They’re Doing?

How to Determine Your EFC

What Is Your Expected Family Contribution

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch.com and US News & World Report. Follow her on Twitter.

I received an email yesterday from a friend of mine whose son is a brilliant high school senior. She wanted to know what they should think about invitations her son has received to apply to colleges through VIP or priority applications.

Here is her question:

My son has received approximately 10+ email/print invitations from schools to complete their priority applications. These invitations say there are no essays, no application fees and quick scholarship notification, etc. The schools that I can remember are:

• Drexel University
• Rice University
• Tulane University
• Fordham University
• University of Denver
• University of Tulsa
• Loyola New Orleans
• Macalester College
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Rochester Institute of Technology
• Colorado School of the Mines

Is this a gimmick to increase their application numbers? Would it be worth filling out the applications (meaning – do you think there is any scholarship money at the end of the tunnel?) I appreciate any thoughts you might have on this matter.

Be Careful!

What my friend has described is a college application that’s referred to in the industry as a fast app or fast application. This is the time of year when high school seniors across the country are receiving these apps whether they are called priority apps, VIP applications or some other names.

Here is how an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education once described these quickie applications:

Many high-school counselors offer colorful descriptions of “fast track” applications, an increasingly popular recruitment tool among colleges. Such applications come with students’ names and other information already filled in. Typically these solicitations also provide other incentives, like waived essay requirements, and promise quick admissions decisions.

For these reasons, some counselors call them “crap apps.” Matthew J. DeGreeff, director of college counseling at the Middlesex School, in Massachusetts, uses a simile instead. “This is like catnip for admissions deans,” he says, “because you can expand the application pool overnight.”

The Motivation Behind VIP Applications

Why are schools making it easy for students to apply? For starters, it boosts their applications numbers. With the help of outside firms, colleges send out thousands and even tens of thousands of applications that are easier for teenagers to complete than the typical ones.

That’s what Drexel University has been doing, according to another Chronicle article. The school buys hundreds of thousands of names of teenagers who have scored within a certain range on the SAT and then sends them a letter asking if they’d like more information. All the students who respond yes end up getting an VIP application. Can everybody be a VIP?

In contrast, Ursinus College has abandoned its fast application practice (to its credit), which had made the liberal arts college, a red hot school as its applications soared. You can get a better appreciation of the fast-app practice by reading this New York Times article from earlier this year:

A College Opts Out of the Admissions Arms Race

Just because a student receives one of these applications certainly doesn’t mean the school is interested in him or her.  In some cases, schools use these applications to increase their applications so they can reject more students.  Selectivity, after all, is something that US News’ college rankings care about.

If applicants receive scholarships from a school, it’s not because they completed fast applications. In fact, relying on a fast app might cause a student to overlook talent scholarships that may require an additional application. The easiest way to find out if a school will give a teenager a scholarship is to use its net price calculator.

Bottom Line:

Don’t apply to a school because it appears to like you. Only apply for the right reasons and you won’t get snookered by fast apps.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.