Undergraduate admissions in the US
Your child might be ready for college, are you ready for US college admissions?
The US college admissions process for undergraduate admissions is a journey. The process requires a lot of introspection from the family and not just the child. It requires you to have real conversations with your children about:
How much money you have for college?
What do you want to study?
What outcomes are you solving for?
What do you value in a college experience?
Relying solely on rankings is lazy. It is a way to not engage in the process to figure yourself out and what kind of a learning environment might work for your child.
Read “A fit over rankings”, a Stanford university affiliated research, if you want to understand this better. The research highlights that ranking are arbitrary and do not reflect the quality of education and the richness of student life at campus.
While the college admissions process is weighted heavily in favor of colleges, you still hold one of the most important cards. It is ultimately your choice to apply and your choice to accept an offer of admission to any college. The yield rate, which is the percentage of students that accept their offer of admission, is still quite low for most college. See this study.
https://www.collegeevaluator.com/rankings/highest-admission-yield/
Even selective colleges have less than 50% of their offer of admission rejected by students.
College visits are touted as the best way to strengthen a college list. Most college counselors will tell you that spending a day at a college campus is the best way to see if you can see yourself at that college. They suggest that you:
Talk to students
Sit in a class
Spend a night at a dorm
Eat at a dining hall
Go see the closest town close to campus
This is highly unlikely for international students. Only the rich get to indulge in such a trip across the oceans with their family. So, how do you develop a sense of the quality of education at a college? How do you understand the richness of campus life? This is incredibly hard. Virtual tours and in-person tours are tailored to wow. I have been on over 20 tours and, after a while, they all seem the same.
Walking backwards
The rec center
The dining hall
The blue pillars with safety phones
Campus police
Old looking buildings
New looking labs
Sports stadiums
Student union
The occasional campus river / lake
Large universities with small study groups but diverse student body
Small universities with large endowments and small class size
So, how do you make your choices? Unless you are lazy or prefer to remain uninvolved in college process - you do this by ditching the rankings.You do this by knowing what is important to your child. How do they learn best? Where can they thrive? And can you afford to send them there if they can accepted. You build a list that reflects these needs and honors the financial constraints.
I’ll share important resources for college admissions next.
—Anubhav