COVID-19 and College Admissions
In my profession, the biggest question since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting quarantine measures has been “what does this all mean for college admissions?” We’ve all had our ideas about how it affects juniors whose second semester grades, summer plans, and spring activities have all disappeared. Through my conversations with admissions offices and my colleagues, I have some good news and some bad news for my juniors.
Let’s start with the good news (or what passes for good news right now)… we are all in this together. As weird as it may sound, from an admissions standpoint a pandemic is much less of a hindrance to the admissions process than a more local disaster. While admissions offices routinely extend deadlines and drop requirements for students who have been subjected to a tragedy, it is often incredibly difficult for an applicant to accurately convey the breadth of the effects of that tragedy on their life. A hurricane in June may disrupt an applicant’s summer plans, standardized testing schedule, and put strain on every other aspect of their life, and it’s almost impossible for an admissions officer thousands of miles away to understand that devastation (even if the student writes a great essay). No one will have any misgivings about the scale of this tragedy though. Every single one of us, no matter where we live, has had our lives upended in some way by COVID-19. There is no reason to worry about how your school is doing its grading, whether you had a chance to take an SAT Subject Test or not, or that canceled summer program because those same things are happening to every student in the country. The scale of the effects has driven schools to make huge shifts in their admissions processes, including dropping SAT/ACT and SAT Subject Test requirements temporarily (or in many cases permanently), and eliminating demonstrated interest in the admissions process, among many other things. It will almost certainly affect the decision process in the fall when schools are considering the disruptions to grading policies, AP testing, and every other aspect of the application that could have been affected by a pandemic. No standardized test score or thin resume is going to make or break an application this year, which is good news for many of my students.
The bad news from an admissions standpoint is fewer requirements also means fewer opportunities to stand out. Colleges are going to be extremely cautious to make sure that students whose plans were not affected by COVID do not have an unfair advantage over those whose plans were, so that summer program that didn’t get canceled or that great SAT score won’t necessarily be the differentiating factor that some students will want them to be or that they would be in a normal year. The key to success this coming year is going to be finding other ways to stand out. If the resume, the SAT score, and the grades can’t push a student over the edge, the onus is going to fall on the other parts of the application: the essay, the supplemental essays, and the letters of recommendation.
As the school year winds down, my juniors need to be finishing their classes to the absolute best of their ability and by thanking their teachers for the extraordinary effort they put in this year. Once that is done, it’s time to start thinking about those essays, and I think you know who to get in touch with for that!
