Curtis WestbayIn college guidance, context is everything.
"Will this help my student's application?"
I get this question a lot from parents. Usually, it's because parents are asking about an optional test or activity. College preparation is a series of questions for the student and parent, that, at their core, are questions about opportunity cost. The question might be "Should my student take the SAT 2 Chemistry test, even if they want to major in biology?" The answer will be different from student to student. Context matters.
As such, it's not easy to answer these questions until I get to know the students. Getting to know the students involves identification of goals, but it also involves getting to know their level of achievement. This is the information gathering stage of college guidance, which I conceptualize as step zero of the process. When there is a wide gulf between goals and achievement, step one of college guidance is expectation management. Though expectation management usually occurs when a student's level of achievement won't make them a competitive applicant for their goal college(s), it can go the other way: sometimes, a student isn't dreaming big enough. Expectation management matters because otherwise the mental calculus of choosing the most cost-effective use of a student's time will be flawed. For example, with a low GPA, a student's choice of summer program is almost certainly inconsequential to the likelihood that their application will earn them admission at a highly selective university. In the context of selective institutions, for this hypothetical student, the answer to "Will X summer program help my student's application?" will likely be, "Probably not."
Predicting the unpredictable with limited context
Much of the college guidance I engage in is a practice in heuristic chancing. This chancing starts with estimating a student's chances at admission based on the hard data available about them: GPA, test scores. This is why, in your student's college planning page, there will be a space with score targets for the colleges in which they are most intensely interested. These score targets are based on observation of admission outcomes, but they are based on personal experience with limited samples of applications nonetheless. At the very least, we can visualize data of previously admitted, rejected, waitlisted, and deferred students with bivariate scatterplots, and trends emerge. We do this in the college admission department (but take note, we will not publish visualizations of this sort for parents, both because we must protect our students' information and because parents tend to share proprietary data within their communities outside BASIS).
Then comes the matter of activities. Make no mistake, all activities are not created equal, and some activities will make a huge impact on the application. Even with past data, predicting the effect of certain activities on the application is unknowable. In college admission we conceive of activities to be sortable into four tiers. Tier 1 activities indicate international or national achievement; tier 2 indicates provincial achievement; tier 3 indicates local or school-level achievement; tier 4 is for participation.
These tiers will be described in greater detail in a blog post two weeks from now, but the point here isn't that students need to pursue activities of the highest tier to be competitive at the highest-ranking colleges (though, they do). The point is, even with arresting, amazing activities, there's still no way to answer what effect an individual activity will have on an individual admission decision. This ignores the human element of application review. Again, there will be a blog post describing the application review process in full detail later this year (on December 19th), so I won't go overboard with detail here, instead offering a brief overview. At many selective colleges, it goes like this.
- First, students submit applicationsā if the application is late, incomplete, or the fee is unpaid, it won't qualify for review.
- Second, the application is reviewed by the admission officer assigned to the geographic region from which the student is applying. For many U.S. colleges, southern China will have its own admission officer. This person will not only review applications but (in more normal times) they also travel to China, hold information sessions, and visit schools. After a brief review of the application, this person will make the initial admission decision about clearly adequate or inadequate applications, rendering either acceptances or rejections.
- Third, the rest of the applications may be reviewed further by a small group of admission personnelā usually the original admission officer, other regional admission officers, and a director. They will make some more decisions on the spot. This step may or may not occur between steps two and four.
- Finally, applications about which the admission officer or small group is still undecided may go to a full committee review. Here, they will go through the remaining applications one by one, giving brief summaries and making quick decisions.
This process is operator-drivenā at selective colleges, there is no objective way of deciding whether or not to admit students. The process is deeply subjective.
Don't sweat the small stuff
At the BIPH College Admission department, we promise to be opinionated. Maybe opinionated isn't the right wordā we promise to be decisive. When you ask a question, we will answer as clearly as we are able. The college admission process is different from college to college, so the answers may be qualified or complex. Or unknowable. The human reading and making decisions on an application may really like it when students participate in National History Day competition. Another human reading that application may not care. Another may not know what it is.
We will be decisive when we can be with the advice we give because we don't want our advice to be misconstrued. When we aren't able to be decisive, it's probably because there is no way of knowing what the effect of a certain decision will be. At this point, the question about whether or not to participate in a certain activity is not a question of impact on the application, and it's not just a question of opportunity cost. It's a question of quality of life. In general, if a student doesn't enjoy an optional activity, they shouldn't do it. This is often the case even when the activity might help the applicationā it is certainly the case when the effect is something a counselor sees as negligible. We worry about a lot of things, so when we tell you not to worry about something, you can trust us. Remember: no one has more to gain from the college admission success of our students than we do as counselors, so there is absolutely no reason for us to be anything but upfront and honest with you. This trust must be earned, but in the meantime, we hope you can try to understand that context is everythingā in the advice we give, in the decisions that colleges make, and in the ways your students use their time. Don't sweat the small stuff.