Ms. Bell Interviews Ms. Bell: A “Good Year” in College Admissions

Please don’t get upset because I think you know from my previous interview that I don’t like how you word questions. We don’t think of college counseling from a school perspective; it is about the individual student and their family. So if even one senior was disappointed by their results, it was not a good year. I am uncomfortable when people come into the College Counseling Office and tell us that they heard we had a great year and the one disappointed student is sitting there listening to the accolades and fanfare but feeling pretty dejected. We will know in December of 2024 whether or not we had a good year. For us, it is not about the list. It is about how our seniors do when they get to college. Don’t forget — we are a college prep school. So ask us in seven months, and we will have your answer. That dejected senior may be the happiest first-year student in the class!

As a sports fan, I like sorting things by athletic conferences, so here we go starting with Division I schools. 

Twelve will attend schools in the ACC: Boston College (3), Wake Forest (3), Syracuse (2), and one each at UVA, Notre Dame, UNC, and Duke. I put Duke last because I am not a fan of the architecture or their sports teams. I love brick campuses and teams that beat Duke. 

Seven will attend schools in the Big East: Providence (5) and one each at UConn and Villanova. Seven will attend schools in the Patriot League: Colgate (5) and one each at the College of the Holy Cross and Bucknell. 

Six will attend schools in the Ivy League: Harvard (2) and one each at Princeton, Cornell, Yale, and Penn. Five will attend schools in the Big 10: Maryland (2) and one each at Indiana, Penn State, and Ohio State. 

Four will attend schools that were part of the PAC 12: University of Colorado Boulder (2) and one each at UCLA and the University of Southern California.

Four at schools that were members of the American Athletic Conference: Tulane (2) and one each at SMU and Temple. 

For Division III, six will attend schools in the Centennial Conference: Franklin and Marshall (2) and one each at Bryn Mawr, Dickinson, Haverford, and Gettysburg. Three will attend NESCAC schools: Middlebury (2) and one at Connecticut College.

Yes! I have been at St. Luke’s for 16 years, and in that time, we have not had a student enroll at Olin College of Engineering, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, or San Diego State University. We are excited to hang some new banners in the office.

We didn’t see as many headlines stating that schools had record-breaking application numbers because application numbers are beginning to stabilize, and we are becoming more desensitized to those headlines. Hyundai Motor America has seen record-breaking sales each year for the past three years, yet that is hardly big news. I think we are all trying to figure out why college application records deserve front-page billing when other records don’t. 

Some schools saw a significant increase in applications and a decrease in acceptance rates, including Bates, Duke, Fairfield, Lehigh, Northeastern, Penn, Rice, UConn, URI, UVA, and Yale. 

To be honest, every decision is a surprise. Predictability seems to be at an all-time low. I want to pull my hair out when I hear people who are not admission officers reassuring seniors that they will get into a particular college or university. Unless they are applying to a school with guaranteed admission if students meet certain criteria, there are no guarantees. It is so hard to estimate what will happen from year to year. In 2014, Fairfield’s acceptance rate was 72%. This year, the acceptance rate dropped to 33%. 

The biggest surprise was how much the waitlist moved this year. There was very little waitlist movement in 2021, 2022 and 2023. But this year, we saw an unusually high number of St. Luke’s seniors receive offers of admission from the waitlist. 

I don’t know for sure, but colleges and universities must have predicted a higher yield this year, and their predictions were off. But colleges may have under-admitted because they wanted to use their waitlists. Some colleges were affected by the delay in the FAFSA though most highly selective schools used the CSS Profile to package students. Colleges and universities could not have predicted the extent of the social and political unrest on their campuses when they set their numbers last spring. That may have affected application and enrollment at some schools but not at others. While some students are applying to more schools, we did not see a significant shift in the number of colleges St. Luke’s seniors applied to. In the past, college admission decisions were tough to predict. Now colleges are having a tough time predicting which applicants will enroll. The tables have somewhat turned. 

Let’s go back to your comment about transferring. What percentage of students transfer each year, and why do they transfer? 
It varies from year to year. From the Classes of 2022 and 2023, we have had students transfer to American, Boston University, Brown, Cornell, Duke, Fairfield, University of Notre Dame, NYU, UPenn, University of Southern California, and Washington University in St. Louis, and a few more. Why? Some wanted a larger school, while others wanted to be closer to a city or wanted a school with more academic offerings. A few didn’t get into their “first choice” school when they went through the process as seniors and wanted to give that school another try. Many got into their first choice school and realized it wasn’t the place they thought it was. More than half of the students who talk to us about transferring decide to stay at their schools. The first couple of months aren’t always a great indication of how satisfied a student will be at their school for the next three and half years. 

As one of the senior deans, I saw the reality that set in on Thursday, May 23, when the seniors came to terms with the fact that it was their last day of classes at St. Luke’s. It was clearly a jolt to their systems. Throughout the year, I saw parents of seniors coming to the sad realization that it was the last time they would be cheering on their kids from the sidelines, filming them as they performed on stage, dropping them off for a debate tournament, or having conferences with their teachers and advisors. I want families to enjoy high school. It goes by quickly, and once kids are out of the house, you can’t recapture those moments. The amount of angst and worry I see related to the college process is not worth it. During this interview, I used words such as “stabilized” as though I were some medical professional talking about an ICU patient’s condition. Even my usage of the word “predictability” is troublesome because this process is not like the stock market, where one wrong decision could make someone lose their life savings. This is another phase in their lives in a series of phases that have yet to come. Enjoy it! 

See College Counseling Director Sonia Bell’s first interview with herself on The Sentinel.