*Listen to The College Spy Podcast—Episode #16 “Not Your Mom” along with this post!

Are you the last person your teen wants to take advice from? Have they refuted or ignored something you said, then taken the same advice seriously when someone else said it? Good news—this is developmentally appropriate for teens as they mature and seek more independence, but it can be understandably frustrating for parents too.

At selective colleges, the majority of applicants are qualified—they’re meeting the minimum expectations and often approximating the averages of the prior year’s accepted students. Admissions is unpredictable because meeting the published standards of last year’s class doesn’t guarantee an acceptance letter. If a college has more than enough qualified candidates, they have to choose among them. Does this mean admissions is merely a guessing game for seniors? Not entirely. While you can’t know all of a school’s priorities in a given year, you can still create a compelling application that showcases your strengths and the ways you’ll contribute to your future campus community.

It is not uncommon for students and parents to embark on the college admissions journey with a preliminary list of schools in mind. Quite often, these are made up of the well-known “big name” schools, many of which are highly ranked on a list such as the well publicized US News & World Report. The college search is not immune from our culture’s obsession with rankings. It is easy to assume that a school’s ranking is the main indicator of how good it actually is. Unfortunately, these assumptions can cause many options to be overlooked. Most rankings do not consider colleges from a holistic viewpoint and as a result, important factors can be left out, such as campus culture, academic and mental health support services and student “happiness”. 

Is applying Early Decision the best option for every student? No. Could it be the right fit for you? Maybe. If you listen to the way college admission is discussed in the media, you’re probably under the impression that hardly anyone gets in anywhere these days and all successful applicants are applying Early Decision (ED). Neither of these is accurate.

As college decisions start to roll out, some students will receive good news, and others will receive bad news. While the majority of colleges in the US admit more than half of their applicants, there are approximately 200 institutions that are more selective than that—and a couple dozen even admit less than 10% of applicants! It is natural for students who have not been admitted to a college they were excited to attend to anxiously ask: Why wasn’t I admitted? What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently?

As you’re deciding what to write about, you might worry that your topic needs to be catchy, or that you’ll choose something that you should have avoided. Are there topics everyone should skip?

Spoiler—I don’t actually think any essay topic is totally off-limits, but there are topics that admissions officers see frequently. If you are considering writing about one of these topics, you have two choices. You could decide to write about something else, or you could find a unique angle and absolutely crush it.

Institutional priorities is a buzzword in college admission, but may be something students and families haven’t heard before. Institutional priorities refers to the qualities each college seeks in their applicants as they build the next incoming class. They often change from one year to the next—and sometimes even during the course of the same admissions cycle—triggered by the applications the school has actually received. They can be incredibly nuanced goals prioritizing several demographic factors at once, and they can be both broad (like aiming to enroll more in-state students) or very specific (such as when the football team needs to recruit a new quarterback).