Excitement and anxiety accompany the college application season, but this year the process is more angst-ridden than usual.
Students’ lives have been upended by Covid shutdowns, illness and the economic crisis, and early signs indicate that fewer high school seniors are applying for college this year because of uncertainty related to the pandemic.
Most of the supports for the complex college application process have been virtual, adding to a sense of disconnection.
The Vermont Student Assistance Corp., the public nonprofit that offers loans and counseling to Vermonters, holds an annual college fair that typically draws hundreds of high school seniors. This year, it was online.
Counseling sessions with advisers have been held on Zoom. With the suspension of sports activities, high school athletes cannot ask recruiters to come watch them play and must rely on old footage. Campus visits are canceled.
“I’m the type of person that gets stressed easily anyway, but the fact that I can’t go in — like physically be at the places where I want to go — was a little nerve-wracking at first,” said Julia Before, a senior at Lyndon Institute.
Deondra Goodspeed, a senior at Hartford High, is attending school remotely this year. She’s applying to nursing programs across New England, but says lack of access to in-person counseling has made the process much more difficult.
“You’re easily distracted over Zoom, or like, things can be miscommunicated,” Goodspeed said.
It’s still early in the college application season. The regular deadline for most college applications is Jan. 1. Then the waiting game begins, until colleges send either acceptance or rejection letters.
But early national indicators suggest many high school seniors are hesitant about making a commitment to higher education, at least for now.
The Common Application indicated that applications nationwide are down from last year, Inside Higher Education reported in November. The trend is particularly acute for first-generation and low-income students.
“It has been a challenge motivating students to apply this year,” said Tara Cariano, a high school counselor who’s president of the Vermont School Counselor Association. That could be because of remote schooling, she said, or simply general uncertainty and anxiety about the future.
Bryce Ilsley, a senior at Oxbow High School in Bradford, hopes to study business and play basketball at a college somewhere in Vermont next year. But he said it feels as if he and his friends generally are less focused on — or excited about — applying to college as they might have been in a non-pandemic year.
“It’s just like, the fun’s not there. Maybe toward the end of the year, when things are a little bit more normal. But for right now, I feel like college is, like, not our main concern,” he said.
Most colleges across the U.S. have decided to go test-optional this year, since the pandemic canceled the in-person administration of so many ACT and SAT exams. In Vermont, that includes some of the state’s most selective schools, the University of Vermont and Middlebury College.
Critics have long argued that the tests are discriminatory and disadvantage those who are already less likely to go on to college, including low-income and non-white students. And VSAC counselors, who work largely with first-generation students, say the change in policy is indeed expanding horizons for many of the teens they work with, particularly those who have good grades but who don’t test well.
In some instances, students are skeptical that schools really won’t penalize them if they don’t submit standardized test scores, said Lindsay Carpenter, an outreach counselor for VSAC who works with students in the Northeast Kingdom.
“Some students also think it’s too good to be true. And so they’re like, ‘Are you sure I don’t have to send anything?’” she said.
The Common Application this year includes an optional 250-word essay section about the virus’s impact. Carpenter said she tells students who are anxious about not submitting scores to tell schools they had signed up for testing dates that were later canceled.
Schools going test-optional has been a real “silver lining,” said Anne Kaplan, a VSAC counselor who works with students in the Upper Valley and Central Vermont. But college admissions departments are also reporting that fewer first-generation and low-income students appear to be applying to top-tier schools, so she’s pushing the students she advises to take advantage of a less crowded field.
“I’m really encouraging my students to go ahead and put those stretch schools on there,” Kaplan said. “The worst that can happen is they don’t get in, but those schools are the ones that can really provide the full financial aid to meet students’ full financial need.”
Generally, Carpenter says the pandemic’s impact on decisions by the students she counsels is hard to parse. On the one hand, she’s noticed quite a few high-achieving students say they’re thinking about deferring a year. Meanwhile, many students who had never paid much attention to college have “all of a sudden done a 180.”
“They’re like: I need to go. How can you help me get there?” she said.
Maybe being quarantined with their families for so long has made them more eager to leave home, Carpenter said. But she also thinks the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic has made students more aware of their precarity and instilled a sense of urgency about getting on a path to better, more secure employment.
“It’s made them realize that life happens, and it’s good to have options and a plan,” she said.
