You can better navigate your college application journey and control your expectations by being aware of the always changing landscape of college admissions. These are six trends that experts in admissions recommend watching in the upcoming year.

Students and colleges that use AI

Colleges and students are witnessing the benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence as it becomes a more prevalent technology. Graham claims that several college programs have included AI policies in their applications that specify when and how AI can be utilized. She anticipates that more universities will follow suit with their application policies.

College advisors advise students to exercise caution while utilizing AI for their college applications. There is widespread agreement that while using it for research and creating college lists is OK, utilizing it for any aspect of the essay-writing process is not.

According to Dr. Amy Morgenstern, president and CEO of Blue Stars, “nothing replaces the way free-writing helps a student get to know themselves, or the deep conversations students might have with teachers or mentors as they explore their writing and define their essay topics.” “A student’s essay will never reflect their inner life if they skip these steps and go straight to AI.”

Conversely, colleges have long employed AI for applicant evaluation and student recruitment. A survey found that 50% of college admissions departments use AI, mostly for the purposes of reviewing recommendation letters, evaluating transcripts, and corresponding with candidates through chatbots or automated messages. The likelihood of admissions staff using AI increases with school size. Furthermore, according to 85% of survey participants, they utilize AI to increase efficiency, 70% to make better decisions, and 56% to get rid of prejudice.

However, there is currently no proof that universities are employing AI to choose who gets admitted, at least not officially.

Traction Is Gained By Direct Admissions

Can you picture receiving an acceptance letter from a college without having to submit an application or write a single essay? If you make honest admissions, this might actually happen to you. An alternate application process is direct admissions, in which eligible candidates get non-binding admission offers directly from institutions. There are no application deadlines, costs, or waiting periods for admitted students. Instead, before students even apply, a college contacts them with an offer of admission. For a while now, the states of Texas and Georgia have run direct admissions programs that grant students who fulfill specific GPA or class rank requirements automatic admission to their state’s public university systems.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw the use of race in college admissions, a number of universities are using direct admissions to fulfill enrollment targets and broaden the diversity of their student body. A few of these universities are also collaborating with direct admissions platforms that link them with qualified applicants.

The Common Application’s direct admissions initiative, which assists 70 member universities in connecting with first-generation and low-income students, was introduced in the fall of 2023. More than 300,000 students received direct admission offers from the Common App platform alone. Companies like Niche, state governments like Minnesota and Idaho, and individual institutions increasingly offer direct admissions platforms.

Although a lot of people think that direct admissions are a good thing, some counselors warn students about its drawbacks. In order to complete those direct admissions offers, kids usually still need to submit applications, and the universities still need to be within their means for those offers to be successful, according to Graham. This is a great possibility, provided those two things work together.

Colleges Are Searching For Summary Essay Alternatives

College admissions authorities are become increasingly wary of essays that use artificial intelligence (AI) because 1 in 5 teenagers admit to using ChatGPT for coursework. Because of this, a lot of universities are investigating different approaches to help applicants authentically convey their distinct voices in their applications.

This year, there may be new conditions for students to meet in order to apply, including portfolios of their academic or creative work, interviews, and samples of graded papers from classes. Counselor Jen Turfler of Blue Stars Admissions Consulting notes, “We’ve noticed a trend in colleges like Princeton asking for past writing samples with teacher feedback, as evidence of students’ own writing, thinking, and synthesizing.”

Similar to the optional “video introductions” that universities like Bowdoin, Brown, and the University of Chicago have long given, students may also see new requirements for films and interviews. Director of admissions at Georgia Tech Rick Clark states on his blog that “changing the medium of delivery to audio/video… gives a much better sense of how a student would engage in the classroom, or on campus, than the essay.”

Colleges can now get video-recorded personal statements from some students who record those using apps like Glimpse from InitialView. These platforms are hosted by a number of institutions on their admissions webpages, where students are invited to record themselves and occasionally respond instantaneously to questions posed at random.

Some college prep services now feature on-camera interviewing as a way to assist students in getting ready for their time in the spotlight. According to Turfler, “preparing for interviews, camera placement, and professional adult communication are all part of the work we perform with children, starting in the ninth grade.”

It’s unlikely that the classic written personal essay will disappear very soon, even with these new choices. College essays will probably always be vital, even though essay prompts may become different in some way, according to Meredith Graham, a counsellor with Collegewise, a college advisory business. “Details about students’ experiences might become more significant, and it will be apparent if such details are absent or inconsistent with the applicant.”

Submission of test scores is declining.

In the 2023–2024 application season, only 4% of the member colleges of the Common Application required test scores, down from 55% in 2019–2020 and 5% in 2021–2022, according to the report released in January 2024.

At the conclusion of the 2022–2023 application year, there were marginally more students who opted not to submit their test results than those who did. But for the first time since test-optional rules were popular, a much higher percentage of students (12%) decided not to disclose their test results in 2023–2024. According to the Common App research, this tendency may pick up speed in the upcoming years.

Universities Are Giving Up on Legacy Preferences

Legacy admissions, which grants admission preference to students connected to an alumnus, has long faced criticism for being unjust and elitist, favouring primarily wealthy and white applicants. Several institutions, including Wesleyan, Virginia Tech, Occidental College, Johns Hopkins, and Carnegie Mellon, discontinued their legacy admissions rules in an effort to make their admissions processes more open and equal. The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the University of Pennsylvania’s historical admissions policy in January in hopes of finding potential violations of the Civil Rights Act, and state and federal legislators have drafted legislation outlawing the practice at the same time. It won’t be shocking if more universities discontinue legacy admissions this year in light of these actions.

College admissions are changing to suit the needs of candidates and colleges, as some of these patterns suggest. It’s crucial to keep your attention on your academic objectives and interests regardless of how the admissions landscape changes. Maintaining focus on your personal college preferences might help you weather changes in the admissions environment and locate the ideal intellectual, social, and economical universities for you.

Financially needy students have to deal with FAFSA delays.

A revised and updated version of the FAFSA was released in December 2023. The new form is shorter than the old one, and low-income students will receive more aid thanks to the improved eligibility criteria. But form modifications caused the FAFSA’s distribution to be delayed by nearly three months, which left students with less time to apply for financial assistance and universities with less time to decide on awards.

Colleges had anticipated receiving student FAFSA data by the end of January, but the Department of Education’s announcement that it needed to make more changes to the form and methodology cast doubt on that timeline.

Because of this, students might not have enough time to consider financial assistance offers when making college decisions, or they might receive them much later than usual. “There’s a lot of potential for problems between the rollout’s hiccups and the shortened timescales that universities will have to assess student information and give aid packages to families,” says Graham. “Because of these difficulties, we may see a decline in the number of first-generation and low-income students enrolling in or returning to college next autumn.”