This post was originally published on this site
Parents nationwide are suffering high anxiety about the coming school year. COVID-19 has caused many school districts to go exclusively remote. For students, parents, educators and political leaders, this has become one hot mess.
It’s even more complicated for rising high school seniors, now in the home stretch of the college-admissions process. This is usually when they polish off their personal statements, make one last push for first-semester grades, and squeeze in a couple more seatings for standardized tests, all to buff their college resumes to a high sheen.
COVID-19 has put the kibosh on all that. Like high schools, many colleges are going remote, so there go those final in-person college tours. Personal interviews with alumni will now be done remotely. The College Board (which administers the SAT) and the ACT are scheduling tests for the fall, but many colleges already have announced admissions will be test-optional this year. These include the entire Ivy League, Pomona, Rice, even Caltech and MIT. (See a list here.) Some schools such as Indiana University are becoming test-optional permanently. (We’ll devote a future column to testing.)
So, with a critical part of college-admissions criteria — and a part parents can control if they have the bucks to pour into test prep — up in the air, and applications for early admissions beginning in mid-October, what should families do to get a leg up in this very confusing year?
Grades are key
I reached out to Daniel Santos, chief executive officer of Prepory, a college and career consulting firm based in Davie, Florida, just north of Miami. Prepory serves an ethnically and economically diverse clientele in South Florida, as well as in the Northeast and California. The firm has a proprietary, week-by-week pre-college plan for students from the first day of high school through late in senior year.
But as the poet said, the best-laid plans of mice and men — well, this year, they’ve gone off the rails. So, Santos urges students to focus on several key things, such as maintaining good grades, which may be the only reliable quantitative indicator schools can rely on, so will weigh even more heavily this year.
First of all, he says, this year the college list is more important than ever, because families need to have a deeper knowledge of the schools to which the student is applying. “Right now, it’s really important to be informed on the school that your student is applying to specifically,” Santos told me. “Are they accepting the SAT [or] ACT? If students do not submit the ACT or SAT, are they required to submit additional essays?”
“Don’t be afraid of contacting the admissions counselors at the schools you’re applying to as a way of demonstrating [your] interest,” Santos said. “Send an email to the admissions counselor or call the admissions office to ask them any questions on how their application process has changed and how you as an applicant can better navigate it now.”
Second, work extra hard on essays and personal statements, because they’re going to count more. Students at competitive public and private high schools already may have done a rough draft of their personal statements, but everyone else should use the rest of the summer to put one together and then work closely with school counselors or outside consultants to make it really stand out.
“Students should be spending a lot of time preparing their personal statements, reviewing, editing, requesting feedback from their counselors, collaborating with other teachers to really make sure that they’re presenting the best version of themselves,” said Santos.
‘Brag sheet’
Third, work closely with high school teachers and college counselors whose recommendations and relationships with colleges may play an outsized role this year. “If possible, provide your teacher or your counselor with a ‘brag sheet’ to make sure that they’re writing as strong a letter of recommendation as they can,” he said.
Finally, in a year when the “soft” side of the admissions process matters more, “it looks like schools are really going to be relying on extracurricular involvement,” said Santos. “They’re really looking into that more deeply than they have in years past because they aren’t able to look at SAT and ACT scores.”
By 12th grade, it may be a bit late to suddenly run for class president or be elected captain of an athletic team that’s not playing a schedule. And since school itself may not happen, neither will many clubs or after-school activities.
That’s why Santos advises students to launch independent research to show deep knowledge of a topic that interests them or social-service projects that “demonstrate extracurricular involvement in a contribution to the community while still obviously adhering to social distancing guidelines,” he said.
COVID-19 has changed everything about college admissions. This year, essays matter, relationships matter, extracurriculars matter more than ever. And, more than ever, students and parents must deal with it on their own.
Howard R. Gold is a MarketWatch columnist. Follow him on Twitter @howardrgold. No-Nonsense College appears once a month.
