A Conversation with Parents: College Admissions Trends 2025 – College Bound Mentor Podcast #37

Welcome to the College Bound Mentor podcast! Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all.

This is Episode #37 and you’ll hear the key trends & takeaways in college admissions for 2025. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re enjoying the show!

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College Bound Mentor Podcast Episode #37: A Conversation with Parents: College Admissions Trends 2025

Want to know the key trends & takeaways in college admissions for 2025? We’ve got you covered. In this webinar, hear why the demographic cliff is real, how schools are using AI in admissions, how to show you’re a great fit for your major, why standardized testing is making a comeback, and what’s happening with supplemental essays. This episode covers everything from AI to essays. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Why there’s a push towards public schools & Southern schools
• Which schools rolled out Early Decision for the first time
• The majors that are most competitive
• How to develop your testing strategy
• Why your authentic self is more & more important

Watch the webinar on YouTube, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Show Notes

• A Conversation with Parents: College Admissions Trends 2025
  • [0:19] Welcome to College Bound Mentor
  • [0:27] Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, Stefanie Forman
  • [0:32] Watch the webinar on YouTube, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
  • Demographics (Lisa)
  • [0:45] Trend – The demographic cliff is Real
  • [1:48] Takeaway – More opportunity at regional schools
  • [2:42] Trend – School mergers & closures
  • [3:42] Trend – Push towards public schools & Southern schools
  • [4:18] Takeaway – Public schools have become more competitive
  • [4:58] Trend – Colleges trying to manage their enrollment
  • [6:17] Takeaway – Be prepared to embrace longer admissions cycles
  • [7:34] Trend – University of Michigan & USC (University of Southern California) had Early Decision (ED) for first time
  • Technology (Abby)
  • [9:30] Trend – Schools using technology to predict student success
  • [11:25] Takeaway – Make sure you stand out
  • [13:15] Trend – Change in institutional priorities
  • [13:45] Takeaway – Don’t worry about institutional priorities
  • [14:28] Trend – Certain majors are more competitive
  • [15:38] Takeaway – You need to show you’re a good fit for your major
  • [17:08] Trend – Standardized testing is making a comeback
  • [19:27] Takeaway – You need a testing strategy
  • [20:45] Trend – International enrollment expected to drop
  • Essays (Stefanie)
  • [22:25] Trend – Supplemental essays becoming less popular
  • [25:21] Takeaway – Look for ways to collaborate with people outside your comfort zone
  • [26:45] Trend – Focus on leadership with essays
  • [27:27] Takeaway – Showcase the impact you made
  • [29:15] Trend – Schools are cognizant of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in essays
  • [29:40] Takeaway – More important than ever to be your authentic self
  • [31:12] Trend – Videos becoming more popular in college applications
  • [32:32] Trend – Schools rolling out Chats instead of full interviews
  • [33:28] Watch the webinar on YouTube, and Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com
  • Theme Song: “Happy Optimistic Americana” by BDKSonic

What is the College Bound Mentor podcast?

Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all – giving you valuable insight to survive the college application process and beyond. Hosted by Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, and Stefanie Forman, Partners of College Bound Mentor.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Stefanie Forman 0:00
I look for ways to collaborate with people outside of your comfort zone. Seek out those challenging conversations. Don’t be scared of them.

Lisa Bleich 0:19
Hey, CBMers, welcome back to College Bound Mentor, where we help you survive the college application process and beyond. We’re your co-hosts, Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie, we’re going to talk about our key trends. We’re going to talk about what the impact will be on college admissions. So our first trend is that the demographic, the demographic cliff is real. I’m sure everyone’s been in the press. Everyone’s really been talking about it. There are approximately 15% fewer 18 year olds that are applying to college between 2025 and 2029 it continues through 20, 2040 but for the purpose of this presentation, we’re looking at the next four years, we do expect applications to decrease by really only 1% from last year’s all time high. Last year was a crazy increase in applications, and so we will see really a plateauing of that, but we’re not going to see a precipitous drop across the across the board, the demographic drop really varies by state. And so we’re seeing the biggest drop in northeast, except for New Jersey, actually, and the Midwest, that’s what seeing the big, greatest drop, and also a little bit in California. We’re seeing not as much of a drop in the southwest and in the south, all right, so what are some key takeaways from this demographic cliff. We’re expecting that, and we’re already seeing, actually, that the regional and the less selective colleges, so schools that accept fewer, greater than 50% of their applicant pool, those schools are going to be easier to get into. We’re anticipating that there will be, continued to be more opportunities at those schools, but the other side of that is that there will be and so what are some regional schools? So those would be schools in New Jersey, like TCM J even like Villanova, would be more considered a regional school Providence Loyola of Maryland. That might be a regional school on the west coast. You might school see schools like Chapman for the non film related majors, Santa, Clara, those would be regional schools, or even regional schools. What we’re seeing within the state systems, like you’ve seen, a lot of Penn State regional campuses have closed, and so a little bit of consolidation there. The other trend is that there are some school closures and their mergers that are expected. So for example, Northeastern has been expanding their footprint by bringing in other campuses. So Mills College, which is out in Oakland in the Bay Area, they acquired that. They also acquired Marymount in New York. So that opens up more opportunities for students at Northeastern, but at different campuses, UCLA also out of Mount St. Mary, I was actually out in Lake Tahoe on vacation, and I visited Sierra Nevada College, which was gifted to University of Nevada Reno, and so that was a little college in Lake Tahoe. It’s beautiful campus and but what that means is that now you and Nevada Reno has more nursing capacity, so we’re starting to see different ways that colleges can expand through these mergers, we don’t anticipate that the Ivy’s and the Ivy plus schools are going to material are going to be materially impacted. So it’s not like all of a sudden, those are going to be much easier to get into. There will be definitely some fewer applications, but not significant to make an impact. The other trend that we’re seeing is that there’s been a push to more publics and southern universities. Students really want a more traditional college experience, like what they’re seeing on Tiktok. They want less political strife. Students also are leaning more towards pre professional programs with big sports. Also, there’s a perception that public schools typically will offer a greater return on investment, and so in some instances, that is definitely the case. And there’s also opportunities for students in public universities going into honors colleges, which give them a really added bonus in that experience, to have kind of that more accelerated experience in a larger university. So what are the key takeaways? Unfortunately, that means that public schools, even the traditionally less selective schools, have become more competitive. We’ve seen that with University of Tennessee in Knoxville, which wasn’t particularly competitive school in the last few years, has gotten more competitive. We saw that a little bit with Purdue last year. We see this actually, yeah, last year was it was more challenging Clemson, so some of the Southern UT Austin applications increased like 40% last year. So that’s what we’ve seen, that Southern schools have had an impact tick in application. So that’s something to keep in mind as well. Another trend is that colleges are managing their enrollment in multiple ways they’re really trying to figure out at the. End of the day, colleges are businesses, and they have to figure out how they’re going to manage their enrollment, how they’re going to meet their numbers, both from making their enrollment, but also not over enrolling. So there was an increased use of deferrals, waitlists and alternative acceptances that they’re using to manage enrollment. So I mentioned Purdue last year, so the two years prior to that, what had happened was that they had over enrolled people had they had yielded, which means that more people matriculated, that were accepted than they anticipated. And so their institutional priority, which we’ll get to a little bit later, was that you need to reduce the class, because we need to. We can’t over enroll again. So they really use their wait list. So a lot of kids that would have normally gotten in right out of the bat, got waitlisted, and they use that to manage their enrollment and ultimately accepted them, but it was just later on in the cycle they’re using more sophisticated data analytics to predict yield, which means how many students will actually matriculate once they’re accepted. Colleges also defer when they don’t have the capacity to review all of their applications. So in 2025 UT, Austin, Michigan, and USC deferred most of their EA applicants, and so that made it more challenging because it creates longer cycles. It also as a takeaway is that students can’t really count on either target or likely your safety schools, you need to kind of be prepared to embrace uncertainty in longer cycles, as the schools used wait lists to manage enrollment, hopefully this year, because last year was the biggest. You know was that the peak of the application in terms of numbers, maybe it won’t be quite as bad this year. The other thing that we recommend is just being open to alternative enrollment options. This will provide more options for students, because colleges want to accept the students that they can, but they also have to be able to have the capacity to manage them on campus. So that’s why they offer summer, start, spring, start, first year, semester abroad, guaranteed transfer. There’s lots of different ways that students can now be accepted, and now they’re actually asking students, would you consider one of these alternate enrollments so that they can parcel out who might be more amenable to that sort of a admission cycle? And a lot of times, people are afraid that if you do that, that they’re you’re not going to start in the same group of students, and you won’t have as good of an experience. But actually, for this kids, particularly the ones that start either later or go abroad, they have a very strong cohort, and that usually becomes their friend group. So it doesn’t it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing. It can actually be quite good. Another trend that we’re seeing to manage enrollment is that this year, for the first time, Michigan and USC added early decision. So Michigan and the business school at USC Marshall added ed, and they also have early action. So that’s EA, which they’ve always had. They had traditionally deferred most of their EA applicants, so they’re really looking for more certainty among their applicant pool. But they’re not giving up on EA, so that will be interesting to see. We don’t know how the data is going to play out, because it’s the first year, because when we asked it was really they were unclear as to what percentage of their class they fill with edeem, just as an example, last year, USC took 10% of their class from early action. That’s it, 10% typically, most schools will fill anywhere from on the low end 35% but usually it’s around 45 to 55% of their class. Early Decision. I don’t anticipate that Michigan knows what percentage they’re going to do. I think they’re going to wait and see how it plays out, because when we spoke with the Ross admissions counselor, she emphasized that early action had always been good for them, so we know that they don’t want to necessarily abandon it, but they also are bringing an ED because they recognize that they want to know who’s really committed to them. The other thing that we’re anticipating is that while EA is an option, it’s going to be more competitive, because the EA is going to have all of the students that are also applying to the Ivy Leagues and the Ivy plus schools, whereas the ED applicant pool will have those people sorted out. It’s also going to be determined how this is going to change the overall admissions landscape, because when students now have to choose, whereas before you could apply to either Michigan or USC early action and then still apply ed to another school, that whole trickle down effect is going to impact admissions, so we’ll have to see how that plays out. Now, Abby’s going to take us through technology.

Abby Power 9:28
Okay? Thank you. Lisa, So technology is always a hot topic, especially I think it increases day by day, but schools are doing a really, I’d say, Good job using technology in the admissions process. They are using machine learning AI to analyze students transcripts and even in their high school context. And they are able to project, or they have means to project how successful students will be. Be based on how successful students at their high school have been in the past, or or students that have you know commonalities within their transcript. So they’re using future success as a criteria and admissions. So as I said, they can predict your performance in or they think they can predict your performance in college, and they’re using that to they’re actually like predicting a predicted GPA for an applicant. They can also determine the likelihood of a student coming. They’ve always tried to do a really good job of this. That’s the yield of the students they accept, the number that actually matriculate. But now they’re using so many pieces of data to do that, that they’re being they’re they’re much more effective at it. So academic profile, your high school, your family’s income, your geography. So you know, in a given high school, if a ton of kids apply to Michigan, but no one ever goes, they’ll be using that data when they look at you as an applicant. And then student engagement is tracked very closely beyond campus visits, in interaction with social media, emails, how long you how many links you click on, how long you interact with a given web page. So all of that stuff tells them how interested you are in the school. So the key takeaways for this, for the idea that they’re so sophisticated in determining who’s a good candidate and who’s going to come it really, in the end, makes sense to apply to schools that you’re a good fit for and you really want to attend. Your application is more transparent than you think. I think Lisa had said that the likelihood of getting into safety schools is less because the colleges have a sense that you might not attend, that you’re using them as a safety school and to protect their yield. They’re not interested in that. And as technology becomes even more integrated, students need to really make sure that their applications stand out as being authentic and genuine and personal in order to show that fit and that interest and investment in the school. I think Lisa also mentioned that different schools have different priorities, so institutional priorities, you’ll hear colleges talk about that, and these differ by college by year. But for example, the the example Lisa used was Purdue had to literally decrease its class size because of over enrollment. Other examples of institutional priorities are increasing first generation or low income students, increasing full pay students, increasing students from rural areas, creating a class with diverse perspectives, a geographically diverse class, there have been a lot of initiatives to increase veteran enrollment. So they really are trying to get a diverse class on many, many criteria, and those are just some of them. And then, as I said, the priorities differ year to year, including this idea of questbridge. With some of you might not know what this is, but it’s a nonprofit that matches low income students, high performing low income students with colleges, and there’s been a pretty consistent uptick in the number of questbridge kids accepted at different schools. So last year, it was up 17% over the previous year. That’s a lot, and so that’s another institutional priority, and it’s a solid way for the schools to increase their diverse classes and still know that they’re getting highly qualified students. So the takeaways for this is you can’t worry about the institutional priorities. There’s a lot that’s out of our control in the admissions process. I know everyone’s feeling that, and one of those things that’s not in your control is the institutional priorities. So, you know, you’ll hear about them, but if you feel like you’re a good fit for a school, you know, you can’t really worry about what the college is doing. You can only focus on what your control, what you can control. So that’s doing, you know, making the strongest application you can make, and picking good fit schools from an academic standpoint, a cultural standpoint, a social standpoint, the only

Lisa Bleich 14:05
time an institutional priority is something that can be in your control. If a school introduces a new major, or they’re building a new Center for Arts or something and that aligns with your interest, then you can understand how you fit within the institutional priority.

Abby Power 14:20
Good point. Here’s another trend, and we’ve seen this over the last few years. It’s much more challenging to get admission into certain majors. So probably the obvious suspects, computer science, engineering, business stem it’s a much more competitive applicant pool. You know, higher grades and math and science, higher test scores, fewer spots. Computer science is often one of the most popular majors on a campus. Most public universities actually admit by major. So when they’re thinking about admitting the whole class, they really kind of think about how many kids they can admit into a given major. Major. Many of the private universities don’t necessarily admit by major, so they wouldn’t admit a history major versus an English major, but they do admit by school. So if a given school like Dartmouth has arts and sciences but also engineering, you know, they’ll do the admissions by by college. It’s engineering and business we we see as being and the computer science major, and often there’s a computer science major in the College of Engineering, but also in the College of Arts and Sciences, and we’re seeing that both are much more highly subscribed majors. So the key takeaways for this is that you need to show that you’re a good fit for your major. So your activities, your classes, your testing, they need to support the major that you’re going for. So if you want to major in biology, and you think you might want to be pre med, all your not all of your activities, but enough of your activities, you should have taken the most challenging STEM classes. And your your scores, especially on the STEM subjects of your tests need to be in line with what they’re looking for. It’s really, really important. We’re kind of working with all of our kids right now doing why school why college essays. It’s really important to understand what the school offers and what the different programs are. You know, for example, if you research the difference, you know different data analytics majors across schools, you will see all kinds of differences in the program, from the level of computer science classes or the number of computer science classes to math. It makes science a lot of them involve physics now. So it makes a really big difference, neuroscience, psychology. You really have to understand what the different programs offer demonstrated fit, which is kind of all of the pieces of your puzzle coming together to show that you’re a good fit for the college is more important than demonstrated interest. Testing, standardized testing, has made a comeback during covid, which seems like a million years ago now. Kids couldn’t, didn’t have access to testing. So a lot of colleges did not. Most colleges didn’t require it. Several colleges, many colleges, have gone back. So many of the most highly selective colleges have gone back to requiring testing. You can see the list here, MIT Yale, Caltech, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, some of the highly selective schools say they’re still deciding, and they’ve they’ve said they’re going to be test optional through 2027 I think Vanderbilt said that, but it’s kind of in flux. But many have committed to going back to testing. And then there are a few states in which testing is now become required, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee. So we’re seeing that North Carolina. Yeah, North Carolina at UNC, Chapel Hill, you only need to submit test scores if your GPA doesn’t meet. Meet a minimum for certain majors. As I mentioned before, the test scores are especially important. So if you’re going for STEM or business, they’re really going to look at those math scores, their STEM scores, the science section, if you’re taking the ACT, although that’s a little bit in flux now too. Policies in terms of submitting test scores and requiring test scores can change year to year, so it’s really important to understand that for your colleges, we can there are ways to check even when a college says that it’s test optional, meaning they don’t require tests. You can look at the data from the previous year’s freshman admitted class to see what percentage of the class actually submitted test scores. So this wasn’t this year, but last year, or the year before. I remember Princeton was saying that it was test optional right before it went back to testing. And if you look at the common data set, which is the place where they record and report all of the admissions data, it showed that 96% of the admitted freshmen had submitted testing, so they were test optional. Some schools at this point, if a school has said we are remaining test optional, you can take them at their word, because now they’ve had a long time to figure this out, and there are enough schools going back, so if there’s a school that’s intentionally staying test optional. We’re going to take them at their word. And I’ve kind of done a lot of looking around lately on the common app, on the common data set. And the case is for those schools, you’ll usually see that between 25 and call it 40% of the admitted freshman class, usually fewer, less than 50% have submitted test scores. So it seems like that’s deliberate, and that they’re sort of living, living up to their word. Key takeaways here, you have to have a testing strategy. You can’t just assume that you don’t need to take a test, because it’s changing year to year. So next year, some of the schools that are saying they’re test optional, now they could go back the middle 50% Test Range scores are inflated at test optional schools, right? Because only kids with super high test scores are submitting. So as the schools go back to requiring tests, we’re expecting a recalibration to the middle 50% so the middle 50% range score should go down a little bit at this point, if someone’s if a school is saying. That they’re test optional, you really have to check the common data set to see if they are really test optional. Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of pieces of data that you have to check out in order to really, really be comfortable not submitting test scores. Because it’s not so transparent. The colleges are not very transparent when they’re saying that they’re test optional. There’s a lot going on in the world of international students. The news is changing day by day, and there is there are various predictions by government agencies and educational industry groups. So this shouldn’t be surprising. The number percentage of international applicants is expected to decrease. You know, it’s a projection, so nobody knows, but it seems like most places are expecting somewhere around 15 to 20% decrease in international applicants for international students, our guests, just because nothing seems to impact the acceptance rates at the most highly selective schools, you know, the Ivies, plus, we’re not expecting to see a big impact. Obviously, we’ll know better once, once we get the data, but that’s, that’s what’s projected. We really don’t know what the full impact of this is going to be yet. You know, international students were a big source of tuition, because they’re always full pay for the colleges. So it’s very difficult to know if there is a big drop in international enrollment, what that’s going to mean, how that’s going to trickle down to everybody else. In addition to everything that you’re hearing like last school year, colleges were telling the international students not to go home at Christmas, it was dangerous to leave the country. So we just don’t really know what decisions are going to be made. But for sure, what we do know is visas are taking longer, and we do know that international students are also looking elsewhere. Enrollment applications to the Canadian schools, for example, among international applicants have have gone up substantially, so it’s in flux, but we expect

Stefanie Forman 22:04
something to happen. All right, essays, so, yeah, with our seniors right now, we are in the heart of supplemental essay writing. So a trend that we are seeing is that the supplemental essays have changed focus, or they’ve been eliminated altogether. So, for example, University of Virginia this year, they got rid of supplemental essays, and Brandeis got rid of supplemental essays. So we’ll see what happens with that, if other colleges continue to follow suit. And then, yeah, so supplemental essays, many colleges will come out and say that if they offer supplemental essays, that those are the essays they look at first and Abby and Lisa mentioned institutional priorities. They look at supplemental essays for institutional priorities to see if a student really is a great fit for the culture, for the community, for the academics, and to see if the student really knows the school, you know, and that it is a great fit for them. But what we’ve seen, we kind of need four categories of where most essays kind of fall under. So one lived experiences, so someone’s unique lived experiences and their background kind of coupled with how they make impact and how they contribute to their different communities, also different perspectives, and like the different dialogs and conversations that we’re having with people from different backgrounds, different experiences, this one which we’re seeing grow, which we’re really happy about is joy and good news, which is really nice for students to share something that brings them joy, a piece of good news that they want to share. So that we especially saw kind of trend this year. And then there’s these mashups that try to cover them all. So we’re going to give examples. I don’t know if we have examples of mashups if we don’t, for example, like Syracuse and Tulane are mashups that try to cover them all. Like Tulane, for example, it’s a mix of, why school, maybe why major, and also like what experiences, how you can contribute to the school through like diversity, your diverse experiences. And Syracuse is something similar. So perspective, so I’m not going to read all of these out for you. I will read Carlton just so you can kind of give see an example of what we’re talking about. So for Carleton, think about someone you connect with who’s different from you. What do you find most meaningful about your interactions with them? And I’ll read one more Boston College, because I think that’s that’s a really great one too. At Boston College, we draw upon the Jesuit tradition of finding worthwhile conversation partners some support or viewpoints while others challenge them. Who fulfills this role in your life? Please cite a specific conversation you had where this conversation partner challenged your perspective or you challenged there. So again, do. Two examples of trying to show how you have these uncomfortable conversations, or conversations with people who are different from you, and how you respond and how you listen and how you grow from them. So the key takeaways, so it’s so important from after you just saw some of those examples, is for our students to or for anyone really in life, but we’ll talk about college. It’s to create opportunities to interact with people with different points of views, and how important that is, again, to for your self growth, especially in our society today, things can be very polarizing, so it’s so important to try to listen to the other side and consider and have these respectful conversations. Look for ways to collaborate with people outside of your comfort zone. Seek out those challenging conversations. Don’t be scared of them, and find ways to interact with different communities. So another category are your lived experiences, your unique background, and then how that leads to the way you’re going to contribute to your communities and make impact. So we’ll actually this one from University of Michigan is new this year, so so I’ll read that to you at the University of Michigan, we are focused on developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future in your essay, share with us how you are prepared to contribute to these goals. This could include the people, places, experiences or aspirations that have shaped your journey and future plans. And I’ll read one more Vanderbilt’s motto. I’m probably going to Chris sheer odd. Any Latin people did. I did? I mess that up? Okay? Is Latin for dare to grow in your response, reflect on how one or more aspects of your identity, culture or background has played a role in your personal growth, and how it will contribute to our campus community. As you dare to grow at Vanderbilt. So these experiences, again, it could be a different community that you’re a part of, which could be a sports team, it could be your family, it could be community service, it could really be anything. And you can be very creative when thinking about how you define community and how that is impacted you, and how you’ll bring that to a certain college. So the key takeaways from that category is impact, no matter how big or small, is important in your extracurricular activity. So many times our students will be like nothing major happened in my life, but a one conversation, one interaction, says so much about your character and who you are as people. And sometimes we and our students don’t give themselves enough credit for for you know the impact they’re really making, even if you know it’s about one person’s life, you can be a leader without a title. So many times people feel like they have to be the captain of a certain team or the president of a certain club, being a leader is also being that person on that same soccer team that might not be this starting goalie, but is so loud on the sidelines and that team and the spirit would crumble without them. It could be the cashier at the local pliable place, and the way that you make everything work if that cashier isn’t running so also, leader doesn’t have to be what you think it is. Think about the role you play in your high school community or local community, and how you can bring those talents and skills to a college community. Again, colleges care so much about impact, and how you’re going to impact not just their larger community, but the smaller communities that you’re going to be a part of. So yeah. So Joy good news is, is another category that, for example, Lehigh just added this year. So I’ll read all of these, because, again, we need some good news always. So MIT, what do you do for fun? And then we know you lead a busy life full of activities, many are required of you. Tell us something you do simply for the pleasure of it. Brown, just what brings you joy? And Lehigh, what is something great happening in your life right now? So it’s nice to see that colleges are caring about this, and it’s also fun for our students. Usually, when our students see this, there’s like a sigh of relief, like, oh. So it leads to an authentic voice, which we’re getting into. So authentic essays are more important than ever. So it’s really happy my I used to be an English teacher to see this as my English teacher self. Anytime that Lisa Abby and I go to conferences, or we go on college tours or listen to webinars, we are hearing admissions counselors and admissions offices, they are truly reiterating how important authentic voice is, especially in the light of ChatGPT, AI and other tools, wink, wink, parents, but they’re just tools, and colleges can tell the difference between the students voice and someone or something else. Else’s. Of course, we have to embrace chat GPT. There’s a lot of good that can come from it, but a lot of schools will blatantly say, almost like an honor code, like, use it to brainstorm, use it to get ideas, but your work, in the end, it should be your writing, so something to consider. And we were listening to a webinar with different admissions officers. And one said, it’s not easy to tell the difference between a man like average essay and ChatGPT, but it’s really easy to tell the difference between a great essay and ChatGPT. And I don’t like to speak for Lisa and Abby, but I think we can all agree that that we see the same. So these are just some quotes from admissions counselors on that I’ll just read one after reading 15,000 applications. What stands out the most is their essay. Some of the best essays have authentically shown who the students are and how they would mesh with the Tulane community. Do not over Edit, let them shine through. Very easy to know what is written by a 17 to 18 year old. And then finally, videos are becoming more prevalent in admissions, and even if a school says, like, I think you Chicago says, maybe not verbatim, but the idea is, is optional, but it’s highly recommended send in that video. So they are replacing interviews at some schools, because colleges are continuing to drop the interview process to the point where you just have to almost check every few months for that and the glimpse videos, glimpse, because you get a glimpse of someone’s life. They’re available at numerous schools. So required are optional. Again, if they’re optional, we’re always going to encourage our students to do them. So brown BU, wash UU Chicago, the list goes on. Just want to say something about glimpse videos is that it can be very scary for students and so, and some students are natural performers, but that’s okay. So I think Abby showed us this video of one of her students who’s a gifted what was he a singer, like performer, and you’re just like, you know, bopping along with this, and he made up this amazing, creative song about so there’s that. But then I also had a student who just spoke about her relationship with her brother with special needs. And there was no glitz and glamor. But again, you could tell so much about that student as well from just this honest transaction and dialog she was having with the camera. And then the last thing is, a lot of schools are offering things called chats. So they’re not interviews. They’re like these casual chats with students like at Richmond and Cornell and Wash U they’re not evaluative, but it is a nice way to get to speak to a student about their experiences. So the key takeaways saying it again, focus on authenticity over professionalism. The essay means a lot. The sub, the personal statement, the supplements mean a lot. They want authentic voices. Think about what gaps are missing from your application, that you can fill in or that you can show better on a video. What do you really want them to know about you? That again, that might not be so prevalent on your application. If you’re creative, great like, like Abby’s student, who I want to see perform on Broadway one day. But if not, that’s also okay. Do you again? It’s all about being authentic and what you offer and how you’re going to make impact research to know which schools allow for videos and if they say optional and the format suits you, we really encourage you to submit.

Lisa Bleich 33:25
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