This summer, Cuca Acosta, who leads admissions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wanted to dispel rumors and misconceptions about the admissions process directly to students. Though she’s held other question-and-answer events over Zoom for college counselors and consultants, this was the first time she would target students themselves. Before the event, she saw other admissions professionals sharing the post online and encouraging students to take advantage of the opportunity to talk directly with an admissions director.
In the end, just one student showed up.
Maybe it was just too early in the admissions process for most rising seniors to be interested, Acosta said. But the low turnout points to one of the challenges of dispelling misconceptions about the college admissions process, she said: Students are often too embarrassed or intimidated to ask questions about the admissions process. Sometimes that’s because they’re afraid to look stupid or ask questions they think should be obvious; other times, it might be because they’re worried they might find out something they thought was true isn’t, such as that a particular course or extracurricular will give them a leg up.
“I find it unfortunate that students oftentimes would prefer to talk to a peer than to talk to the admissions expert,” she said.
Admissions myths tend to rear their heads around this time every year. Students assume they need certain scores, extracurriculars, or courses to get into colleges when they do not—or, inversely, they assume they are a shoo-in for a highly selective college just because they excel in part of the application.
Admissions experts attribute these pervasive myths to a number of sources, from social media conversations to word-of-mouth or parents’ outdated understanding of the application process. Such an anxiety-provoking process can be especially prone to misinformation, as students are eager to latch onto any tidbit that makes it feel clearer and simpler.
“I think it makes sense: You’re trying to [create] a narrative around how the decisions are made,” said Charles Murphy, executive director of admissions at Rice University. “It’s a very intentional and human process, and it’s a process that, at Rice, involves our entire staff reviewing the applications and taking a lot of time and energy and effort to review them, and it’s something that’s not easily distillable into one statistic.”
Online communities like r/ApplyingToCollege and r/chanceme can perpetuate the myths. They invite students to ask other users—often fellow applicants or young adults who may know little about the admissions process—to evaluate their chances of getting into specific universities.
Inside Higher Ed spoke with five admissions leaders at selective U.S. colleges about the common misconceptions they run into, and how their institutions are approaching the Sisyphean task of debunking the myths.
The ‘Perfect’ Application
Whitney Soule, dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, said that one of the most pervasive myths she encounters among Penn applicants is that there is such a thing as a perfect, or even ideal, application.
She frequently sees advice online telling students that admissions officers strongly prefer certain extracurriculars, or that they’re looking for a certain “correct” answer to an application question. But there’s no such thing, Soule said, and Penn wouldn’t want to admit a truly “perfect” student anyway.
“The reality is that if they were perfect, they wouldn’t need school,” she said. “I think that there’s a misunderstanding or a myth that only certain things can be important in [the application] when, in fact, what’s important is what’s important to the student.”
One of Penn’s essay prompts asks students to write a thank-you note to a person of their choice. It’s designed to encourage applicants to “decenter” themselves, but Soule said she’s seen people online advising students to use the prompt to uplift themselves, such as by thanking someone who helped them achieve a particular accomplishment, like a research mentor.
There is a “myth that every answer has to be elevating oneself, instead of simply representing oneself with the confidence of, ‘This is what I know and this is what I’ve done so far,’” she said.
Sarah Fischer, assistant vice president of admissions at Grinnell College, a liberal arts institution in Iowa, has seen students approach their personal statement in a similar way. There’s a feeling, she said, that students must have a “unique, incredibly moving sob story” to have a shot at admission.
In reality, she said, most Grinnell applicants write about ordinary topics, and the subject itself isn’t even evaluated when the essay is reviewed.
“First and foremost, we are looking for strong writing ability. Grinnell is a writing-intensive institution … we want to make sure that you at least have those foundational skillsets to be successful,” she said. “What we’re looking for, secondary to that, is what do we learn about you? And there’s no value judgment placed on this. It might be that you like tennis. It might be that you vacationed in Costa Rica. It doesn’t matter.”
Other admissions leaders noted that their applicants often believe they must meet some very specific requirements to be admitted. After releasing a blog post about an incoming class one year that said that many of the students had conducted research in high school, Soule said she began seeing rumors online that research experience is required to get into Penn.
Murphy said students often believe they must have a certain number of volunteer hours to get into Rice. He hypothesized that the misconception may exist because some institutions and state-level scholarships do require applicants to have completed a certain number of volunteer hours, such as Florida’s Bright Futures scholarship—though even in that case, paid work can be used instead.
Busting Myths
Some admissions rumors go beyond what’s included in the application. Acosta, of UCSB, said she frequently hears from students concerned that the University of California campuses talk with each other about individual applicants, making it disadvantageous to apply to multiple UCs.
They don’t, Acosta said; even if just one percent of UCSB’s 110,000 first-year applicants also applied to another UC—and that’s definitely an underestimation—that would still mean having unnecessary conversations with other campuses about a thousand applications. That’s simply not feasible, Acosta noted.
“I do see some students self-select themselves out of applying to multiple campuses because of the myth, and that’s unfortunate,” she said.
She also noted that students sometimes struggle to understand how their anticipated major impacts their chances of admission. Although some applicants are admitted by major—particularly engineering students—that isn’t the case for majors in the university’s largest college, its College of Letters & Science. Students also sometimes erroneously believe they will be docked for coming in undeclared.
At Washington & Lee University, Sally Stone Richmond, vice president for admissions and financial aid, said she’s seen students opt out of early decision (ED) because of the misconception that ED students receive worse financial aid packages than those admitted through the regular cycle. Though institutions vary in how they apply financial aid to early decision applicants, WLU promises to meet all demonstrated need, offering free tuition for all families making under $150,000—regardless of whether they apply early or regular decision.
Still, WLU has had to work to dispel the rumor, even offering early financial aid reads to interested students so they can see what their package would look like before they even apply.
Several admissions leaders also said they sometimes encounter students who, for whatever reason, think they are a shoo-in for admission thanks to one particularly impressive element of their application—a great test score or excellent essay. But no one element can carry an entire application, the directors agreed. Almost every U.S. college and university uses holistic admissions, weighing a range of factors outside test scores and grades in the admissions decision.
Lisa Carlton, a veteran independent college counselor and president of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, said she finds that her clients never come in fully understanding the holistic admissions process.
“When I would work with a student, we actually used a graphic to kind of show them all the pieces of the pie that will be looked at, and kind of explain to them that when we put everything together—your grades, your test scores, your résumé, your recommendations, any volunteer work that you’ve done, all the things that are interesting to the story of you— that’s the holistic admissions piece,” she said. “I would say that students and families, in my experience, tend to focus on one or two, but not all of them … most families, especially who are going through this for the first time—our job is to educate them on that.”
In recent years, institutions have made more of a concerted effort to combat misinformation about the college admissions process. At Grinnell, for example, the admissions office has started uploading “Ask the Experts” videos filmed by admissions officers that address questions about the process and financial aid.
Admissions directors stressed that they also make an effort to debunk misconceptions during info sessions, trainings for high school counselors, and high school visits, as well as one-on-one conversations with both college counselors and students themselves. But they said students can sometimes be reluctant to ask admissions leaders questions they think might be embarrassing or negatively impact their chances of getting into the institution.
Students often worry about “asking a question that might divulge something about themselves that would be viewed negatively in the eyes of an admission counselor, or maybe the question wouldn’t be viewed as a smart question, and it just doesn’t work that way,” said Fischer from Grinnell. “We interact with thousands of students, so we do not remember every interaction that we have … and the application is going to reveal a lot about you. So I wouldn’t worry about revealing something through a question that you don’t want the admission office to know.”
