Admissionary Position

Congratulations. You’ve been accepted to our college. Hopefully, this comes as good news, but it probably comes as more of a surprise since you never applied to our school. That acceptances like this exist will likely come as a shock to students and parents (like me) who have recently suffered through the highly stressful, family bond-testing, overly competitive college visit and application experience. But application season is very different for different schools. The top brands somehow parse through an entirely unmanageable mountain of applications; last Fall, my son’s current top choice, UCLA, received 145,910 applications from prospective freshmen. But it can be a lot more lonely for those schools not at the top. Many of them have deployed a relatively new strategy. “Under so-called direct admissions programs increasingly being tried by states, colleges and third-party services, seniors who meet minimum academic qualifications are receiving unsolicited notifications of admission. Once they are identified as qualifying candidates, the students can complete an often-simplified application online.” (I can’t believe I’ve spent all these years sitting on the couch waiting for people to subscribe to NextDraft when I could have preemptively accepted them.) NYT (Gift Article): Even if They Didn’t Apply, Some Students Get College Admission Offers. (I came of age during the wrong era. The only time I’ve been accepted without applying was for a Capital One card.)