I’ve been teaching high school English for 33-years, and I’ve been advising students through test preparation and college application assistance for 15 of those years. Just in the last 15 years, the college admissions process has become nearly unmanageable for even the most high-achieving, motivated, and even gifted students. High school students have an overabundance of both information and choice, and, as a result, many students simply follow the lead of their friends or classmates or trusted adults–who went to college in the 1980s and 1990s when it was normal to apply to three colleges. In other words, the most trusted people who students often turn to are just as overwhelmed or operating with ideas that are utterly outdated.

In my English classrooms, I’ve often found that when you teach someone to write, you can only do it as a “collaborator” or even an “editor.” It’s time consuming and sometimes exhausting, but you cannot create a real writer without lots of practice and thought, without lots of tinkering. I’ve come to love this part the most in my classrooms, and I try to build in time to tutor and mentor. Students don’t learn to write without much, much revision. 

I think students don’t really, often, apply the same kind of ethic to the college search and application process. I don’t mean they don’t work at it; I mean they don’t like to experiment. It’s so much like just feeding the “data points” like GPA, class schedule, and activities into ChatGPT, and having a robot make recommendations based on “safety” and “target” and “reach” school. And then, even when kids get the machine’s answers, they still sort these results by brand names like they are shopping at Amazon. Their fellow students 4-star-reviews (those great dorms and that all-night spa!) delivered in reverse order of cost. Students use “markers” of excellence, upheld by massive marketing and “influencing.”

Here’s a little known data point – college acceptance is actually up. Year-over-year acceptances increased from 2022 - 2023 by 6.9%. That’s not a fact many people know. This is the effect of all the many, many applications. But there’s a perception problem regarding increased acceptances since elite acceptances are down. Students don’t look at the advantage in this increase, an advantage available to everyone – with application numbers sky high there’s a broader number of schools to consider. However, so many, many kids are relegated to sending in the same 10 - 12 applications to the same 18 universities, comprised of flagship public schools and/or “elite” private schools.

I’d like to help students break this cycle.

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Richard C. Jones
Founder, wisecollegechoices.com