Most of those who knew me during my “formative years” were convinced that I was destined for a career as a baseball play-by-play announcer. I was fascinated by baseball statistics and history back when most of my peers were still playing with army men or dolls. I am far less fanatical today, but still enjoy a hobby my wife refers to under her breath as “stupid.” I think I could have been good at announcing, and it would have been fun, but it ultimately didn’t meet my need for purpose and wanting to make a difference.
I recently read an article that stated that baseball announcers (as well as players and umpires) have a chance in every single game to see something they’ve never seen before. That happens often enough to be fodder for sportswriter Jayson Stark’s regular “Weird and Wild” column for The Athletic. One of the things I loved about college counseling was that my days were always unpredictable. I might start the day with one thing I hoped to accomplish, then never get to it because of other issues and crises that popped up. But, after years in the profession, I wouldn’t have said that on most days I was likely to encounter something I’d never seen before.
I wonder if that’s changing. Last week on back-to-back days I encountered something I’d never seen before, and it was the exact same thing. (Yes, I am fully aware that the second occurance no longer qualified as “never seen before.”)
Last Thursday, the day before May 1, I talked with a counseling friend. That afternoon two of her students had received unexpected good news.
The first was the kind of feel-good story we all love at this time of year. The student received a call from her dream school informing her that she had been admitted off the waitlist. The only thing keeping the moment from being perfect is that the young admission officer who facilitated the acceptance and made the call is leaving the profession to go to law school in the fall. My friend considers him a rising star, a future Dean or VP for Enrollment, and is glad for him but sad for our profession. College admission and counseling are people-driven professions, dependent on attracting quality people into the field and then holding on to them. That’s a topic to be explored in a future ECA post.
The news received by the second student caught the college counselor off guard. At 1:00 p.m. on April 30 the student received an acceptance letter and a $25,000 scholarship from a selective university on the East Coast. The letter at least recognized that the student might need time to process the offer in the hours before May 1, messaging a version of “operators are standing by” to offer help from admission staffers.
The second example differed from the first in one important way. What was surprising was that the student had been denied outright several weeks prior by the same university after having previously been deferred in Early Action. The student hadn’t appealed because he had great other options that were higher on his list. So, in essence, the student was admitted off the waitlist without ever having been placed on the waitlist. My friend, a college counseling legend, declared that she had never seen that before. And neither had I.
Until less than 24 hours later, that is. On Friday evening my wife was catching up on some of the shows she watches on a regular basis, one of which is “The Equalizer,” starring Queen Latifah as a former CIA operative now in private practice as an–well, equalizer. One of the secondary plotlines this season has been that the equalizer’s daughter, Delilah (or Dee) is applying to college. One episode included a scene that could have been an infomercial for attending an HBCU, and in another episode she was traumatized by receiving a rejection from her “safety school,” leading her to question whether whether she would be admitted anywhere and whether her commitment to her studies and extracurricular activities had been worth it.
In one of the opening scenes of last week’s episode, Dee receives a letter from UCLA informing her that a space has become available and offering her admission. While being congratulated she remarks that she had already been rejected by UCLA. In a 24-hour period, something I had never seen before happened twice, once in real life and once on a television show.
So what’s going on here? Is this now a thing? Is life imitating art (if a drama like “The Equalizer” can be considered art) or art imitating life? Am I more out-of-touch than I think I am?
Even though the UCLA example was fictional, I reached out to a friend at UCLA to see if it was plausible. They responded that their initial reaction was “No, that would never happen,” but that the answer is more nuanced than that. UCLA and other schools in the UC system have a provision that allows students to submit an official appeal to an admission decision. An application can be reconsidered if there is new and compelling information (updated grades and activities don’t count). In any given year a handful of appeals might be successful, less than one percent of those submitted. So there is an avenue where a student who had been denied at UCLA might subsequently be accepted. The Equalizer plot involving the daughter was a secondary plot in the episode, but there was no suggestion that the original decision had been appealed. The UCLA acceptance came out of the blue.
We might excuse Hollywood for playing fast and loose with the truth about college admission, but shows about doctors, police, and first responders all have technical advisors to make sure that the scripts don’t bend the laws of reality. I don’t know why the same can’t be true for college admission, and I would be happy to start a new phase to my career consulting with film and television producers on whether a plot connected to college admission sends the right messages.
The real-life example (I am not naming the institution) is harder to explain away. Why would a university admit on April 30 a student it had previously denied? The first answer that comes to mind is difficulty making the class. The university in question is not a place I think of as struggling, but it is also among a growing list of places where the market does not match their self-perception. I have read that the institution in question fell 350 short of its enrollment goal last fall, a shortfall that translated into a loss of $20 million in revenue.
That doesn’t explain why the university would begin accepting students it had already rejected. One of my friend’s office colleagues wondered if the institution was acknowledging it had made a mistake, because the student’s credentials made him a solid, even strong, candidate. TV shows may use the term “safety school,” but college counselors know there is no such thing. The student is local, and hadn’t bothered to visit, so may have been a victim of a demonstrated interest/likelihood of enrolling algorithm.
And why send an acceptance 12 hours before May 1? In college admission May 1 (or May Day) is the National Candidates Reply date, when many admission offices celebrate the completion of the admission cycle (there are many others where May 1 is just a date in an on-going process). But May 1 is also May Day!, the international distress call, and distress is the emotion felt by any college that hasn’t made its class.
It has been said that the first time you see something it’s innovation, and the second time is tradition. Is reject then admit something new in college admission, or have I just missed it? In either case it makes me want to cry out, May Day! May Day!