“This has been the most difficult year of my career,” says Shawn Abbott, Temple University’s vice provost for admissions, financial aid, and enrollment management. Now, in the wake of COVID’s tumult, schools and parents and kids are all left to wonder: Where do we go from here? They always took those standardized tests - sometimes many times over, and often with the aid of pricey test-taking prep. When that flipped to a preference for specialists, they hunkered down and stuck to concert piano or tae kwon do. Kids adapted to it when the trend was for well-rounded applicants, they went out for sports, took part in school plays, joined student government. The old way of doing college admissions may have sucked, but at least it sucked in ways we understood. #West chester university majors plus#The cost of tuition plus fees at nationally ranked schools has more than doubled over the past two decades.ĬOVID provided the impetus for change, says Shawn Abbott, Temple’s vice provost for admissions: “For us, it was a revolution.”Īll these factors have made an already fraught process for parents and kids even more daunting. household that carries any owes more than $57,500. Mega-universities like Arizona State and Southern New Hampshire, with their massive enrollments, have been eating into the diminishing pool of college candidates. Colleges are gutting humanities programs to make way for more practical subjects like computer science in March, Cabrini University in Radnor announced it would nix majors in religious studies, Black studies and philosophy. Professors who can’t find room on the tenure track because of budget cuts are walking away from academia others are grappling with the challenges of teaching online or are fighting to unionize to protect themselves. In the first year of the pandemic, higher ed lost more than 650,000 jobs. Dozens of schools nationwide, including some that have been around more than a hundred years, are closing or consolidating due to financial woes - among them, six Pennsylvania state universities that are folding down into two. The fewer kids enrolling and paying tuition, the fewer dollars colleges have to get by on. That’s 50,000 kids with their dreams deferred, their futures on hold. The Pennsylvania figures are equally gloomy enrollment for spring 2021 was down for the third straight year, by a total of almost 50,000 students over 2019. colleges saw undergraduate enrollment for spring 2021 drop by 4.9 percent over spring 2020. #West chester university majors series#A perfect storm of contributing factors over recent years - COVID, a plummeting American birth rate, the shocking revelations of the Operation Varsity Blues admissions scandal, economic unrest, the movement for social justice - has walloped higher ed with a series of body blows. #West chester university majors how to#In the absence of the quantifiable factors they traditionally relied on - comparable GPAs and test scores - colleges are struggling to figure out how to choose whom to admit and whom to reject. So what happens when quarantine forces cancellation of those all-important tests? When high-schoolers are learning remotely, or in some mash-up of in-person and online, isolated and anxious? When stretched-thin guidance counselors have to reach out to students via Zoom? When kids can’t schedule college-campus visits? When the carefree self-exploration celebrated in the admissions essay grinds to a halt? As ranked in a survey of admissions employees in 2019 - pre-pandemic - those were grades, curriculum strength, standardized test scores, and the admissions essay. Photo-illustration by Matt ChaseĪll it took to blow up the American system of higher education was a deadly pandemic.įor years, admission to elite colleges and universities has depended on a, well, dependable set of factors. COVID-19 exposed just how badly broken our higher-education and college admissions system has become.
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