Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be MUCH easier for your kid to get in. There is a population drop off after class of 2027. There will be much fewer kids applying to college.

From what I've heard: a number of colleges will cease to exist, but the competition to attend top schools will be as fierce as it is today.

Agree. And I think the crazy competition is largely due to TO. If the T25 brought the SAT and ACT back, the number of applicants would start falling off.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:College game strategy =

money (donations, ED, full pay, college consultants, private hs)
+
connections (legacy, private schools, internships, paid research, rec letters)
+
lies (inflated GPA, nonprofits, sob stories, volunteer work)
+
TO

There you go!

Forgot “URM”

The SCOTUS took care of that with Ed Blum. Remember?

Anonymous wrote:It will be MUCH easier for your kid to get in. There is a population drop off after class of 2027. There will be much fewer kids applying to college.

From what I've heard: a number of colleges will cease to exist, but the competition to attend top schools will be as fierce as it is today.

SAT won't be as important anymore, unless the College Board lobbying holds sway.

Anonymous wrote:I can see a strategy among MC/UMC families in the future who might purposefully move their kids to a Community College for the first year or two, and game plan to transfer into a highly-ranked private as a sophomore or junior as a way to mitigate rising costs. This would need to become a 'thing' though, any social influencers on DCUM?, bc it has be seen as a good, cool, right, justifiable, appropriate thing to do.

People have been doing that for a while, but most private colleges have gotten very picky about how they let CC classes fulfill their distribution requirements. It might be one reason those distribution requirements all have fuzzy names now like "depth" and "thinking focus" and "logical drum-making" instead of "Science" and "social Science" and "Math."

I can see a strategy among MC/UMC families in the future who might purposefully move their kids to a Community College for the first year or two, and game plan to transfer into a highly-ranked private as a sophomore or junior as a way to mitigate rising costs. This would need to become a 'thing' though, any social influencers on DCUM?, bc it has be seen as a good, cool, right, justifiable, appropriate thing to do.

Anonymous wrote:It will be MUCH easier for your kid to get in. There is a population drop off after class of 2027. There will be much fewer kids applying to college.

Only in US. Not internationally…
Look at these schools and their international students. Your kids are competing with them and it will only get worse.

Anonymous wrote:6th grade? Chill bruh.

Don’t chill. Invest now and every year in 529 index funds. Love your instate options or OOS schools that give merit discounts.

Anonymous wrote:With the enrollment cliff looming, won’t colleges just accept more international students?

Some of that might depend on the next election.

I always try and buck the trends and I'm right a lot. Doesn't mean always, but here is what I think:

Flagships are oversubscribed and overpriced. They're also subject to the whims of state and federal (less fed) funding. We've already seen schools like WVU slash programs, and others are following suit. Schools everywhere are trying to pivot right now into pre professional laboratories for engineers and computer scientists, but along the way many seem to be forgetting we might also need actual scientists as well as people who can speak other languages and people who know what happened ten years ago, or ten thousand.

It's kind of the worst kind of brain drain: bright kids aren't leaving their communities to go someplace else, they're just all majoring in the exact same thing. This never ends well, but we don't have enough economics or history majors left who to remind them.

I don't think it's sustainable.

Smaller private colleges are getting slammed demographically, but that's where my optimism lies. I think a lot of them have already adjusted tuition pricing, either by actually cutting it in half, or by offering nearly every student merit to make the same outcome. They also don't have the same bloated levels of administration to deal with. (Mostly.) I see the tuition adjustments continuing to filter up, until the highest-ranked slacs adjust as well. I see a lot of belt-tightening, and fewer capital improvements, but let's get real: SLACs all went through a recent phase where they were throwing too much into capital improvements.

I see some slacs failing and closing, but not always the ones you'd think.

A lot of the reason I don't think the small liberal arts model is going anywhere is because of how socially stratified we are. State schools were designed for the Everyman, whereas a lot of smaller schools began as incubators for the ruling class--and that's what they will still be. Despite what the good people of dcurbanmom think, you can't build a society with just computer programmers and the people who do their laundry. You need managers, doctors, writers, entertainment, etc.

Not all social change is a progression or an evolution, much as we'd like to think otherwise. There are certain movements in American thought that run counter to the standard Enlightenment deal, and as we become a more polarized and stratified society, that can be quite dangerous and destabilizing. Not sure how it will play out.

Anonymous wrote:College game strategy =

money (donations, ED, full pay, college consultants, private hs)
+
connections (legacy, private schools, internships, paid research, rec letters)
+
lies (inflated GPA, nonprofits, sob stories, volunteer work)
+
TO

There you go!

Forgot “URM”

College game strategy =

money (donations, ED, full pay, college consultants, private hs)
+
connections (legacy, private schools, internships, paid research, rec letters)
+
lies (inflated GPA, nonprofits, sob stories, volunteer work)
+
TO

There you go!

With the enrollment cliff looming, won’t colleges just accept more international students?

First thing to keep in mind is that the SATs have been rescored (inflated). Your 1380 is more comparable to 1500 on today's scale. That's why the SAT scores look so impossibly high to those of us who took them 25 years ago.

The other thing to keep in mind is that your 6th grader will potentially benefit from a significant drop in college age matriculants that's due to begin pretty soon. In theory fewer kids chasing after the same number of spots.

But on the other side, like everything else about modern America, we are rapidly moving towards a two-tiered system so what the top 50% does is irrelevant to the bottom 50%.

Your kid will be all right if he/she has discipline and aptitude. I'm around the same age as you but in looking at people 10 years older than me, many who went to expensive Ivies and LACs are sending their equally bright kids to major flagships or other midlevel colleges with great merit aid, and those kids are turning out just as accomplished as their parents. I've been impressed by what they're doing, and if anything, less impressed by what I see coming out of elite colleges....

They also need to bring back testing in some form and maybe limit the number of applications. They system is just overwhelmed with applicants.