By Tom

Well, we had another highly competitive year for admission and, as is always the case, we had many more qualified applicants than we have space for in our class. Those of you who have been offered a spot on the wait list are students whom we believe are fully qualified and would contribute greatly to our campus but for whom we don’t, given our size limitations, have space at present. Selective admission is a difficult process for us, as we try to select a class from among many strong, similarly-qualified applicants.

There are quite a few myths and rumors out there about how wait lists work, so I want to spend a few moments busting up some of the myths and perhaps confirming some others. Here goes.

We have no idea whether or not we’re going to go to the wait list this year (or any year for that matter) – that’s why we have a wait list. If we knew we’d need to admit more students, we’d have done so already. Typically, we won’t have a strong sense of whether or not we’ll go to the wait list until the very end of April/beginning of May. We have been able to go to the wait list three out of the last five years.

We won’t know how many students are on the wait list until after April 15 when all students have decided. Typically about half of the students offered a place on the wait list will accept that offer. We offer spots to hundreds of students, but we don’t release the final number.

The wait list is not an actual ranked list, so you don’t get a number after you accept a place on it. Should we go to the wait list, we will go back into the admission committee and reevaluate all applicants on the wait list using the same holistic process we use in regular admission, which as you know places greatest emphasis on academic achievement. The one additional, secondary factor that may be added into that holistic process in wait list review is your level of interest. If Richmond is your first choice, please be sure to let us know of that. Feel free to check in with us once May rolls around to see how things are shaping up and let us know if you’re still interested at that point. Again, your academic and personal merits will always be the primary basis of the decisions that the committee makes – interest is secondary to that.

Some things you should do:

• Confirm your spot on the wait list online
• Read the Wait List 2009 brochure thoroughly
• Make your deposit at another university to secure your place in their class by May 1
• Send us additional academic information (e.g. third-quarter grades) that becomes available
• Check in with us periodically to let us know you’re still interested (periodically=every few weeks or so)
• Visit campus IF AND ONLY IF you need to learn more about Richmond or decide whether Richmond is right for you

Some things you shouldn’t do:

• Call us every day
• Call us every week
• Try to bribe us
• Send us more letters of recommendation
• Send us crazy, ridiculous items to try to get our attention
• Send us anything other than additional academic information
• Visit campus to try to convince us of your interest or make a case in person (a phone call or e-mail is just as effective and will be looked upon equally)

We do our very best to keep you posted on what’s going on. We will contact you by mid-June at the latest to let you know about the status of the wait list. Watch your e-mail once mid-June rolls around for news and further instructions.

We understand how difficult this process can be, and we try to be as forthright as possible, but when it comes to the wait list there are simply a lot of unknown factors. I am confident that all of you have many wonderful options from which to choose, and that you will find yourselves excited and content next autumn, whether you are at Richmond or elsewhere.

By Sabena Moretz (Associate Director of Admission) and Tom

Our average GPA is a 22.96.

Seriously.

We’re asked that question so frequently – “What’s your average GPA?” – that we thought we’d actually go ahead and calculate it. So we took all of the enrolled students in our current first-year class and averaged together all of the GPAs that their high schools reported to us last year. And the golden number came out to be 22.96.

We’ll come back to that crazy (and accurate) number in just a minute. We find that, for many students in the college search and application process, GPA tends to get a whole lot of attention, often being used as the measuring stick for likelihood of admission. But when an admission office looks at your transcript, there is much more that directs us toward a particular decision than just a GPA. Admission offices all over use very different practices in this regard, so there is not a singular approach, but we think it’s important for you to have a deeper understanding of this statistic and its use in admission decisions from the point of view of UR.

The most important academic factor in our process is rigor of curriculum. Not just the number of honors or AP or IB or Dual Enrollment or whatever your school calls their best classes, but how deeply you’ve continued your studies into each of the five academic core disciplines of English, mathematics, lab science, history, and foreign language. The student who stops taking math after Algebra II/Trig is differently prepared for college than the student who goes on with higher level math, especially if they’ve gone on to calculus. Two students with the same GPA can have made enormously different choices in regard to curriculum, so when students start asking about average GPA, a smart admission person would be very cautious about commenting.

Grades are weighted in a myriad of ways, so we never really know what kind of performance a student has until we actually look at their transcript. We’ve seen straight-B students with 4.0 GPAs. (And the families really are convinced that their students are “4.0s”!) Highly selective colleges would be looking for students with grades of A in weighted courses, not grades of B that are inflated in the GPA calculations. (Though most of us would much rather admit a student with an A/B mix in a weighted curriculum than one with straight As in a basic college prep curriculum.) We find this to be a source of great frustration to parents and students. Not all GPAs mean the same thing.

This is not even to mention the many different grading scales out there. We do look at what the scale is, and we expect a little higher GPA in more generous grading scales to try to offset that difference. Most students I (Sabena) have met in my years in this business think that their school’s scale is the toughest in the world and puts them at a disadvantage. Trust us – most colleges and universities are smart enough to put measures into place to try to minimize the influence of different scales, although no system is flawless in this regard.

A strong GPA can mask some serious individual grades that demonstrate weakness in a particular curricular area. If it’s a curricular area that is required for graduation at UR, we can be reasonably concerned about a student’s likelihood of success in required courses. Senior semester or trimester grades can also change a decision if they show dramatic decline from the previous performance.

So when a college publishes an “average GPA” for its enrolling students, the smart prospective student would ask the source of that number. Is it a straight average of all the GPAs as calculated by the high schools? Or is it a recalculated GPA based on the way that college might recalculate? We regularly see high schools using 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 40, and 100-point scales – some weighted, some unweighted. (That’s where our average GPA of 22.96 comes from!) Some high schools don’t even calculate a GPA. At a school on a 6.0 scale, a “4.0” student is usually a straight-C student.

We hope you’re beginning to see how GPA is much more complicated than it might appear, and why the individual grades on your transcript are much more important to us than that one number. We also hope this is making clearer why, when you ask about GPA, we say that the typical student admitted to Richmond has average grades of A- in highly rigorous courses, not that our average GPA is 22.96.

By Tom

Okay, now that it’s January 15 and our application deadline has arrived, all seniors applying to college (and their parents) should begin thinking about the next step – applying for financial aid. This means a few things: (1) consider getting your taxes done as soon as possible to make sure everything goes smoothly; (2) start work as soon as possible filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA; and (3) check whether the schools where you’ve applied require any sort of supplemental financial aid application (you can find ours here).

There are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding the FAFSA and financial aid – and understandably so, since it’s a very complicated process involving lots of numbers and formulae. Anyone who’s done it before can tell you this. And there’s no way I can cover all of this in one post, but I’ll do my best to clear up some of the confusion.

The biggest misconception I encounter regarding financial aid is that the FAFSA form determines your financial aid package. Let me be very clear on this: The FAFSA does NOT determine how much financial aid you receive.

All the FAFSA does is to impartially, formulaically calculate your Expected Family Contribution, or EFC – how much you and your parents/guardians are expected to contribute to your education each year, based on income and resources. That’s all it does. Nothing more.

How much financial aid you receive, and what your financial aid package looks like, depends on what each individual college or university actually does with your EFC. If your EFC is higher than the college’s total cost, it’s unlikely that you’ll receive any need-based financial aid. If, however, your EFC is lower than the college’s total cost, that left-over amount is often referred to as your Eligibility or your Demonstrated Need – the part you aren’t able to pay.

But different schools have very different policies regarding what to do with that Eligibility. Many universities do not promise to meet this amount, while others promise only to meet it partially. There are fewer than 70 colleges in the United States that guarantee they will meet 100% of your demonstrated need, and the University of Richmond is one of these schools. Carolyn Lawrence, an independent counselor, does some great mythbusting and advising about this on her blog.

So even if you (parents) have sent a student off to college before, and did not qualify for financial aid, please don’t let that deter you from applying again. I worked with a family last year that had sent two students off to college before – one to a public university whose cost was lower than their EFC (so they did not receive any financial aid), and one to a private university that cost well above their EFC but did not guarantee to meet demonstrated need (and they did not receive any financial aid). Based on their past experiences, they did not intend to “waste time” applying for financial aid because they hadn’t received any before. I encouraged them to apply, they did, and they ended up receiving a fairly generous package.

For another real-life example, just turn to FinAid.org’s EFC Calculator and plug in your own numbers. See what it spits out. Keeping in mind that this is just an estimate (but often a pretty good one), see how that estimated EFC compares to the total cost for Richmond ($47,050 for 2008-2009). Whatever the difference, however big or small – we guarantee that we’ll meet it. It’s that simple. It might seem almost too simple, especially if you’ve had past experiences that didn’t seem so straightforward, but remember that only 70 colleges in the country do this. Remember, too, that the number of children you have in college significantly impacts your EFC (to your benefit) – so be sure to take that into account as well.

At Richmond, though, it doesn’t stop just with meeting 100% of your need. It’s also how we meet your need. Within your need-based aid package, Richmond will cap the loans/work study portion at $4000 and award the rest in grant money (free money, which does not have to be repaid). Moreover, if you bring in outside scholarships, we’ll start by replacing the loan portion to give you the maximum amount of grant aid possible and lessen debt.

You might wonder why I seem so excited about this, or why I’m bolding so many things in this (very long) post. The reason is that, even during my first year in admissions, I worked with several families who did not plan to apply for financial aid because they assumed (based on hearsay, stereotypes, or previous experience) that they would not receive any; I encouraged them to apply, and some of them were very pleasantly surprised by the amount of aid they did end up receiving. Richmond is pretty unique in what we do. So everyone should seriously consider applying for financial aid.

If you have further questions about this, or more specific concerns, please feel free to be in touch with our Office of Financial Aid (800-700-1662). We will also be hosting another online chat for parents, focused on the topic of financial aid, which will take place on Thursday, January 29, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Come join us to learn even more!

By Tom

I love autumn. It’s my favorite season of the year. The brisk days, the changing leaves, apple cider… it’s an exciting and invigorating time. And now that I’m working in college admissions, autumn brings back fond memories of my own senior year in high school – the campus visits, the final decisions of where I would apply, and the act of actually, really, truly applying to college.

They say that when you visit colleges, you’ll eventually walk onto a particular campus and have that “click” moment when you realize that this place is the right fit, the perfect school. In fact, I hear a lot of people talking about this experience – I think it’s become part of college admission lore (right alongside the story that community service trumps any other form of involvement and that the FAFSA determines how much financial aid you receive). As with any lore, there is some truth and some myth to it. In this case, I think it’s true for some people and not true for others.

I never had that sort of “click” experience in my own college search process, nor did I identify one single “perfect school” for myself. Instead, I visited a number of campuses that I liked, where I could definitely see myself fitting in and thriving. And if that’s your story, let me reassure you that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

In fact, there are a lot of advantages for those of us who don’t find the perfect school: we can keep our options open, weigh advantages and disadvantages, and see what the application process brings us. For me, financial aid ultimately became a significant factor in my decision, and that was totally okay, since I could see myself at any number of colleges and allowed finances to help narrow my options.

Now, don’t get me wrong – some of you will definitely have the “click” moment and find your one top school. And I hope that for many of you, that school will be the University of Richmond! Early Decision can become a great option for students who are 100% sure of where they want to be, and there is something very exciting about having that moment and knowing you have a runaway first choice.

I should note, however, that I don’t ultimately believe there is such a thing as one single, perfect school for anyone, even those who are 100% sure of a top choice (there’s an important distinction between a top choice and a perfect school). There are hundreds of excellent institutions of higher education across this country and beyond, and you can receive a great education – and truly fit in – at any number of them. I firmly believe this. Even if you identify one top choice school, you have to recognize that colleges also have to make decisions about who they feel is best suited for their campuses. I don’t mean to be a downer, but I would point out that I have heard dozens of stories of students who don’t get into their top choice (“perfect”) school and instead find themselves perfectly happy and excited at another – in fact, exceptions to this are rare in my experience. It’s important that you always remain open to different options at the most basic level.

So is the perfect school a reality? No. Instead, I think it’s a reality that some students have a “click” moment and identify the one place they most want to be, and that some students don’t. And I think both are entirely valid experiences.