Admissions in the Time of COVID

Before moving into Bursley Hall in late August, first-year student Jeffrey Jin had never set foot on the U-M campus. But by last April, when the Texas native learned he had been admitted into the LSA Honors Program, he could tell you which residence halls are most conveniently located and which dining hall has the tastiest food. He knew honors classes offer special access to professors and that the Department of Political Science is top notch. He could even suggest a place to get a bite to eat off campus.

In fact, between YouTube videos and Reddit posts, Jin felt pretty confident that he knew what to expect upon arrival on campus this fall. He had spent hours reading the candid opinions of current U-M students, along with those at more than a dozen other colleges he applied to last fall. Day-in-the-life videos gave him a taste of what his first year in Ann Arbor might hold. A Zoom meeting for prospective students in the Houston area let him ask U-M alumni about paying out-of-state tuition and dealing with the dramatic difference in climate. Online, Jin also found his roommate, a fellow high school senior who gave him a personal tour of campus via FaceTime.

“We’re, like, the exact same person,” Jin says. “It is incredibly convenient that we found each other.”

Accepting an admissions offer from a college sight unseen and more than 1,200 miles away might sound like a wild leap of faith—but for the incoming class of 2025, it wasn’t an uncommon experience. As shelter-in-place orders, travel restrictions, and COVID caution ruled out the typical campus tour, high school seniors had to get resourceful as they researched schools and imagined their future.

Meanwhile, U-M admissions officials found creative ways to help the next class of 2025 make the biggest decision of their young lives.

As director of U-M’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, Erica Sanders knew from the first months of the pandemic that building the class of 2025 would present a special challenge. The first step is always reaching out to high school seniors who might be a good fit to encourage them to apply. With in-person events discouraged during the past year, Sanders and her counterparts at Michigan’s 14 other public universities worked together to ensure students across the state had as much information as possible about the educational options available at all the state’s four-year institutions.

Next, U-M’s admissions office had to figure out how to help prospective applicants get to know the University at a time when travel and in-person events were prohibited. So they planned virtual question-and-answer sessions, worked with campus partners to create school- and college-specific virtual programming, made materials available to give high schoolers near and far a sense of campus life, and worked to soothe applicants’ worries caused by the pandemic while periodically providing updates to school counselors.

“All of those things certainly provided a lot to think about,” Sanders says.

The key to making it all work was flexibility. Knowing that many applicants had lost access not only to on-campus visits but also to in-person standardized testing, curriculum options, extracurricular activities, and even teachers and guidance counselors who might have advised them about college applications, the University extended deadlines to give applicants more time to complete their applications and submit required materials.

Meanwhile, applicants themselves found creative ways to adapt at a time when most U.S. high schools closed their buildings for all or part of the school year.

“The biggest challenge with college applications was not being able to connect with classmates at school and talk to them about the process,” says Hailey Love, a first-year student at the Ross School of Business and a LEAD Scholar. “But people found different ways to be helpful, like group chats and support groups and Instagram pages. Social media helped to create a different type of community for this year’s application process.”

Maeve Everett, a first-year student in LSA, had spent years diligently practicing for her college admissions exams, but when it finally came time to take the tests, her dates were repeatedly canceled due to the pandemic.

“It was the most frustrating part,” says Everett. “I really just saw no hope in it. So I kind of stopped studying. I didn’t try as hard. And then once I was actually able to take an SAT after months of having tests canceled, I wasn’t able to reach my full potential.” It came as a relief to Everett, who had always dreamed of college in Ann Arbor (“I bleed Maize and Blue”), when U-M, like more than 300 other universities nationwide, made standardized tests optional for 2021 applicants.

“It just felt like they were more caring,” she says, “like they were aware of the situation.”

Cognizant that young people last year faced many tough situations—ranging from bureaucratic frustration to COVID-related trauma—the admissions office encouraged applicants to share their COVID-related experiences in the form of an optional short essay on the Common Application or through short answer questions on the Coalition Application. It was through these that Sanders and her staff got a better picture of how teenagers were experiencing the pandemic. (The Alumni Association encouraged applicants for the LEAD scholarship to submit similar essays. See below for two examples.)

“Students whose parents were front-line workers really thought about the impact of these circumstances on their families,” Sanders says. Other applicants were essential workers themselves, with jobs in child care, retail, or food service. Some had ill family members or unemployed parents, while others struggled with the transition to online learning. Says Sanders: “Many of them wrote about it very articulately.”

While admissions staff were moved and impressed by many of the applicants, Sanders says, it was also a more competitive year, with increases in applications across all categories—in-state, out-of-state, and international. A new record for applications was set, with 83,029 from first-year students for the fall of 2021, an increase of almost 28% since 2020, when 65,021 applied. The University offered admission to 16,235 students and as of mid-July had enrolled 7,529, which will make the incoming class at least 9% larger this year, compared with the fall 2020 enrollment of 6,879.

It’s not clear why the number of U-M’s applications jumped, but Sanders says it’s part of a pattern among flagship schools nationwide, a trend that she believes may be related to students’ desire to be near a major medical institution. Pandemic-related interest was certainly part of the reason why applications to U-M’s School of Public Health (SPH) were up 12%, including a 32% increase in applications from underrepresented minorities, says Rachel Casanova, SPH’s director of student affairs.

“Students are coming to us with a greater idea of what public health is and how they can make impact within it,” Casanova says. “So many of the personal statements are really geared toward questions about the pandemic and marginalized groups or, ‘My grandmother got really sick and this made me realize I need to make a difference here.’ We’re getting a lot of difference makers, which I guess is a positive within a pretty traumatic experience.”

Given the impact of the pandemic on the performing arts, the School of Music, Theatre & Dance (SMTD) also saw an increase in applications.