How COVID-19 going to impact college admissions

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Due to this pandemic, universities around the globe have faced major delays in their admission processes. Normally universities are filled up by a particular time of the year and they start their sessions same time every year and students choose their universities and plan their admission the process according to that but this year as due to the uncertainties surrounding the health and financial implications of the pandemic, many colleges will not have filled their classes by their traditional deadlines. Colleges which are concerned about not meeting their annual student the goal will be more flexible regarding application deadlines and admission processes.

Better Chance of getting in:

If a student has applied to a university which is more selective, they will be just as hard to get in but as their waitlist is going to be way longer than before and it will be hard for them to tell if the international students will be able to travel to come to the university, they will be accepting more students from the waitlist compared to last year.

And the rest of the colleges which are less selective are also going to accept more applicants as they understand that most of the students are going to consider colleges which are closer to home and are more affordable so these colleges are going to admit more students than last year as because they expect that more of their admitted students will ultimately opt to stay closer to home or to attend a more affordable school.

Better Scholarships:

Due to this pandemic, students are declining college offers because of the health concerns it brings and the financial fallouts they’ve experienced due to this pandemic. Colleges can’t really afford to have so many students declining their offers as they have their annual student goal to reach. So they use the biggest influencer to lure students in which is more money. Colleges in this pandemic are believed to offer more money to students in order to get them to enroll in their universities. It makes it easy for the students as finance don’t become an important factor in choosing a university and almost all universities assure full hygiene and medical support in this pandemic. So as colleges are handing out more money or better scholarships, the competition for student enrollment will get intense. So like this, colleges will probably reach their annual student enrollment goals and students will get to go to the University of their choice so it is a win-win situation.

University Crisis:

Educational department is one of the highly affected departments in this pandemic, universities were hit by such crisis out of nowhere and now as many universities are financially capable to keep themselves together, there are others who started recently and now had to face such crisis and are left with no other option than to close their gates and shut down their institution. According to an Education Dive database, 60 private and public nonprofit colleges across the country have either closed or merged since 2016.Other universities which started on shaky financial grounds are also going down the same path to closure.

Many institutions have faced loses of millions of dollars and it's incredibly hard for them to recover from it. Institutions have adopted many cost-cutting measures, to buffer its losses, a lot of universities froze salaries, slowed down academic hiring, suspended discretionary spending and started to look for other budget cuts.

Student’s Experiences:                                                       

Students were asked how they were adjusting to remote learning, many teenagers responded by telling us about all the things they miss about going to school: their friends, teachers, sports, and extracurricular activities. Some also recounted the challenges of distance learning, like struggling to understand assignments, getting easily distracted and not having reliable internet.

However, many students also said there were aspects of remote learning they enjoyed, such as getting to work at their own pace, setting their own schedule and being free from “the stressful the environment of the school.”

Discussions were also raised about how this pandemic can make permanent changes in our educations system, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business:

 People resist new ideas until external shocks force them to change, who cites as an example the way World War II propelled women into jobs that had traditionally been done by men. “We are at that kind of an inflection point.”

Faculty will ask themselves, “What part of what we just did can be substituted with technology and what part can be complemented by technology to transform higher education?”

Universities should consider this semester an experiment to see which classes were most effectively delivered online, he said — big introductory courses better taught through video-recorded lectures by faculty stars and with online textbooks, for example, which could be shared among institutions to lower the cost.

Students who want classes best provided face to face, such as those in the performing arts or that require lab work would continue to take them that way.

“Let’s take advantage of this moment to start a larger conversation” about the whole design of higher education.

“We had better not lose this opportunity.”

- Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.