Born in California, Alex Brightman is a two-time Tony nominee and writer living in New York City. He loves watching baseball and basketball when he's not on stage. Right now you can see him as Richard Dreyfuss in “The Shark is Broken” on Broadway.
09.09.2023 - 10:57 / forbes.com
The price of gas is rising. Air travel is a mess. But this fall, many college-bound high school seniors and their parents will spend days—sometimes happily, sometimes not—exploring far flung campuses. They may ask blunt questions of undergraduate guides; wander through dorms where the students aren’t yet dressed; listen to lectures (if they get there on a weekday); snap touristy selfies with scenic views (at parents’ insistence); or find that tours at the schools highest on their lists are already booked up, at least for fall weekends.
While college visits done right (see the tips below) are still a valuable way to determine whether an institution is the right fit, taking an official tour of Princeton, Yale, Stanford, or Harvard won’t earn you any points with the admissions office. Yes, many colleges do still consider what is called “demonstrated interest”—how eager a given applicant appears to be to attend the school—in their admissions decisions. And historically, taking the tour was a good way to show interest.
But today, no members of the Ivy League and none of the top 15 schools on Forbes’ 2023 America’s Top Colleges even consider applicants’ interest as a factor in admissions. Looking at the top 100 on the new Forbes list, only 48% of private schools and 23% of public schools take demonstrated interest into account, according to the latest information they’ve provided to what’s known as the Common Data Set. By contrast, 81% of those same private colleges (including all eight Ivies) consider legacy status—meaning whether an applicant is the child of a graduate, and particularly a wealthy one who might be or become a donor. (Among state schools in the top 100, only 27% consider legacy.)
Moreover, even those admissions officers who care about demonstrated interest measure it by a lot more than just who schleps to campus. They count interactions at college fairs and high school visits and how many times the student contacts the admissions office. And, like any good marketer, they track open rates and click through rates on emails.
Then there’s the University of Michigan (the highest ranked public college on the Forbes list that’s outside of California). It doesn’t track clicks or visits, but factors in a student’s interest based on how they respond to an essay question asking what attracts them to the program they’re applying to, reports Kelly Cox, senior associate director of recruitment and operations with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Rice University in Houston does the same.
Giving extra points for a college visit has fallen out of favor for several reasons. One is equity (though that doesn’t seem to have killed legacy preference). Not everyone can afford a cross-country flight or
Born in California, Alex Brightman is a two-time Tony nominee and writer living in New York City. He loves watching baseball and basketball when he's not on stage. Right now you can see him as Richard Dreyfuss in “The Shark is Broken” on Broadway.
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“You’re here for the launch?” Ted Ebbers asked me the night of April 19, 2023, when we met on the beach of South Padre Island, Texas. The answer was obvious: We both were killing time before the next day’s scheduled flight of the world’s most powerful rocket. A recently retired Canadian federal employee, Ebbers, 58, drove from his home in Toronto to SpaceX’s spaceport in Boca Chica to watch his first rocket launch. He made the 1,900-mile trip alone, sleeping overnight at rest stops inside his Tesla Model Y.
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It's become an iconic image of travel in the United States – a red convertible with the top down, cruising such classic California thoroughfares as the Pacific Coast Highway or across the Golden Gate Bridge.
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The saying goes, "West Coast, best coast," for a reason.