The Unsolicited Golden Ticket 021126

My name is Gary Stocker with College Viability. Let's go beyond the college brochure. It's a ritual as old as the ivy on the walls. The high school senior sits at the kitchen table surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. There are essays to polish, personal statements to agonize over, and a $50 check to write for every single school on the application list. And then the wait, the long agonizing walk to the mailbox, hoping for the thick envelope and fearing the thin one. It's a game of one-way street. You did the asking and they did the deciding. And it was played out across the country of ours. We've always assumed that's just how the gateway to the future works. You ask, and if you're lucky, they say yes. But lately, in the quiet offices of the admissions deans, the script is being flipped. You see, the one-way street game isn't working like it used to. The birth rate is down and has been for a long time. Skepticism of higher education is up and the halls of higher education learning are starting to look a little hollow, not hallowed. And so the schools, the colleges have come up with a new plan. They've decided to stop waiting, to stop waiting for you to knock on the door. Instead, they're going out in the proverbial neighborhood looking through the windows and sliding the golden ticket, the golden admissions ticket, under the doormat before the student even asks for it. They call it direct admissions, and on the surface it sounds like a dream. No applications, no essays, no fees. You just wake up one morning, check your email, and find out you've already been accepted to something like 3 colleges you never even applied to. It's a miracle in the inbox. But as the Chronicle of Higher Education is finding out, this new automatic future has a few wrinkles. Because while it's easy to send an email, it's much, much harder to send a student. The schools are finding that a yes yes from the university doesn't always lead to a yes from that student's kitchen table. Many of these students, the ones the schools are so desperate to reach, don't have the money for the dorms. They don't have the hidden knowledge or the knowledge at all of how to navigate a bursar's office, admissions office, and much, much more. And more than that, they're skeptical. They're skeptical. They wonder why a school they never talked to is so suddenly eager to have them. The colleges call it access. We call it enrollment by solicitation. Enrollment by solicitation. And for some, it is exactly that. But for the struggling colleges, for those struggling colleges, it is something else. It's a Hail Mary pass. In a game they're losing in way too many cases. They aren't just opening the doors, they're begging people to walk through them. We used to think that a college acceptance was a prize that you earned, but in the age of direct admissions, it's become a sales pitch that you can't escape. The schools have realized that the gateway The historical gateway isn't a privilege anymore. It's a product. And they're finding out that even when you almost give the product, the education away for free, some people still, too many people still aren't buying. The college brochure says, you're invited. You're invited. The reality says, We're worried. And now we have gone beyond the college brochure. I'm Gary Stocker with College Viability.