Opening doors through community service

by Nancy Griesemer

This is the first of a series of 3 articles on community service.

Incorporating community service into your life is incredibly rewarding and is almost always habit-forming. In fact, it often opens doors for life.

As you consider volunteer options, look for opportunities that fit you—your interests and skills. You don’t have to travel across the world or pay fees to be an effective volunteer. Some of the most engaging community service may be found right in your own backyard and costs nothing but your time and caring.

And the time commitment is entirely up to you. You can be deeply involved in a one-time event or you can sign up for a couple of hours each week. It really doesn’t matter.

Yes, community service pays off in many different ways. By sharing your time and talent with others, you most certainly will:

• Do some good. Volunteers have the opportunity to make a difference—change lives, support a cause, or improve the world around us.

• Discover a passion. Figuring out what you really love to do and channeling it into something productive is the surest road to happiness. And what better way is there to discover passion than through service to others?

• Test-drive careers. If you’re thinking about medicine, teaching, or even large animal husbandry, volunteer in a clinic, a school or on a farm. Community service provides hands-on experience and opportunities to explore different career paths. 

• Polish job-readiness skills. Being dependable, on time, and responsible not only makes you a great volunteer but also prepares you for entering the world of work. In addition, you can develop communication, organization, and invaluable “people” skills, all of which make you incredibly employable.
  
• Learn to collaborate. At its core, volunteerism is about teamwork. The ability to collaborate on a shared goal is an essential element of community service, whether it’s participating on a construction crew for Habitat for Humanity or fundraising for the American Cancer Society. And along the way, you may learn how to develop a business plan, schedule activities, and assign tasks—all valued skills for prospective business majors.

• Expand your network. Volunteering is a great way to make new friends and build solid connections to businesses, schools, or other community-based organizations. These are the kinds of relationships that tend to grow and blossom, particularly if you find yourself working in a team or supporting a cause.

• Get a recommendation: A byproduct of the volunteer experience can be a strong personal recommendation for college, scholarships, or future employment. While teachers and counselors can speak to academic and school-based accomplishments, some of your best character references will come from among supervisors and co-workers in organizations to which you contributed volunteer hours.

• Challenge your comfort zone. If life as a high school student has become a little boring and predictable, try volunteering in a totally unfamiliar part of your community or serving a population with which you don’t ordinarily interact. Expose yourself to new ideas, challenges and situations that will help you grow as a person.

• Enhance scholarship prospects. Although service to others should be its own reward, there’s no question that colleges, foundations, and businesses are willing to acknowledge service by awarding very generous scholarships. Winners of these kinds of honors typically begin early and dedicate significant hours throughout high school.

• Build leadership skills. As a volunteer, you may be presented with opportunities to build supervisory, management, or decision-making skills as a team leader or project organizer. You might even get the opportunity to explore your entrepreneurial side. These are talents that colleges, scholarship organizations, and employers value highly.

• Receive academic credit. If your school offers service-learning as part of the curriculum, you could be eligible for academic or extra credit if you volunteer your time or get involved in a community-based project. In fact, high schools are increasingly seeing the benefits accrued by students engaged in various kinds of ‘experiential learning’ opportunities and are moving to make them required for graduation.
  
• Upgrade college portfolio. Colleges want to see that you’ve done something more with your summer than texting or posting pictures on Instagram. Community service provides strong evidence of character, commitment, and motivation—all of which are pluses in college admissions.

• Discover an essay. The best college essays flow from personal experience. In fact, essay questions often ask about significant achievements, events, or people—all of which may be found by volunteering.

• Learn something. You learn by doing. And if you’re lucky, you may even be offered specific skills training you can take with you long after the event or project is completed.

• Be a role model. As a volunteer, you set an important example for your friends, family and community. When you step up, others will follow.
  
• Do some good. This cannot be overstated.

So get involved. You really will make a world of difference for yourself and others!

Headlines from NACAC’s 2019 State of College Admission

by Nancy Griesemer

Every year, the Arlington-based National Association for College Admission Counseling(NACAC) surveys its members to get a picture of what’s happening in the world of college admissions. Their results are compiled in NACAC’s State of College Admission, which essentially examines the “transition from high school to postsecondary education” and features data collected from school counselors as well as admissions staff at colleges and universities across the country.

This year, 2345 school counseling offices responded to the Counseling Trends Survey (CTS), of which 85% were public, 6% private non-parochial and 10% private parochial. The Admissions Trends Survey (ATS) was subdivided into two parts—one went to admission offices and the other went to institutional research (IR) offices. NACAC received 447 institutional responses for an overall response rate of 35% out of 1263 colleges contacted.

While the report provides a good overall snapshot of the state of the college admission industry, a few specific headlines are worth noting:

1.      College applications increased by 6 percent. The Higher Education Research Institute reports that 36% of first-time freshmen applied to seven or more colleges. And according to the Admission Trends Survey, the average number of applications for each admission office staff member for Fall 2017 was 1035 for public institutions and 461 for private institutions. It’s no surprise admissions offices are increasingly turning to enrollment management software for support.

2.      Colleges and universities accept two-thirds of applicants. Despite how it feels to the average high school student, the average selectivity rate among colleges surveyed was 66.7% for Fall 2017. This rate has actually increased from a low of 63.9% in Fall 2012.

3.      Average yield rate holds steady after long decline. Over the past ten years, average yield (percent of students accepting an offer of admission) has steadily declined from 48% in Fall 2007 to 33.7% in Fall 2017. While yield rates mean little to most prospective students, accurately predicting yield is critical to admissions professionals hoping to avoid either over- or under-enrollment. Having this metric stay steady is a big deal for those charged with crunching the numbers.

4.     Email tops the list of recruitment strategies. Colleges have a wide range of tools available for connecting with prospective applicants. Not surprisingly, contacting them through email and engaging with them through the institution’s website or by hosting campus visits were the most “important.”

5.      Early decision applicants increased in 2018. Twenty-five percent of respondents to the Admission Trends Survey offer Early Decision (ED). Between Fall 2017 and Fall 2018, colleges reported an average increase of 11% in the number of ED applicants and 10% in ED admits.

6.      Early action also increased.Thirty-eight percent of colleges responding to the ATS offered early action options. For Fall 2018, 45% of applications to colleges with early action plans were received through EA. But average yield rate for EA admits was nearly identical to that of the overall pool (25% and 24% respectively). From Fall 2017 to Fall 2018, the number of EA applications increased by 10%, while the number of students accepted through EA increased by 9%.

7.      Likelihood of wait list acceptance remains low. While wait list activity generally increased, the odds of getting admitted from the wait list were still pretty low. For the Fall 2018 admission cycle, 43% of colleges reported using a wait list and placing an average of 10% of all applicants on the wait list. An average 50% of waitlisted students opted to stay on the wait list, while colleges admitted only about 20% of these hopefuls.

8.      Admissions offices identify grades and curriculum as top factors in admissions. For decades, academic performance in high school has been the most important consideration in freshman admission. In fact the relative importance of many admissions decision factors have remained “remarkably” stable over time. Notable exceptions would include the declining importance of class rank and interviews.

9.      Student-to-counselor ratios remain outrageous. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2016-17 each public school counselor was responsible for overseeing a caseload of 455 students, on average. This number greatly exceeds the 250:1 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association. Only New Hampshire and Vermont had ratios below the ASCA’s recommended standard (220 and 202 respectively). The states with the highest number of students per school counselor included Arizona (905), Michigan (741), Illinois (686), California (663) and Minnesota (659).

10.  Private schools devote more time to college counseling. College admissions counseling is only one of myriad responsibilities shouldered by school counselors. Counseling staff at private schools spend an average of 31% of their time on college counseling, while their colleagues in public schools spend only 19% of their time on that task.