As April begins, high school seniors choose colleges and the Boston University Admissions Office waits to see how many of their admitted applicants will send back their enrollment confirmations in the next month.
The office said it has seen a “definite increase” in the number of applications it receives every year and in the number of schools applicants compare and apply to, making the process of admitting the right amount of students and of evaluating these applicants more challenging, according to BU spokesman Colin Riley.
Riley said every year it is increasingly harder for BU admissions to judge how many students will enroll, once admitted.
“It’s an art, it’s not a science,” he said. “It’s an art that people in the Office of Admissions are truly expert in.”
According to the office, it had to process in 2005 its largest number of applications in the past three years when the class of 2009 was chosen among over 31,000 applicants.
Waived application fees and the spread of the Common Application are often responsible for the high amount of applications high school seniors send, Riley said.
To counter the influence of applicants comparing many colleges to BU, the Admissions Office holds various programs to entice prospective students into enrolling. Riley said programs including campus tours, overnight hosting, day hosting and open house events have a positive effect on prospective students who evaluate many colleges.
“We know that the determining factor is usually a visit to campus,” Riley said.
BU also employs recruitment efforts to attract students who for practical reasons cannot visit campus and who the Admissions Office believes have a strong interest and a good likelihood of enrolling.
“If a student expresses an interest for BU and they are in a particular area of the country that our recruiters will travel to, they will host an information session,” Riley said. “That is certainly very effective in addressing questions they have and in telling them about the university.”
Campus tours are one of the favorite tools that the Admissions Office pulls on prospective students.
“It’s the first week that kids have been getting their acceptances, but there has definitely been a slight increase,” tour guide and College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Zach Hobbs said. “You can tell we are getting more questions about things that are burdening kids who know they are coming rather than kids who think they are coming.
“A lot of families come in and we are the fifth or sixth school they have looked at just in the Boston area in a weekend,” Hobbs continued. “That makes a huge difference in how they perceive this school. It would be really difficult to make a good decision seeing that many schools in that short amount of time.”
Two years ago, Hobbs was in the same situation when April arrived and he started receiving acceptance letters from the 15 colleges he had applied to.
“It was mostly because I was unprepared for the process,” he said. “I think most people with research ahead of time wouldn’t need to apply to that many.”
Hobbs said he sent a dozen Common Applications, a process that, because of its ease, enables students to apply to a greater number of colleges.
Many students said they applied to six to eight colleges during their high school senior year. Students said applying to a dozen schools or more is unnecessary and results from a lack of focus and of knowledge about the schools students apply to.
CAS freshman Spencer Doherty applied to four schools last spring.
“It shows that they don’t really have set criteria for what school they really want to go to,” he said.
Some students said they blame peer pressure, pressure from parents or a lack of overall guidance in the applications process for the increasingly large amount of colleges that applicants consider.
“I know when I went to high school, my counselors weren’t helpful at all in helping me narrow down what I wanted to study or how big of a school I wanted to go to,” Doherty said.
According to some students, the strongest influence on prospective students comes from the Office of Financial Aid.
The financial aid packages BU offers makes many students consider the $65 online application fee an investment in order to have the option of comparing different financial aid packages offered in April.