It was not the typical barbecue. What was cooking at Colorado Academy were rejection letters from the country’s top colleges, which are turning away well-qualified students in record numbers as applications boom.
Seniors at the private prep school late last week let the flames in a campus fire pit devour crisp 8½-by-11 pages with short unwelcome messages. The bonfire is a 13-year tradition designed to assuage any bruised egos and to put students in the mood to celebrate their acceptances by other institutions.
They are part of the Echo Boomers, the children of the large Baby Boom generation, which have created a demographic bulge in college application and entrance numbers. But that’s not all.
“More kids are applying. But kids also are applying to more colleges,” said Cathy Nabbefeld, a counselor at the academy in Denver.
A “common application” (www.commonapp.org) now allows students to apply to several colleges at once, and most schools offer incentives, such as fee waivers, to apply online. “It creates a mentality of ‘Why not, what have we got to lose?”‘ Nabbefeld said.
Around the country several months of suspense ended for high school seniors with the early spring arrival, most by April 1, of an envelope or e-mail informing them whether they got into the college of their choice.
Nationwide, four-year colleges accept an average of about 70 percent of their applicants, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
East High School senior Jeremiah Black applied to seven schools – five junior colleges and two universities. A football player, he was hoping to get into Clemson University, which sent him a rejection. He’s going to West Hills Junior College in California.
Black said he wasn’t disappointed with the Clemson decision because he’ll still play football. “I knew something good was coming my way, anyway,” he said.
The University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 admitted about 16,000, or 89 percent, of its 18,000 applicants.
Colorado State University in 2006 admitted 77 percent of its 15,081 applicants.
In contrast to some students who made multiple applications, another East High senior, Rishi Ashtakala applied only to CU-Boulder. He was accepted.
“I knew I would get in. My grades are good,” he said.
Ivy League schools accept far smaller proportions of applicants.
Harvard, for example, just accepted 9 percent of its 23,000 suitors. Adams City High School valedictorian Chris Loney is one of the few who got in. He said his ACT scores weren’t as high as many kids who were rejected, but he served as student body president both his senior and junior years.
And he started a group called Kids First that helped pass a $78 million school bond issue for a new high school and air conditioning for elementary and middle schoolers in Adams County School District 14.
Loney plans to major in government in Harvard.
The current boom in applications took root in the early 1980s when schools struggled with declining enrollments and diminished federal aid for students, according to the Education Conservancy, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit that monitors college admissions.
Colleges began aggressive marketing campaigns. U.S. News and World Report magazine began publishing its rankings of schools. More students, traditionally aspiring to the best schools in their region, began looking nationwide.
The population of graduating high school seniors also grew, to an estimated 3.2 million students this spring, compared with 2.6 million a decade ago – a 23 percent increase.
Despite the increased competition, Nabbefeld said, she encourages students not to panic. “We like kids to build a balanced, manageable list of six or seven schools.”
Kalee Crassia of Colorado Academy applied at 14 colleges.
She relishes her acceptance at Vanderbilt but had to swallow the disappointment of Stanford’s and Duke’s rejections, now relegated to an ash heap.
“It was stressful, but everybody else was going through it,” Crassia said.
Late last week, as a good portion of Colorado Academy’s 85 seniors tossed their negative notices on the fire, they intoned, by turns: “Stanford, Brown, Amherst, Duke, University of Southern California, Bucknell, Georgetown,” and so on.
A sympathetic adult voice in the crowd cried out in response: “Short-sighted weasels.” And, “A pox on USC.”
“I burned American University,” said Christy Laplante, who applied to eight schools and now looks forward to attending Boston University.
A classmate, Ian McNab, who was accepted by most of his seven picks, must now decide where to go by the national reply date of May 1.
“The hardest part is narrowing it down,” he said.
Staff writer Electa Draper can be reached at 970-385-0917 or at edraper@denverpost.com.
