Admissions standards are shifting. Tuition costs have outpaced inflation. Students, parents and state agencies have tried to find ways to cope with the changes in higher education.
This generation of college students faces different challenges from students a decade ago.
“It’s so different nowadays,” said Keith Buchholz of Olympia, whose daughter, Palmer, 17, represents students on the Olympia School Board. She has applied to eight different colleges, he said.
“It’s a different world. The amount of information she had to create was unbelievable. And each school asked for different material, so (applications) had to be tailored to the individual schools.”
Stephanie Brodin, career adviser at North Thurston High School, said students have been asking her questions since the first day of school about everything — from whether they’re taking the right classes to whether they’ll be accepted.
“One of the main concerns is just the money to pay for it,” she said.
Getting in
State colleges are bigger than ever, but they haven’t necessarily been growing at the same pace as demand.
According to the state Higher Education Coordinating Board, enrollment must grow to more than 242,000 by 2010 to keep up with the number of students in school. That would be an increase of about 12 percent from 2004-05’s college enrollments — or 26,000 students.
“You need to make sure there is sufficient capacity,” University of Washington President Mark Emmert said in an interview this month.
“You need a whole system of schools.”
While it’s unrealistic for the UW’s Seattle campus to grow by 12 percent, he said, the state must look into building capacity in less crowded schools and in branch campuses.
“What we’re trying to do, is we don’t want to grow the numbers of students in Seattle. ... Where we want to grow most (is) our Bothell and Tacoma campuses.”
“We bring in 4,800 freshmen at the UW,” Emmert added. “We get 17,000 applicants.”
Faced with competition, some students take themselves out of the running before they have a chance to get in — and that’s too bad and unnecessary, said Jim Rawlins, associate director for recruitment and outreach at UW.
“A student looks at the average, and thinks that’s a minimum,” he said. Half the students at UW fall between a 3.5 and a 3.9 GPA, he said; the rest fall above and below that.
“I think it’s horrible that there’s a company out there that says, ‘Better Scores, Better Schools,’” Rawlins said. “I think it’s a terrible way to make a buck.”
While it is true nationally that the grades of incoming freshmen are higher, the reasons behind that are unclear, according to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. In its latest annual report, the group noted that while C grades outnumbered A’s among college freshman in the 1960s, the opposite is true today. But the group said it had found no conclusive results that determined whether grades rose because of student achievement or grade inflation.
The Higher Education Coordinating Board, which oversees the state’s colleges and universities, does not track that information.
The state asked Washington’s universities to move away from what is known as the admissions index, which was entirely based on GPAs and SATs, Rawlins said.
Though some state schools still use the index, all UW applicants will be accepted this year based on factors other than grades and scores, including difficulty of classes, community service and essays.
Because the nature of admissions is changing, students must get help from the admissions departments at the universities to which they apply, rather than relying on outdated information that their parents or other relatives had relied upon, Rawlins said.
“They find out then that GPA and test scores don’t have all the bang they thought they did,” he said.
That doesn’t mean that a student can slack off. North Thurston High School senior Alissa Stempson, 17, who just accepted an offer to go to Gonzaga University, said college was in the back of her and her friends’ minds as they picked clubs and sports. She has a 3.895 GPA and is involved in many sports and service clubs.
“There is a drive to do more stuff and do everything,” she said. “They have sections on the applications for sports and clubs and organizations.”
“You feel like if you leave a section blank, you’re already out of the running.”
Rising tuition
The cost of tuition also has been rising faster than the rate of inflation.
As a result, more students are taking out loans for college and it might be encouraging a generation to take on more debt.
“They’re needing the money and they’re willing to take it,” said Brian Shirley, financial aid director for The Evergreen State College.
“Living expenses have gone up, grant programs in general are down,” he said. “That gap is taken up in loans.”
According to the Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state average for tuition for four-year state colleges and universities rose 72 percent from $2,256 in 1994-95 to $3,879 in 2004-05. For community colleges it rose 78 percent. Other expenses, such as room and board, rose by a third in the same period. Inflation was only 20 percent.
Rising tuition that has outpaced family incomes is one reason students are taking on more debt, according to a report released three years ago by the State Public Interest Research Groups. According to its study, the percentage of students that took on loans jumped 22 percentage points from 1992-93 to 1999-2000. During the same period, 5 percent more seniors were graduating with more than $20,000 in debt.
At The Evergreen State College, although tuition is relatively low at $4,128 a year for in-state students, it has risen for all students about 35 percent in the past five years, Shirley said. The college has also seen a rise in the percentage of students who need help paying for it.
“Back in 2001-2002, 59 percent of our students received some type of financial aid, whether it was grants or loans or work study,” Shirley said. “In 2004-2005, it was 67 percent — a 9 percentage point jump.”
Programs such as work study and Perkins loans — a federal program that provides low-interest loans to students with need — have been declining and the number of loans at Evergreen has increased since 2001-02, he said. “As an institution, we have been processing 47 percent more student loans,” he said. “The only bright spot is that state grant support has gone up” about 65 percent.
He said that college financial aid officers are trying to make students more aware of the effects of loans, and many are getting training in how to counsel students about the effect of the loans when they graduate.
“Students have an increasing debt burden and we’re trying to make that part of their everyday thinking,” he said.
“When you’re a freshman and payments are four years away, you’re not as concerned about it.”
