Admission Matters: What Students and Parents Need to Know
About Getting Into College (Second Edition)
by Sally P. Springer, Jon Reider, and Marion R. Franck

BOOK REVIEW by Jennifer Dees

Admission Matters is a great first book to guide your college search, application, and admissions process. The authors are experienced in college admissions from both the high school and college sides, and at both public and private universities. The book is especially helpful in orienting readers to how very selective the one hundred most selective colleges have become today. After your expectations have been adjusted, the authors offer help in adjusting your attitude about it all as well.

This book is a good place for homeschoolers specifically to start looking over the college search landscape. The authors say they have written the book "…to demystify the college admissions process by explaining how it works and to level the playing field for those without access to extensive assistance from knowledgeable high school counselors." The latter situation may be the case for students who attend large public high schools, but it's especially true in the case of homeschooled students, whose parents wear yet another hat in serving as their high school counselors.

The style of the book is very readable and accessible, and it is aimed at both students and their parents. You can read a sample chapter ("Why Has College Admissions Become So Competitive?") on the book's accompanying Web site. The site includes a detailed Table of Contents as well.

The book presents criticisms of the current obsession with college rankings, concluding, "The rankings simply don't measure what they are supposed to assess – the educational experience for an individual student." The authors recommend an alternative or at least complementary measure, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and they explain what it reflects about colleges.

Since the one hundred most selective colleges and universities receive more applications every year, the trend of increasing selectivity is likely to continue. Therefore the authors offer sound advice about creating a realistic prospective college list.

The first category they call "good-bet" colleges, which include those where the student is almost certain to be admitted (they recommend having one to three of these on a list). Next, they recommend choosing two to four "possible" colleges, which involve chances that "can range from fairly likely to fifty-fifty to not too likely." Finally, they suggest two to three "long-shot" colleges, those "where the college's acceptance rate combined with the student's record makes admission unlikely but not impossible." They then describe how to use the student's grades and SAT scores compared to the college's mid-range of scores to decide which are good-bet, possible, and long-shot choices.

This book would be excellent to read even before you're actively compiling a college list, because it has sections that really put the PSAT (Preliminary SAT) and SAT into perspective, as well as academic preparation during high school. There is also helpful information about essay writing, about "Early Decision" and "Early Action" college applications, a review of The Common Application used by more than 450 colleges, and an overview of financial aid considerations.

There is a brief section just about homeschoolers, but they say, "As you approach the college application process, our basic advice is that you should try to emulate the behavior of a regular high school applicant as much as possible." One of the authors, Jon Reider, wrote Stanford University's original homeschool application guidelines, so this carries additional weight. The book further notes, "There is excellent, more detailed advice available from some college Web sites (for example, you can search for Home-Schooled Applicant Guidelines at Stanford University, Homeschool Admission Guidelines at Claremont McKenna College, and Homeschool Applicants at Lawrence University) to find suggestions on how to proceed that will fit almost any college."

The one drawback of buying the book now is that it was published in 2009 and it includes data on "the class of 2012," the one that entered college in the fall of 2008, which makes its data three years old. However, if anything, selectivity at colleges has only increased, so this book is still a strong starting point if you also check for updated information on colleges important to you.

December 14, 2011

Copyright 2011 Jennifer Dees