Did your Zip Code Sink Your Chances of Admission?

High school is tough.  Many students can't wait to move on to college.  You might be surprised to learn how much your high school plays a role in where you actually end up.  

According to Rachel Toor’s 2001 candid inside account of the admissions process at Duke, Admissions Confidential, colleges care about their relationships with certain high schools.  Toor writes, “We do care about offending the guidance counselors at the fancy schools, who are in large part responsible for making up the ‘college lists’ of the kids they advise.  If they start steering applicants away, that can affect our numbers…We wouldn’t want to do anything to affect our numbers.  Unless it’s to make them go up.”  

The “numbers” she is referring to apply to applicants, not acceptances.  Admissions officers want the number of applicants to rise, even as the number of available spots stagnates, or even decreases.  A low acceptance rate could lead to a high placement in the U.S. News & World Report rankings – those rejecting the most students must be the best, or so goes the logic of U.S. News. 

Also note that this courtship only applies to the “fancy” schools.  How do you know if your school is on a college’s dancing card?  Most of the “fancy” schools are private and located in and around major metropolitan areas – New York, Boston, D.C., San Francisco, etc.  Unless you go to one of these schools, or are a star from an underrepresented state (like Alaska), your zip code could be working against your chances of admission.

Toor also explains that Duke would accept weaker students if it meant establishing a fruitful relationship with a targeted school.  As she writes, “There’s nothing like having an enthusiastic first-year college student return to her high school in the fall, talking about how much she loves her university, to increase applications.  For that reason, we took special care with decisions on kids who were clearly ‘impact’ kids in their high school, where everyone in the school would be aware of their college application process and its outcome.”  

I wouldn’t be surprised if for every underqualified “impact” student at a “fancy” high school, an overqualified student at a regular old high school (the type most of us attended) is rejected. 

The courtship works both ways.  Guidance counselors from certain high schools have been known to lobby selective colleges on behalf of their students.  You can't blame them - these counselors are just doing their job, and doing it well.  Do you think it would have made a difference if your guidance counselor had the ear of the admissions official at your top-choice school?  Well, a personal conversation puts a face on an application, and gives the reader helpful information, such as explaining away a less than stellar performance in a particular class.  This is clearly not an equal playing field.  Regular students can’t compete with guidance counselors personally pitching their students to admissions officers. 

             

Your zip code could also sink your chances because colleges have regional targets to yield a geographically diverse class.  One expert in the field described it this way: “There is not a college president who does not like to stand before the freshman class and proudly announce that every state in the union and many foreign countries are represented there” (Evaluative Judgments vs. Bias In College Admissions, Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, Forbes.com, 8/11/2010). 

Given these targets, if you come from an area densely populated with qualified applicants, you have to stand out in order to be among the few accepted from the region.  So unless your parents are willing to move to Montana, this is yet another factor in the college admissions process that is simply out of your control.