Iowa high school seniors anxious for college acceptance letters

Plenty of Iowa teens are anxious lately, looking forlornly toward their mailboxes. High school seniors should hear within the next week whether they’ve been accepted to college.  

Joie Jager-Hyman, a former applications evaluator for Dartmouth College , has studied the application process in-depth. She says many wanna-be college-bound Iowa kids have applied for the same spots. Jager-Hyman says: "It’s more selective than ever. There’s just more kids graduating from high school. There’s a bit of a demographic bulge so there are a lot of high school graduates this year. Many of them are really well-prepared and a lot of them are applying to more colleges than before. People a generation ago would apply to five or six. Now, kids are applying to more."  

She says colleges still evaluate students on grades, but there’s a lot more to consider. "Grades and test scores are still the most important thing. It’s still primarily an academic assessment but they’re not looking at it as evaluating a student’s merit or potential on an absolute scale," she says. "They’re really trying to build a class. What that means is they need football teams and they need kids whose parents went there and they need other types of students that will do things that the college cares about. It’s a complicated process and different students are looked at differently."  

Jager-Hyman recently wrote a book called "The Fat Envelope Frenzy." When a student is selected to attend a college, they’ll get a fat envelope full of information, while the rejection is in a thin envelope.  

No matter which letter a student receives, she says they need to keep things in perspective. Jager-Hyman says: "It’s one small piece of hopefully a long life and everybody in the end ends up happy and these kids are a lot more resilient than we give them credit for. I think sometimes when you’re in it or in it as a parent, it’s hard to see what will happen either good or bad when those envelopes come. Life definitely does go on."  

The wait for Iowa seniors should be over soon, as she says most colleges will send out the letters, be they for acceptance or rejection, by April 1st.