Dublin School is a four-year prism that sends students hurtling in many different directions post-grad. Most graduating seniors elect to pursue a four-year degree, and over the previous five enrollment cycles have collectively applied to and been accepted at roughly two-hundred-fifty undergraduate institutions. Over that same five-year interval, Dublin students have most frequently gone on to matriculate at Bates College (8 students), University of New Hampshire (8), Northeastern (6), Dickinson (5), Skidmore (5), UMass Amherst (5), and University of Vermont (5). 

Though an assorted list that reflects the ways different students approach college selection, the schools share certain geographic and demographic characteristics that help explain how students think about life after Dublin.

Each of these schools is located in the Northeast, and all, except Davidson, are located in New England. College Counselor Holly Macy, who has been supporting Dubliners through their college selection process since 2007, has noticed a bias for schools in the Northeast emerge in more recent years, especially since COVID.

“Pre-COVID, we were starting to see kids look across the country, and then it's crept back. Few of our students seem interested in exploring outside of the Northeast.”  

Asked why this is, Holly hypothesized there’s a homing-instinct that COVID really set-off. That and also considerations around cultural fit, which amidst a confusing social and political landscape has become increasingly salient. Students are weighing socio-political factors while considering the location of their colleges to an extent unprecedented in Holly’s experience. The Northeast, for many students, seems like a safe cultural bet. 

Demographically, Dublin students often prioritize membership in diverse communities. Their college selections reflect this. Each of the above listed schools score high in diversity (Niche, for example, rates all at B or above, which their own rubric counts in the “high” range), another element of cultural fit, and one Holly feels students take away from their time at Dublin. 

“I would say people really are looking for a diverse community in all senses of the word diverse – it’s a thread that I hear very often. I definitely feel like some of Dublin's values are things that they strongly look for in their college community.” 

Senior Tyreis M., who will be attending University of Southern California next year, echoed this sentiment. Deciding between USC and another school, USC won him over because, to paraphrase, the vibes on USC’s campus were more community forward. 

Cultural fit is just one element of a three-pronged framework for appraising colleges, with the others being academic fit and financial fit. 

Academic fit, which in many ways bears on cultural fit, is often about whether students are seeking a more career-oriented undergraduate track, or an academic experience that is more in the vein of the liberal-arts. And just as the seven-school list above speaks to an interest in belonging to diverse communities, it also underscores how Dublin graduates branch in both directions, some towards a more career forward school, others towards the liberal-arts. Schools like Bates and Skidmore are aggressively for the liberal-arts approach, whereas a school like Northeastern, with its Co-Op program and emphasis on professional experience, is more for the students who are interested in an applied education. 

One senior’s quandary dramatizes this divide very well. In recent weeks, this student has been  deciding between Trinity University (San Antonio) and Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. He plans to study business regardless of which he chooses to attend, yet is struggling to decide between the more career-oriented program of Trinity and the more classically liberal-arts emphasis of Pitzer’s program. 

A major part of Holly’s work with student’s and their families involves having conversations about financial fit, about affordability, a sometimes hard-to-swallow dose of reality. Undergraduate education is heinously expensive, and getting more expensive all the time. Middle-class families rarely qualify for need-based aid, and loans can saddle you with a lifetime’s worth of debt, and all for a slip of paper an increasing number of young-people are deciding isn’t worth the trouble. 

And so Holly works to get families thinking about affordability early and often throughout the college process. Her goal is for families to be frank with themselves about affordability; in recent years, however, Federal Student Aid (FASFA) packages and additional affordability information has been delayed, meaning families have had to act on limited information, sometimes leading to uninformed decisions and unpleasant financial consequences.

“FAFSA has been a real debacle in the last couple cycles. Students haven’t had their aid packages in time to make good decisions, and families have been in the dark about what schools have merit aid, and what cost of attendance will actually look like.”

In an effort to provide families with more resources for assessing financial fit, she lobbied the school to invest in a new software service that will provide a single pane of glass into the college application process, consolidating acceptance statistics alongside historical data on cost of attendance, and aid, amongst other key data. She’s recently finished onboarding the program and will be reaching out to families about access in the coming months. 

Outside of Dublin, the college admissions landscape is always evolving. Did you know many schools are now leaning on AI in the admissions process? That’s a little but yucky, yet makes sense given surging application volumes, especially at top-ranked colleges. Holly’s been working to learn about the use-cases for AI and how to best position Dublin students for success in a world of AI-assisted application review. This may, for example, involve working with Academic Deans to rename courses in ways an AI will classify appropriately. 

Standardized testing is another aspect of the landscape that has been under scrutiny. The sturm und drang of the Pandemic years pushed many schools to go test optional, meaning the SAT / ACT was not a required part of their application process. The thinking there was that standardized tests were not an accurate predictor of college preparedness, not to mention a whole host of equity issues they create. With four years of data now in their pockets, however, colleges are learning that the tests are, in fact, helpful indicators of preparedness. Many are beginning to go back on test-optional policies. Equity issues remain, which is perhaps why colleges are placing more weight on parts of the application that give students a chance to tell their story (think CommonApp essays and supplementals). 

The courts reneged on decades of legal precedent in June of 2023, effectively ending affirmative action in higher education, a policy that for years helped ensure historically underserved segments of the population were represented in institutions of higher learning. And while schools can no longer account for things like race in the admissions process, students remain able to share their story, and colleges remain able to account for personal background in the admissions process. Holly stressed that personal narrative is more important than ever - the question of “who are you,” though an overwhelming question, is worth thinking about. 

When we spoke this past week, Holly was preparing to visit the English 11 classroom to help students begin the process of teasing out their narratives. We have a very strong English department, a robust culture of writing, and students who have stories to tell.