What's new
- Profile → Admissions: "What they look at" shows whether each factor is required, considered, or not considered: high school GPA, the high school record, class rank, a college-prep program, recommendations, an essay, legacy status, work experience, and more. A plain line appears when a college considers whether an applicant's parent attended, and a "Recent change" line when a factor changed since fall 2023.
- Profile → Over time → Changes: policy changes over the last 10 years, such as "Stopped considering legacy status, fall 2023", including housing policies like requiring first-years to live on campus.
- Home → What's changed: "Fewer colleges weigh legacy." Between fall 2022 and fall 2024, 88 colleges stopped considering legacy status and 17 started, across 1,559 colleges reporting both years (32% to 28%).
- Explore: filters for colleges that don't consider legacy, don't require an essay, or require a GPA.
- Compare: a row for each factor.
- Glossary: admission factors, legacy status, high school record, and college-prep program.
Behind the scenes
- From the federal admissions survey colleges complete each year, for fall 2024. No existing value changed.
- Changes are worked out from each college's yearly answers, never typed in by hand. The survey's categories were redesigned in fall 2022, so a change that only reflects the new categories isn't shown, nor is one undone within two years.
- Only the last 10 years of changes appear: earlier years show bursts in a single year that look like changes to the survey question rather than to colleges' policies.
- This completes wave 1 of the data expansion, so it no longer appears on the roadmap.
The last of the five wave 1 specs: admission-factors.md.