Colleges Chasing Potential Students
We're a Good Option, Lesser-Knowns Say

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 17, 2008

As soon as three seniors got near the Trinity Washington University table at a Ballou Senior High School college fair, George Walls pounced.

"You want to study forensics? You like criminal justice?" the Trinity associate director of admissions asked, lobbing ideas like tennis balls. "How would you like to do an internship at the CIA? The FBI? The Department of Homeland Security?"

He fixed them with a look. "Do I have an application from you yet?"

Ialisha Morrison and her friends shook their heads no. They had never heard of the private women's college in Northeast Washington.

Walls opened a brochure and pointed to a photo. "Look at this campus! Does that look like a city campus to you? It's 26 acres of fields, trees, squirrels, fountains -- see the squirrel?"

They giggled, and he told them about how much financial aid Trinity gives. "It's what we call the love. You know what that is? When you pull up at the drive-through, order a Number 7 and they supersize it! That's the love."

All that love is the flip side of the college admissions frenzy. Many of the most prestigious schools are swamped with record numbers of applications, making top students curse the odds this winter. But for everyone else -- all the students applying to more-typical schools -- there's no need to worry so much.

It's harder to get into the most selective colleges than it was five or 10 years ago, said David Hawkins, director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, in part because of an unusually large population of high school seniors sending out more applications, driving up numbers of candidates and forcing admission rates down.

But the bigger picture is that there are thousands of colleges in the United States, and many are open to almost anyone with a high school diploma.

On average, U.S. colleges accept about seven of every 10 applicants, Hawkins said. "It's not really all that difficult to get into a four-year college now."

That's why counselors are always trying to reassure stressed-out students: Don't get hung up on one or two big-name universities. Apply to a range of schools. Find the places that fit you and your interests. You'll be fine.

Or as Trinity's president, Patricia McGuire, put it, "There is a place for everyone who wants to come."

Some schools are desperate to get more students.

Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., went coed in the fall to boost enrollment; only a tiny percentage of women consider single-sex schools. The former Randolph-Macon Woman's College had been discounting tuition so deeply for so many students to lure them that the school was no longer financially stable, according to college officials. Randolph has about 665 students this year and needs to get to about 1,000, it says.

This year, applications have nearly tripled, according to John White, Randolph's dean of admissions and student financial services, and school officials are hopeful that recruitment will keep pulling more in for their rolling admissions this spring.

Some schools, such as Georgetown and Brown and Stanford, use recruiting to cast a wider net, reach extraordinary students all over the world and increase the diversity of applicants.

And some schools, even though their application numbers are up, find they need to push recruitment to ensure that enough students enroll. Because many students apply to multiple schools, said Florence Hines, dean of admissions at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md., "what we're seeing is it takes more applications to generate the same numbers."

At Trinity, recruiting isn't a luxury. In 2000, there were 421 students in the university's College of Arts and Sciences. There were nearly 640 at the start of this school year, and applications are up 50 percent over last year at this time.

Trinity mails out glossy brochures, e-mails reminders, creates customized Web pages for interested students, and sends staff to college fairs like the one at Ballou.

There are students who are very bright, McGuire said, but haven't had the advantages of others and haven't been told they can be successful. Some of the most successful future students could be unsure whether to even consider college, she said.

Walls got to the recent college fair at the Southeast Washington public high school more than an hour before the first students arrived. He set up his table, then decided another table was better, then another.

He knew that at least half the students would ignore the college reps and just sit on the bleachers talking with friends. So where he put his Trinity-purple tablecloth and stack of pamphlets was important.

"Here, I can compete with the voices -- and I can be seen," he said. "Real estate is everything."

When Betty Williams, a Ballou counselor, walked by, he told her, "I know you have a lot of young ladies who haven't taken the SAT or ACT yet, but that is not a requirement for applying. . . . Let them know I have fee-waived applications here."

Students began wandering in and sitting down, talking and laughing.

A sophomore looked at the Trinity sign. "I never heard of it," she told Walls. Williams hugged her and told Walls, "This is my sweetheart. She's going to Spelman."

"We'll see about that!" Walls said.

One girl told Walls, "My GPA isn't the best." He encouraged her to visit campus.

When another said she had heard about Trinity from a friend enrolled there, he told her to visit and bring the friend to his office, too, for a chat. "I'm not that busy!" he said, smiling.

He handed out another application with the $40 fee waived and teased, "What do I have to do to get you to fill out an application?"

Again and again, Walls ran through his patter.

"You interested in business?" he asked. "You know, you can't trip and fall without hitting your head on a Fortune 500 company in D.C.!"'

When Ialisha Morrison and her friends asked about nursing, he told them about the new nursing program at Trinity and the internship opportunities at the hospital nearby.

"On top of all that, our class size is 15, all professor-taught! You play sports?" They shook their heads no; he showed them photos of the new athletic center anyway.

"None of you have applied yet?" he asked again, incredulous.

Morrison, who said her grade-point average is about a 2.5, listened carefully. She wants to be a pediatric nurse, she said later as she held her 6-month-old son, and she thought the small class sizes would help her learn.

"I liked it," she said, "what he was saying and the stuff he was showing me."

She sent her application in last week.