By Jeremy Tiers, Director of Admissions Services
Tudor Collegiate Strategies and Niche have once again partnered together on a joint survey project, this time receiving feedback from 7,129 high school juniors.
The Class of 2022 has had an early search process unlike any other, so it’s important to understand what has changed for them, how they’re feeling about everything, and how you may need to adjust your recruiting strategy.
Key Takeaways:
- 25% of juniors have already narrowed down their list of schools, while another 68% are actively doing college research. The majority of juniors reported actively started researching colleges between the summer before their junior year and the spring of their junior year.
- In a very surprising turn, juniors who have a preference for considering the distance from home are more likely to want to go further away than the senior class has reported. They were more likely to want to attend colleges four or more hours away from home than those within 30 minutes.
- Again we see the majority of students eliminating colleges from consideration based upon the published total cost. Almost a third of students said that $30,000 would be too much to consider.
- 75% of juniors believe that their chances of being accepted will be hurt if they do not submit test scores with their application to test-optional and test-blind colleges.
- Nearly half of students reported that they had already taken the SAT, ACT, or CLT; and amazingly only 6% reported that they don’t plan to take a test. Of students who have taken, or plan to take, a test, 96% plan to submit the scores to some or all of their colleges when they apply.
- Only 16% said that the outreach they’ve received is very personalized. Just like their senior counterparts, juniors feel that most of the information they’ve received from colleges and universities is very transactional, impersonal, generic, and mass message sounding.