There is one admissions change the DOE implemented this year that I feel is the most impactful of them all: the elimination of the 12 program limit.
In the past, not only did applicants need to consider which programs sounded appealing, but they had to balance that with their chances of receiving an offer. Do you waste one of your precious 12 spots for a program you have a very little chance of getting in to? Do you use up one of your spots for a program you don’t like but need to have it because you need a “backup program”? Now that the 12 program limit has been removed, applicants no longer need to ask those questions.
But what about cutoffs and chances of receiving an offer? Your chances of receiving an offer are not dependent on how your programs are ranked. That is completely up to the admissions methods of those programs. Except for programs requiring additional assessments, your chances of receiving an offer were already determined when you were given your groups and random number.
So then what else is left to decide when creating your list of programs?
Nothing other that what you like best. To steal an abbreviation from the Facebook Group “Applying to High School in NYC”: RIOOTP (Rank In Order Of True Preference). I think everyone should submit lists of 40-50 programs and order them by preference. You could list every single program in existence with the only downside having spent the time to do so.
Aside from applicants potentially creating long application lists, there will be additional effects that may play out immediately this year or over the next few admissions cycles.
The first is the increase in “true applicants”, or applicants who are counted as competing for an actual spot in a program. This means that applicant pools have the potential to increase drastically from historical levels and reduce the effectiveness of the “Applicants per seat” metric for determining popularity.
This in turn will affect cutoffs, as this increase in applicant pools also increases the amount of competition for programs. In addition, if these applicant pools change enough, one cannot be certain of predicting future cutoffs. Predictions based on historical data are only accurate if the future parameters remain constant. Varying applicant pools will throw all predictions into the wind.
Another change will be the size of waitlists. A school’s waitlist has the potential to be nearly the same size as the number of applicants across the entire city (somewhere around 70,000). Chances of receiving an offer from a waitlist could also drastically change.
I’m going to look into my crystal ball and guess that it will take about four admissions cycles before things settle back down into a predictable pattern, and that is assuming they don’t change something else during that time. This cycle will be a feeling-out period. In the cycle after that, people will start probing the limits of this change, and the third cycle will be when people fully embrace the unlimited nature of the lists.