Every year the Dunbar group is privileged to get to know our students and to assist them in their college, graduate school or boarding school searches and applications, and every May we meet to review the year's successes and challenges. We are happy to share this year's insights with you in this report.

First, more families are weighing the expense of college carefully. Experts and the media are beginning to talk about tuition charges as having reached a tipping point where families are no longer willing to pay higher amounts even if they are able to do so. As resistance to higher costs rises, some colleges which normally fill their freshman classes had openings in late May, which is unusual.

On the other hand, boarding schools had a very healthy year, increasingly driven by international students' demand for spots. Now a significant question for some boarding schools has become how to handle the international and domestic mix of students on their campuses.

Dunbar students also had a good year. Half of Dunbar students were accepted to their first choice college and over a third were accepted to their second choice, for a total 85% admit rate to their first or second choice of college. As a group, Dunbar students applied to 141 colleges, from Adelphi University to Yale, filing 430 applications in total. The most popular colleges were:

• University of California system as a whole
• University of Southern California
• Northeastern University
• University of Vermont
• Boston College and Syracuse (tied)
• Brown, Boston University, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth and Emory (tied)
• Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and UVA (tied)

Each fall the Dunbar group assesses the likelihood of a student's admission to a particular college by using three categories: Likely (chance of admission greater than 75%), Possible (chance of admission 50%) and Reach (chance of admission less than 25%). Each spring we review our accuracy to ensure that we are giving our students the best information throughout the application process. The college decision results this year confirmed the accuracy of the group's estimates.

Please click here to see our Class of 2013 College Acceptance List.

This year's group of students include an investigative journalist bound for the Wharton School of Business at U Penn and a young eco advocate who will be moving from the Pacific coast to the East to run track for Middlebury. We worked with students who had special needs, such as learning differences or health issues, and with students who were being recruited for athletic teams. Our students, 25% of whom are international residents, come from as far as the Middle East, Peru, Australia and across the United States. We'd like to thank our families once again for sharing this part of their lives with us, and we wish all of our students the best as they start the next phase. 

Dunbar Educational Consultants

www.dunbarconsultants.com