Insider Perspectives from a Highly Selective Admissions Office

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03/07/2017 23:16

Subject: Insider Perspectives from a Highly Selective Admissions Office

quote

Anonymous

I work at a highly regarded school with a <15% admit rate and got to learn a lot about how admissions works. Here are some things you may or may not know. Not in any organized fashion, just what I remembered. Feel free to ask any questions. Certain details omitted as I don't want to identify the school.

1. We have minimum SAT and GPA expectations of all students. If you don't rank at least in the top half of your class, or if your ACT is below a 23/SAT below a 1600 (old SAT), we won't review your application. Around 5-10% of applicants are automatically rejected based on this metric.

2. We have a listing of the profiles of applicants from each school that we receive applications from, which includes race, rank, GPA, and test scores. This page also includes applicant information from the previous year. If you're in the bottom 25% of your class by those standards, your application won't be reviewed.

3. From there, every application is reviewed in extensive detail. Regional readers start with all the applicants from a high school, looking through the school profile to understand how course rigor and grade distribution works. Even if your school does not rank, readers will try to parse a rank from the percent of students earning a particular GPA. By detail, every thing is reviewed- parent/sibling occupations or educational background, additional information, extracurricular involvement, essays, recommendations, etc.- and the regional readers summarize the highlights in an application form. They are then tasked with evaluating, on a point system, the applicant's academic merit (rank/test score/gpa), academic potential (LOR feedback), extracurricular involvement, talent/ability, personal character, writing ability, and other things.

4. From there, the reader gives a brief statement as to whether or not the candidate warrants a new review or a pass into committee. Very few go straight into committee, many receive a second read (who decides whether or not to send to committee), and some are rejected at the first read. About 30-40% of applicants go into committee. There are mini-committees in which groups of admission readers further consider which applicants to review, and then there is the larger committee for each round that decides which students to admit.

All admission readers are given a brief highlight of the strengths and weaknesses of the committee applicants, presented by the readers. They launch into a conversation about whether or not the applicant is admit-worthy. Little details, like the C in Calculus or a poor phrase in the LORs, are mentioned, and very few applicants receive all-around glowing feedback. After this discussion, each admission officers votes to deny, waitlist, or admit. If the majority votes for a particular group, they're placed there; if they receive an equal number of admits and denies, they're waitlisted, so on and so forth.

More applicants are placed in the admit pool than are ultimately admitted. Near decision release time, we review the admit pool and trim it to the strongest applicants we want to admit (we calculate based on anticipated yield). Those who don't make the cut are waitlisted, but they are given a special tag in our system as being in the admit pool. They are the applicants we look to in admitting waitlist students.

5. The vast majority of essays received are bad, if not awful. It's really a case of splendid essays that make a difference for the admissions process. Also, we ponder at the sheer number of college confidential chance me posters who rate their LORs as 9/10 or 10/10. The average is in fact 5/10; the LORs at our college tend to be glowing in the first place, so we are looking for not just strong students, but those who show initiative, creativity, and compassion. Anecdotes mean more to us than blanket statements. We encourage students to share stories with their writers, and we encourage them to be not just A students in the classroom, but leaders, questioners, and active learners.

6. For URMs/low income students, we are trained to understand their percentile ranks for various tests (here is one such source: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-ethnicity-2015.pdf). The 95% mark (700 for whites, 750 for Asians, 600 for African Americans, 650 for Latinos/Native Americans) is the benchmark we use. Obviously, those from a lower income background will not be held to as high a standard as those who are higher income; we can deduce income levels from essays, LORs, and subtle/explicit things in the application (we don't get actual income info- that goes to financial aid. Need blind means not that we don't consider it, but rather that asking for aid won't hurt your chances). Also, even though we do lower our test standards for certain groups, academic metrics are just as stringent- we want students in the top 10%, ideally top 5%; we want the most rigorous course-load possible, and we want good letters of recommendation. While URMs do have a slightly higher admit rate, the overwhelming majority are still rejected.

7. Being from an area we don't have many students from (Wyoming, West Virginia, certain countries, etc.) will not make up for poor academic performance, even if admitting those students won't harm our SAT or rank profile. As much criticism as we get for admitting lower-standard applicants, our top priority is to ultimately admit students who can handle the coursework and contribute vibrantly to the community. We receive applicants from all states and dozens of countries, but we don't admit someone from every state, even if it may look good for our admitted student profile.

8. The overwhelming majority of our ranked students rank in the top 10% of their classroom- and we parse that out best we can even for those from non-ranking schools, as mentioned above. If you're not in the top 10%, it gets much harder to be admitted. The exceptions we make come from rigorous high schools or have clearly demonstrated outstanding intellectual commitment and potential.

9. We do have a tag for certain applicants. These include powerful alumni connections, influential people, donors, etc- I'll term them VIPs. VIPs are not reviewed by readers but rather the higher ups in the office. In general, if VIPs meet a certain academic standard, they are admitted.

10. Applying early will not increase your chances. The early pool tends to be much stronger than our regular profile, and a number of the applicants are varsities who have been pre-read and selected by our coaches. Our standards are still very much the same, and if you are a non-hooked early applicant, don't expect an increase in admit rate. The reason we offer this is to give students the option of an earlier decision.

11. Athletics- our coaches have a limited number of spots that they can give to pre-read athletes. We give coaches a minimum expectation of what we want- generally near a 4.0 UW, 30+ ACT, 2000+ SAT- so that they can relay this information to prospective athletes. Coaches have some leeway with those expectations if the applicant will be noteworthy for the program, but not much. Once we receive a positive evaluation, we tend to admit the student if they don't have glaring flaws in their application. They don't go to committee- they are simply admitted. A coach may not designate a strong applicant to a slot, but rather another category based on how they think they'd fair for the athletics program; those applicants are reviewed normally.

12. Yield protection- this school is not HYPMS, so we're often asked this. No, we do not engage in yield protection. We want to bring the strongest applicants to our school. We can tell from certain students that they will be admitted to every college they apply to. We will not turn them down because they haven't showed interest, or because their whole family went to Harvard. We have had students who have turned down HYPMS to come to us- not many, but we know what to anticipate based on past trends. We want our admissions process and school to speak for itself.

The reality is that almost 80% of valedictorians and those with 2300/35+ are rejected. We receive so many qualified applications for so few spots that we have to make excruciating decisions at times. Having those credentials will not guarantee you, nor will it be noticeably distinctive for our process.

13. We do recognize differences in ethnicity. For instance, being Hmong or Uzbek will mean you are reviewed under a different light than if you were Chinese or Indian. At the end of the day, all of these groups will be reported in the same census group, but we are tasked with bringing a diversity of students, and that means people from all ethnic backgrounds. A case in point- we had an applicant ranked #4 who was Chinese and another ranked #13 who was Vietnamese; the former had higher test scores and more extracurricular involvements, but the Vietnamese applicant was low-income and the strongest STEM student in their school. We admitted the latter, not the former; we receive so many qualified Chinese applications, but not many Vietnamese ones.

14. On boarding schools and elite high schools- we like to admit at least one student from these schools, but we receive 50+ applications (some, 100+) from these schools and can only take a maximum of 5 (no strict quotas, but this is the unstated understanding given the diversity we aim for). The chances of being admitted from an elite school are often lower than our total acceptance rate. Just keep this in mind.

15. On interviews. We take on-campus interviews (admission officers, senior students) and those from very recent graduates more seriously than alumni interviews. If you are not seen as a good fit for the school based on an interview by a current student, recent graduate, or an admissions officer, your chances will be noticeably hurt; this is not really the case for alumni interviews. Our institution has changed over the last few years; we want to bring in students who will thrive in the community that is present, and the first group is a better judge of those (they are also trained to be impartial; we can't really host training for alumni). Few students have an interview that is so strong that it will noticeably help them for admissions.

16. Ultimately, the process is subjective, but we try to balance it out by having a diverse admissions team. Invariably, we have some applicants who we fall in love with individually or even in the mini-committees, but they are not admitted in the large committee. The reality is that most of our applicants would meet the academic standards. 30% of them at least would contribute meaningfully to the community. But we can only admit so many students. We want students to know that we are being sincere when we say that being rejected is not indicative of much. Our institutional priorities mean we just can't admit every student. Different schools have different priorities, so one should not be too surprised to be admitted by HYPMS and not a school below.