Interviews: The Inside Story, Part I

Recently I was asked to write something on what makes for a great alumni interview. I have taken this question and broadened it a bit to talk about interview prep in general in a 3 part series. The first describes the underlying structures and information needed to place alumni interviews in a proper context. Pragmatic and specific interview advice will be the focus of the two forthcoming entries.

If I had to summarize the overall thesis of these entries it all comes down to this: context is everything.

Let me try to explain. It might be useful to know, first off, that in most cases, alumni interviews come in near the bottom of factors that matter much in an admission decision. Why? Part of it has to do with the lack of knowledge and data on the part of admission professionals in the alumni and in the predictive value of alumni interviews. Very little work has been done to research whether alumni interviews can help predict the success of students. It would be very difficult to quantify in any meaningful way so from a research-based perspective there is not much to help decision makers in an increasingly numbers and data driven assessment process.

 But there has been much ink and computer space given to the issue of trust between and among constituencies in business recently. Who do you trust and why. And in the world of admission these days, there is lots of suspicion on just about everyone’s part.

In these days of enrollment managers who are trying to move up in their world, it is becoming much more common to have people in positions of power who have never attended the schools they work for. Does this make a difference? Of course it does, but how much depends on the individuals. Some people in admission see the students who come through as people they will admit but never get to know. On top of that, they have never taken classes or been all that involved with the institution itself. Therefore, when an alum writes that a student is a perfect fit for a school the person making the decision did not attend, it tends not to have the same neural pathways that click in as it would for someone who spent years as a student and has emotional ties to the school and the students.

In addition, alums doing interviews tend to be successful people, some of whom are older and have been out of the school for a while. There is a tendency to think that old people don’t really have a good sense of what the atmosphere of the school, in this day and age, really is. And in some cases this is quite accurate. When an alum remembers a school that was single sex when he attended it, it makes it difficult to think they know much about’ fit’ in a way that is all that useful.

Demographics and background also come into play on the part of admission officers’ cognitive make-up. Many admission officers are not necessarily the product of upper middle class upbringing, but the majority of people doing interviews tend to be. Why is this important? Well, say an alum writes how he (or she) could see this student being a great addition to the Greek system. A statement like this assumes the person reading the rec will be receptive to a comment like this. It is not always so by any stretch. A Greek reference may actually have negative connotations to some people in admission who perceive these groups as bastions of privilege and exclusion. And again, there is some evidence that the composition of dining clubs and Greek organizations is not anywhere near as diverse as the student body as a whole and very often not at all like the composition of current admission offices. For those who think the Greek system is detrimental to education, having an alum who mentions his great days in the fraternity will not often be given much credence and in some cases it will hurt the student. I say this based on conversations and exchanges with people in admission.

As with all things in the world, our upbringing, our race, our class shape our thinking. It is essential, however, to keep in mind that colleges are evaluated as diverse or not by looking to those rubrics that emphasize group identity rather than individual quirks and voices. Schools are not rewarded in the press or anyplace else for having incredibly diverse groups of students who are all from one race or class (I think many would argue-- possibly persuasively-- that it is not possible to have an incredibly diverse group of people from one group, since diverse means, for some: race, class, demographics rather than individual life experiences; others might argue that a place like Stuyvescent High school, which is well over 70% Asian, still contains an immense amount of experiential and, demographic  diversity--If we don’t just count Asians as all alike. And while we ourselves may not perceive Asians as all alike, the only percentage that matters in the glance of a school's profile, in terms of ethnic diversity, is the percentage of any given race. So whether a student has Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Singaporean, etc. heritage, they are all lumped under one percentage.

Pragmatically, in the current way admission works, if a student is a part of one group, they will automatically be perceived as adding to the mix; in others, even with a great individual story to tell, it will not be to the advantage of the institution in the rankings or among peers to add yet another upper middle class white kid who does not have top testing and a boatload of APs. And it's even worse for Asians.

Finally, for this part of my answer, it needs to be re-emphasized that interviews are not all that important. One other reason I will cite here has to do with what philosophers call a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. If a school has huge numbers of alumni interviewers located around the world, it will be very difficult to impose quality control. Schools don’t have the budget to fly off to many places and train each interviewer. Instead, they often train the leaders of an alumni group in a particular city and let that person teach those who have volunteered in the region. The school supplies text and rubrics but because of the holistic nature of admission and the fear of giving out too much information, these texts tend to be superficial. If they really talked honestly about all that goes on in admission offices there would be a whole lot of discussion going on among alums, some of it positive and some of it not.

Instead, the generic overview is the path most schools take. As a result, the feedback they get may or may not be all that useful. Not only do some students interview well, some interviewers also conduct great interviews. Others do not. Given the range of people doing the interviews, and the lack of specific guidelines, it makes sense to downplay their overall importance. On the other hand, a person who has done interviews for years and has a great working relationship with the admission office will have far more sway in an admission decision than another interviewer who has no record or connections.

Finally, interviews are important for one other often overlooked reason: they keep alums in touch with the school and touches are useful for future fundraising and outreach of various sorts. In other words, schools sometimes use interviews more for the recruitment of alums than the students themselves. This is not what schools would admit in public, but behind closed doors this type of marketing and development office outreach is part of a larger strategic plan.