True Confessions: Mistakes Have Been Made

What are some confessions of a college admission officer?

Here is my answer to this question that was posed on Quora.com:

  

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If I do write the book of all the dirt I have it would make lots of money and grab some headlines, but for the moment I have no intention of going down this road. 

Instead, I will submit this pretty simple confession. The responsibility of deciding who gets in and who does not sounds great to some, but it is also hard to work at a highly selective university. Almost all the students who apply are at the very least quite good, and most are close to great or even better. The pool of students who would contribute to a school is far larger than the spaces that are allotted. This means I make way more people unhappy than happy.

Given what I have just written, I have to confess that I have made mistakes about students. There are some students I have not admitted who, after looking over the application, after the fact, I have said to myself: “What was I thinking?”  Any admission officer can manufacture a reason not to take someone. And the reverse is true too in terms of accepting people.  There have been times when in reviewing decisions I think I was far too snarky about an essay, or sniffed too judgmentally about an academic program or an SAT score. But here’s the thing. I have been in touch with some of these students and the fact is getting into a specific school as a senior seems like the biggest deal in the world to some but it really isn’t. 

One student this year contacted me about transferring from the school she got into to her former top choice. At her current school she is the number one student in the whole university. But she felt she needed to trade up. I actually talked to her for quite a while about how being the best at a strong school is far better than being in the potential academic middle of a top 5. And in the end she chose to stay at her school as they offered her research, and many other perks. So maybe some of those students whose applications I read either with too critical an eye or too much focus on numbers actually ended up doing better at another school anyway. If nothing else, this kind of reasoning helps me sleep at night.

It is sort of an unwritten law for admission people never, ever to admit mistakes about decisions, but I think that anyone who has made lots of decisions and can’t admit they made a few wrong calls should be looked at with suspicion.

Now that I no longer work for a university it is, perhaps, easier for me to admit my faults than when I was making admission decisions. TS Eliot began the most important poem of the 20^th Century this way:

April is the cruelest month

In the word of highly selective admission there is some truth to this line. Within a few seconds after posting decisions on-line, the phone calls and emails begin to flood in. The calls are very rarely from students calling to thank the admission office. Instead, students (and more often parents) contact offices in shock. They ask in one form or another “What were we thinking?’ when we decided not to admit them.

Admission offices usually meet just before the onslaught to get on message about how to respond to these enquiries. The first line of defense: numbers and data. (This year we had a record number of applications. The students applying had the strongest set of credentials in the history of our school. Our acceptance rate for students was…(in the case of Harvard for example, the answer is 6%).

The next question put forward is: “Can the decision be reconsidered?”

In the best of all possible worlds the answer might be yes, but if all the students/parents asked for and were granted reconsideration, then a whole new evaluation process would have to take place. In other words, reconsideration for admission to highly selective schools is not pragmatically possible. This helps explain why even if an admission officer goes back to look over an application and feels that the decision might have not been correct, the or she will almost never, ever change it. The only times I have ever been witness to changes were in those cases where the academic information provided either was not entered correctly into the data collection system or there was significant information that had not been included in the application during the evaluation.

In other words, those denied admission have virtually no chance of becoming a part of the school’s entering class unless they re-apply for transfer.

In the end, there will always should be, at least from my perspective, a subjective element to decisions made by admission officers at highly selective schools. Subjectivity is another way of saying ‘human’; given our flawed natures there will always be some errors in the process. On the other hand, in my many years in education it is only a tiny number of students I have ever evaluated whose outcome was not what it probably should have been. Decisions are not made on a whim but through the best efforts of people working long hours to select great students.