<p>Imagine...30,000 applications from 30,000 of America's best overacheivers</p>
<p>application
resume
2 extra recommendations
creative arts supplement
rec letter from a former alum (if you got it, flaunt it!)
interview report</p>
<p>I know I might be exaggerating, but I DO know some applicants with this much stuff.</p>
<p>HOW does the Admissions Committee get through 30,000 of these in 3 months. o_o</p>
<p>Anyone wanna take a guess? 30,000...wow, the number alone scares me.</p>
<p>I suppose they divvy the applications up by regions? Correct me if I am wrong.</p>
<p>they throw them off of a diving board, those that make it back onto land, instead of into the pool, are the ones they go through. or sometimes, they have mr. ed (the horse) pick and choose the ones he think should get in.</p>
<p>but then. isn’t there an inherent ‘subjectivity’ (being pc here…) built into the application process, even before your application arrives? your geographic region could, in theory, directly impact you even before your application is read? (of course, I don’t mean that as in geographic diversity, just in terms of geography determining the app readers you have access to due to your location).</p>
<p>P.S. I’m just rambling. DO NOT START ARGUING ABOUT THIS.
:)</p>
<p>Well, I think there is some validity to what you are saying. A lot of competitive applicants are from the New England and Mid-Atlantic area. And I believe, correct if I am wrong again, that if you are from Rural Montana or the Dakotas, you will be seen as an anomaly. Of course there are other ways to stand out to colleges. I am in no ways an expert lol!</p>
<p>the admission process actually involves summoning the spirit of john harvard… </p>
<p>then the members of the committee close their eyes and listen to john harvard’s voice on which application or applicant they should accept.</p>
<p>EDIT:</p>
<p>I also want to add that Yale uses the same method… Now, I question this method as “the voice” chose George Bush Jr for admissions… look where it got us now</p>
<p>neon: i heard that similar to the oracle of delphi, there is a giant crack in the admissions room floor where gases leak into the room allowing john harvard’s voice to be heard. when the crack is not releasing enough gas, they burn some shrooms in the fireplace.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>4 months. Harvard starts reading on Dec 1.</p>
<p>Bingo Cards. Applications get divvy’d up between regional admissions officers and then they play high-speed bingo for the next 4 months. Bingo means you get in and everyone else in that round gets rejected. If two people bingo at the same time they both get waitlisted.</p>
<p>I would guess that 90% of them don’t get their essays read based on screening.</p>
<p>Not to sound like schleprock or anything…</p>
<p>So, because I had a calculator lying around, I did some math.
30,000 applicants in 4 months. Thats 7500 applications per month. That is 250 applications a day. And this is giving them the WHOLE 4 months, which they obviously don’t have, and also, not taking into account some of the applications that get read more than once.</p>
<p>There has GOT to be some preliminary screening method.</p>
<p>realistically they will filter based on non-essay criteria and short-list about 3000
then they read the essays of only those 3000.
the initial screening is probably done by a horde of student reps who are paid hourly.</p>
<p>i definitely don’t agree that only a few essays are read.
there is some kind of screening process - i think i saw on the yale (?) forum that approx. 1/3 of applicants are thrown out initially because of absurdly low test scores, gpa, etc - ie, people who had no shot but who just applied for the hell of it.
assuming that’s true… well, 1/3 of the apps is a pretty significant chunk.
i can’t be so cynical as to think they don’t even read most essays.</p>
<p>“30,000 applications from 30,000 of America’s best overacheivers?”</p>
<p>Correction: 30,000 applications from 30,000 of the worlds’ best young achievers.</p>
<p>for sizing up the problem:
assume there are 10 people on staff
each application they spend half hour
they work 8 hrs a day - 40hrs a week (that is 80x10= 800 applications a week)</p>
<p>there are 12 weeks to final decisions.(discounting they probably need a week or two to do the final committee meetings/type up letters/get the database up/)</p>
<p>that is 12x800=9600 applications.</p>
<ul>
<li>so probably they have more staff or spend less time per app or have a objective filter index (which cannot include essays)</li>
</ul>
<p>You are discounting the time it takes to organize. Most people do not get their apps in before the last week I would guess. And they don’t finish making decisions on March 31.</p>
<p>Assume about 2 months of intense reading at your clip of 80 apps/day.</p>
<p>That is around 5000 or less. That would make sense at a larger # of apps college such as Harvard. At a small LAC I would imagine that the claim of reading everyone would be closer to the truth.</p>
<p>10 people on staff? I thought it would have been much higher…say 50 or 100.
10 just seems small compared to 30,000</p>
<p>Nothing we can do now 
</p>
<p>Like a weight has been lifted…</p>
<p>Filter 15,000 by GPA/Sat scores alone.
Filter 5,000 of those who do not have awards/ec’s.
They read the last 15,000.</p>
<p>They surely have ways of screening out the applications that are not worth reading. I would almost guarantee that they throw all the applicants’ data into some kind of database so they can sort by any kind of metric. There are probably many thousand applications that they only spend a few minutes each on because they are obviously uncompetitive.</p>