<p>u mich had something like 22K ea applicants, let's say they admit half. The app deadline was nov 1, six weeks later ea decisions were distributed. If I were running admissions, I'd concoct some sort of quantitative algorithm to rank applicants, automatically take the top quarter, automatically reject the bottom quarter and read the middle 50%...that still leaves 11k essays to read...so maybe play with those numbers to get to a manageable number of essays to read.</p>