How do we know admission offices are doing a good job?

Parent Cafe
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<p>I think I owe to QuantMech the idea that prompts this thread. How do we know a college admission office is doing a good job? In other words, if a college admission office were doing a BAD job, what would look different about what it does from what the good college admission offices do? Does a capable admission officer add value to the university the officer works for? Can a bad admission officer drag down a great university? How bad is bad? Just what is bad? </p>

<p>I'd love to hear the point of view of parents, students (in college and in high school), professors, high school counselors, and of course admission officers on this issue. I'm really curious how one knows which admission offices to praise and emulate and which to decry and reexamine.</p>

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<p>By what criteria are we judging the job an admissions office does? This depends heavily upon the caliber of the college in question, but in broad terms I think an admission office’s “success” must be measured relative to the status of graduates in previous years.</p>

<p>An elite school of the level of HYPSM will want to continue to stay elite. A school below this top tier will strive to improve it’s status and attract a greater portion of the best available applicants. I think we can agree that an admissions office is doing a “bad job” if the quality of their student body worsens, or if they begin to lose a higher percentage of cross admits to rival schools.</p>

<p>However, in my view the only way to tell if an admissions office is doing a good job is to let time tell it’s own tale, and I think the earliest temperature reading can be taken three years after a class’s admittance, that is, when they graduate. Then, you can look at numbers such as % into med/law/business, Rhodes/Fullbright scholars, and other indicators of achievement. Ten years later you can take a look at the % of graduates receiving PhDs. Twenty years later you can look at alumni giving rates and the “who’s who” of that graduating class.</p>

<p>Of course, more immediately, if coaches, conductors, directors, and professors are happy with what they see, then that too, could be called a “good job”.</p>

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<p>I think you could start by looking at MIT’s stats from before the Marilee Jones era to now. I have read that the faculty complained about the admits, and then there was that unfortunate incident what with her lying about her credentials and all. </p>

<p>She garnered a lot of publicity but it would be interesting to see what her impact, if any, was on the institution.</p>

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<p>Thank you for the replies. It appears from both of the first two replies that an admission office can more easily look like it is doing a good job if it is situated at a highly desirable college, such that throwing a dart at almost any application would land a strong student. Thus, if I’m correctly understanding the principle involved here, the difference between a good admission office and a bad one is much more easily noticeable at a college that admits most of its applicants. Or is there another way of looking at this?</p>

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<p>A problem with only looking at the success of those who get in at the elite schools is that it doesn’t consider any of those possibly equally, or more, qualified who did not get in- a matter of whose perspective is valued most, the school’s or the student’s. A school with many, many qualified applicants has a lot of leeway in making less than the best decisions, they can come up with a stellar class but not the most stellar possible class.</p>

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<p>From whose point of view do we define “good job” and “bad job”? Faculty, administration and trustees/directors each has its own set of interests. Sometimes those interests converge, but not always, and at times they can be incompatible.</p>

<p>The question of which master admissions offices are serving has interested me for a while now.</p>

<p>I would love to think faculty opinions are primary–can these students do the work, are they interesting, are they interested, do I want to mentor them? The answers to those questions are obvious pretty quickly, but I don’t think faculty actually take their concerns, if they have any, to admissions offices. I think most are pretty fatalistic about what they are given to work with. Undergraduate college administrators tend to get caught up in faculty hiring decisions and resource allocation brouhahas among various departments, in my experience, and are content to let admissions do its own thing.</p>

<p>University-wide administrators and trustee/directors are sensitive to public relations issues because those issues can impact graduate and research programs. They worry more about looking good in a political sense than in pleasing the majority of the faculty with students who keep them happy. Sometimes those larger issues serve the interests of faculty also, as in the case of geographic and socio-economic diversity.</p>

<p>In other words, I don’t think there is any simple answer to your question. </p>

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<p>So, you are saying that it is possible, if not a fact, that some admissions offices are not serving the larger interests of the institution, even though they are assembling a group of strong students? I think it would be possible for an admissions office at a highly selective school to redefine, over time, what characteristics constitute a “top” student, and assemble a very non-random collection from a group of students, all of whom presented a strong record. What weight is assigned to athletic participation, or volunteer work, or affinity for group projects? What is the relative importance of being well-rounded versus “showing passion”? These relative weights have changed quite a bit over the last decade or so. Whether or not the classes better serve the vision of the institution depends on who is answering the question.</p>

<p>I think the larger question is: are admissions offices being granted so much leeway that they are remaking undergraduate programs? Is everybody with an interest in the question paying attention?</p>

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<p>My friend that is an admissions officer at an elite school says that she hears feedback while each admitted class is on campus from professors, coaches and the faculty involved with student organizations. She said she takes their input seriously.
At her university, there are definitely formal, annual conversations about how the admissions process/admitted class is reflecting the whole institution’s goals. Remember that no single person creates a class…there are multiple points of input and school needs that get balanced.</p>

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<p>If one criteria of successful admissions is for the child to graduate within four years, a university such as UVA does this by being strict about scheduling decisions and aggressive with tutoring support where needed. Other schools may take a more relaxed approach. The differences are therefore less influenced by admissions decisions than university policy.</p>

<p>Another difficulty with judging the impact of admissions decisions on a class is that kids as a group keep changing due to cultural influences. How would folks know which influence is which? I think the only way would be to create an annual test group, admitted based on different criteria weighting, and then track whether or not there is a discernible difference between “test” group kids and “all others.”</p>

<p>Of course, the problem would be to determine how to test the outcome. While an individual school should be able to understand what it is trying to achieve and have some sense of success or failure, it gets more complex when comparing schools to each other. For example, William and Mary, UVA, and Washington and Lee are all selective schools in Virginia, each with distinctly different personalities. How much of that difference is the work of admissions and how much are kids self-selecting? </p>

<p>In sum, I intuitively believe admissions officers are influencial in the class that they create, but I have no idea how this could be objectively measured by an external observer such as a parent.</p>

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<p>Musing here… When I was in architecture grad school professors and students together formed the “admissions office”. Every application was read by two professors and one student. Of course you are looking for candidates with interest in one area, so we weren’t necessarily looking for well-rounded candidates or ones with arcane interests. I believe however that there are some undergrad schools that still work this way. Cornell maybe? (If I remember correctly from The Gatekeepers.)</p>

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<p>I think that one needs to be careful when looking at graduation rates. My son attends another public U in VA, and he has come across many students who enter with sophomore and junior status! My son says that many high schools in VA offer many dual enrollment classes (meaning one gets high school and college credit with a C or better). My son’s high school (in NJ) offers 2 or possibly 3 of those courses (I am not discussing AP classes), yet many of his friends from public high schools in VA have taken many dual enrollment classes and received college credit. What the college does in admissions, tutoring, etc. has nothing to do with these students graduating within 4 years. The only thing that the college is doing is giving credit for those courses toward graduation.</p>

<p>I think it is just as important to have a funds to distribute to make college affodable to those admitted, as it is to have a highly dedicated admissions office.</p>

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<p>Mathmom, the only school that I can think of that lets their students make the admissions decision is Deep Springs. Cornell is unique, I believe, in that it takes into account the input given by their professors. Thus, their admissions office is not insulated from the faculty, as it is at many schools.</p>

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<p>I have ideas about which adcoms are doing a good job and which aren’t. I would judge this by which schools are consistently choosing candidates alligned with their mission and which are applying more strenuous numbers game than they let on.</p>

<p>In our family we have respect both for schools that accepted and rejected my D and S. Some of the rejections seemed to really indicate insight about match, whereas some rejections seemed capricious or based almost solely on financial issues.</p>

<p>I also look to who has gotten accepted to different schools from our local high schools across the years, and it has given me a good idea of values of the adcoms.</p>

<p>I don’t feel comfortable posting about specific schools here, but if you, tokenadult, wanted to PM I would be more forthcoming.</p>

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There are some other schools that have professors involved in the reading process.</p>

<p>My last institution is a perfect example. Admission officers there supervised reading teams that included faculty and administration. It made for an interesting dynamic.</p>

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<p>Universities pay a lot of attention to the job being done by the admissions office and each admissions official. Indeed, it is quite easy for them to see how good a job each individual and the office collectively is/are doing, ONCE “good job” is defined. </p>

<p>Most major universities, and many colleges, have an office dedicated to “institutional research”. Among other things, these folks can, and do, look at how various aspects of admitted students correlate with college performance. For example, it is relatively trivial, from a data analysis POV, to look at how factors such as SAT score, HS GPA, class rank etc. correlate with college GPA for first or even subsequent years. (And this explains why many of these same schools are holding back on the use of the SAT writing score. they are waiting to have several years data to see if the scores correlate with any aspect of college performance.)</p>

<p>Since all of the data is collected, including application reviewer, all sorts of scores for essay quality, school quality and such, it is pretty easy to do multiple factor analysis to look at various relationships. </p>

<p>So the OP’s question is an interesting one, but the answer is even more fascinating. It is fascinating because there is no one definition of “good job”. And there is more science to the admissions process than most offices would ever admit, even given the subjective nature of many of their evaluations.</p>

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<p>It seems to me that doing a good job involves a lot of factors:</p>

<p>No one has mentioned the public tasks of enticing students to apply (including everything from training tour guides, to designing web sites and viewbooks, to interacting with students and parents).</p>

<p>But I think the real tests are the tasks that are largely invisible, and that would be hard to evaluate even if one could get a glimpse at the inner workings:</p>

<p>-how an admissions office balances the desire to maximize academic potential against the institution’s other enrollment goals</p>

<p>-how ethically they tread applicants during the reading and decision phase</p>

<p>-how they allocate financial aid resources to construct their class</p>

<p>Maybe one litmus test would be the number of admitted students who are not representative of the rest of the student body academically. If a school is admitting too many dumb, full-pay students, maybe they’re not allocating their FA resources as wisely as they could. If the gap between applicants who receive preferential treatment (URMs, athletes, legacies, etc.) is too wide, maybe there’s something wrong with the outreach or recruiting, etc.</p>

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<p>I wasn’t actually suggesting students though I believe Caltech has had students giving input on admissions decisions too - Ben Golub who posts on the Caltech board has talked about it. It’s always seemed a bit odd to me that admissions offices are full of people who haven’t even attended the college they are making decisions for.</p>

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<p>A good test for the dossier-reading part of the equation: how well does the academic rating assigned by the admissions office correlate with college performance? Particularly, how much additional predictive power does the adcom’s subjective sense of things like the essay, recs, and high school rigor have over raw gpa and standardized test scores?</p>

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<p>Caltech admission director said that Caltech sophomores read incoming applications.</p>

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<p>I’d look at MCATS, GREs and GMATs of graduating seniors to determine the quality of the job performed by those recruiting incoming freshmen. Yea - I know – numbers based. Sorry, it just works for me.</p>

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<p>Thanks for reviving the thread. There are some interesting ideas here I’ll have to think about for a while.</p>