<p>The economy is tough all over. Layoffs despite records numbers of applicants to handle:</p>
<p>TheDartmouth.com</a> | College lays off three from admissions office</p>
<p>Great, now they can write the new and improved version of “A is for Admissions” and launch similar consulting job competing with Michelle Hernandez. A win win situation, IMHO.</p>
<p>I think each school could trim its admission staff by half if they just write a simple program to reject 50% of its applicants automatically based on certain criteria -</p>
<p>REJECT ( select (SAT <=2200) or (GPA <= 3.9) or (RANK >= .05) or (ECS NE football, soccer, track, golf, fencing) or (FA = Yes) or (URM = No) or (LEGACY = No) or (FIRST<em>GENERATION = No) or (SCHOOL</em>EMPLOYEE = No))</p>
<p>They could continue to refine their criteria over time. As it gets better, they could cut more staff because the computer could do the filtering for them.</p>
<p>oldfort, I was going to suggest replacing the admissions staff with a random number generator. It’s all a lottery anyway isn’t it?</p>
<p>Why not outsource it all to India?</p>
<p>Why outsource? Call it an unpaid internship and give current students credit for reading application files.</p>
<p>When DS was looking, he and I soon discovered that the admit/recruiters all had the same presentation. The parents had the same questions. The kids had the same dream.</p>
<p>Dartmouth could cut almost all of its travel budget on the dog and pony shows it probably does around the country and in high schools until the economy got better. That money spent probably doesn’t add a lot of bang for the buck.</p>
<p>A lot of colleges have quit sending paper catalogs to the high schools, but either send a CD or just refer the GCs to the website. </p>
<p>But with applications going up 10%, does it make sense to decrease the numbers of readers?</p>
<p>If Dartmouth was really serious about reducing the number of applications they could simply require that all students be on-campus for BOTH winter sessions (known in other places as the Fall and Spring semesters).</p>