<p>Any word on shift in admissions policies with the new director?</p>
<p>I found this online:</p>
<p>Search the job listings for top-level admissions and enrollment openings, and you will find that many colleges seek a “data-driven” leader, someone who will develop “data-informed” strategies. This past winter, for instance, Pomona College, in California, began a national search to replace Bruce J. Poch, who had stepped down after 23 years as vice president and dean of admissions. Among the qualifications listed in the job advertisement: “an ability to analyze and use data to guide decision-making and measure results.”
David W. Oxtoby, Pomona’s president, led the college’s search committee. The modern admissions dean, he says, must have a “technical, quantitative facility,” the ability to delve into the relationship between a student’s SAT score and her subsequent performance in college, or why some kinds of students are more likely to enroll than others. Moreover, Pomona had decided to merge its admissions and financial-aid offices (a change many colleges have made already). So the new dean would need to speak the language of costs.</p>
<p>And this:</p>
<p>Soon to occupy one of the premier jobs in admissions, Mr. Allen, 43, represents the next generation of enrollment chiefs. They’ve ascended during an era of high competition, learning how to market their colleges and massage the metrics that define success in admissions.
Although idealism may inform their work, they are clear-eyed realists. They are not introverts, for they must collaborate constantly with faculty members and other campus offices. They are diplomats who must manage competing desires: those of administrators who want to enroll more first-generation and low-income applicants, professors who want more students with high SAT scores, trustees who want to lower the tuition-discount rate. “Twenty years ago,” Mr. Allen says, “there were not as many wants.”
Drawn to statistics at an early age, Mr. Allen earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at the Johns Hopkins University in 1990. He first worked as an admissions counselor for his alma mater, a cutting-edge laboratory in the then-burgeoning science of enrollment management. Mr. Allen learned how predictive modeling could project net tuition revenue, how many biology majors would enroll, and a hundred other outcomes.</p>
<p>I can’t say anything about a shift in admissions policies - that seems like something that would happen slowly, and not in the first year of Allen’s tenure. But for anyone interested in selective LAC admissions, there’s an interview of Allen from last February, while he was still at Grinnell: [Inside</a> the college admissions process - parenting - TODAY.com](<a href=“http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41622747/ns/today-parenting]Inside”>http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/41622747/ns/today-parenting) The video at the link shows his Grinnell committee meeting, so it’s also worth a look.</p>
<p>This is a really informative thread. I LOVED the interview with Seth Allen.</p>