<p>I see a balance in the process. Some students really attempt to make a quasi-rational based decision on the schools they apply to. They look at ratings related to departments, hiring statistics, etc. Others go on subjective feelings related to fit or campus appearance, etc. Or, in most cases some blend of all the above.</p>
<p>Adcoms seem to do the same for the selection process. Perhaps a realatively bright line scores/stats decision on many (most) with a subjective component to the decisions on those not clearly a “keeper” or a “reject.”</p>
<p>I don’t think a student applicant needs to consider the effect on the schools he or she declines to attend who offered the student admission. So, why is it that the school should consider the feelings of the student applicant it did not offer admission?</p>
<p>What I found a little odd, though, was that even employees of these schools who have a reason to need/want to understand how their admissions office works, don’t always achieve that understanding. Athletes will tell you that coaches tell stories of having met with their top recruits, noticed that they are mature, personable and articulate young people with academic stats in the proper range and may even be on the upper end of the range, and yet they are rejected despite coach support. The coaches have absolutely no idea why and seem genuinely stumped. </p>
<p>We had an interesting experience with our S. He had participated for a number of years in a particular activity at HYPS. He was repreatedly recognized for his success in this endeavor, and university staff had interacted with him personally over the years. At the beginning of his senior year, one such staff person contacted him to inquire if S would be applying, since she’d love to see him attend. Yes indeed, he was applying. But he got waitlisted, to her dismay. On her own volition, she even went to bat for him at that point, but to no avail. Yet he was accepted to several other Ivies. The woman was clueless as to any possible reason. No doubt there was a good reason, but it certainly wasn’t evident to her. Isn’t this a bit counter-productive to atrracting the type of student who fits at a particular school?</p>
<p>But sometimes there ARE no reasons. When I’ve interviewed people for a job, sometimes I’ve got a lot of candidates who are fine / qualified on paper and present themselves well in an interview – and it’s the little, subtle things that make me say that I want to go with candidate X over candidates Y and Z. Is that “arbitrary”? Frankly it’s not that candidate Y couldn’t do just fine - but I only have one slot and it goes to candidate X.</p>
<p>How is this any different from dating? You met people, you spark to some and you don’t spark to others. Is that “arbitrary”? Sure.</p>
<p>No, the adcoms shouldn’t and don’t. What gets me is when they say they do. Yes, some of the decisions are arbitrary and they have to be, given the volume of apps they are processing. At some colleges there are more middle ground apps where attention is given and agonizing is done as to who gets on the wait list and who gets in, but most of the cuts are quite automatic and numbers driven.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl’s analogy of college choice to finding a spouse made me think of this song: [YouTube</a> - Tim Minchin - If I Didn’t Have You](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube) (if CC won’t allow the link, just search for "Tim Minchin If I Didn’t Have You.) Probably a good attitude for our kids to have about the schools that they are wooing/being wooed by.</p>
<p>OP, if in your profession or job, you need to hire someone for an opening at your work from a pool of hundreds of applicants and resumes, how do you cope with such undertaking? Certainly the life of who ever you choose is drastically change and other qualified persons who do not get the job are also in some way left out from a great opportunity.</p>
<p>Any decision made by a human has some degree of arbitrariness to it. If you want college admissions that aren’t arbitrary, find a state school that admits by the numbers, plug and chug. </p>
<p>Arbitrary implies that there is an objectively correct decision out there, that indeed Candidate A “belonged” at the school but they arbitrarily chose Candidate B because he wrote his essay about the cello and the adcom loves the cello. No one “belongs” at any of these schools.</p>
<p>I don’t think OP has been in the workforce long enough to have had to make those decisions. OP is a recent college grad helping a younger brother in the college application process.</p>
<p>IMO–having to deal with the randomness of life is what makes it interesting. Of course, the results of “life happens, deal with it” can be pretty brutal. I recall reading that when the gasoline prices really spiked the first time in the 2000s, the movement of American agriculture to corn for ethanol caused there to be an increase in the cost of certain food staples India acquires to feed its people. There was a speach by the head of the Ministry in India that deals with food for those Indians at the starvation level. He was able to quantify the number of additional deaths by starvation due to each rise in the cost of those staples. It was hundreds of thousands of additional deaths for each very small incremental increase in the cost of the food.</p>
<p>Cheap(er) gas for the US meant higher profits for the change over argicultural businesses and more Indians dead due to starvation. Kind of a Kurt Vonnegut moment–“and so it goes.”</p>
<p>I remember one time listening to a piece on NPR about flu shot. The CDC scientists every year develop the flu shot by surveying and taking accounts of the outbreaks in the previous season and statistically figure out what would be the best strains of vacine to be put into this year shot. One of the point of the story was that every year they basically decide which tens of thousands of people that receive flu shots will die and which will live.</p>
<p>We spend a lot of time developing our processes, analyzing them after each season, and implementing changes to adjust for what we’ve found. Committee works differently at each school. While there are colleges out there where one and only one person reviews a file, I would suggest that that is not the norm.</p>
<p>Dean J–question. There are applicants who apply who clearly will not be admitted under the published data sets, right? What percentage of the total application pool fall into that description?</p>
<p>To what extend is dealing with those DOA applications taking away from more in-depth review of possible admits?</p>
<p>People never believe this, but there is no weed out process here. When we crossed the 20,000 thresh hold in 2006 or so, I thought it might come up, but it hasn’t. </p>
<p>There are “quick reads” on both ends of the spectrum (clear offers, clear denies), but we still have to go through the entire file to be sure of our recommendations (that’s all “decisions” are early on…decisions aren’t set until March). After the first and second read, the passes through the file can be a little faster. </p>
<p>Now, this does not apply to other schools. We read in rounds here and we don’t read by territory. This is not common! The UVa way would not be considered normal by many of our peers. I’m not suggesting that we are an example, either.</p>
<p>I have worked in offices that used territory management and there are times when I miss that style of reading. There are times when I really prefer our style, too.</p>
<p>Another book that gives insight into the process and is a fun read is the novel, Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz - she is an admissions officer at Princeton and she games the system to get a favored student into Princeton.</p>
<p>How does the admissions process work? I saw from the above posts of the UVA dude ot dudette that it varies by school. </p>
<p>Maybe someone in this space can sketch the high level how admissions is done in the colleges outside of HYPSM (the non-Ivy’s (excluding Cornell)) to colleges where you are pretty likely to understand whether you can get in based on the stats as Hunt suggested above . wd that be something like numbers 6 through 100 colleges , LAC and Uni, in usnr?</p>
<p>No one outside the system at a given school really knows how it works. “The Gatekeepers” is a book length treatment of the process at Wesleyan from maybe 10 years ago at this point, and is worth a read. The Tufts blogs that were recently posted offer some insight. It is all about candidates who have numbers in the right range but are also able convey a compelling personality that convinces the early file readers to advocate for them.</p>
<p>One way to misunderstand that statement would be to think that “tens of thousands of people that receive flu shots will die” (of the flu shot). Which is not true. The flu shot is safe. </p>
<p>What is true is that the flu shot will only defend against those flu strains that were included in the vaccine. So the wrong choice could mean the death of tens of thousands.</p>
<p>I don’t think the analogy is a good one to college admissions.</p>
<p>The process is not at all arbitrary, and to call it so is insulting to highly-trained, experienced professionals (like Dean J) who know how to do their jobs, and for the most part, do their jobs well.</p>
<p>For almost a decade I served on a college-level scholarship committee that granted several hundred thousand dollars each year to our continuing students. While we tried to be thorough, and certainly were not capricious, we nevertheless were forced to be arbitrary. There was only so much money, and so much information we had on each candidate, and we had to decide. Sometimes large amounts of money swung on “she got a B+ in Bio202 and he only got a B-”.</p>
<p>I think my experience is directly analogous to the challenge adcoms face as they assign “admit/deny” judgments to thousands of applicants they have never met.</p>
Credentials/applications arrive, get processed, filed
Completed files are distributed to readers in some way (randomly, by academic area, by region, etc.)
Files are reviewed by individuals or committees or both
Decisions are made
Decisions are finalized
Decisions are published
Decisions are explained (some might not be aware of the admit rates where they apply)
Open Houses occur (someone plans these during the reading season)
May 1st - National Candidates’ Reply Date
Waitlist process begins</p>
<p>What most people seem interested is is the logistics. They want to know how files are assembled, distributed, then passed around the office for review. This varies depending on the system in use at the school.</p>