<p>Especially Ivy Leagues, or colleges within the area, when do the admission committees start the admission process?</p>
<p>I know that the deadline for most ED/EA colleges are 11/1 every year and RD 1/1. But when do they actually start eliminating or accepting applicants? Columbia, for example, allows the applicants to view their checklist status until 12/1. Does this mean that they start the admission process on 12/2? </p>
<p>I understand that this may differ for every college depending on its number of applicants, but I want to know whether the admission process begins right after the submission deadline (starting with the complete applications including transcripts, LOR etc), or individual colleges have their own "start date" so to speak. </p>
<p>If anyone can shed any light on this matter, I'd greatly appreciate it. </p>
<p>“Reading season” can start as soon as there are complete application packets available - though I’m sure RD packets don’t start until EA/ED is done. And assuming there are two readers per packet, committee meetings can start as soon as there are enough of those to go through in a session, but I imagine they try to do all of those at once for ED/EA, that way they know how many non-committee admits there are and how many they’re looking to admit in committee. (Non-committee admits can range from both readers agree on admission to athlete admits to developmentals - each school has its own procedures.) </p>
<p>So if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say reading probably happens at least through Thanksgiving and maybe up to Dec. 1, then they spend a few weeks at some of the schools with a ton of applications hashing things out and finalizing the list. Smaller schools with a Nov. 15 application deadline probably only need a weeks or so to sort things out, but at least a few days to prep the emails, so they probably start deliberations by Dec. 1 as well.</p>
<p>RD is going to be similar, but with a lot more packets to go through, so they may have several rounds of readings and committees.</p>
<p>This is covered pretty well in “The Gatekeepers”, still the gold standard in elite school admission procedures.</p>
<p>@vipham: I agree with @MrMom62 's comments, but I’ll add an important fact: it’s entirely institutionally dependent (and schools alter their policies with some frequency). To illustrate:
At some excellent – but comparatively small – LACs, every completed application is evaluated by the Committee, whereas
At many “mega universities,” applicants who meet defined criteria or who fall below specified thresholds are automatically admitted or denied, with those in between the established parameters being Committee judged.</p>
<p>Since you’re particularly interested in Columbia, I respectfully suggest you might obtain more-detailed and -precise information on their CC forum. </p>
<p>@MrMom62 Thank you for the insight - I just ordered that book from Amazon. Hopefully, it’ll be a new learning experience!</p>
<p>@TopTier I was just trying to learn the general process of the elite universities, because I was under the assumption they use similar if not the same methodologies regarding admission process. </p>
<p>Everything i know about college admissions is based on watching 3/4 of the movie Admission starring Tina Fey on a flight from LaGuardia to O’Hare but i get the <em>impression</em> that they quickly go through the first stacks pretty early on…and then deliberate quite a bit longer once they reach the true applicant base.</p>
<p>i will say that i spoke with a rep at Georgetown earlier this week…my D was having trouble with a 2nd teacher rec not being uploaded (its complicated and i was told that D’s application wouldn’t be read until its marked 'complete" so it likely had not been seen yet. She acted as if this were a positive thing (maybe because it’d seem fresher since everyone else had already been read?) and that the delay would not affect her chances. </p>
<p>@SouthernHope What you are saying is that the “true” applicant base only comes AFTER its counterpart. Obviously, that won’t simply be the case. For example, if one of the outstanding applicants is the first to be reviewed, followed by mediocre applicants, does that mean that the outstanding applicant is going to be denied? </p>
<p>Georgetown is a great university. I’ve been to DC this past summer and been on the campus. Best of luck to your daughter </p>
<p>I guess what i’m thinking is that surely there must be a first sweep…a sort of, “this person is not even borderline…” a person who’s, say, in the bottom 25% of all stats and with no hooks…its sort of like how we interviewed for a job opening here a few months ago…we received maybe 200 applicants…but I swept through the resumes in about 1 hour and quickly discarded the applicants who weren’t even in the realm of possibility…then I sent the 125 legit applicants to the larger group of colleagues…</p>
<p>on the other hand, i may be completely off on this. </p>
<p>The procedure described in “The Gatekeepers”, which was written about Wesleyan 15 years ago, was that everyone got read by two readers. If neither reader thought the person worthy of admission, that was it, denied. I imagine most schools follow a similar procedure - everyone gets looked at by at least two people, so biases don’t come into play. You’ve got to peak someone’s interest to get further in the process, but everyone gets a look - there is no automatic reject pile, but I would imagine the readers know pretty quickly when they look at a packet who is hopeless.</p>
<p>^ ^ ^ ^
However, fifteen years ago the number of annual applicants to many “elite” LACs and National Research Universities was MUCH smaller than it is today. In addition, schools are reluctant (financially constrained) to increase staff employment greatly. In combination, this means that some universities now have MrMom’s “automatic reject pile,” that did not only a few years ago. For example, for the Class of 2017’s admissions cycle (if my memory is correct), Duke (for the first time) established criteria for “automatic” denial. While the number/percentage of applicants who fall below specified thresholds is VERY small, we now employ this approach to reduce staff costs, evaluation workload, and administrative burden. </p>
<p>Yes, we wouldn’t want schools spending all that massive pile of money we have to send them each year, which is much larger than it was 15 years ago too.</p>
<p>But in reality, there probably should have always been an “auto reject pile” - some applications are so far off the mark that nothing can save them.</p>
<p>@MrMom62: I know you were principally kidding, but – truthfully – would you rather the incremental income allocated for financial aid, faculty enhancements, better facilities, information and library systems, and so forth OR for more administrative overhead (in this case, undergraduate admissions processing, reading, and evaluating)? </p>
<p>@viphan it’s a great read, I hope you enjoy it. I don’t know if a student would as much as a parent, but especially you will likely enjoy the stories of the student’s they follow. I love that book!</p>
<p>There is a 2013 Brown video where admissions mention taking every file to committee. It seems very hard to figure out how they can do that.</p>
<p>@MrMom62 @BrownParent I just finished reading The Gatekeepers. Thank you for your excellent recommendation. Contrary to what I had previously thought of this book - cold, hard descriptions of how and why of the process - it was more personal and human. Definitely gained major perspectives and insights!</p>
<p>Glad you enjoyed it. I think it really shows how hard it is to select the class among so many qualified students at high selectivity colleges.</p>
<p>Fun facts</p>
<p>-- Jordan who ended up working in admissions became and entrepreneur focusing on college education and wrote The Students Guide to Colleges then founded Unigo. Also named “One of the Top 30 Young Entrepreneurs in America” by Inc. Magazine,“One of the Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs in America” by the White House,[28] and “One of the 100 Most Influential People in New York Business and Technology” by Silicon Alley Insider.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Mig who dropped out of Wesleyan, was selected by Disney for an intern program, became a screenwriter and is also in a Native American comedy group. His group was recently on The Daily Show. </p></li>
<li><p>3 have law degrees: Juliana, Becca, Tiffany</p></li>
</ul>
<p>If really large universities are like Berkeley and other UCs, they may have no centralized admissions committee reading every application at the final stage to bottleneck the process. Instead, each application is read by two readers and scored. If the scores are too different, a senior reader reads it for tie breaking. Then the scored applications are ranked (within divisions applied for) and the cut-off score for admission is determined based on the number of admits needed to get the desired class size (probably also with knowledge that yield tends to be higher for lower scoring admits than higher scoring admits). That leaves a borderline score where some will be admitted and some rejected, so tie-breaking procedures are used for applicants with that score.</p>
<p>There is an auto-reject pile, which would be applicants who do not meet the minimum stated criteria for admission (a-g course work, UC-weighted-capped GPA >= 3.0 in-state, >= 3.4 out-of-state).</p>
<p>Thanks for the info - I would expect that the larger the school, the less “personal” and more formula it gets. Only makes sense that it’s decentralized like that, a system as huge as the UCs can’t afford to be completely holistic. I can only imagine what a school like Yale or Harvard does to get through that pile of applications - then again, they have the endowments to support a legion of readers and relatively small classes to fill.</p>
<p>The UC admissions reading methodology of how applications are scored is not by formula, but there obviously are guidelines that readers are trained to use in order to get consistency. The goals of the process are presumably consistency and scalability, which may not be as important to other (particularly smaller) schools. Other schools’ processes where all applications that pass the initial readings get a final reading before the whole or main admissions committee, which then votes on the decision, indicate that their goals for their admissions processes are different.</p>
and i was told that D’s application wouldn’t be read until its marked 'complete" so it likely had not been seen yet. She acted as if this were a positive thing (maybe because it’d seem fresher since everyone else had already been read?) and that the delay would not affect her chances. </p>
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