Who should admit students?

[VeryLuckyParent]

Interesting article

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/college-admissions-narcissists/475722/

And some interesting quotes relevant to this discussion

It used to be faculty members who handled a college’s administrative functions. They were in charge of running the business operations; they were the registrars; they decided who was and wasn’t admitted. As the number of applicants grew, these roles became more and more specialized, and eventually, working in college admissions became its own profession.

Today, admissions officers’ responsibilities vary little from institution to institution. Often fresh out of college—where they may have been tour guides or admissions-office employees as students—many of them attended the institutions they now represent

Jonathan Cole and other educators worry that people who aren’t immersed in the day-to-day academic experience at a school are the ones tasked with designing that school’s student body. Admissions officers and enrollment-management consultants, according to Cole, see their institutions through a business lens rather than an educational one. In a National Association for College Admission Counseling survey that asked colleges to rate the importance of various skills for the position of chief enrollment officer, previous admission experience, statistics/data analysis, and marketing/public relations were the top three categories. Aside from having an advanced degree, which only half of respondents rated as “very important,” experience in academia appears nowhere on the list. “You would never find the faculty in any decent university that would allow 24-year-olds to determine who were going to be their colleagues on the faculty; nor would they allow these 24-year-olds to determine who are going to be their graduate students or their postdoctorate fellows," said Cole, noting that admissions officers have often declined to go forward with his recommendations. “So why do we do it in undergraduate education?”

Admission, Cole said, often depends on “which person in the admissions committee reads your application; what their biases are, their presuppositions; whether they’ve had a bad egg-salad sandwich that day or read too many applications. These are all things that enter our decision-making process as human beings.”
“It is [a lottery],” Cole said, “but no one is willing to admit it.”