An admissions officer is pronounced

When I learned that Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, among about forty others, had allegedly corrupted colleges to admit their children, I was not surprised. Working in a college for five years has taught me that only one factor is important: will you be able to pay all the tuition? Basically: are you rich?

I have worked in two different schools as an admissions counselor. The first, a small private liberal arts college with fewer than 5,000 students. It was an institution focused on tuition fees, so our (relatively) small endowment meant that we relied heavily on the financial security required for students to pay their tuition. One of the most attractive aspects of applying to this school is that we were an "optional test", which means that you were not required to submit your ACT or SAT scores to be admitted. In our office, fewer than ten admissions counselors were assigned to read the applications. I read about 350 of these apps a year and the acceptance rate was about 60%.

The other school was a large public D-1 research institution with approximately 25,000 undergraduate students. It was a public school. It was therefore possible that a majority of the admitted students would be residents of that state. Our office had about 40 admissions counselors. I read about 1,500 of these requests a year, and the overall acceptance rate was about 50%, even though the rate of acceptance in the state was probably closer to 75% and off-state by 25%.

Most colleges and universities tout a "holistic" application review process, including the two I've worked on. This means that we have reviewed each piece of information submitted in order to make a decision, instead of just focusing on ABM and test results. When you're first trained to read applications globally, you get a lot of information about the type of student that would be best suited on campus. "Fit" was the combination of the rigor of their school schedule (did they follow courses with honors / AP / IB?), Their academic performance (did he maintain good A / B grades?), Their involvement extracurricular (were they balancing multiple priorities?), as well as their interests expressed in their essays (not they Does he think they are good at this campus? What distinguishes this school?). At first, it seemed exciting to browse a list of apps and select which ones I thought to be a good fit and find success on campus.

But the more I read the applications, the more holes I saw in the so-called "holistic" process, and the more I discovered how much money was involved.

I often got out of a student's file, looked at my "delay" or "decline" recommendation, and then a second reviewer recommended the same thing, then an admissions staff member turned the tables around. decision to admit. Usually, the rationale would be a brief couple of sentences with deliberately vague language, such as "A student struggling to master the mathematical sequence, but should agree with the tutoring resources on campus, ADMIT". rarely for students who had applied for financial assistance. One time I saw a student who had fallen well short of our clearly defined admission criteria, admitted – this student was the heir to the fortune of a well-known meat processing company.

Although our school has announced our "holistic" review process, our principal has generally used test results to select candidates. His reasoning was that it was "more risky" students. The only time he did not do it? If the student could pay the full price to attend our school, or a student "full salary". He was not embarrassed by this fact and often commented on how Silicon Valley students could "afford" to come here. When I planned my California recruiting trip, I was given an Excel spreadsheet listing secondary schools based on average household income.

There were different ways to glean if a student was receiving the "full salary" of an application. First, in the joint application, there is a place where students can indicate whether they intend to apply for financial aid or not. My director's instinct was always to see what we could do to admit students who were checking that they did not intend to ask for help, regardless of the academic success of the student. I had a student from Northern California who, in every way, was categorical. I remember very well that there were several C and D on his transcript, plus a test score well below our average, and a two-sentence essay (actually only two). He went to campus twice, once before applying and then once he was admitted. He paid the full tuition fee without assistance for four years.