Colleges Alter Application Processes

As high school seniors wade through the college admissions process, some schools are updating their applications in a stated effort to both humanize the process and to gain more informative responses from applicants. A roundup of recent changes:

HARVARD: PLAYING PENPAL

According to Dean of Admissions William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, the Harvard admissions office is “[reaching] out in a more transparent way” to applicants this year.

“We are trying to be very respectful with students by being straight forward and accessible by returning phone calls, snail mail, and e-mails,” Fitzsimmons said.

Because budget cuts have forced the admissions office to scale back on school visits and mailings, officers have been encouraged to reach out to students individually via e-mail. Undergraduates are also running a message board for the first time this year on the admissions Web site to answer questions about the process.

“The electronic age, the accessibility of e-mails, and blogs, and Facebooks and Twitters, have all helped students,” said Deanna Smith, Head Guidance Counselor of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Kentucky.

And while David Hawkins, Director of Public Policy and Research at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, said he believes that the main impetus behind blogging, twittering, and e-mailing students is recruitment, he said these more personal relationships between admissions officers and applicants may help increase the transparency of the process at both ends.

PENN: GET TO THE POINT

Claire Beslow has read her fair share of application essays as a guidance counselor and former English teacher at Ramsey High School in New Jersey. One of the worst responses, she said, was to the University of Pennsylvania’s supplemental essay question asking students why they want to attend Penn.

“I had been working with someone privately who said ‘I would like to go to Penn because it’s a city school with a great campus,’” said Beslow.

“If you love the rah-rah factor of a school that’s nice to put in, but you are going for the college education. So figure out what makes Rutgers [for example] different than the University of Maryland.”

For college admissions offices, deciding what information to solicit from applicants and in what manner is an ongoing challenge. And for students, determining what information to present—and what colleges want to hear—is a source of endless stress.

“Kids are writing for acceptance as opposed to writing from the heart,” Beslow said. “They know they are being judged but not what they are being judged on, or who the reader is.”

This year, the University of Pennsylvania combined its “Why Penn” essay with a short answer asking applicants to discuss a professor with whom they would like to study. The new question now asks students how, specifically, they would contribute to the social and intellectual communities on campus.

“This strikes me as a very efficient way to get the information they are looking for,” Hawkins said.

With the number of freshman applicants steady and students’ tendency to apply to more schools each year, admissions offices will continue to sift through record numbers of applicants in the coming years, Hawkins said. In light of this, he said efficiency will be key to the admissions process.

MIT: AIMING FOR HONEST ANSWERS

MIT also changed its freshman application this year, replacing one 500-word essay with three short answers questions between 200 to 250 words.

“Part of the thinking was wanting to change the dynamic a little bit,” said MIT Dean of Admissions Stu Schmill. “The 500-word essay has become the piece that students stress about and overwrite. We’ve had shorter essays along with the long essay and we feel that we’ve gotten better information off of the shorter answers.”

Hawkins said this may have to do with the proliferation of third party application editing services, which has made it harder for admissions officers to determine who exactly is wielding the pen.

“You see a lot of college essay editing sites—not necessarily a lot of short answer editing services,” he said.

Beslow said this may have to do with students’ focus within their applications.

“I think students don’t stress as much about short answer questions—they don’t worry about making it as literary. Shorter answers are more about content than style.”

And because Schmill said “the reality is that the application is not a writing test,” short answers serve the admissions office’s purpose better.

Nevertheless, eliminating long essays may not solve the problem of ghostwriting and editing.

“We often don’t know exactly what we have in front of us,” Fitzsimmons said. But he added that “There are all kinds of ways students could get help it wouldn’t simply be on the essay.”